Higher education is a hard thing to generalize about. Superficially, universities look the same the world over, but scratch beneath the surface a little and you’ll see that there are enormous differences in structures, policies, and cultures.

Nevertheless, it’s still pretty safe to say that over the last 40 years (in some countries longer) three major trends have emerged more or less the world over:  first, in every country, there has been pressure to expand systems and accommodate greater participation in various ways.  Second, there has been pressure on universities to produce more research in a bid to make countries more innovative/productive/modern/rich/whatever. And third, there has been a gradual push to alter institutional governance structures to strengthen institutional managers and to shift the notion of universities from being vaguely-connected Places Where Academic and Scholarly Stuff Happens (PWASSH) to a notion of universities function as corporate entities with independent entities and internally consistent goals and missions.

That third trend, to my mind, doesn’t get enough serious attention (although if you’re interested, I can recommend International Trends in University Governance: Autonomy, Self-Government and the Distribution of Authority, a recent book of essays edited by Michael Shattock.)  Sure, everyone talks about “growing administration” – either in the context of some irritating form they have to fill out or in some conspiratorial tones involving words like “hegemony”, “neoliberalism” and the like.  But when we look closely at changes to governance, we see that two things are happening.  Firstly, higher education systems are converging on governance systems which privilege managers over the academic oligarchy (to use Burton Clark’s famous term).  Secondly, and maybe more importantly, institutions are functioning as single integrated units rather than as loosely-coupled organizations consisting mostly of independent self-governing academic units based on discipline (or, in Robert Hutchins’ phrase, “a collection of departments united by a common steam plant”). These deep and structural changes should make us question simple explanations. 

To really understand the nature of governance changes, it’s worth going back to what universities looked like around WWII.  Largely, they weren’t up to much.  Though some of them engaged in research, they were mostly teaching institutions for a relatively privileged minority.  Governments didn’t give them a lot of money, and in consequence didn’t demand a lot of accountability.  In such circumstances, it was easy enough for the Academic Oligarchy to win and keep control of universities and run them in the loosely-coupled manner which suited them.  Academic and Scholarly Stuff Happened.  But the institutions were more or less at the service of the disciplines and individual academics; they did not possess an identity independent of the Oligarchy.

But then three things happened.  Costs rose due to increasing participation.  Research became more pressing and had to be paid for.  And the governments trying to work out how to pay for all this increasingly urgent public business, which was taking place in institutions outside government, had to make sure the job was getting done at a reasonable cost. 

Now governments around the world chose quite different paths to deal with these issues.  Some – particularly the Americans, Brits and Australians, chose to pursue what some call “marketization”: let institutions go out and attract whatever they could.  Others – most of continental Europe, for instance – chose to keep funding as near to 100% public as possible, but at the same time engage in what some call “New Public Management”: that is, turning to various management techniques (mostly quasi-market) to look for value and efficiency.  And here’s the crucial bit: regardless of which route countries chose to finance higher education modernization, the result seems to have been a stronger emphasis on the central administration of universities.

The point here I think is this: regardless of whether you think universities’ “clients” are students, or governments, or business, or whoever, the point is that all of these clients find it a hell of a lot more efficient to deal with one well-resourced corporate entity rather than dozens of disciplinary groupuscules.  But in turn, for institutions to be able to deliver on commitments to all these various clients, it can’t simply be scaffolding for hundreds of individual and departmental research and teaching agendas.  It must project an image of being a single, unified entity.  In short, at the very least it can’t look like a loosely-coupled entity and survive in a modern era. Part of this looking like a single entity is down to having certain central control functions, such as control of budget, tenure lines, research priorities, etc.  Another is about centralized communication and speaking with one voice: one brand, one strategy, one set of messages, etc.  All of this creates an image of being a single entity with a single set of corporate goals. 

But here’s the big secret of modern universities, the world over.  The disciplines, the Oligarchy, the PWASSH, whatever you want to call it – hasn’t disappeared, not in most places.  It’s not even necessarily in retreat.  It just looks like it has been replaced.  Partly, that’s down to people inside institutions fighting rearguard actions against central power in institutions.  But at least as often, it’s by design.  Inside institutions, all sorts of tacit deals get made which allow the institution to present itself to the outside world as if it were one institution with a single set of unified goals, but which actually leaves the decentralized, loosely coupled underpinnings beneath virtually unchanged. In many ways, academic governance today is a delicate balancing act between the management of institutions and the interests of the PWASSH.

The best universities are the ones who can pull off this balancing act with aplomb.  In fact, I might go further and say if you can’t pull off this balancing act properly, you will never join the ranks of great universities.  And of you find the balancing act and its inherent deceptions distasteful, just keep in mind that it’s not a neoliberal plot, and it’s not a powerplay by power-hungry admins: it’s just the price the system has to pay for trying to keep in play the values of a much smaller and cozier system while extracting tens or hundreds of billions of dollars from the public that it needs to operate at scale.