Authentic Universities: Choosing What Not to Be

Alex Usher: Hi everyone. I'm Alex Usher and this is The World of Higher Education Podcast.
University missions are tricky things to enunciate. From the point of view of many faculty — people who've reached their position by dint of their excellence in a specific field of research — their employer's main mission should simply be one of providing a platform for their discipline. Understandably, this is not how local publics view things. They tend to look for something more externally focused. Yet when institutions try to enunciate something beyond disciplines, for many, it tends to feel odd or inauthentic.
My guest today is Frank Ziegele. He's the Executive Director of the Centrum für Hochschulentwicklung, or Center for Higher Education, located in Gütersloh, Germany. He recently co-authored a book called Authentic Universities: Effective University Identities in Times of Transition, which is available free on the CHE website.
He thinks, and I agree with him, that despite the difficulties of creating authentic missions, it's well worth the effort for the simple reason that universities can't be all things to all people and need to find focus in order to be effective.
Today we talk about Frank's book and specifically how he sees the task of institutions, finding ways of differentiating themselves and adopting distinctive missions, which nevertheless feel authentic.
We talk about what kinds of missions might be authentic, about the strategy process for institutions and how they can nudge their communities towards well articulated, differentiated missions. And most interestingly, we also talked about how governments can encourage — or unfortunately, more often than not — discourage institutions from pursuing differentiated missions.
Although the book was written for a German audience, I think it has pretty wide resonance for universities right around the globe. And so without further ado, let's hear from Frank.
So Frank, thanks for joining us. Your book is about authenticity and specifically how higher education institutions can pursue strategies of differentiation in an authentic manner. And before we get into the issue of authenticity, I wanna ask you why is differentiation so desirable? What's changed in higher education's operating environment that makes the adoption of differentiation strategies so urgent?
Frank Ziegele: Yeah, a lot of things are fundamentally changing. We, in the book, we talk about something that we call unraveling certainties. So things that we have taken for granted for so many years in higher education are changing. So we always thought academic education is something else from and, and completely isolated from professional training. What we want now is permeability. We always thought in biographical terms, university education is a phase between secondary school and the career. Now it's happening um, lifelong. Yeah, we always thought people are going for a major qualification like bachelor or master, now we see a boom in certificate courses in Microcredentials and we talk about the stackability of educational small components.
Yeah, we always thought what universities are doing is teaching and, and research, and now we are talking about, in Europe, we say third mission or community service or whatever, in so many respects. So, and we used to think people need specialist knowledge, now we are talking about future skills like resilience in a changing world and so on.
And all this is happening at the same time. And all this is creating opportunities, maybe also threats, yeah, maybe you could be afraid of it. But we argue an authentic university should embrace these opportunities that are out there, should be front runners and should go into certain directions. So taking, for instance, the, the third mission issue in Germany, we just, we have a university which just has renamed into university for sustainable development and everything they do is related to that.
But that will not be the model for every university. So in the end, it goes towards diversity. If you want to satisfy a variety of needs, then you also need a variety of profiles. A one size fits all solution is definitely not enough. So that's the argument for differentiation.
Alex Usher: You don't quite put it this way in the book, but it seems to me that it's implied in the early chapters that there's good differentiation and there's bad differentiation. That, and, and the difference is basically how authentic the profile of differentiation is. If we were gonna create a spotter's guide, right, like if we were gonna try and pick out, you know, what are the rules of thumb here, how would you tell the difference between a profile which is authentic and one which is inauthentic?
Frank Ziegele: Yeah, maybe, maybe before going to the spotters guide. So, so I, I would like to say what, well, if you want to build a house, you need a foundation. So our basic idea is if you want to be authentic, stay true to yourself, know who you are, and take up the trends that fit with your identity. So what is important? Authenticity is not a static concept according to our idea. It's a very dynamic one. It's not of saying I will always remain like that. No, I want to change, but staying true to yourself.
So for instance, if you are a university, you are already successful startups, you have an innovation ecosystem around you, which contains many small and medium enterprises like we have quite often in Germany, yeah, then it would be a good idea to become a university for small and medium enterprises and something like a regional engine, which is just promoting change and development in, in your region, so, so look at what is there, yeah, what is the foundation that we can build on.
