The Implications of Institutional Evaluation and Accreditation in Greek and British Higher Education on the Organizational Autonomy of Universities and the Professional Autonomy of Faculty

This paper examines the internationalization of educational policy making and the homogenization of evaluation practices in Higher Education (HE) across Europe, with a focus on Greece and Britain. More specifically, it explores the impact of the new regulatory frameworks regarding institutional evaluation and accreditation on the organizational autonomy of universities (and generally HE institutions), and on the professional autonomy of the faculty. In Britain, evaluation and accreditation is relatively well-embedded into the domestic HE system, and, more recently, it has been exported to other parts of the world, not least through satellite campuses and overseas university branches. In Greece, these processes have intensified since the early 2000s through concerted policy efforts by all recent administrations.

This study employes a Critical Discourse Analysis approach to scrutinize the language, ideology and rhetoric of a variety of documents that relate to the evaluation and accreditation of HE institutions in Greece and Britain. The documents we analyzed come from official sources, which include parliamentary proceedings, legislation texts, ministerial decisions and circulars, governmental discussion papers, policy reports published by official evaluation and accreditation agencies and the like.

Analysis from the Greek documents points to an over-centralized Greek “Regulatory State”, which is increasingly demanding from HE institutions to be “accountable” and produce “evidence” that they comply with criteria of efficiency and effectiveness. Analysis from British documents shows that the pressures described in relation to the Greek context, namely accountability and efficiency, form part of a wider discourse around the sustainability of the current HE architecture and especially its funding system, which is based largely on income from tuition fees.

Our findings show that the evaluation and accreditation of the Greek and British HE institutions, according to criteria of accountability, efficiency and effectiveness, raise issues about academic freedom as well as about faculty and institutional autonomy.