"I worked on the issue of higher education governance for many years at an NGO in Slovakia before I enrolled in the PhD program," explained Renáta Králiková, "but due to the type of work I was doing (work at an NGO, for the government), I did not have time to research the topic, to look at the big picture, and go more in-depth." That's what she has done as a doctoral student.
Králiková has done extensive research in Lithuania, Romania, and Slovakia to understand how higher education reform policies have evolved in these three countries. She has focused on three areas related to the modernization agenda for higher education governance: the centralization of university management and organization; the introduction of external stakeholders to university management; and changes to how universities are funded. Her initial plan was to compare and contrast higher education governance in three countries that, she says, shared similar starting points, but had traveled very different paths in applying the modernization agenda. "I very quickly realized though that in order to understand the decisions that were being made in the early 2000s, I would need to start my research in 1989-90," she says.
She made this discovery during an intense month of interviews in Lithuania. "I spoke to a lot of people," she remembers. "I really pushed them to understand why they listened to some people and not to others, why they considered some options, and ignored others – why they were doing things differently in Lithuania than, for example, we had done in Slovakia." The answers that she got to her questions pointed to the importance of decisions taken right after the overthrow of communism in these three countries. The key idea was that in the late 1980s and early 1990s people designing changes, including changes in higher education, introduced new perceptions of what are appropriate ways to manage universities and who should be making the decisions about university management structures. That's when she started looking at what had happened during the transition period in Lithuania – and in Romania and Slovakia as well. "It required a major shift in my project," she says.
Králiková found that many people in Lithuania were not themselves aware of the impact that the transition period had on them and the decisions they were making 20 years later. This did not surprise her though since she too had failed to make this connection when researching the situation in her home country of Slovakia. "Like them, I was too much a part of the system to be able to see how things could have been done differently," she says.
According to Králiková, all three countries made decisions after the fall of communism that influenced later policy choices. She explains that one type of legacy that was produced during this period was path-dependency. "The institutions set in place during transition pushed later historical developments along set paths." Králiková says that what remained path-dependent in Slovakia "was the belief that universities should be self-governed in a decentralized way, and that the central executive management of universities cannot be fully trusted." This distrust of central university management caused Slovakia to adopt laws in 2002 to tightly regulate fund and property use by universities. This differed from the situation in the Czech Republic that granted greater authority to central management.
Another type of path-dependency relates to the identification of "legitimate policy designers," she says. In Lithuania, for example, groups identified as legitimate policy designers during transition were able to block efforts 10 and 20 years later to introduce and empower boards that included external stakeholders. "The university rectors and the Lithuanian Constitutional Court remained the legitimate policy designers in Lithuania – even 20 years later," she said.
One of the interesting findings that Králiková made while conducting research for her thesis was to discover that even people who had been institutionalized during the transition period could be considered legitimate policy designers later. "The determining factor was whether or not they were considered 'appropriate,'" she said. What is considered appropriate can change when "the behavior of the reform authors and/or policy designers starts to be structured by a 'new' institution," she explained.
Králiková has found answers to many of the questions that she was asking in Lithuania. Along the way she has also gained a greater and more nuanced understanding of why the modernization agenda in higher education governance has been translated in very different ways in Lithuania, Romania, and Slovakia.