And now coming to the Spotters guide, this is really a tricky issue. So thanks for that question because I, I think there is a backside of this idea of differentiation. Differentiation creates complexity and intransparency. So how should a student understand what all these different universities stand for and what she or he will will get there? So it would be good to have this spotters guide, but it's a very difficult thing, yeah. What we do in, in Germany, my institution Center for Education, we, we created what we call our CHE ranking, which is a very complex system which is trying to say what are really the differences?
And here I would look at the question, does the university really live the story that it is telling? We have some universities in our country, they rename study programs with English titles, but they teach in German. Yeah, so this is not authentic.
Alex Usher: Yeah, so I, I was struck early on in your book, you have a very stark declaration: a university can't do everything. And it seems to me that a big part of what differentiation is, is about institutions being clear about what they're not gonna be, right? It's not actually, it's, it's sort of like Peter, Peter Drucker always said that about nonprofits and, and mission statements. The important thing is that, is that it be a guide to what not to do. 'cause otherwise you could just do any old thing. And it sounds simple and it sounds true, and yet, we always see universities act as if it's not true that they can do everything. What do you mean by that phrase? What is it that universities should not be doing?
Frank Ziegele: Well, it's, it's different things. So, so first of all, well, what I described as these unraveling certainties and all these options that are emerging, this could be overwhelming. It's not one, one institution, a one size fits all institution cannot satisfy all these needs. Yeah? If you look at the third mission, we have the expectation universities should save democracy, should solve all the issues around climate change, should do whatever. And, and you cannot do all that at once.
I would agree that sometimes it's very difficult for a university to do that, yeah, because, well, on the one hand I said we should not have one size fits all universities, but on the other hand, we often have one size fits all metrics. Measuring the success of a university, yeah? So then you have to satisfy them all. Or another thing is well, the issue of funding. Yeah. Governments are hanging all kinds of carrots in front of your nose. And would you really say, no, this carrot is not according to my profile, I don't take it. Yeah. So, you need the funding, so you take all the carrots, and many governments have not understood that this differentiation is, is really a good idea. They just think we need three universities in the world class segment. Yeah. And, and this is not really creating a diversity. This is just a, a very narrow understanding of diversity. So there are a lot of obstacles that have to be overcome, but still we have to try.
Alex Usher: So you talked about world class universities there, and that's a form of, I guess, vertical differentiation, right? Some are at the top and some are at the bottom. But you spent a lot of time in the book talking about horizontal differentiation, right? Having different authentic missions. Can you give us some examples of those authentic horizontal missions, if you will, sort of, that, that institutions might profitably pursue?
Frank Ziegele: Yes. Well, in, in the book we created 12 different horizontal differentiated profiles. I have to say in the beginning this was not necessarily done to say this is really the reality. Yeah. What we did is we, we looked at these current trends and then we made an extrapolation of the trend and, and went 10 years or so into the future.
And then we said, okay, if a university would follow only that trend, what would come out of that? Yeah. And, and that led to these different profiles. But to give you two or three examples, for instance, we said in the future there could be something like, we called it a guidance university. That's a university which is not so much focused on providing content. Providing qualifications by itself. But it's focused on guiding individuals through a lifelong individual learning journey. Guaranteeing the stackability of modules supporting students, and then you need much less professors than you have today, and you need more coaches employed in the university, or you train your professors to be more like coaches. Um, so that could be one option, totally focused on accompanying people through an educational journey. We created, that's maybe a very European perspective, but I think it's important.
We, we also created the profile of the European University. Maybe these days this is more important than ever to say a university could be in, in a place where European values are being promoted, where a transnational campus is providing a super national degree and, and promoting all these ideas that we have in Europe and positioning ourselves in the world with our European approaches, and, maybe people from Canada might agree that this is really needed in, in the current world.
And that these are only two examples. We also have a future skills university focusing on, on future skills and, and so on. Yeah, I mentioned the regional engine before as a profile. There are many options and when I talk about that, I even in, in the last year, I developed 10 more of these profiles. It's, just, yeah, you can have a lot of these things and reality will always be a mixture.
Alex Usher: We're gonna take a short break. We'll be right back.
And we're back. Frank, I wanna move on from the, the what to the how, right? So how does an institution get to a position statement or a profile that would allow them to, to differentiate? You know, I know a lot of strategy processes are dedicated to teasing out, as you say, the, you know, the things institutions are doing. Staying true, I think was the phrase you used before the break. But there's also the possibility isn't there of, of not trying to tease something out, of trying to look at a blue ocean strategy. You know, wow, there's this market opportunity or this societal need going unaddressed, making a big leap, rather than, you know, going the teasing out route.
