99 Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus Globalement, le volume fait une contribution significative à la problématique de la gestion universitaire au Québec. L'ouvrage, bien rédigé et d'accès facile, constitue une excellente initiation à la question et fournit une vision et des témoignages québécois de première main. Cependant, la problématique n'est peut être pas aussi nouvelle que le titre ne le suggère pour l'observateur attentif du monde universitaire canadien-anglais et américain. En effet, celui-ci a été confronté au phénomène d'austérité budgétaire et aux dures réalités de la gestion dès le milieu des années 1970 et de nombreux écrits ont été produits sur ce sujet. (Voir par exemple, le rapport: Council of Ontario Universities, An Uncertain Future, Toronto, Ontario, 1979). En résumé, l'ouvrage s'avère un excellent outil de sensibilisation pour les personnes qui s'intéressent à la gestion universitaire au Québec. Il peut également devenir un précieux instrument de formation pour les gestionnaires universitaires québécois. Roger L. Geiger. Privatization of Higher Education: International Trends and Issues. Princeton: International Council for Educational Development Conference Report, 1988. Reviewed by Robert M. Pike, Department of Sociology, Queen's University This slim monograph is a summary analysis of the papers and proceedings of a special seminar on the privatization of higher education organized by International Council for Educational Development in 1987. The seminar brought together a group of distinguished educators representing nine countries directly, and four countries indirectly, to outline and discuss national and international trends in the privatization of institutions of higher learning. Roger Geiger - the author of a major study on Private Sectors in Higher Education (1986) - attended the seminar and prepared the analysis at the request of ICED which is a U.S.-based international organization for the comparative study of priority educational problems. In a preface, the chairman of ICED notes that the increased privatization of higher education is on the agenda of many countries. Originally meant to refer to a process of moving utilities from the public to the private sector (for example, the privatization of Air Canada) the general concept has taken three major forms when applied to the higher education sphere: a more positive attitude to the creation of private sector universities and colleges financed mainly by endowments and tuition fees; an increased public interest in maintaining and improving the quality of existing private education; and efforts to increase the private element in the funding of public colleges and universities, notably through closer ties with industry and sometimes through tuition fee increases. Provided with information on one or more of these forms of privatization from thirteen disparate countries, Geiger had the difficult task of creating a conceptual 100 Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus framework for its analysis. His solution, inevitably slightly contrived, was to treat the large and complex higher education system of the United States as a special case, to offer just a brief note on third world countries (Ghana being the only such country indirectly represented at the conference) and to divide the other countries into three categories: those with mass private sectors (Japan, Brazil, Columbia, Puerto Rico); those with a tradition of centralized and predominantly public higher education (France, Italy and Spain); and those with originally pluralistic and decentralized educational systems which have come, since 1945, to rely heavily on government funding of the higher education sector (Australia, Britain, Belgium and Sweden). Canada was not represented at the conference despite some major differences between the philosophy and structure of higher educational systems in this country and in the United States. Our systems would, however, fit most appropriately into the last of these three categories of countries which Geiger describes as "welfare states". Forty years ago, some eastern Canadian universities were relying as heavily for financial support on tuition fees as some U.S. private universities do now. Members of the international higher education community are not particularly well disposed to the notion of privatization: as Geiger notes, "it conjures up images of mean-spirited free-market economists insisting that there are no free lunches". The conference participants were not, therefore, keen to accept that there was a macrotrend towards privatization equivalent to the trend towards greater government support of recent past decades, nor that such a trend would necessarily have positive outcomes. Their view on the absence of a macrotrend was partially correct. Countries with mass private post-secondary sectors do not seem to be significantly expanding these sectors (indeed, in Japan, a substantial public funding of the private universities was required during the 1970's, though it has since been reduced). In the United States, where the majority of students attend public universities and colleges but where the private sector also thrives, the enrolment expansion which ended in the mid-1970's was mainly in the public sector; and since then, both sectors have held their own in quantitative terms. In none of the "welfare state" nations except Australia has there been any significant move to create private institutional alternatives to the public universities and colleges. Australian academic entrepreneurs, heavily funded by Japanese capital, have been engaging in some imaginative private projects which are aimed at attracting both an Australian clientele and wealthy foreign students from the Pacific Rim. The economic success of such projects remains in doubt, but Geiger does claim that Australian attempts to attract more foreign students paying full-cost fees both to new private universities and to financially-strapped public ones "... raises the spectre of selling university places to foreigners, while denying them to qualified Australians". On which note, we reach a central message of the ICED conference: that, in many countries, privatization has been powerfully stimulated by government economic constraints on post-secondary spending. Most commonly, public universities have been driven to seek non-government funding in the face of 101 Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus governments cutbacks which are usually accompanied by official encouragement to broaden the funding base. In the United States, so Geiger suggests, the distinction between public and private universities has become increasingly blurred as intertwinings between public institutions and private firms and foundations proliferate. The development office which, he surmises, has grown faster in American universities than any other administrative unit is now also being replicated in many other countries: for example, even Oxford University has hired a development officer from an American university for its worldwide funding campaign. However, Geiger describes Britain as demonstrating the worst case of government retrenchment in university education during the governments to change the tradition of charging low fees or no fees to students attending public universities and colleges. In the context of government restraint, Geiger suggests that this unwillingness may deprive universities of much needed financial resources which could be used for discretionary purposes. The possibility of increasing tuition fees in order to raise revenue is clearly relevant in the context of Canadian higher education. So are many of the other policy issues raised in the sixty information-packed pages of this conference book. However, like Geiger and the other conference delegates, Canadian educators should view moves towards privatization with caution. At their worst, government policies which foster privatization are simply a mechanism for replacing public funds by private funds. At their best, they may stimulate the augmentation or adaption of university activities through a more flexible financial environment. REFERENCES Roger L. Geiger, Private Sectors in Higher Education: Structure, Function Countries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986). and Change in Eight L.C.J. Goedegeburre and V.L. Meek. Change in Higher Education; the Non-University Sector - An International Perspective. (Uitgeverij Lemma B. V. Culemborg: 1988). Review by Paul Gallagher. This 182 page book is the eighth in a Dutch series on Management and Policy in Higher Education. It presents a set of papers from the Ninth European Forum of the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) in August 1987 at the University of Twente, prefaced by a skillful 20-page overview of the papers and the international trends they suggest relative to the changing relationships between governments, higher education systems, and higher education institutions. While ample reference is made to the university sector, special emphasis is placed on the developments within the non-university sector higher education. In addition to the fine, extended Introduction, the book has two main subunits: the first sketches recent developments in public sector higher education in Britain, the Netherlands, and West Germany; Part II includes four papers which discuss different institutional responses to system change in Australia, the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States.