From Collegial Governance to Boardism: Reconfiguring Governance in Higher Education

Abstract

Until the last quarter of the 20th century, many European universities had been primarily governed by academics, and the state acted as a buffer protecting higher education institutions and academics from the interference of external interests (Neave, 2012) and held ruling power over non-academic matters. From a normative stance, less than half a century ago, Moodie and Eustace still considered that in universities, ‘the supreme authority … must … continue to rest with the academics’ (Moodie and Eustace, 1974, p. 233), and Burton Clark (1983) argued that the adoption of models based on the metaphor of organized anarchy would be more appropriate for allowing individuals and research teams to liberate their inventive capacity and to produce innovative ideas.