Is one preferable to the other? Is one easier than the other?
Frank Ziegele: It depends. So if you, well, if you, if you compare if you allow me to compare for a moment university to a clothing store, then we could say, well, on the one hand, what this store is doing is showcasing some of the elements of its portfolio in the store window. Or it could go for a completely new fashion collection. Yeah. Which has never been there before. And, and I think both is possible. I think both could be a good strategy for a store and both is possible for a university.
You asked what is easier. Of course, this teasing out strategy, building on your foundation, moving forward, hopefully also moving forward fast and in big steps. But that is of course the more realistic I would also say less risky one. Yeah. So it's less likely that on this way you are losing your, your staff members and you, you create a lot of opposition and so on.
But on the other hand, if you are in a situation of crisis. Or if you have external disruptions, like the emergence of artificial intelligence and, and we do not know what, what similar kind of transformations are coming in the future. And that might be something for a more disruptive approach. But I would still argue we need some foundation for it. Yeah. You cannot do it out of the blue. Yeah. You need something as a basis, otherwise it's not working.
Maybe also this, second approach of, of using a completely new market opportunity. Maybe that is more realistic if it's not referring to the university as a whole, but only to a part. Yeah. I, I know one example from Germany. There is a small university of applied sciences in a remote area, and they had a lack of students. And then they said we are starting to provide online education as distance learning provider, and now are the, they are the second biggest one in Germany of public institutions. So that was a kind of really new strategy. So that could work, but that is only then a partial change and not referring to the institution as a whole.
Alex Usher: Well, that's interesting 'cause that, that sort of gets to my next question, which is I didn't see much discussion in the book about disciplines, right? Like you're talking about institutions and I mean, I don't know how different this is in Europe, but certainly in Canada, I would argue that you have there are a lot of people who, you know, have more loyalty, I guess, to the discipline or they, or they think of themselves as historians or physicists or whatever, more than they think of themselves as employees of University X.
You know, and lots of the types of horizontal differentiates you're talking about are fairly specific, like, you know, if I'm the University of Sustainability, that was in an argument that you gave, how does a, professor of poetry or a, you know, a, a historian of Africa, how do they see themselves that way? Or, you know, if you were the regional engine university. Seems to me this could be a real barrier to adopting differentiation simply because some parts of the university would say, we don't see ourselves in that identity. And we recognize there are parts of the institution that you know, for whom this is true, but not us.
How do you overcome that kind of reaction?
Frank Ziegele: Well, first of all, we could also have written a book about authentic faculties. Yeah. So, so I, I, I think that's, that's as relevant as talking about an, an authentic university as a whole. We thought about that when we wrote the book. How should we deal with that? But then we said, well, terms of the book, we stay on the level of the university as a whole for the reason that in many of these future profiles that we analyzed, we found the need to overcome faculty silos. Yeah, because that is, that is one of, so, so I sometimes I even say, well, if everyone is sitting in, in his or her faculty silo, yes, some of these changes that we want, that will not move forward. We also have one profile, another example, we say there could be a teaching concept university, so a university which develops its profile, for instance, because they say everything we do is challenge-based learning. And, and that is our approach. But you can only do that if you come together across faculty borders. Yeah. So, so that's the reason why we use that perspective. But of course also the level of the faculty is also the level where strategic planning and profiling is being done. So we just put it aside a bit, but it's totally relevant.
Alex Usher: Yeah, no, that's a great metaphor actually. I think, I always try to get people to think about the English department at MIT. You know, I mean MIT is the STEM university. It also has one of the best English departments in the world, right? And it's, it's, anyway that I, so I, I thank you for that metaphor. That's really good.
What are the other big pitfalls that universities need to look out for in developing distinct, authentic priorities?
Frank Ziegele: Maybe there's one, there's one danger then that is a bit related to this metaphor that we were just discussing. Well, if you, well, you found a great profile, you have an idea where to go, and then you somehow become lazy and complacent and, and think now we are on the right way. And you do not watch out for the next changes that are happening. Yeah. So retaining your agility and being able to change, I think that is something you should not forget if you, if you go for a profile. The second thing maybe is don't neglect that building a profile is related to funding structures behind it. Yeah. If you go a certain way, it means something for generating revenue.
