The Politics of Quality: Developments in Higher Education in Western Europe 1992-1994

In olden days, when gentlemen's suits were crafted by hand, sartorial elegance went hand in hand with closeness of fit. The art of the tailor was, in the older meaning of the term, nice. The customer garnered his satisfaction in the compliments and admiring remarks of his friends and colleagues. There is, however, a tale of one unfortunate who, rather than going to Savile Row, where the most exquisite of British bespoke tailors are to be found even today, thought to avoid untoward expense by going to a tailor in the East End of London. The measurements were taken. The adjustments made. The result was surprising. The garment fell from his shoulders like a bell tent. The trousers, sagging at the knees, also hung at the gusset. The suit was in sooth the most monstrous monument to a degree of hamfisted incompetence never previously achieved by either tailor or cutter. Called to account for the disaster, the little tailor, tugging briskly at his customer's lapel, said: 'Never mind the quality, Sir. Feel the width.' Like the legendary Whitechapel tailor, contemporary higher education finds itself deeply enmeshed in an age-old dilemma: can one have both quality and width and more especially so when more customers want traditional quality and excellence but are no longer prepared to pay the previously going rate? Or, to put it slightly differently, when customers, if they are prepared to pay the same amount, want two suits for the price of one-which comes to the same thing? Over the past two years, the momentum that has built up around the issue of quality-whether quality maintenance (a conservative notion to the extent that it seeks simply to uphold what are deemed previous levels) or quality assurance (which calls for more radical change, often, one suspects, because of the fear that without it, quality will deteriorate)-has taken on the dimensions of a universal concern to which the world of higher education is occasionally prone. Few indeed are the systems of higher education in Western Europe in which this issue is not the focus of frenetic activity. And fewer indeed are the measures governments are embarked upon that are justified without reference to it. The least one can say about the issue, in its substantive and operational as opposed to its political consequences, is that quality is elusive. The same term brings together a whole range of different notions which, when implemented, have vastly different results in terms of authority and control, not to mention the mission placed upon the structures set up to exercise oversight or, to use the jargon 115