The Bologna Process: One more step on the road to federalism

The Bologna Process: One more step on the road to federalism

A paper presented by the PCP Working Group on Higher Education - Education, Science and Technology Subgroup

The capitalist system's survival is dependent upon a dynamic and constant process of wealth accumulation. Without this accumulation, the system enters a crisis and collapses. Therefore, the capitalist system’s logic is one of continuous accumulation in order to survive. This condition - survival of the capitalist system - has always been the underlying factor in the European Union's development. It was the logic behind the 1951 Paris Treaty that established the European Coal and Steel Community, behind the 1957 Rome Treaty that set up the European Economic Community and the European Atomic Energy Community, behind the 1992 Maastricht Treaty that established the European Union, and also behind the successive enlargements that led up to the current 25-member Union.
So, to dynamise its accumulation process, capital is constantly in search of new business opportunities: this has been recently highlighted through many investments in sectors that have traditionally been run by their States. Prominent among these are the cases of health and social security, pharmaceuticals, transport, telecommunications, biotechnologies, military industries, and now also education. It should be borne in mind that education generates a capital movement of some 200,000 million dollars a year, about twice that generated by the world auto industry.
It was within this logic that in 1999, the Bologna Declaration made a European undertaking out of the intention expressed by the European powers one year earlier in Paris, where the education Ministers of France, Germany, United Kingdom and Italy had underwritten the Sorbonne Declaration in which they had their respective countries undertake to “harmonise the European Higher Education System's architecture”, thus fulfilling one more goal in the neo-liberal blueprint for a future European Federation – and in actual fact fighting to mold European Higher Education too to finance capital's interests.
The first stage of this molding implies breaking down Higher Education into “packages” (called “cycles”) that could be more easily privatized by the new education business owners. In addition, this packaging process has other obvious benefits for capitalist development: It tends to create an army of cheap labour force, one that is usually unrecognized by corporate structures since they generally accept degrees. But these people get to enter the productive system without the critical abilities that traditional higher education institutions tended to provide. In the Bologna Declaration's new logic, schools of Higher Education will henceforth output producer-consumers, molded according to the system's accumulation requirements.
In addition, since States are no longer required to provide equal financing to the various Cycles of Higher Education, an ignoble economic discrimination is being intentionally introduced. Access to the “highest levels” of education – which potentially grants the ability to enter the system's “higher management” - thus becomes something for the rich only, preventively excluding all those who might threaten to subvert the system itself. This fulfils yet another of big business' goals: using the education system as a mere device to reproduce the status quo.
With this backdrop, it must be stated that under-financing education is a crime against Democracy. In effect, as [Portuguese anti-fascist mathematician 1901-1948] Bento Caraça said, the existence of citizens with a well-rounded culture is a necessary precondition for a truly democratic system to work. Well-rounded culture for its citizens is therefore a price that a democratic State must pay to be worthy of its name. That is why in a democratic constitution such as ours, State financing of education and universal access of all citizens to it are guaranteed.
Higher Education Degrees in the More Developed World and the Bologna Process
The ratio of higher education degree holders among the active population in the EU (21% in 2002) varies greatly from country to country, and is lower than that of several other economically high-performing States (43% in Canada, 38% in the USA, 36% in Japan). The ongoing demographic decline implies that even if the rate of entry and completion of higher education were to rise, the active population with degrees will stagnate at about 3 million graduates per year (as compared to about 2 million in the USA, India or China). Thus, the European Council has set as a target that by 2010 at least 85% of 22-year-olds should have completed secondary education (in Portugal that means 12 years of schooling).
Eurocrats view the Bologna process as a trail of short and medium-length qualifications that would make it possible to achieve the highest rates of higher-level qualifications. In Portugal, 10% of the population (ages 25-64) has higher education (the figure is 20.7% in EU15) and the average schooling is just 8 years (as opposed to 11.6% in EU25, 12.7% in the USA, 12.6% in Japan and 13.8% in Norway).
The “fast-track” schooling model, with 3 relatively short cycles, that the Bologna process is imposing upon Europe seeks, among other things, to solve that difficult conundrum: how to increase the number of graduates and post-graduates without increasing public financing. This solution is only feasible through private financing, certainly based on greater financial effort by families and a drastic reduction in the quality of “accredited” qualifications.
Getting famous universities to attract foreign students is a self-confessed way to try to attract “brains” that can contribute to enhance the host countries' labour force. In the 20th century, several factors contributed toward the fact that the USA, with great self-benefit, attracted students and scientists from all over the world. Some European countries have attempted to do the same, in particular the UK, France and Germany, as well as the EU itself when its Council of Education Ministers established that as a goal in February 2002. Countries on the world economic system's periphery are thus exploited in every possible way: by hosting labour-instensive industries, and by exporting their most talented or qualified workers.

