All of the higher education (HE) system reforms implemented in western countries over the last three decades have had one fundamentally important aim, namely that of changing the existing institutional and system governance arrangements (Lazzaretti and Tavoletti 2006; Cheps 2006; Maassen and Olsen 2007; Trakman 2008; Paradeise et al. 2009; Huisman 2009; Capano 2011; Shattock 2014; Dobbins and Knill 2014). The logic underlying such measures has remained substantially the same in each case, although the instruments adopted to achieve the aforesaid aim have differed, depending on the characteristics of the various systems and the nature of their historical heritage.
As far as system governance is concerned, generally speaking, there has been a significant difference between the English-speaking world and continental Europe.
In fact, universities in the former countries enjoy considerable operational freedom and independence as far as their internal institutional and organizational arrangements are concerned. Their governments have aimed to implement national policies which, through strong regulatory measures and a substantially interventional approach, have significantly conditioned the behaviour of universities which until then had enjoyed ample room for manoeuvre. In the UK, Australia and New Zealand, for example, governments have dramatically reorganized the system governance through the creation of agencies entrusted with the task of evaluating teaching and research, and through the adoption of a strong stance pursuant to which universities are called upon to constantly meet the requirements of the socio-economic system. Americaâs public universities have been required to compete for financial funding (Geiger 2004) and to further verticalize their institutional governance arrangements (McLendon 2003a, 2003b; Leslie and Novak 2003; El-Khawas 2005; Schulze-Cleven 2015). In other words, in the English-speaking world, universitiesâ traditional autonomy has been restricted through the implementation of policies designed to increase competition among the universities for both public and private funding.
In continental Europe, there has also been significant government intervention, although this has come about through the adoption of somewhat different strategies to those witnessed in the English-speaking world. In fact, the governments of Continental Europe have attempted to gradually abandon the centralized model, based on State control of all aspects of the universitiesâ lives, and have chosen to grant greater autonomy to the universities. This approach has been accompanied by national strategies based on the concept of âsteering at a distanceâ (Neave and Van Vught 1991), and thus no longer centred on invasive micro-regulations, but on light regulation, target and benchmark setting, contracts and continuous assessment.
From the point of view of the system governance, in other words, what has been witnessed is the âhybridizationâ of various different historical models. In the English-speaking countries, governments have tried to coordinate universities so as to achieve systemic targets; in Continental Europe, on the other hand, governments have loosened the centralist grip on their respective universities and have developed policies granting the universities varying degrees of autonomy. The one thing that both groups of countries share is that governments have played, and continue to play, an active part in the coordination of the university system, converging towards the steering at a distance approach, albeit from diametrically opposed positions.
This reorganization of the system governance has been accompanied by the reform of institutional governance through gradual changes to the distribution of power and to roles within the universities. The competition/assessment mix and the demand for institutional accountability which have characterized all national policies imply that the universities are capable of providing a rapid, homogeneous response guided by strategic rationality. In other words, the universities have been systemically pressured into transforming themselves into corporate actors. This requirement has led to a process of institutional centralization characterized by the strengthening of the monocratic posts (deans, department heads and rectors) and of the Boards of Governors (BoG) within universities; by the weakening of collegial bodies and of the power of academic groups; by the introduction of instruments of governance of a managerial type; and by the gradual strengthening of the role played by external stakeholders.
In the English-speaking countries, where universities are basically free to establish their own internal governance system, this transformation of institutional governance has been the result of external pressure and of governmental policies regarding new systemic regulation; in Continental Europe, on the other hand, where universities are governed by national law, the reform of institutional governance has been designed through legislation. The legislative reform of institutional governance in such countries began in the Netherlands and Sweden in 1997, which were followed by Austria (2002), Denmark (2003), Germany (2003â2006), France (2007), Portugal (2007), Finland (2010) and Italy (2010). The features that these reforms share, in fact, consist in the attempt to strengthen the institutional leadership of the universities, together with the verticalization of all decision-making processes. In some cases (the Netherlands and Denmark), the reforms have been genuinely radical, with the introduction of the appointment system for all monocratic posts. In other cases (Germany and France), there has been a mix of strategies (rectors appointed by the BoG or the Senate, while all other monocratic posts are assigned following an election).
