L’évaluation des universités comme symptôme des transformations universitaires

This article looks at the university transformations of recent decades from the point of view of the so-called “evaluation” practices of Dutch universities introduced in the 1980s by and for the Association of Dutch Universities (VSNU). The aim is to trace the genealogy of the VSNU in the 1980s: the context, the players involved, the reform projects underway, the reasons for its creation, and how it functioned in its early days. A historical survey of the VSNU’s archives shows that its main activity, from its inception to the end of the 1990s, was to set up a system for evaluating Dutch universities and their teaching and research activities. In terms of their genesis, raison d’être, functions and aims, the practices implemented since the 1980s stand in contrast to the more recent university evaluation regimes studied in the context of New Public Management-type university transformations since the 2000s: grasping the shifts in institutions and evaluation practices themselves enables us to observe these transformations in one of their concrete dimensions.