Governance of Higher Education

Global Perspectives, Theories, and Practices

Ian Austin, Glen A. Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317810520
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Governance of Higher Education explores the work of traditional and contemporary higher education scholarship worldwide, providing readers with an understanding of the assumptions, historical traditions, and paradigms that have shaped the scholarship on governance. Bringing together the vast and disparate writings that form the higher education governance literature—including frameworks drawn from a range of disciplines and global scholarship—this book synthesizes the significant theoretical, conceptual, and empirical scholarship to advance the research and practice of governance. Coverage includes the structures of governance, cultures and practices, the collegial tradition, the new managed environment of the academy, and the politics and processes of governance. As universities across the globe face a myriad of challenges and multiple stakeholder demands, Governance of Higher Education offers scholars, practitioners, and higher education graduate students an essential resource for advancing research and the practice of governance.

1 Conceptualizing Governance in Higher Education

DOI: 10.4324/9781315816401-2

Universities have become one of the most important institutions in our society. They educate the professionals that provide our health care, teach our children, strive for justice in our legal system, and design our buildings, bridges, and technologies. They provide a liberal education that challenges and expands our thinking. They are institutions of knowledge creation that contribute to the social and economic development of our society through new concepts, ideas, applications, and inventions. They play a key role as a safe home for social criticism by identifying key problems and contributing to informed public debates.

Universities are not simple organizations. In fact, given the breadth of their goals and missions, the tremendous expertise and specialization that characterize their basic functions, and the huge diversity of their activities, universities have evolved to become one of the most complex organizational forms that the human species has ever created. They employ hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of highly specialized experts who share their knowledge through teaching and pursue what are frequently unique programs of research. The university's physical plant includes classrooms and laboratories, but it also may include medical centers, restaurants, rental housing, museums, art galleries, spaces for worship, and a plethora of specialized research facilities, ranging from agriculture research lands, to supercomputing facilities, to nuclear reactors.

Given the tremendous importance and complexity of the university, the question of how universities are or should be governed has been a recurring issue in higher education. Who decides what programs a university will offer and who will be admitted to those programs? Who decides who will lead the university? Who hires the professors? What role does the government play in funding, regulating, and steering universities? What role should students, business leaders, community organizations, and professional accrediting bodies play in these governing structures? What sorts of checks and balances are needed to ensure that there is appropriate oversight and that the university is moving in the “right” direction? These are all key themes and issues in higher education governance.

Governance is therefore of vital importance in higher education can be a fairly elusive and abstract concept for many people. The complexity and diversity of higher education systems means that what we see depends in large part on where we look. As Burton Clark (1983) noted in his classic work on the organization of higher education, there are very different levels of authority within these systems and quite different decisions have been made on the power and authority of actors working at different levels within different institutions and systems. Many scholars have analyzed governance from a system-level perspective by exploring the relationships between universities and governments. How does the “system” make decisions about universities? There is a large body of scholarship describing and comparing system governance focusing on such issues as system planning, accountability, quality assessment, and funding. Others have centered their attention on the internal self-governing structures and practices of universities. How do universities decide? All of these research studies, in different ways, increase our understanding of governance, but given the trends and challenges identified by this research, these works also reinforce the importance of governance in higher education.

The importance of governance has been significantly amplified by the dramatic failures of governance and a series of well-publicized scandals in the private sector over the last few decades. Reforming corporate governance has come to be viewed as an important mechanism for rebuilding trust between the company and its shareholders, strengthening the oversight of financial decisions, and enhancing organizational performance outcomes. This makes the interrogation of traditions, structures, and practices of governance critical in the search for fresh and improved ways to govern organizations and systems. Yet, while higher education governance is regarded as an extremely important issue, there continue to be many theoretical and conceptual gaps in the literature. This concern prompted Tight (2004) and Huisman (2009) to describe the literature on higher education generally, and governance in particular, as atheoretical, descriptive, normative, and short on explicit theoretical frameworks.

This book focuses on the governance of universities. Our objective is to provide a comprehensive analysis of governance in higher education, with a particular focus on the governance of public universities, and address the theoretical limitations associated with the existing literature. One component of this analysis is a systematic, structured review of the literature. The other component draws on theories from sociology, political science, organizational studies, institutional theory, and neo-institutional theory, among others, to create a systematic, theory-based explanation of governance in higher education. The objective of this chapter is to establish the conceptual groundwork for the remainder of the book. The chapter will introduce and discuss key concepts that are foundational to understanding the governance concepts, theories, and practices explored in later sections of the book.

Higher Education Governance

Governance is essential to the functioning of higher education at all levels, from the basic academic unit of the department (microlevel), to the level of the organization (mesolevel) and at the level of the higher education system (macrolevel). It is the means by which order is created in the academy to achieve the goals of educating, researching, and providing service to multiple publics. At the micro and meso levels, governance is related to the day-to-day functioning of universities and how they order their affairs through governance instruments that facilitate decision-making authority to ensure desired organizational performance outcomes. At the macrolevel, it is through governance mechanisms that the state attempts to ensure that its higher education system is achieving state-desired goals.

Governance has always been an important topic in the study of higher education, but in recent times it has gained more prominence because public universities are receiving increasing public scrutiny. Prior to the late 20th century, universities had a relatively sheltered existence in an environment in which they served stable national markets and had guaranteed financial support from governments (Parker, 2011). While the timelines vary by country, beginning roughly in the mid-1980s, governments and stakeholders in some jurisdictions have raised concerns about the manner in which the academy functions. They referenced performance challenges such as slow responsiveness, lack of agility and flexibility, operational inefficiency, and ineffectiveness (Kezar, 2004). These shortcomings are often attributed to university governance structures and practices. The claim is that the current structures and practices are no longer appropriate for the new, rapidly changing higher education environment (Currie, DeAngelis, de Boer, Huisman, & Lacotte, 2003).

