University missions are tricky things to enunciate. From the point of view of many faculty, people who have reached their position by dint of their excellence in a specific field, tend not to view their employer’s main mission as 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 is the Executive Director of the Centrum for Hochschulentwicklung (or Centre for Higher Education) in Gutersloh, 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 his 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 toward authentic missions, and how governments tend can encourage – or, unfortunately, more often discourage – institutions to pursue differentiated Missions. Although the book was written for a German audience, I think it has pretty wide resonance for universities throughout the globe. And so without further ado: lets hear from Frank.
The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 4.17 | Authentic Universities: Choosing What Not to Be
Transcript
Alex Usher (AU): Your book is about authenticity — and specifically about how higher education institutions can pursue strategies of differentiation in an authentic way. Before we get into the issue of authenticity, I want to ask: 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 (FZ): A lot of things are fundamentally changing. In the book, we talk about something we call unravelling certainties — things we’ve taken for granted for many years in higher education that are now changing.
We always thought academic education was something separate from, and completely isolated from, professional training. Now what we want is permeability. We always thought, in biographical terms, that university education was a phase between secondary school and a career. Now it’s happening lifelong. We always thought people were going for a major qualification — like a bachelor’s or a master’s degree. Now we see a boom in certificate courses, in microcredentials, and we talk about the stackability of small educational components.
We always thought what universities do is teaching and research, and now we’re talking about — in Europe we say the “third mission,” or community service, or whatever you want to call it — in so many respects. And we used to think people mainly need specialist knowledge. Now we’re talking about future skills, like resilience in a changing world, and so on.
All of this is happening at the same time. And all of this is creating opportunities — maybe also threats. You could be afraid of it. But we argue that an authentic university should embrace these opportunities, should be a frontrunner, and should go in certain directions.
Take, for instance, the third mission issue. In Germany, we have a university that has renamed itself the 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 toward diversity. If you want to satisfy a variety of needs, you also need a variety of profiles. A one-size-fits-all solution is definitely not enough. That’s the argument for differentiation.
AU: You don’t quite put it this way in the book, but it seems to me — especially in the early chapters — that there’s good differentiation and there’s bad differentiation. And the difference is basically how authentic the profile of differentiation is. If we were going to create a spotter’s guide — if we were trying to pick out the rules of thumb here — how would you tell the difference between a profile that’s authentic and one that’s inauthentic?
FZ: Before going to the spotter’s guide, I’d like to start with something more basic. If you want to build a house, you need a foundation. So our basic idea is that if you want to be authentic, you need to stay true to yourself, know who you are, and take up the trends that fit with your identity.
Authenticity, in our view, is not a static concept. It’s a very dynamic one. It’s not about saying, “I will always remain like this.” No — you want to change, but you want to change while staying true to yourself.
So, for instance, if you’re a university and you already have successful startups, and you have an innovation ecosystem around you that includes many small and medium-sized enterprises — which we quite often have in Germany — then it would make sense to become a university focused on small and medium enterprises, something like a regional engine that promotes change and development in its region. You should look at what is already there — what is the foundation you can build on.
Now, coming to the spotter’s guide — this is really a tricky issue. And thanks for that question, because I think there is a backside to this idea of differentiation. Differentiation creates complexity and intransparency. So how should a student understand what all these different universities stand for, and what they will actually get there?
In that sense, it would be good to have a spotter’s guide, but it’s very difficult. What we do in Germany, at my institution, the Centre for Higher Education, is that we’ve created what we call the CHE ranking. It’s a very complex system, and it tries to show what the real differences are between institutions.
And here, I would look at a simple question: does the university really live the story it’s telling? We have some universities in our country that rename study programs with English titles, but they teach in German. That’s not authentic.
AU: I was struck early on in your book by a very stark declaration: a university can’t do everything. And it seems to me that a big part of differentiation is about institutions being clear about what they’re not going to be. It’s not actually about doing more — it’s more like what Peter Drucker always said about nonprofits and mission statements: the important thing is that they guide what not to do, because otherwise you could just do any old thing.
It sounds simple, and it sounds true, and yet we always see universities act as if it’s not true — as if they really can do everything. What do you mean by that phrase? What is it that universities should not be doing?
FZ: It’s different things. First of all, what I described earlier as these unravelling certainties, and all these options that are emerging — this can be overwhelming. It’s not possible for one institution, a one-size-fits-all institution, to satisfy all these needs.
If you look at the third mission, for example, we have expectations that universities should save democracy, should solve all the issues around climate change, should do whatever is needed. And you cannot do all of that at once.
I would agree that sometimes it’s very difficult for a university to say no. On the one hand, I said we should not have one-size-fits-all universities. But on the other hand, we often do have one-size-fits-all metrics for measuring the success of a university. So then you’re forced to satisfy them all.