The Bologna Process and federalist options for the European Union
In spite of the benevolence of those who viewed, or still view, the Bologna process as the answer to the difficulties plaguing higher education, it has today become more obvious that it is actually a process whose goal is a far-reaching change in academic and professional qualifications. Its real goals are to shorten schooling periods for the masses, to stratify degrees and educational and research institutions in each country and from country to country, selecting the best students – i.e. those with the best “performance” - to attend Europe's “great schools” in the “hard-core” countries of the old European Coal and Steel Community now extended to aerospace, bio-technology, telecommunications, etc.
But more critical than just harmonising contents or methods of education and learning – something that is polarising the academic world's attention – for the European Higher Education Area's federalist outlook the key issues are the standards, the criteria, the assessment procedures, as well as the centralised accreditation and auditing that are emerging in the course of this process. That is the Bologna process' more silent part, where corporate or industry interests can be more thoroughly enshrined, far removed from any democratic oversight. For this, the current network (the European Network for Quality Assurance in Higher Education - ENQA) of national structures involved – currently still accountable to national authorities – has been morphed into the cusp of a pyramid that stands above national authorities (under the label “European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education”) an agency with pan-European jurisdiction, and with predictably a single set of pro-centralisation and federalist standards, procedures and goals.
From 2010, the European Higher Education Area will be regulated by the ENQA, standing at the cusp of all national assessment and accreditation institutions, following common indicators and criteria. The evaluation agencies will have regulatory functions, similar to those exercised by other bodies in other sectors of “economic activity”: actually, the concepts of quality and quality assurance emerged within industrial economic activities and have now expanded to many socio-economic activities with the pretext of “consumer” protection.
We note the fundamental errors and the social damage caused by educational policies in which “adapting to Bologna” is obviously just an excuse: maintaining a policy of under-financing the whole Higher Education system, lack of investment to undertake a real educational reform, a huge increase in students' share in financing their own education together with a lack of social support structures for them, scant organised involvement of teaching staff both nationally and internationally, scant involvement of students, both in their educational institutions and at a national level. The whole process is increasingly run by a European Commission-led executive board, and solely to implement the neo-liberal and federalist goals it establishes.
The Bologna reform invokes a change of “paradigm”, but the actual outcome is reduction in public financing for Higher Education (once again involving major cuts in the State Budget) and a vacuum when it comes to the investment needed for a “paradigm” change to take effect. The 3 cycles are basically the ones that already existed; what changes is that the initial cycle is shortened – disregarding the specificities of each national education system upstream – and there is now an insistence on qualifications for “employability” downstream. What in the previous system was a university degree (a “licenciatura”) now becomes something that will be either a 1st or 2nd level qualification, depending solely on whether there is a corresponding profession regulated Europe-wide, and otherwise bearing no connection to the training's content or specific purpose.

