Prof. Dr. Jürgen Enders

The presentation discusses the development and current state of the regional engagement of higher education institutions in Germany. A special focus will be on the external and internal governance of the regional role and contribution of higher education institutions. An overview is, first, provided of the classical linkages of higher education institutions with their region and contributions to regional development. Related considerations by the German Länder as regards the positive side-effects of higher education institutions for their region played an important role in establishing new higher education institutions in the wake of the massification of higher education.
Second, more recent trends in regional engagement and their governance are discussed: (1) the 'return' of regional contributions of higher education as one of the main topics in the political and institutional discourse on German higher education and research that is somewhat surprising given that there is no strong and coherent political coordination of the relationship between higher education and the region; (2) the prominent role of competitive time limited funding programmes for regional engagement organised by the governments incentivising clusters of heterogeneous actors from higher education and research, business, and civil society. Finally, some tensions and dilemmas in the governance of higher education-region interactions will be discussed.

Jürgen Enders is Professor at the School of Management, University of Bath, UK. His academic interest is focused on the study of institutional change in the field of universities, and their role in society and economy.

He has written and (co)edited 15 books and published more than 150 articles in books and journals including Organization Studies, Public Management, Public Management Review, Studies in Higher Education, Higher Education and Scientometrics. He is member of the editorial board of the journals Higher Education and European Journal of Higher Education. Elsevier and University of Stanford released data has recently named him among the top 2% of most highly cited academics in the world in the social sciences.

Jürgen is member of the University of Oxford based Center for Global Higher Education, Fellow of the Academia Europaea and of the German Academe of Science and Engineering, and Honorary Fellow of the Society for Research in Higher Education.