Another issue is funding. Governments are hanging all kinds of carrots in front of your nose. And would you really say, “No, this carrot doesn’t fit my profile — I won’t take it”? You need the funding, so you take all the carrots.
And many governments haven’t really understood that differentiation is a good idea. They often think, “We need three universities in the world-class segment,” and that’s it. But that’s not really creating diversity — it’s a very narrow understanding of diversity. So, there are a lot of obstacles that have to be overcome. But still, we have to try.
AU: 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 spend a lot of time in the book talking about horizontal differentiation — having different authentic missions. Can you give us some examples of those authentic horizontal missions that institutions might profitably pursue?
FZ: Yes. In the book, we created twelve different horizontally differentiated profiles. I should say at the beginning that this wasn’t necessarily meant to describe reality as it is today. What we did was look at current trends, then extrapolate those trends — maybe ten years into the future — and ask: if a university followed only one of these trends, what would come out of it?
That’s how we arrived at these different profiles. To give you two or three examples: one is what we called a guidance university. That’s a university that’s not so much focused on providing content or awarding qualifications itself, but is focused on guiding individuals through a lifelong learning journey. It would guarantee the stackability of modules, support students over time, and operate with fewer professors in the traditional sense and more coaches — or professors trained to act more like coaches.
So that would be one option, totally focused on accompanying people through an educational journey.
Another example — maybe this is a very European perspective, but I think it’s important — is what we called the European university. A university that positions itself as a place where European values are promoted, where transnational campuses offer supranational degrees, and where these ideas are actively developed and projected outward. Especially these days, this might be more important than ever. And I think people from Canada might agree that this kind of positioning is really needed in the current world.
Those are just two examples. We also describe a future skills university, focused explicitly on developing future skills, and I mentioned earlier the idea of a regional engine as another profile.
There are many options. And when I talk about this, I should add that just in the last year I’ve developed ten more of these profiles. Reality will always be a mixture — but the point is that there are many different, plausible directions institutions could take.
AU: Frank, I want to move on from the what to the how. How does an institution get to a position statement or a profile that would allow it to differentiate? A lot of strategy processes are dedicated to teasing out — as you say — the things institutions are already doing, staying true to themselves. That was the phrase you used before the break.
But there’s also the possibility, isn’t there, of not trying to tease something out, and instead looking for a kind of blue-ocean strategy — seeing a market opportunity or a societal need that’s going unaddressed and making a big leap, rather than going the “teasing out” route. Is one preferable to the other? Is one easier than the other?
FZ: It depends. If you allow me to compare a university to a clothing store for a moment, we could say: on the one hand, the store can showcase some elements of its existing portfolio in the shop window. Or it could go for a completely new fashion collection that’s never been there before.
I think both are possible. Both can be good strategies for a store, and both are possible for a university. You asked which is easier — of course, the teasing-out strategy, building on your foundation and moving forward from there, is the more realistic and also the less risky one. It’s less likely that you lose staff members along the way or create a lot of opposition internally.
On the other hand, if you’re in a situation of crisis, or if you’re facing major external disruptions — like the emergence of artificial intelligence, and we don’t yet know what other transformations are coming — that might call for a more disruptive approach. But even then, I would argue that you still need some kind of foundation. You can’t do it completely out of the blue. You need something to build on, otherwise it won’t work.
Maybe this second approach — going after a completely new market opportunity — is more realistic if it doesn’t refer to the university as a whole, but only to part of it. I know one example from Germany: a small university of applied sciences in a remote area was facing a lack of students. They decided to start providing online education as a distance-learning provider, and now they are the second-largest public institution of that kind in Germany.
So that was a really new strategy, and it worked — but it was a partial change, not something that applied to the entire institution.
AU: That’s interesting, because that gets to my next question. I didn’t see much discussion in the book about disciplines. You’re talking about institutions, and I don’t know how different this is in Europe, but certainly in Canada I would argue that a lot of people have more loyalty to their discipline — they think of themselves as historians or physicists or whatever — more than they think of themselves as employees of University X.
And a lot of the kinds of horizontal differentiation you’re talking about are fairly specific. If you’re the “University of Sustainability,” for example, how does a professor of poetry, or a historian of Africa, see themselves in that identity? Or if you’re a “regional engine” university, it seems to me that this could be a real barrier to differentiation, because some parts of the university might say, “We don’t see ourselves in that identity. We recognize that it fits some parts of the institution, but not us.” How do you overcome that kind of reaction?
FZ: First of all, we could also have written a book about authentic faculties. I think that’s just as relevant as talking about an authentic university as a whole. We thought about this when we were writing the book — how to deal with that question.
In the end, we decided to stay at the level of the university as a whole for a specific reason. In many of the future profiles we analyzed, we found that there is a real need to overcome faculty silos. That’s one of the key challenges. Sometimes I even say: if everyone stays sitting in their own faculty silo, some of the changes we’re talking about simply won’t move forward.
