International Trends in University Governance

Autonomy, self-government and the distribution of authority

Michael Shattock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317668190
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Governance is becoming increasingly important in universities just as it is in the wider world of commerce and banking. Historically, universities were run by their academic communities but as mass higher education has taken root, as university research has become a critical element in national economies and as the demand for more accountability both financial and in academic performance has grown, pressure has mounted for a 'modernisation' of governance structures.

One aspect of 'modernisation', particularly important in many European systems, and in Japan, has been the decision by governments to give institutions greater autonomy, more control over their budgets and legal responsibility for the employment of their staff. International trends to introduce greater competition between institutions, to encourage greater institutional differentiation and give greater play to market forces has led to an emphasis on leadership, a more systematic involvement of external stakeholders and a more 'corporate style of governance. At the same time this has often led to a sense of loss of collegiality, a redistribution of authority and a growing gap between the 'centre' and the 'periphery' within universities.

This book analyses governance change in nine major higher education systems, Australia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Norway, the UK and the USA, each account being the result of independent research by a leading authority in the field and describes how a convergence of governance structures has been mediated by the historical, cultural, political and social characteristics of the different systems. Michael Shattock is a leading authority on university governance; this study offers the most up to date account of governance reform in a range of higher education systems, an analysis of the common trends and an assessment of their impact on the idea of a university. It will be essential reading for academics, postgraduates and practitioners in higher education.

1

The context of ‘modernising’ reforms
in university governance

MICHAEL SHATTOCK

Diversity in governance structures

Any attempt to identify international trends in university governance has to begin with the recognition that the last decade has witnessed major transformations in many countries in the relationship between universities and the state, and that the implications of these transformations have not only impacted heavily on university internal governance structures but are ongoing in the sense that institutions are still very much in the process of adapting to the demands of new legislation. It is also plain from the following chapters that these and other changes do not necessarily spring from a common international perception of what the central issues might be. Concepts like collegiality and external (or ‘lay’) involvement in governance have very different resonances in different national contexts: in southern Europe, for example, collegiality is characterised by a reluctance to accept any external involvement in university governance and moves to ‘modernise’ governance structures are seen as representing the importation of business practices; while in the USA and the UK ‘lay’ involvement is deemed to be an essential element of institutional governance structures and collegiality is an essential component of ‘shared governance’, that is a partnership between the lay and the academic voice. By contrast, in many continental European systems, ‘shared governance’ represents not a partnership between ‘lay’ and academic governance but the operation of a dual structure of governance and management between the academic community and a non-academic institutional administration.

Most continental European (and Japanese) scholars, including those contributing to this book, regard the characteristic reforms to increase institutional autonomy, strengthen leadership, increase competition and introduce an external element into governance as the product of New Public Management (NPM) theory, while their US and UK counterparts would be more likely to regard them simply as necessary steps to creating more competitive institutions. (An exception in the UK would be Deem et al. (2007).) Historically, US and UK universities have always been competitive – the UK long before the introduction of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) – but one of the chief objections to the ‘modernisation’ reforms in continental Europe has been the use of performance-based funding systems aimed at introducing differentiation between institutions coupled with governance reforms that introduced a strategic decision-making capacity into institutional management.

The roots of these different interpretations lie in the different historical relationships between continental European and Japanese universities and the state and the relationships between the US and UK universities and their governments. In Europe, the continental model is divided between university systems which owe their inspiration to the Humboldt reforms initiated in the foundation of the Humboldt University in Berlin in 1810 and the Napoleonic reforms in France which recreated the dormant French university system in a system of teaching-based faculties and professionally-orientated grandes ecoles. The former linked research and teaching together in multi-disciplinary universities, the latter located research outside the universities in specialist research organisations (later under the control of the Centre National da la Recherche Scientifique (CRNS)). But a characteristic of both systems was the close integration of the institutions with government, in France centralised in a single Ministry in Paris and in Germany, after 1945, in a split role between the federal government providing the framework conditions and the institutional controls being maintained at the lander (regional) level.

Unlike the Humboldtian and Napoleonic systems, university institutions in the UK and the US grew up independently and autonomously. In the UK, from the founding of Oxford and Cambridge, through the University of London in 1820 to the creation of Owens College (later the University of Manchester), the Yorkshire College (later the University of Leeds) and the other colleges, which became the ‘civic universities’, university institutions owed their origins to independent benefactors and to charging fees to students. Even when they became fully funded by the state in 1945, they retained their independence and autonomy as if they were privately funded (Shattock 2012). In the US, the first university institutions were privately funded and the Dartmouth judgement (see Dill p. 166) ensured that later publicly-funded universities enjoyed a level of independence and autonomy comparable to that retained by privately-funded universities. A further distinction in the US was the absence of a federal ministry and the fact that education and higher education was devolved to the states, leaving room for considerable differences in system governance and funding structures across the continent. Arguments in continental Europe that government reforms are aimed at persuading universities to become ‘institutional actors’ (see Kehm pp. 30–32), to develop their own institutional strategies and to compete in a higher education marketplace, contrast with the position in the US and the UK (and Australia) where institutions have historically competed with one another for the best staff and students, have seen autonomy and self-government as a key to the development of institutional strategy, and have had the principles of institutional identity and (relative) freedom of manoeuvre embedded in their organisational cultures. It would have been as inconceivable in the US or the UK for academics ever to have been employed as state civil servants, as it would be in continental European or Japanese universities for senates and governing councils to concur in the closing down of academic departments to release resources to invest in other parts of the university.