The new higher education environment has been described by many scholars (e.g., Barnett, 2000; Gumport & Pusser, 1999; Marginson & Considine, 2000) as dynamic, shifting, and turbulent. The new environment in which universities now operate is driven by the philosophical prescriptions of globalization and the new economy. These philosophical prescriptions are mainly advanced by neoliberals and global governing institutions such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) and have gained acceptance by many governments. They promote the massification and commodification of higher education with an emphasis on market-like behaviors among universities, with students as customers, significant increases in student enrollment, and international competition for students. Additionally, they advance industry-university relations and the sale of academic research as a diversification of funding sources, a phenomenon that is commonly referred to as academic capitalism (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). These global governing organizations position universities as vehicles of economic development, and advocate greater, direct stakeholder involvement in the academy. These environmental conditions are accompanied by demands for greater accountability, quality assurance mechanisms, and calls for professional management. As a result, universities face new expectations from states, provinces, national governments, and their expanded stakeholder base. When these factors are aggregated, university environments may be described as becoming increasingly more complex. Governance structures and practices are being restructured to cope with the complexities of the environment.

But what is governance in higher education? Governance is a complex concept and several definitions have been advanced to define governance in higher education but with little consensus (Currie et al., 2003; Rebora & Turri, 2009). They range from very simple conceptualizations, such as authority and legitimate rule—who has the authority to make decisions in the university—to more mid-range definitions, for example, by John Millett (1978), who conceptualizes university governance as “a structure and process of decision-making, within a college or university, about purposes, policies, programs and procedures” (p. 9). These purposes, policies, and procedures are written in statutes and charters that outline the mechanisms through which day-to-day decision-making is executed in attainment of the higher education mission.

Shattock (2006) attempts to further explain governance by introducing the notion of governance operating at multiple levels in higher education, especially when compared to a traditional company or nonprofit organization. Shattock treats governance as extending from a governing body down through senates and academic boards to faculty boards and departmental meetings. This conceptualization places heavy emphasis on internal governance, but governance is both internal and external, although a strong case may be made for seeing the governing board as external. The importance of the external dimension of governance is further augmented by the world-wide restructuring of higher education in which shifts have occurred and continue to occur in the relationship among universities, the state, and external stakeholders. A definition that better captures the external and internal aspects of governance is advanced by Margin-son and Considine (2000). They posit that university governance:

is concerned with the determination of values inside universities, their systems of decision-making and resource allocation, their mission and purposes, the patterns of authority and hierarchy, and the relationship of universities as institutions to the different academic worlds within and the worlds of government, business and community without.

(p. 7)

In defining governance, Marginson and Considine bring to the fore the relational connections of universities to governments, businesses, and the broader community. In essence, this definition reminds us of the prominence and the expanding base of external stakeholders in governing universities. Here external stakeholders are those individuals, states and nongovernmental agencies, and other entities that legitimately represent the interests of “outsiders” in university governance (Amaral & Magalhaes, 2002). We will have a more detailed discussion of external stakeholders in the chapter on theories of governance and in our discussion of governance and stakeholders.

However the definition is constructed, it must be remembered that to varying degrees, public universities are subject to and guided by the policy direction and the underlying policy ideology of the host government. Triggered by global forces, the dominant ideology shaping public policy and impacting higher education across many countries has been converging towards neoliberalism (Currie et al., 2003). Neoliberalism is a “public policy agenda characterized by a desire to extend market relationships and private ownership to all areas of social and economic activity” (Goedegebuure, Hayden, & Meek, 2009, p. 151). This globalizing trend emphasizes the primacy of the market in structuring institutions (Currie, 1998). Defining contemporary governance structures, practices, and ideological orientations through a public policy lens provides yet another way in which to begin to understand higher education governance.

Through the public administration and public policy lens, Rhodes (1997; 2007) views governance generally as having four important components:

1. Interdependence between organizations in which governance includes the government and also non-state actors. Rhodes notes that when there are shifts in the boundaries of the state, the boundaries between the public, private, and voluntary sectors also shift.
2. A network of members in which there is continued interaction in order to exchange resources and negotiate shared purposes.
3. Interactions negotiated and agreed upon by network participants that are based on trust and regulations.
4. A significant degree of autonomy from the state but with the state having the ability to indirectly and imperfectly steer.

In Rhodes's conceptualization, governance in a contemporary sense is characterized by networks. This approach has also been applied to higher education to further illuminate our understanding of governance (e.g., Padure & Jones, 2009). Padure and Jones argue that the policy networks approach to analyzing governance sheds light on international, regional, and domestic networks in which universities, international organizations, national governments, interest groups, epistemic communities, and individuals are all connected. This conceptualization provides a wide-angle view of governance in which multiple stakeholders form a dynamic network and play a critical role. It also suggests that in addition to the formal structures and mechanisms of governance, decision-making can frequently be influenced by interactions and relationships that are less visible, unstructured, and informal.

The OECD (2008) integrates th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Brief Contents
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Conceptualizing Governance in Higher Education
• 2 Theories of Governance: Institutions, Agency, and External Influences
• 3 Theories of Governance: Structure, Culture, and Internal Dynamics
• 4 State-University Governance: Concepts, Perspectives, and Shifting Tides
• 5 State-University Governance in Selected Countries
• 6 Academic Self-Governance: Concepts, Theories, and Practices
• 7 Governance as Politics and Processes
• 8 Governing the Managed Enterprise
• 9 New Issues and Challenges in Governance
• 10 Concluding Observations and Reflections
• Index