Turning the University into an Organizational Actor

Abstract

Abstract Universities worldwide have gone through a variety of changes over the last half-century. From the offspring of institutes for learning and teaching in higher education in the late 1960s to the current emphasis on e-learning, methodological and systematic approaches to academic teaching have more and more replaced the belief in the natural teaching abilities of university professors. Educating university students has come to be seen as something that can be taught like physics or languages, and the individual style and aura of the professor gives way to a more sober and rationalized image of academic teachers. Likewise, the societal conception of academic research has undergone profound transformations.