Higher Education Governance in the UK: Change and Continuity

Abstract

The tensions at the heart of academic governance can be said to exist at two levels. The first level concerns universities’ place in their wider environment. Here the key tension concerns the balance of power, authority and accountability to be exerted over the system of higher education as a whole, as between: academics (as, in the traditional formulation, the owners of expert knowledge); the state (as the licenser of universities and in public systems their funder); and a range of stakeholders potentially including students, graduates, the employers of graduates and the range of other potential clients for university services. At the second, intra-institutional level, there are further tensions around the balance between working academics, ‘managers’, ‘governors’ and other stakeholders (notably students but in principle all other ‘clients’): tensions exemplified in the case of managers and governors not only in the balance of their roles and responsibilities, but also in questions of who should constitute each of these groups and how responsive they are, or should be, to external and internal influences.

My thanks for their comments and very helpful suggestions on the first draft of this paper to fellow members of the Douro seminar, especially Jef Verhoeven, commentator; Glen Jones and Alberto Amaral, editors — not least for their patience; and Mike Reed, colleague and informal discussant on the journeys from and to Lancaster. Errors and omissions are of course my own.