By Chris Fauske
Communications Department

Chris Fauske

Tempting though it is to begin this article with some passing joke about processed meat, for those in higher education in much of Europe the word “bologna” now means only one thing. And everyone knows it.

We should be much better informed in this country of the implications and consequences of the Bologna process, and we soon might have to be as the Western Governors University and a Lumina Foundation initiative gather steam. So what is the Bologna process?

The first misconception is that Bologna is an initiative of the European Union. In fact, it is perhaps the most tangible non-legal initiative of the Council of Europe and seeks by this year to

• increase ease of mobility from one country to the other either for further study or employment within states adopting the Bologna process protocols;
• attract increasing numbers of students from non-European countries to come to Europe to study and, ultimately, to seek employment
• provide Europe with a broad, high quality and advanced knowledge base ensuring the further development of Europe as a stable, peaceful and tolerant community.¹

As with any multinational process—perhaps as with any complex process—Bologna is unlikely by year’s end to offer the type of seamless higher education experience agreed to in the 1999 declaration signed in the Italian city of, surprise, Bologna.² That declaration triggered a series of biennial meetings to encourage continuing progress toward full implementation of the declaration and to discuss implementation strategies.

The Bologna process, as befits the finest of European intergovernmental initiatives, concerned as they are with creating an increasingly borderless Europe while protecting national sovereignty to a degree acceptable to each member state’s electorate, is a non-treaty collaborative exercise, which means that in practice signatory states have adopted a variety of approaches to implementation, some designed for domestic consumption as much as anything, others designed to push the process as far as possible.

Higher education institutions themselves have also responded to the Bologna process in a variety of ways, so that some institutions are increasingly defining themselves as European rather than national. One prime example is the University of Bergen in Norway, until recently a stolid, serious university in Norway’s second city, now busy rebranding itself (in English) as Norway’s international university and (in Norwegian) as the country’s gateway to the world (an initiative in keeping with Bergen’s historic role as a Hanseatic port and gateway to the easiest route to the continental mainland of Europe).

One consequence already apparent from the process is increased competition among higher education establishments for talent, both faculty students, and an increasing emphasis on collaborative projects across institutions, collaborative exercises that allow for the sharing of resources and which have allowed institutions from less wealthy or otherwise historically or geographically marginalized states to increase cross-state collaborations.

Another consequence has been an increase in the expectation that universities will publish results of their scholarship, teaching, and learning. Participating states have chosen, largely led by their higher education associations, to resist a formalized “report card” process, in contrast to Britain which went furthest down this route in the 80s (before the Bologna process began) and ‘90s, inspired by then prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s determination to reduce everything to matters of finance and accounting. Britain’s approach (still largely continued by the present Labour government) led, among other things, to the Research Assessment Exercise, which seeks to measure qualitatively the research results of each higher education institution in Britain and to use those results as one (significant) part of a funding formula for state support of higher education. If you think “publish or perish” at some of the more ambitious U.S. universities makes working there a cut throat business, have a look at what has happened to faculty hiring (and firing) practices in British universities.³ Bologna, however, with its emphasis on learning outcomes, has offered countries and institutions an alternative way of defining success other than by faculty research.

Bologna is ambitious and about state building while at the same time falling back on the individual constituent states of Europe to do the design and implementation, but it is not simply, or even primarily, an economic initiative. While there are expressed goals to be met across all nations, each nation is free to determine what it means to meet those goals, and some countries are even delegating to individual institutions how to meet goals. First and foremost, Bologna is about freedom of movement (of both people and ideas) and about the development of a fully functioning democratic civil society. The Council of Europe and its member states understand higher education as more than just an economic engine. Education builds civil society.

Because common goals can be met in a variety of ways, Bologna potentially offers a model that is scalable in reverse and that might be attractive to Massachusetts’ institutions of higher education: We could all agree on common outcomes but then devolve the implementation to individual campuses, obviating the potential for state mandates. The big stick in the process is the free movement of students. Institutions can no longer create barriers as we do by designing, say, a core curriculum that penalizes transfer students who have to complete far more than 120 credits to graduate.

One consequence of signing up for the Bologna process is that participating nations have to work to deliver higher education that is consistent in its outcomes across borders. Science, then, has to include evolution. History has to focus on methodologies as well as events, rather than on discrete, nationally-informed “facts” that differ by national outlook. Geography has to take account of cross-border implications of planning.

