>> home >> research > fields > IDISC IDISC: The Internationalization of Higher Education. A Discourse Analysis of University Reforms in France and Germany J.A. co-applicant with B. Schmidt, Montpellier 3 For about twenty years, higher education in both France and Germany has seen major change in the light of the Bologna process and excellence initiatives, international comparisons and evaluations (e.g. the "Shanghai ranking") and new tendencies in academic governance (e.g. the "entrepreneurial university"). The university reforms have often been explained and justified by international phenomena (such as globalization, europeanization, knowledge society, international competition etc.). The question, therefore, is to what extent discourses about higher education reforms refer to international instances of legitimation even though educational policy is generally considered to be among the sovereign duties of the nation-state in France and the Landers in Germany. The IDISC project investigates the influence of public debates on higher education reforms in Germany and France from the 1990s until today with respect to their contribution to an emerging transnational space of higher education. The choice of the French and German cases is justified by their role as the driving force in European integration. While both countries have different academic and political cultures, their policies are tightly enmeshed and oriented toward the European space. IDISC mobilizes qualitative and quantifying methods of discourse analysis: 1) In the part on the historical contexts, we will elucidate the institutional traditions and the evolution of both academic systems in which the discussions about higher education reforms are embedded. 2) In a document-analytical part, the declarations of the French and German university presidents' associations (HRK and CPU) and of the specialized press in higher education policy will be analyzed with respect to the discursive field of positions. 3) In a quantifying part, large corpuses of press texts will be analyzed with respect to the thematic-semantic organization of mass-media discourse. An interdisciplinary, binational and comparative project, IDISC, with its multidisciplinary team composed of sociologists, historians and linguists as well as by means of discourse analysis as its common methodological tool, aims to contribute to a better understanding of the ongoing higher education reforms in the European space of higher education.