A Clash of Intentions in Higher Education

Modern higher education has an obligation to form graduates who can work in new fields, deal with complex problems and contribute with new angles to societal challenges. Consequently, programs should be planned so that students learn to apply disciplinary knowledge to real problems in their surroundings and develop complex cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal skills. For this, quality assurance and clear goal orientation can be helpful tools. Nevertheless, the development of these tools seems to bring education into a direction of predictability where students – and their teachers – lose motivation. The perceived reasons are: detachment from research, heavy administrative tasks, and less room for curiosity and creativity. In relation to this, I wish to discuss how universities, with specific reference to university management systems, can fulfil their mission to educate independent critical thinkers and play an important role in solving the basic problems of society. I will analyse some of the challenges we need to address, mainly in the planning and management of education, including the pedagogical approaches and the relation to the research base and research methods. In order to understand the current tendencies in education today, the challenges of the growing performance culture will be included in the overall picture.