Perhaps at the end of the day, all of this will prove too much; but ambition is important in any entity that wishes to thrive, and the Bologna process requires university administrators, faculty, and staff to ask themselves not whether what they have always done can be sustained, but, rather, how they can contribute their own institution’s distinctiveness, history, and precedents to the development of an organic, multi-state effort to deliver meaningful, internationally-aligned, socially-constructive higher education.

What does this have to do with Salem State College? Perhaps not much immediately, but three major initiatives in this country that owe much to the ideas that underpin Bologna suggest that regional accreditation agencies will be unable much longer to apply only local definitions to their members. Additionally, pressure is already mounting, both within Massachusetts and across the country, for institutions of higher education to agree on definitions for common concepts that almost all institutions use but that remain so ill defined as to make them meaningless, terms such as “core curriculum” and “competence.” At present, one institution’s core need bear no relation to another’s, and one institution’s definition of mathematics competence need bear no relation to another’s, not just across the whole institution but even within a field. What do computer science graduates have in common, for example, if some are expected to demonstrate abilities with symbolic logic that others are not, or what do archeologists share if some are expected to have completed field work at previously unexplored sites while others are not?

In this country, the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) initiative seeks to offer ways of considering what constitutes a liberal education, an education which Salem State claims for every one of its graduates, so that while institutions bring their own traditions and practices to implementation, common standards underpin the goals and outcomes of a liberal education across AAC&U member institutions. For the first time, faculty and students from all 50 states would have a common working definition of something many of us have claimed to be committed to throughout our professional careers.

More specifically grounded in the ideas of the Bologna process is an initiative of the Western Governors Association designed to redefine the higher education experience for the 22 member states [19 U.S. states and three U.S. flag pacific islands, Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands]. Already up and running, the Western Governors University bills itself as “truly a university without boundaries… a non-profit online university founded and supported by 19 U.S. governors… to tackle one of the western states’ most pressing problems: rapid population growth confronted by limited public funds for educational services….  The governors agreed that this new university would make maximum use of distance learning technologies, would be collaborative among the western member states, and would use competencies rather than seat time as the measure of its outcomes.”⁴

Meanwhile, in 2009, the Lumina Foundation teamed up with faculty in three states to create

“Tuning USA [whose]… methodology is based on similar work to increase the transparency around what a degree represents under Europe’s Bologna Process.” Lumina Foundation publicity material states that:

Working with students, faculty members and education officials from Indiana, Minnesota and Utah…the aim is to create a shared understanding among higher education’s stakeholders of the subject-specific knowledge and transferable skills that students in six fields must demonstrate upon completion of a degree program. Each state has elected to draft learning outcomes and map the relations between these outcomes and graduates’ employment options for at least two of the following disciplines: biology, chemistry, education, history, physics and graphic design. Tuning involves creating a framework that sets forth clear responsibilities for institutions and establishes clear learning expectations for students in each subject area while balancing the need among programs to retain their academic autonomy and flexibility. The objective is not to standardize programs offered by different institutions but to better establish the quality and relevance of degrees in various academic disciplines.⁵ [Emphasis added.]

As with the Bologna Process principles, Lumina seeks not to define what is taught and how it is taught, but to help establish an agreed upon common set of outcomes, distinguishing between outcomes–what students should be able to do and understand upon graduation, and content and pedagogy, both of which fall to individual faculty and to departmental faculties to determine. While a common goal is established, individual ways of meeting that goal are devolved locally. LEAP and the Western Governors University are already seeking to put that concept of “competencies rather than seat time as the measure of its outcomes” into practice.

With the Bologna Process to their east, two significant Bologna inspired initiatives to their west, and a national effort by the AAC&U (of which Salem State College is a member) in full stride, neither NEASC nor Massachusetts is likely to be able to ignore the idea of common agreed upon outcomes across higher education institutions for too much longer.

This article is part of ASpect’s March 2010 issue on the core curriculum.

1 Council of Europe (2010). “What is the Bologna Process?” Strasbourg: Council of Europe.

2 The full text of the declaration is available as a PDFhere.

3 For more on the RAE, click here and, for the most recent report, visit www.rae.ac.uk. It is important not to confuse British political initiatives with the broader Bologna process.

4 “Created by 19 U.S. Governors. Designed for you.”

5 Details of the Turning USA initiative can be found at the Lumina Foundation’s web site dedicated to the project. The quote above is taken from the press release announcing the initiative [8 Apr. 2009]. The full text is here.