Nevertheless all these systems – the Humboldtian, the Napoleonic, the Japanese, the Anglo-Saxon and the American – have been subject to change driven by state recognition of the importance of universities to the knowledge economy, by austerity and by government pressures to compete in international markets. The aim of this book is to show how these changes – and in many countries, transformations – have affected institutional autonomy, self-government and the distribution of authority within universities and to reflect on what common principles they embody. Special studies of institutional governance have been commissioned from a range of scholars in respect to different countries selected to illustrate international trends, and appear as separate chapters significant on their own as independently researched accounts of the state of university governance in these countries. These accounts form the basis of some general conclusions in the last chapter about common themes which can be identified across a very broad international scene.

In a single volume it is not possible to include every national perspective and variation so those selected have been chosen to illustrate generic themes and to draw in scholars in the field who have thought deeply about these issues over a period of years. Thus for the Humboldtian model, which has been widely adopted not just in Germany but in central, northern and eastern Europe, the countries chosen were Germany (Barbara M. Kehm pp. 17–33), Norway (Bjørn Stensaker pp. 34–48) and Finland (Maria Salmela-Mattila pp. 49–63). In important ways, Germany is atypical because of the devolved structure of its university system. As Kehm makes clear the reforms initiated by the Federal Government have been taken up in various forms by the different lander so that Germany presents a mixed picture of governance ‘modernisation’. Not so Norway and Finland, where unified states have implemented far reaching reforms across their university systems, relatively monolithically, mostly in the face of a distinct lack of enthusiasm from the academic community. Two national systems were selected from the Napoleonic model, France (Stéphanie Chatelain-Ponroy et al. pp. 67–88) and Italy (Robert Moscati pp. 89–104), although the model also applies in Spain and Portugal. Of these, the French reforms, as described by Chatelain-Ponroy et al., are much the most radical and potentially far reaching because they not only deal with internal governance issues, including the massive step of devolving staffing budgets to the institutions and ending the civil service status of academic staff, but seek to address the integration of research into the universities and to take first steps towards rationalising the organisational divisions between French universities, faculties and grandes ecoles by creating regional higher education ‘poles’, which constitute ‘communites d’universities’ offering the prospect of confederations or even mergers. In Italy, however, as Moscati shows, the ‘modernisation’ agenda has been pursued only sporadically so that the academic community has been able to frustrate the proposed changes largely by assimilating them with as few actual changes in behaviour as could be managed. France and Italy thus present historic contrasts where different political cultures have led to a divergence of the ‘modernisation’ process even though the process itself has been quite similar. In France a ‘petit Napoleon’ in M. Sarkozy has substantially reformed a structure that can be dated back to the Faure reforms of 1968, but which substantively owes its existence to the nineteenth century. In Italy the absence of any consistent commitment from government has allowed reforms to be absorbed with minimal change into the system except where, as Moscati describes, three individual institutions, recognising the importance of international collaboration, have chosen to reform themselves.

Japan offers an interesting link between the European and the US models. Its university system was founded in the latter half of the nineteenth century on Humboldtian principles of the interrelationship of research and teaching but, like the Napoleonic system, with a close integration of the governance and management of institutions with the state through a highly centralised Ministry. However, Japan adopted academic programmes aligned to the US not Europe. Like the US, Japan encouraged a large private sector of higher education fuelled by a rapid post-war expansion in student numbers but, unlike the US, it exercised quite close control over it and even provided it with some public subsidy. The result has been a reputationally much more diverse university system than is to be found in continental Europe with a subset of private universities competing with the top public universities in international ranking lists. As Jun Oba shows (pp. 107–124), the governance and management reforms to the public universities to create National University Corporations (NUCs) in 2004 paralleled the reforms introduced in continental Europe, except that once the Prime Minister, Mr Koizumi, the initiator of the reform, left office the Ministry has found ways to regain a high degree of control over the direction of the system through bureaucratic machinery and funding pressures. The Japanese example thus offers a variant to the European models in that it combines a de jure commitment to institutional autonomy but persists de facto in a continued close exercise of bureaucratic control over the exercise of autonomy, which has the result, as Oba points out, of encouraging institutional homogeneity rather than differentiation and of stifling the strategic freedom that the reform was designed to create.