This overall and generally homogeneous, in comparative terms, reinforcement of the universitiesâ institutional governance has been accompanied by a thorough reorganization process within the universities. The English-speaking countries have moved towards strengthening those intermediate units (Faculties/Schools/Colleges) that are considered to be genuine governing structures of the universities themselves, and an executive arm of the universitiesâ governing bodies that is entrusted with the routine management of power within each university. In Continental European countries, this tendency has been less marked, with the historical role of intermediate structures â the Faculties â being preserved (with the exception of Italy after 2010), as they continue to coordinate the interests of the various academic subjects and of the basic organizational units. In these cases, however, the persistence of the traditional internal organization has been counterbalanced, under law, by the strengthening of the rectorâs and of the BoGâs roles with regard to the process of recruiting and promoting academic staff (Capano and Regini 2014).
Thus the reform of institutional governance has been, and is, a global phenomenon that governments have consciously pursued, in the knowledge that the steering at a distance approach, with all its methods of evaluation and assessment, cannot work if the universities are not institutionally equipped to respond in a coherent manner. For universities to be responsible, that is capable of reacting positively to external challenges and to the demands of society, they have needed, and still need, to relinquish the self-referential conception of academic self-government (which translates into institutional policies of a distributional type). In order to compete, universities need to be able to make decisions in a selective manner, and in order to do this they have to change the way they are governed. The choices made in the western HE systems have all been based on this consideration. The reforms of institutional governance have been accompanied by national policies whereby universities have had to start making clear choices in order to create their own space; that is, in order to access public funding, and in some cases private funding, provided for certain specific purposes (improvements to teaching, better quality research and an attention to the socio-economic effects of their actions).
Within this general framework, Italy is a latecomer to a scenario where attempts at university reform have been characterized by considerable difficulties and have been blighted by the poor quality of policy design which has compromised their ability to achieve the desired results. Italy may be considered a latecomer since, until very recently, the Italian HE system had represented the classic case of a traditional Continental European model characterized by a centralized decision-making process controlled by the Ministry, by the limited autonomy of the countryâs universities, by the significant power of academic oligarchies and by the limited power of the institutional authorities (rectors and principals) whose role was mainly that of mediating between different academic subject areas. Some of these features were modified by the reform of the system governance adopted between the late 1980s and early 1990s, and also by a process of progressive autonomy witnessed since then. However, this autonomy was not accompanied by any reform of the governance arrangements within the universities themselves, or by other features of the European models of system governance (that is competition and, above all, assessment and accountability). This led to a situation defined in the public debate as âautonomy without responsibilityâ, which gave rise to several distortions that the media were quick to pick up on during the early 2000s, thus feeding governmentsâ diffidence towards the academic world. This formed the backdrop to the attempts made to reform institutional governance during that initial decade of the new millennium, which were to culminate, in 2010, in a reform that embodied the lack of trust in the academic world, and transformed this mistrust into a whole series of restrictions on the universitiesâ autonomy.
Following approval of this reform, debates about, and studies of, university governance from a comparative perspective have flourished in Italy as well (Barone et al. 2010; Capano 2011; Turri 2011; Cassone and Sacconi 2013; Regini 2015a; Capano and Regini 2015). However, the political attention of decision-makers and the analytical attention of scholars have focused almost exclusively on the design of national reform strategies, that is, on national regulations or on university statutes. Very few studies, on the other hand, have tried to investigate the changes made to universitiesâ actual governance modes and arrangements, that is, the ways in which governance and decision-making processes work in practice. This is because both policy-makers and several scholars tend to assume that a general policy strategy, or a national law reforming universitiesâ institutional governance, directly determine the outcomes. But national reforms are interpreted, elaborated and implemented by the universitiesâ internal actors â with their power resources, culture, learning abilities â which act as âfiltersâ vis-Ă -vis the planned reforms. It is only when the universities actually implement the reforms that any assessment may be made of the degree to which the objectives have been achieved, and the manner in which this has been possible, and of the variability of those solutions actually adopted.
For this reason, in 2013, we decided to conduct a survey of the ways in which Italian universities had implemented the 2010 law reforming institutional governance. In order to analyse the implementation of this reform and to understand how the new governance arrangements work in practice, we opted for an online questionnaire sent to all 66 Italia...