Higher education is a tradition-driven industry.  It’s frankly useless to try and deduce very much about national higher education systems based on public/private split, funding systems, methods of student selection, etc.  If you really want to understand what a country’s university system looks like, go find a history of the country’s first institutions.  That’s where you’ll find all the answers.

Within each country, the first university (or perhaps two or three) tends to act as a “model”, which the rest of the system tries to emulate.  So in the UK, Oxford and Cambridge were the model for later institutions; in the US, it was Harvard; in Uganda it was Makerere, etc. etc.  Canada is actually one of the few countries where this isn’t true. You could make an argument that McGill and Toronto (the oldest English-language universities in Lower and Upper Canada, respectively) played this role, but you’d have to ignore places like Laval and UNB for it to work.  Tricky.

Now among these model institutions, there are basically only three “origin stories” out there.  In Europe, most of the early universities began as communities of scholars who banded together out of necessity.  And though they often sought protection under the state’s wing (at Bologna, they did so in order to weaken the collective bargaining power of students), they still saw themselves as the university, and viewed things like the right to elect a President as an essential component of university life.  Thus, in Europe, the way a university “ought” to be run involves a great deal of collective faculty authority.  This privilege is guarded jealously, even at the price of lower levels of funding and fiscal autonomy.

In Anglophone settler societies, the first universities tended to be created by small communities, which banded together and created their own institutions (often mediated through the offices of the church).  That is, the community’s will came first, and the professors came second.  This gave rise to a system where professors had considerably less power, and the board of governors comparatively more.  The Board expressed that power at a day-to-day level by installing a strong president to keep the faculty in line.  But even though public education became the norm in all of these countries, the tradition of endowing institutions with strong external boards and powerful Presidents remain.

(There are some exceptions to this rule.  At the University of Melbourne, for instance, the governing board just ran the place directly for 80 years, waiting until the early 1930s to hire a full-time Vice-Chancellor. Hard to believe the place survived, frankly.)

In Asia and Africa, the earliest universities were creatures of the state.  In these countries, there is a considerable tradition of strong state direction, even in private universities.  A phrase one hears frequently in these countries when discussing university autonomy is: “there is only one university – the Ministry of Education” (meaning that little variation is tolerated, regardless of the legal status of the institution).  In Taiwan for instance, even though most institutions are private rather than public, Taiwan National is still the model (ditto Tokyo University and Japan, or Seoul National University and Korea).  As in anglophone settler countries, there is a tradition of a strong President, but in these countries their role is more about executing government orders.

(Latin America is probably a fourth model – based on a weird mix of strong church, weak state, and a chaotic private sector – but I don’t know Latin American origin stories well enough to fit them into this framework.  Mea culpa, and I’ll get back to you on that one.)

These aren’t just historical curios.  Origins constrain people’s mental conceptions of what a university is and what it can be.  Although rankings and other forces are pushing people towards a Global Standard Model of a university, the continued strength of regional traditions ensure that these transitions will not be frictionless.