The Uniqual Initiative
The 1st UNIQUAL Conference at NTNU, organised by PLU and the Section of Higher Education Studies, and UNIQUAL 2, organised by Kaunas University of Technlogy, have affected a number of useful feedback comments. UNIQUAL 4 will be organised by Xiamen University, the third core partner of the UNIQUAL initiative. Over and above it seems that an audience comprised of both typical academics ("ivory professors") and "entrepreneurial" administrators found the presentations at UNIQUAL conferences and discussions of significant value.
An overall strategic ambition of UNIQUAL was to overcome the traditional schism of "Quality as fitness of purpose of" (ivory professors) and "Quality as fitness of purpose for" (the business-oriented university administrators). As organisers we are pleased to have got comments indicating that both camps are quite pleased with the chosen key not speakers and presenters. However, listening more sophistically to the comments we might hear that some of the administrators had found the conference a bit "too academic", while the opposite camp had found it too open to the market. Such opinions were expected, since people obviously make comment from their actual cognitive frame of references, values and subjective interests.
In terms of content the ambition of UNIQUAL was to clarify how functional relations between the changed frame factors of universities - that is the macro level context, the institutional level (management and organisation development) and the micro level (production of learning for competence and new knowledge) are affected by today's globalisation processes in general, and in particular - by the global knowledge economy. This line of reasoning is often overlooked by university people.
