TRUE – Transforming Universities

The Collaborative Research Project TRUE is funded by the European Science Foundation under the programme Higher Education and Social Change (EuroHESC). The project is a comparative study of higher education reforms in eight European countries that aims to clarify how steering and governance affect essential organizational characteristics of higher education institutions and how this in turn affects the differentiation of the higher education landscape. This will help understand how consciously designed European and national reforms affect national systems and presumably their basic functions: education, research and innovation and individual institutions.

Three perspectives:

The transformation will be analysed by means of three perspectives:

1. Universalism assumes that universities are specific organisations
2. Instrumentalism assumes that universities are just like any kind of organisation
3. Institutionalism assuming that the crucial question is the fit between the norms and values of universities and reformers.

Themes:
The CRP focuses on three interrelated themes:

• Governance and steering
• Organisational change
• The higher education landscape.

The IPs and APs have divided the subthemes systematically between them in order to study the subthemes comparatively in a systematic way.

The CRP has accordingly adopted a systematic procedure for a common eight country database based on five data collection strategies:

1. National cases studies based on a common design, realised by national teams.
2. Case studies of three individual HEIs in each country (24 overall)
3. Joint survey of all HEIs in the involved countries, developed collectively and delivered nationally.
4. In-depth comparative analyses of national policies and instruments
5. Collection of common data for a basic characterization of HEIs.