The discourse is couched in apparently neutral or even positive terms, but all conforming to the “single thinking” that capitalism wants to make dominant. There is talk of “knowledge society”, harmonisation of qualifications, internationalisation, student mobility (currently, only 1% of Portuguese students participate in mobiity programmes!), faculty and researchers, employability, life-long learning, etc: But the real content of it all is an irreversible tendency toward “training” a labour force, placing “learning” in second place and forgetting “education” altogether; the end of stable or predictable careers; the casualisation of jobs, flexibilisation of the labour force, loss of social safeguards and rights for an emerging “intellectual proletariat”; all this in parallel with full-speed “production” of an elite of managers, researchers and technical staff, all of them highly sought-after and remunerated since their numbers will be scarce world-wide.
It is as if mobility of students, professors and educators were not something that has permeated Higher Education all the way since the Middle Ages, as if a Convention had not been signed (Lisbon, April 1997) – under the aegis of the Council of Europe and UNESCO, and that 42 countries have joined to date - providing for mutual recognition of academic qualifications at both entry to and exit from Higher Education.
It is as if Higher Education institutions should or could take responsibility for employability – or worse, for unemployment or underemployment or professional redeployment due to mergers or acquisitions or delocalisations, all of which are solely the province of enterprise.
It is as if the harmonisation announced actually needed to violate the sovereignty of each member state - furthermore on such a sensitive issue. As it stands, it not only affects its labour force, it also constricts its intellectual potential and its cultural differentiation, as well as striking at the autonomy of educational institutions' functioning and structure.
It is as if the “Bologna process” had actually moved toward the harmonisation that was announced. It is not happening. The objective difficulty in comparability of qualifications persists - no adoption of a pan-European common list of scientific fields, or an in equivocal standard for unit of credit, or of minimal common terms of reference for the granting of a degree in each sphere of knowledge and at each level of qualification - and the lengths of the various training cycles, all continue to differ between countries. All this when a convention on these basic comparison and assessment tools would be a direct path toward achieving real comparability.
It is as if the Higher Education reform process had any chance of succeeding without the direct participation and cooperation – right from its inception – of universities and polytechnics, of professional guilds, of teachers' trade unions, of scientific societies and of students organized into student unions and participating in the management bodies of educational institutions.
The Higher Education Reform as fostered by the Socialist Party government
The situation in Portugal's Higher Education is complex, and made worse by the contrived split between universities and polytechnics, that has been stubbornly upheld by successive governments. But they will now be subjected to a common assessment standard.

With the insidiously-imposed choice of a three-year first cycle (“licenciatura”) - with the exception of a few degrees in certain areas including Law, for which a four-year cycle was proposed - a student who completes the first cycle will have a level of education that is only formally appropriate to enter the labour market (and only formally comparable to the earlier “licenciatura” degrees). Official discourse requires of educational institutions that the first cycle be of a generalist nature and profession-oriented, while at the same time promising (to students) employability: These are either unfathomable paradoxes or cynical irony.
Actually, those students who do not continue their studies into a second cycle – meaning those with least purchasing power, due to tuition fees based on “real costs” (annual fees of €2700 have been set for the 2nd cycle at the [state-owned] Lisbon New University's School of Economics!) and due to lack of social support – will only have access to basic-level (or else very narrow) scientific and technical knowledge. It is the others, those with enough purchasing power that will have access to advanced education and to culture. For that same reason, many current 2nd-cycle degrees (in universities and above all in polytechnics) will not be eligible for accreditation and financing. The existence of numeri clausi and minimal grades for the 2nd cycle are also barriers to continuation of studies. The obvious goal of this elitisation process for the 2nd cycle is to align capital's economic elites and its leading intellectual elites.
There will of course be a highly-selective mechanism, using the very scarce social support resources, to allow the exceptionally-endowed who have survived all the schooling process' obstacles to shore up the declining flow of new highly-qualified intellectual workers essential to the continued operation of a certain number of Science and Technology “centres of excellence” that can feed big European industry's prosperity.
In the meantime, what is now coming for Polytechnic Schools of Higher Education is the same as the “short Higher Education” previously proposed by the IMF for Portugal. This time, they are labeled “CET – Technological Specialisation Courses”. The schools of Portugal's hinterland – with insufficient teaching resources and insufficient numbers of students in graduate degrees – will probably remain confined to this role.
Universities and Polytechnics are already realising that the Bologna process is an oncoming steamroller, one that besides inducing problematic education reforms, is already reducing and will further reduce human resources (faculty, researchers and staff) in the Public Higher Education system; will reduce the number of authorised degrees (be they financed or otherwise); reduce the number of students in initial training (predictably enhancing “new audiences” such as pseudo-working-students, most probably composed of unemployed or under-employed persons, due to company “restructurings”); will exacerbate imbalances in the education network; and many universities and polytechnics will be reduced – if not to extinction, at most to appendage status.