So your diversification of funding sources is related to building profiles and, and that should be part of it. Maybe the, the third big pitfall is, well, the, the lack of, I think I mentioned it before, the lack of enabling conditions from the government side. Because that is always something that universities are struggling with. If a government has not realized that this differentiation um, is, is something that would be good. You, you talked about the world class university before. Instead of a world class university, we rather need a world class system which is differentiated and not only focusing on this small segment.
Alex Usher: Yeah, I mean, so I mean we, we talked about this in the first half of the interview. You know, the government can be a hindrance rather than a help in this area. Now, I know, you know, government here in, in Ontario, Canada, we have a system of multi-year agreements, which in theory provides a carrot for differentiation, but it's pretty weak.
You know, I, you talk about carrots and, and if you only put carrots out for world classness, then yeah, everyone's gonna go a research route. But are government's even capable of, I mean, I, I can't think of a government off the top of my head that that actually provides diverse carrots. If I can put it that way, right? Like government's instinct is to flatten distinctions between regulated organization, not accentuate them. They don't like collecting data on a lot of different metrics. As you say, there's a lot of one size fits all metrics here. What can we do to change government's views?
And, and do you have any models, I guess, of from maybe from among German Länder about governments that are doing the right thing to encourage differentiation?
Frank Ziegele: In general, I would say this what you just said for Ontario, this performance agreement system is a good one. Yeah. Because it allows differentiation. Interestingly, we had one, one state in Germany, in Germany, higher education is a state issue that we have 16 different systems. So, so similar to Canada, not 16 in Canada, but um, and there, there was one state in, in, called Hessen, um, there, the, the minister said, we need a differentiation process. And they said, we have a fund for it, and you universities say where you want to go and we are going to support it. And, and they, they implemented also a peer group which went through all the universities and gave a kind of feedback and assessment if these differentiation strategies are realistic and desirable. Yeah, so, so that's, that's what they did.
I think maybe there is one thing about Germany, which makes it a bit easier for us, compared to many other countries. In Germany, we always had this binary system of universities and universities of applied sciences. Yeah. And, and so in Germany we are used to the fact that not all universities are the same. Yeah, because we always said there is the more theoretical, basic research oriented type, and there's the more practical applied research and innovation oriented type of university.
And, and that makes our lives easier. Yeah. Because you can, the, the story is understood by governments that not all the institutions are, are the same. But things are changing. But currently I'm working in a project in Ethiopia, so, so far away from our two countries, and the Ethiopian government has decided to transform 15 universities into universities of applied sciences. Yeah. And, and differentiating. So, so there are things happening in the world which move towards this idea of differentiation.
Alex Usher: What's the reaction to the book been like in Germany? Are there any signs that institutions are becoming more willing to take a chance on having different authentic profiles,
Frank Ziegele: On the one hand, I'm very happy with the reaction to the book. On the other hand, I am well, at the end of last year, I was a bit exhausted because I was traveling the whole year through Germany, talking to all kinds of people, giving presentations. And, and what, what we did is in the meanwhile, we even developed a moderation concept out of the book where we run a foresight workshop together with universities quite successfully.
So you see from, from these examples it was a very positive reception and, and really people are, I think there is a kind of window of opportunity where, where universities start to think beyond the four or five year term they usually think of. Yeah. So these like the Ontario Performance Agreements, most likely they are also four or five years or.
Three. Even, even even three. So, so, so this is the period which usually is in the focus of thinking about the future. But now there is a tendency saying, well, we also need something like foresight processes. Yeah. We, in, in, in Switzerland, the ETH Zürich um, they even established a foresight hub on, on the level of the presidency of the university.
So this is something which is coming, and which helps to shape the, the three, four, or five year strategy if you have an idea where you want to go if you think a couple of years ahead. Yeah. So, and that is really something where our book was provided or, or closed a gap, which was there.
And so, people are really taking it up. And with these different profiles that I mentioned, this is really something um, we even put it into a card game. These, these different pro
Alex Usher: I want one of those.
Frank Ziegele: And, and so, so universities are playing with that and that helps to identify your own profile or ideas about your own profile.
So I'm happy about that.
Alex Usher: Frank Ziegele, thanks so much for joining us.
Frank Ziegele: Thank you.
Alex Usher: It just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Samantha Pufek and Tiffany MacLennan, and you, our readers and listeners for joining us. If you have any questions or comments about today's podcast or suggestions for future ones, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us at podcast@ higheredstrategy com.
Join us next week when our guest will be American author Bryan Alexander. He's coming to talk about his new book, Peak Higher Education. Bye for now.