Willem Halffman

Is Inequality Among Universities Increasing? Gini Coefficients and the Elusive Rise of Elite Universities

One of the unintended consequences of the New Public Management (NPM) in universities is often feared to be a division between elite institutions focused on research and large institutions with teaching missions. However, institutional isomorphisms provide counter-incentives. For example, university rankings focus on certain output parameters such as publications, but not on others (e.g., patents). In this study, we apply Gini coefficients to university rankings in order to assess whether universities are becoming more unequal, at the level of both the world and individual nations. Our results do not support the thesis that universities are becoming more unequal. If anything, we predominantly find homogenisation, both at the level of the global comparisons and nationally. In a more restricted dataset (using only publications in the natural and life sciences), we find increasing inequality for those countries, which used NPM during the 1990s, but not during the 2000s. Our findings suggest that increased output steering from the policy side leads to a global conformation to performance standards.

Science/policy boundaries: a changing division of labour in Dutch expert policy advice

1 Describing science/policy boundaries The tasks science-based experts perform for policy are many. In the traditional set of instrumental tasks, experts provide factual information to policy makers, assess future policy outcomes, or determine effects of past policies. However, the practice of policy expertise is much more varied. Experts may criticise policy makers’ problem definitions, redefine problems, reframe policy beliefs, point at unanticipated outcomes, suggest alternative strategies, interpret policy and provide critical reflection, or even mediate in controversies (Bal et al., 2002, MacRae and Whittington, 1997, Renn, 1995). This does not imply that experts do or should do all of the above all the time. There is no universal list of experts’ tasks. Policy makers may prefer to rely on their own knowledge, their own mediating skills, or their own ability at critical reflection. Especially in times of difficult political bargaining, ‘critical reflection’ is the last thing politicians want, especially from the experts. In other cases, the very status of the expert is at stake and actors may attempt to redefine what can be considered a matter of expertise and what a matter of policy. That is why we can analyse the relation between experts and policy makers as a complex and contested division of labour. This division of labour consists of a boundary that demarcates who can and cannot be considered an expert in various degrees, and articulates the coordination between actors who have come to be considered ‘experts’ and ‘policy makers’. Such boundaries are the outcome of – and form the resources for – continuing boundary work, the further articulation, reproduction, or modification of this division of labour (Halffman, 2003, Gieryn, 1999, Gieryn, 1995, Shapin, 1992, Jasanoff, 1990). Over time, patterns have developed in this division of labour, varying between countries and policy sectors. Some advice giving tasks come to be recognised as important, and some as the job to be fulfilled by experts exclusively. Accordingly, the process of providing expertise is organised in different formats, ranging from ad-hoc expert committees, consensus conferences, contract research, to even informal meetings in a personal network. Hence, practices of advice giving develop into institutions, i.e. more or less routinised patterns in which expertise and policy are demarcated and coordinated. Governments have installed expert organisations for the specific purpose of advising policy. Such organisations develop a body of knowledge, formal and informal rules about how to provide advice, a more or less guaranteed budget, or a conception of what is and is not their business. Government departments have developed procedures for commissioning research, ranging from model contracts to informal routinised practices of commissioning expertise. Scientists also have developed institutions for expert advice giving, such as professional codes of conduct, networking platforms for meeting policy makers, or conceptions of what kind of public roles their profession should or should not play (Peters and Barker, 1993, Hoppe, 2002a). Most of the descriptions of this institutionalisation of science/policy boundaries tend to homogenise their account in one of two ways. The first and static homogenised account

The Academic Manifesto: From an Occupied to a Public University

Abstract Universities are occupied by management, a regime obsessed with ‘accountability’ through measurement, increased competition, efficiency, ‘excellence’, and misconceived economic salvation. Given the occupation’s absurd side-effects, we ask ourselves how management has succeeded in taking over our precious universities. An alternative vision for the academic future consists of a public university, more akin to a socially engaged knowledge commons than to a corporation. We suggest some provocative measures to bring about such a university. However, as management seems impervious to cogent arguments, such changes can only happen if academics take action. Hence, we explore several strategies for a renewed university politics.

Participation under a spell of instrumentalization? Reflections on action research in an entrenched climate adaptation policy process

The article discusses action research in a Dutch intergovernmental project group DV2050. That group was to assess the effects of climate change and soil subsidence on the regional water system and to propose adaptive policies to increase regional water safety. In this study, we draw a parallel between the stakeholder participation trajectory of DV2050 and our collaborative learning trajectory within the DV2050 project. In the academic literature, both participatory policy-making and action research are advocated for instrumental, normative and quality reasons. In our case, both trajectories took place in an entrenched context, i.e. a strongly institutionalized environment in which the involved governments compete for competencies. Despite broader ambitions stated at the beginning of these trajectories, we explain that both became instrumentalized by actors involved, narrowing their scope. Instrumentalization was influenced by powerful interests, a strongly institutionalized science–policy interface and the pressure of imminent decision-making.