The Bologna process strips universities/polytechnics of autonomy. By imposing strict pedagogical models, pedagogical autonomy is drastically undercut – adding to the fact that scientific autonomy never really came into existence, due to lack of focused investments and the absence of research components in the State Budget's financing formula for higher education that would have enabled schols to pursue autonomous science policies.
Its impact on school populations and higher education institutions will be especially felt outside the most densely populated areas, thus also contributing toward the human desertification of depressed areas (together with the ongoing closure of hospitals, maternities, health centres, and of basic and secondary schools that according to the Government are “in unsuitable condition”).
With this backdrop – due to the no-longer-central role of teacher-dispensed learning for students' acquisition of professional skills, and to the shorter class attendance time required to attain a 1st-cycle degree – what is to be expected is that teaching time will be substantially shortened, and not even compensated by a desirable enhancement in scientific research (for which there is also a great dearth of resources). So what can be expected is what the government wants: a reduction in teaching staff. This reduction will be especially felt among younger teaching staff, due to their more tenuous tenure and lower formal qualifications. Compounded with the gradual ageing of teaching staff as a whole, this implies the real possibility that some educational institutions will “implode”.
Above all else, what prevails is a distant silence from the relevant Ministry. It merely issues, occasionally, new Laws that step by step confirm a long-since premeditated neo-liberal roadmap. To this effect, it marginalises the real participants of Portugal's education system, and the historic path of its self-construction. In a Council of Ministers Resolution (nr. 39/2006, 21 Abril), the Government continues its “restructuring process of Public Administration, in the direction set out in the Government Programme and in the 2005-2009 Stability and Growth Programme”, and in article 24f and 24g, it announces that “the National Higher Education Evaluation Council is hereby abolished (…) a Higher Education accreditation and assessment agency shall be created (…) following completion of the evaluation process that is being undertaken by the OECD and the ENQA”.
Scientific research is also operating within a more difficult context. The separation between financing mechanisms for Education and Research runs counter to their desirable unity, in terms of both function and organisation. This has negative repercussions especially on the quality of 1st-cycle teaching, which is offered according to conjunctural and competition-driven criteria. It will predictably also affect the 2nd-cycle offer, since many educational institutions (mostly polytechnics) will have their post-graduate teaching offers curtailed (and not accredited) due to lack of qualifications or resources in place.
The dishonesty behind all the “knowledge society, economic progress and social cohesion” talk (on which the whole Lisbon Strategy text is based) is blatantly obvious in Portugal, where we have a shocking situation: Thousands of young PhD.s, whose education was supported with EU funds throughout the last decade and a half, the vast majority of whom are now working in casual jobs, even though there is a shortage of researchers and other specialised staff in Public Administration and in industry. The extent of this is so great that there is a real problem of graduate unemployment and drain of Portuguese brains abroad (as the OECD recognises).

Higher Education Beyond Bologna
Higher Education is a public asset, as it is also a private asset but with public implications; its humanistic and universal nature (as regards teaching and research) also makes it an international public asset. The latter opens up scope for both inter-governmental cooperation and supra-national jurisdiction, one that the European Union is seeking to impose via the European Higher Education Area (the conceptional and organisational framework) and the Bologna process (the mobilisation and change process to achieve it). In it, Higher Education is no longer a public asset supervised by a sovereign state and exercised by educational institutions with scientific and pedagogic autonomy; several levels of responsibility participate and are diluted, making it easier to shepherd them all with a pro-centralisation vision.

The March 2000 Lisbon Strategy, with its essentially economistic outlook, raided and took over Higher Education policy (among others), without even mentioning the already-initiated Bologna process, but incorporating it and legitimising it as an instrument of the European Commission and the other Union bodies. Ever since the March 2002 Barcelona Council of Ministers, the Bologna process definitively stopped being a voluntary harmonisation process spearheaded by the European Universities Association (EUA) and the European Association of Schools of Higer Education (EURASHE), to become mandatory for member states and superintended by the European Commission.

Following the Bologna process' development, Higher Education stopped following national public service standards, to begin following the standards of, and being treated as, a regional-level (EU) public asset; so it too, comes under regulatory scope as a “General Economic Interest Service” (Bolkestein Directive), and as such is treated like any commercial service and subjected to single market rules. The public consultation on the Green Book on General Interest Services was a mere formality, and was obsoleted by the fact that the European Constitutional Treaty was denied ratification. This treaty in the main already included mechanisms and conditions for individual countries' sovereignty to be violated – by a Council majority or by a Commission decision – and especially for their public education systems to be overrun by commercial interests. After the Constitutional Treaty's ratification suffered its setback, Europe's economic powers had to reassess how and by what means they could still push ahead in their quest: After the Directive was adopted with some changes by the European Parliament (February 2006), the European Commission intends to take it to the Council of Ministers. It should be noted that Higher Education was not removed from the list of “general interest services”, so the Bologna process can freely proceed all the way to its final, unspeakable, consequences.