For example, one of the profiles we describe is what we call a teaching concept university — an institution that develops its profile around a shared approach to teaching, such as challenge-based learning. But you can only do that if people come together across faculty boundaries.
So that’s why we took that perspective in the book. But of course, the faculty level is also a level where strategic planning and profiling happens. We put it aside a bit for the purposes of the book, but it’s absolutely relevant.
AU: That’s a great metaphor, actually. I always try to get people to think about the English department at MIT. MIT is the STEM university — and it’s also one of the best English departments in the world. Anyway, thank you for that metaphor. That’s really helpful. What are the other big pitfalls that universities need to look out for when developing distinct, authentic priorities?
FZ: Maybe there’s one danger that’s related to the metaphor we were just discussing. If you’ve found a strong profile and you have a clear idea of where you want to go, there’s a risk that you become a bit lazy or complacent — that you think, “Now we’re on the right path,” and stop watching out for the next changes that are coming.
So retaining agility, and being able to change, is something you shouldn’t forget when you commit to a profile.
The second thing is not to neglect the fact that building a profile is connected to funding structures. If you go in a certain direction, it has implications for how you generate revenue. Your diversification of funding sources is closely related to building profiles, and that needs to be part of the conversation.
And maybe the third big pitfall is the lack of enabling conditions from government. That’s something universities are always struggling with. If a government hasn’t realized that differentiation is actually a good thing, it becomes very difficult. We talked earlier about world-class universities — but instead of focusing on a few world-class institutions, we really need a world-class system: one that’s differentiated, and not just focused on a small segment.
AU: We talked about this in the first half of the interview — the idea that government can be more of a hindrance than a help in this area. Here 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 talk about carrots, and if governments only put carrots out for “world-classness,” then everyone’s going to go down the research route. But are governments even capable of doing this well? I can’t think of a government off the top of my head that actually provides diverse carrots, if I can put it that way. Government instinct is usually to flatten distinctions between regulated organizations, not accentuate them. They don’t like collecting data across lots of different metrics, and as you said, we often end up with one-size-fits-all measures.
What can be done to change governments’ views? And do you have any models — maybe from the German Länder — of governments that are actually doing the right thing to encourage differentiation?
FZ: In general, I would say that what you just described for Ontario — this performance agreement system — is actually a good one, because it allows for differentiation.
Interestingly, we had one state in Germany — higher education is a state responsibility there, so we have sixteen different systems — and one of those states, Hessen, explicitly said, “We need a differentiation process.” The minister created a fund and said to universities, “Tell us where you want to go, and we will support it.”
They also set up a peer group that went through all the universities and provided feedback and assessment on whether these differentiation strategies were realistic and desirable. That’s one concrete example of how this can work.
I think there’s one thing about Germany that makes this a bit easier for us compared to many other countries. We’ve always had a binary system: universities and universities of applied sciences. So we’re used to the idea that not all universities are the same. There’s the more theoretical, basic-research-oriented type, and the more practice-oriented, applied research and innovation-focused type. That story is already understood by governments, and it makes things easier — even though that distinction is changing.
At the moment, I’m also working on a project in Ethiopia — so quite far from both of our countries — and the Ethiopian government has decided to transform fifteen universities into universities of applied sciences. That’s a very explicit differentiation strategy.
So there are things happening around the world that move in the direction of differentiation, even if it’s still difficult in many systems.
AU: 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?
FZ: On the one hand, I’m very happy with the reaction to the book. On the other hand, by the end of last year I was a bit exhausted, because I spent the whole year travelling across Germany, talking to all kinds of people and giving presentations.
In the meantime, we’ve even developed a moderation concept out of the book. We now run foresight workshops with universities, and that’s been quite successful. So from these examples, you can see that the reception has been very positive. People really are engaging with it.
I think there’s a kind of window of opportunity right now, where universities are starting to think beyond the four- or five-year time horizon they usually focus on. And those horizons are often driven by things like performance agreements — in Ontario, as you mentioned, they’re three years.
AU: Three.
FZ: Three, yes — even three. So that’s usually the period people think about when they think about the future. But now there’s a growing sense that we also need foresight processes. In Switzerland, for example, ETH Zurich has even established a foresight hub at the level of the university presidency.
That kind of work helps to shape the three-, four-, or five-year strategy, because you have a clearer idea of where you want to go if you’re thinking further ahead. In that sense, our book helped to fill a gap that was there, and people are really taking it up.
With these different profiles I mentioned earlier, we’ve even turned them into a card game. Universities actually play with these profiles, and that helps them identify ideas about their own profile.
AU: I want one of those.
FZ: And so universities are really engaging with it, and that makes me very happy.
AU: Thanks so much for joining us.
FZ: Thank you.
AU: It just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Samantha Ick 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, who’s coming to talk about his new book Peak Higher Education. Bye for now.
*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service. Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.
