Kerr (1995) wrote that by 1520, 70 universities had been established in the western world, which are still in the same locations with some of the same buildings, and with governance carried on in much the same way. There may have been various interest and task behind the university over the years but the main idea of teaching, scholarship, and service in one combination or another continue the be the heart of the university. “Looked at from within, the universities have changed enormously in the emphases of their several functions and in their guiding spirits, but looked at from without and comparatively, they are among the least changed of institutions” (Kerr 1995, 115). However, despite a significant persistence, the university as an institution has faced changes during its history.
During the 17th century, the originally cosmopolitan universities gradually became centralized by the nation-states. With the rise of territorial nation-states, schools and universities became important centers for promoting and codifying national cultures, languages and geographies, and academics became an important
part of national elites (Ben-David 1977). Since then, higher education has produced ‘positional goods’ (Hirsch 1976) that provide access to social prestige and income-earning in the society and is one of the special features of the higher education. One of the more influential university models was the 19th century Ger-man university model, called the Humboldtian university model. The idea of the Humboldtian university model, to combine the research and education together, has been adopted worldwide (Ben-David 1977). In a broadly distributed version of the Humboldtian idea of the university, the notions of university autonomy and academic freedom are central. In the Humboldtian tradition, higher education institutions can serve as key institutions for the democratization of society. (Marginson 2018.) During the 20th century, the university moved from the margins of society to the center of it, changing the ethos of the élite institution of truth and knowledge into the institution that takes the social project of equality, democratic plurality and justice as its key mission (Nokkala 2007, 42–43).
Kerr (1995) declares that the new post-modern university, the Multiversity, has been born. As a result of the massification and enlargement of the higher education sector, the university has become fragmented. A post-modern university is led by various truths, values and practices and by different political missions. Moreover, the university has become an institute of cultural transformation and one of the most important institutions cultivating democratic values. Tirronen (2006, 130– 133) uses the concept of the Multiversity when describing the transformation of the university into a service university wherein the idea is that the role of the university is to serve the nation and the state. The Multiversity is com-plex in its internal organization and it is heavy with administration. The task of the multiversity is to exert tension on the outside, with the result that the value basis of the university and the form of action are fragmented. Välimaa and Hoffman (2008) used the concept of the ‘knowledge society’ to describe the growing importance of knowledge, research and innovation in the change in post-modern societies.
The changes of societies from a modern, industrial society to the post-modern globalized knowledge society has contributed to a significant change in the university as an organization and social institution. Even in Central Asia countries, which cannot yet be directly called globalized knowledge societies, the policy rhetoric is changing the direction in which the principles of the higher education follow the principles of post-modern globalized knowledge society. The changes faced by higher education and higher education institutions during the last few decades have been described in numerous studies in the field of higher education (e.g. Gibbons et al 1994, Nowotny et al 2001, Delanty 2000). These studies have been interested in the issues related to the massification of higher education in the past few decades, the curriculum reforms which support lifelong learning skills and the specialized needs of society. Moreover, scholars have been interested in the diversification of university funding, increasing global completion,
cooperation of various knowledge providers and organizational changes in the university. Connected to the other reforms and changes, internationalization has developed over the last 20 years from a marginal point of interest to a pivotal factor of the higher education system.
Along with the rapid expansion of the higher education system, the growing interest by national governments and international organizations, like the World Bank and the OECD, are evolving higher education institutions, whose missions are increasingly transforming. In the 21st century, the autonomous university as an ‘ivory tower’ has been transformed into a quality measurement system, which is led by the political and ideological ideology to which the development of a society can be nationally planned and controlled (Neave 2002).
Ozga, Segerholm and Simola (2011, 94) note how evaluation, quality criteria and different quality standards have created a governance system which has supported the birth of new European governance culture. This new governance culture of education is underpinned by several evaluations of learning results such as the PISA studies of OECD, the growing importance of Eurostat educational statistics as well as by the ENQA higher education standards. Gushchin and Gureev (2011) argue that education is a top-priority interest of the state in Russia and in the Central Asian countries. The future of the societies and their economic and legal stability depend on the level of development of the system of education. One may argue that these changes have contributed towards an infrastructure of education based on statistics and measurability that serves as the basis for governance of education (Lawn & Segerholm 2011, 45). Morley (2003) has coined the term quality revolution to describe this turn in education policy that has been achieved by methods of bureaucracy and governance (see also Lawn, Rinne & Grek 2011, 17; Simola & Rinne 2004). Also, in the post-socialist context, the term ‘quality revolution’ has been used to demonstrate the rhetorical shift away from the Soviet era quality control towards a neoliberal quality assurance paradigm (e.g. Minina 2017). Other concepts to describe this turn in education policy include society of assurance, society of evaluation and evaluation society (Dahler-Larsen, 2011) which both highlights that evaluation and its features such as assessments and collection of data have become more common (Virtanen 2007, 12–13). What is common in all cases is that quality is understood to include the quality of educational outcomes, meaning that the quality of educational outcomes for students and societies is linked to the productivity of educational policy (Valverde 2014, 576).
The UN, World Bank and the International Development Evaluation Association have defined the approach as being an Evidence-based policy, which means that “evidence-based policy making refers to a policy process that helps planners make better-informed decisions by putting the best available evidence at the Centre of the policy process” (Segone 2008, 27). Segone (2008, 27) argues that many governments and organizations are using the term evidence-based
policy mainly because of “the fact that the policy making process is inherently political and, that the process through which evidence translates into policy options often fails to meet required quality standards.” In evidence-based policy making, monitoring and evaluation have strategic roles. The use of evidence can lead to differences in policy making (Segone 2008, 7), even though Karlsson and Conner (2008, 50–56) have pointed out the importance of keeping politics and evaluation operationally and conceptually apart.
First, the information function of evaluation should be the primary activity of the evaluators and under them control. Secondly, the judgement function based on the information, should be under the control of others, for example politicians, program planners and implementers. Furthermore, the term outcome-based education has been employed to understand this change in education policy, in which the focus has twisted from ex ante educational planning to ex post evaluations (see Steiner-Khamsi, Silova and Johnson 2006).
In the post-Soviet context, the role of the university has been historically closely related to the perceived tasks of the society. In the Soviet Union, the university was an important institution in the ideological dissemination of the state. In the current debate, there is discussion going on about how to develop the higher education system in the direction of becoming an institution that supports the goals of the state. In that discussion, the main focus is on how higher education supports more the economic development of the country (e.g. Senashenko 2006, 11 & Demidenko 2007, 89).