But besides liberalising the internal market, the European Union's ambition for world competition led it to join the General Agreement on Trade and Services (GATS) negotiated in the WTO's Uruguay round, that envisages a gradual liberalisation of services worldwide; Education is one of the spheres where the least countries have joined and where the liberalisation's applicability is most debatable; but neoliberal ideology keeps on pressuring to open it up. The European Commission has already made limited undertakings on Education within the GATS framework; the only reason it did not go any further was the pressure from public opinion mobilised during the March 2003 WTO summit in Cancun. But, while it is true that some of its member states are already actively pursuing those policies (for example the UK), the “single market's” permeability will imply that not only European countries, but also third countries that are GATS members in the Education area (prominent among them the USA and Australia) will in any case gain access to any other country in the European Higher Education Area, independently of a possible full opening up of the Union to the Agreement in the Education Area.

This GATS allows for several modes in the provision of marketable “education services”: for example the offer of “online” education by a foreign university, mobility of students to foreign countries, establishment of a local branch by a foreign university, a teacher teaching in a foreign country; these modes are already to a greater or lesser extent familiar to us within the Union, but tehy will tend to proliferate and to involve new, non-European, participants. It should be noted that some of the liberalisation modes provided for in the GATS have already been enacted as part of the Bologna process, meaning that the latter was just a facilitator that eliminated barriers to free trade of services in Higher Education.
In Portugal, promotional initiatives by private agents and intermediation undertaken by certain NGOs and other bodies on behalf of foreign universities (and now also by the Socialist Party government itself, on behalf of the MIT, CMU and University of Texas) are all symptoms of the fact that the “void” generated by the government when it comes to enacting public-interest policies is now being filled by new Higher Education “suppliers”; even the infrastructure-enhancement process in broadband telecommunications is an indirect facilitator for a strong presence of well-endowed and well-advertised foreign educational institutions. European accreditation and “public relations” will take care of creating credibility for a new Higher Education supply scenario in our country.
What is at stake is whether Europe's Higher Education system will benefit or lose out in this clash of world political-economic blocs. This is an issue for the capitalist groups confronting each other; but it is not a cause for the peoples of Europe, whose universal and cost-free access to Education is being sacrificed in this clash.

This is not the reform that Higher Education needs. The needed reform implies a reconfiguration of public Higher Education, with a harmonious integration of all universities and polytechnic institutes, respecting each institution's identity, specificity and creativity, and establishing a general framework of scientific areas that is flexible and evolving. National States should retain the ability to develop their national systems in accordance with their own priorities and levels of development.

Public Higher Education should enable citizens to become the creators of an advanced, aware and democratic country.

The public higher education system must ensure: that democratisation in access to, and benefit from, higher levels of education and culture is implemented; that freedom to educate and learn is guaranteed; that a coherent supply of diverse, relevant and high-quality education covering the whole of the nation's territory is available; that strategic infra-structures exist and operate.
A new and fairer access regime for access to higher education must be created, for a rapid expansion of Public Higher Education, with abolition of overall quantitative restrictions (numeri clausi). This regime should harmonise the nation's development needs and the candidates' preferences, with an access system whose essential base is contiuous assessment in Secondary Education, complemented with national tests of absolute ability.

Higher Education is not just an individual matter, it is a national issue. So its financing must be viewed as an investment, an investment in the country and not just an investment in the individual. In this respect, the PCP stands for repeal of the current Higher Education Financing Law, and for the adoption of new rules, embodied in a new Law, that will not involve the payment of fees, where financing levels will be adequate to ensure high-quality education and research, enabling educational institutions to assert themselves responsibly, autonomous from political powers and independent of economic powers.

Research and Development is part and parcel of the various Higher Education institutions' mission. As such, it should be part of their faculty's day-to-day activities. Research must be closely intertwined with teaching, so that faculty members' involvement in both aspects of their work can be both stimulating and useful, in their own work and in their students' work.
29th November 2006

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