The ghosts of HeLa: How cell line misidentification contaminates the scientific literature

While problems with cell line misidentification have been known for decades, an unknown number of published papers remains in circulation reporting on the wrong cells without warning or correction. Here we attempt to make a conservative estimate of this ‘contaminated’ literature. We found 32,755 articles reporting on research with misidentified cells, in turn cited by an estimated half a million other papers. The contamination of the literature is not decreasing over time and is anything but restricted to countries in the periphery of global science. The decades-old and often contentious attempts to stop misidentification of cell lines have proven to be insufficient. The contamination of the literature calls for a fair and reasonable notification system, warning users and readers to interpret these papers with appropriate care.

Promoting Virtue or Punishing Fraud: Mapping Contrasts in the Language of ‘Scientific Integrity’

Even though integrity is widely considered to be an essential aspect of research, there is an ongoing debate on what actually constitutes research integrity. The understanding of integrity ranges from the minimal, only considering falsification, fabrication and plagiarism, to the maximum, blending into science ethics. Underneath these obvious contrasts, there are more subtle differences that are not as immediately evident. The debate about integrity is usually presented as a single, universal discussion, with shared concerns for researchers, policymakers and ‘the public’. In this article, we show that it is not. There are substantial differences between the language of research integrity in the scientific arena and in the public domain. Notably, scientists and policymakers adopt different approaches to research integrity. Scientists tend to present integrity as a virtue that must be kindled, while policy documents and newspapers stress norm enforcement. Rather than performing a conceptual analysis through philosophical reasoning and discussion, we aimed to clarify the discourse of ‘scientific integrity’ by studying its usage in written documents. To this end, large numbers of scientific publications, policy documents and newspaper articles were analysed by means of scientometric and content analysis techniques. The texts were analysed on their usage of the term ‘integrity’ and of frequently co-occurring terms and concepts. A comparison was made between the usage in the various media, as well as between different periods in which they were published through co-word analysis, mapping co-occurrence networks of significant terms and themes.

Regulatory Futures in Retrospect

In our 1998 volume The Politics of Chemical Risk: Scenarios for a Regulatory Future we envisioned four ideal-typical scenarios for the future of European chemicals policies. The scenarios focused on the nature of expertise (seen either as a universal or a localised phenomenon) and the organisation of the boundary between science and policy (as either diverging or converging). The four scenarios were titled International Experts, European Risk Consultation, European Coordination of Assessment, and Europe as a Translator. For all four scenarios, we hypothesised internal dynamics and articulated dilemmas related to the development of the sciences contributing to chemical assessment, the relation between the EU and member states and the role of the public. In this contribution, we look back on our four scenarios 15 years later, to see which ones have materialised and to explore whether the dilemmas we saw have indeed surfaced. We conclude that the International Experts scenario by and large has materialised and explore some of the underlying tensions and dynamics in this development.

The Politics of Chemical Risk Scenarios for Regulatory Policy

In conclusion to this volume, we have made an attempt to integrate the papers in order to map different alternatives for the future development of the regulation of chemicals. Rather than drawing up long lists of all the ideas and analyses that are presented, we have tried to digest these into a set of four ‘scenarios’. These scenarios are four sets of coherent choices that could guide the further development of chemical regulation. In this sense they are not to be read as predictions about the regulatory future, they are sketches of possible regulatory futures. As sketches, they only indicate a number of structural lines, not the flesh and bones of specific domains of regulation. Combined with an analysis of the likely developments and tensions in each of these models, they obtain a dynamic component, warranting the term ‘scenarios’.

The changing forms and expectations of peer review

The quality and integrity of the scientific literature have recently become the subject of heated debate. Due to an apparent increase in cases of scientific fraud and irreproducible research, some have claimed science to be in a state of crisis. A key concern in this debate has been the extent to which science is capable of self-regulation. Among various mechanisms, the peer review system in particular is considered an essential gatekeeper of both quality and sometimes even integrity in science.However, the allocation of responsibility for integrity to the peer review system is fairly recent and remains controversial. In addition, peer review currently comes in a wide variety of forms, developed in the expectation they can address specific problems and concerns in science publishing. At present, there is a clear need for a systematic analysis of peer review forms and the concerns underpinning them, especially considering a wave of experimentation fuelled by internet technologies and their promise to improve research integrity and reporting.We describe the emergence of current peer review forms by reviewing the scientific literature on peer review and by adding recent developments based on information from editors and publishers. We analyse the rationale for developing new review forms and discuss how they have been implemented in the current system. Finally, we give a systematisation of the range of discussed peer review forms. We pay detailed attention to the emergence of the expectation that peer review can maintain ‘the integrity of science’s published record’, demonstrating that this leads to tensions in the academic debate about the responsibilities and abilities of the peer review system.

El manifiesto académico. De la universidad ocupada a la universidad libre

Universities are occupied by management, a regime obsessed with ‘accountability’ through measurement, increased competition, efficiency, ‘excellence’, and misconceived economic salvation.Given the occupation’s absurd side-effects, we ask ourselves how management has succeeded in taking over our precious universities. An alternative vision for the academic future consists of a public university, more akin to a socially engaged knowledge commons than to a corporation. We suggest some provocative measures to bring about such a university. However, as management seems impervious to cogent arguments, such changes can only happen if academics take action. Hence, we explore several strategies for a renewed university politics.