The contrasting roles of the state

In each of the continental European and Japanese cases reforms in internal governance were initiated by government legislation. In the UK and Australia the role of government in matters of internal university governance has been much more nuanced, while in the US it has been non-existent. In the UK, the only legislation that related to internal governance was the creation of a polytechnic constitution in 1988, which then carried over into the university sector when the polytechnics became universities in 1992. As Michael Shattock shows (pp. 127–144), this new constitution has, however, offered a long-term model for change, entered into voluntarily in some pre-1992 universities. The most influential change agents existed, technically, within the sector itself (the Jarratt Report) or were initiated by the Committee of University Chairmen or, at a more detailed level, were imposed on a year by year basis through amendments to the Financial Memorandum, the contract that universities signed with their funding council in order to receive government funds. The most significant changes in internal governance were initiated by the universities themselves not by the state. When an ill-judged intervention was launched by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) into proposals for governance change in Oxford it was firmly rejected by the university’s governing body and the Funding Council chose not to pursue the matter. In Australia, as described by Jeanette Baird (pp. 145–164), a series of official reports recommended more top down authority in universities but formal constitutional change has been restricted to a move to smaller and more professional governing bodies. The realisation of the ‘enterprise university’ structure could be said to be a natural (though not necessarily welcome) evolution derived from changes in funding arrangements and the increasing marketisation of the system. This does not mean that the state has not played a powerful role in shaping the system – the upgrading of the polytechnics and the decisions on tuition fees in 2010 in the UK, and the Dawkins reforms and the introduction of the Higher Education Contribution (HEC) scheme for student funding in Australia, are evidence of that. But it does reflect that governments have accepted institutional autonomy and self-government as a given and chosen to seek to steer at the system level leaving the institutions to take their own decisions in their own way as to how to respond.

In many ways the USA, as described by David D. Dill (pp. 165–183), offers the most diversified, individualised and autonomous range of universities in any system. First, it has a highly developed private university system that includes some of the world’s leading research universities. These universities provide exceptional examples of ‘shared governance’. Second, the absence of a federal control over the public universities, to a much greater extent than in Germany, has encouraged variety in the form of public university systems from, for example, the highly-structured Californian system to the much more variegated system in New York State, which has encouraged wide diversity in institutional missions and vigorous competition between the flagship campuses at state level with the best of the private universities. Autonomy is reinforced by reference to such competition and to the competition for excellence in research that runs across the US system. This diversity seems to be endemic and embedded. In the UK, by contrast, the decision to devolve control of higher education to Scotland and Wales in 1992 has done little to diversify the system (except in respect of tuition fees) and institutional governance and management continue to adhere to a broadly UK model.

One of the striking features of governance reform imposed by legislation is the extent to which it has been concentrated into the last decade, and even into the last five years. In France the two key pieces of legislation, the new law on research and innovation (LOPRI) and the act on the liberties and responsibilities of universities (LRU), were only passed in 2006 and 2007 and further legislation on the organisation of research is due in 2013. As Chatelain-Ponroy et al.’s chapter makes clear, in combination this legislation introduces the most fundamental changes to the internal governance of French universities for more than 150 years, as well as addressing critical structural issues in French higher education. In Germany, the Framework Law for Higher Education was abolished in 2006, devolving all questions of institutional governance and management to the lander where complementary delegation to the universities themselves has been accomplished, though in a variety of forms. The implementation of the Excellence Initiative in the same year reinforced internal reform to facilitate strategic planning and institutional self-government. In Italy, legislation in 2006 and 2010, the former creating an agency for evaluating universities and research (which Moscati points out only become operative in 2010) and the latter redefining institutional governance, is paralleled by university reform legislation in Finland in 2009 and the so-called Quality Reform in Norway in 2003, which also included changes to funding arrangements which incentivised outcomes and institutional performance. Similar reform legislation has been enacted in the same period in Denmark and Portugal. In Japan, legislation defining the reform was passed in 2004 and took effect immediately.

The drivers of ‘modernisation’

What has prompted this rush to reform? Many commentators, including some contributors to this book, attribute it to the extent to which governments have committed themselves to a reform of their public services by the adoption of New Public Management approaches. While not wishing to deny the importance of NPM (which Oba makes clear was the dominant determinant in Japan), it may be that in Europe the more direct influ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Other Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Series editors’ introduction
• 1 The context of ‘modernising' reforms in university governance
• The Humboldtian Model Germany, Norway and Finland
• The Napoleonic Model France and Italy
• The Japanese Model Japan
• The Historically Incorporated Model The United Kingdom, Australia and the United States
• Index