One of the things that I find most interesting about higher education studies is how there are all these completely different regional/national literatures that pay almost no attention to one another.  For instance, in North America, higher education studies mostly come out of sociology and mostly deal with how institutions and institutional policies affect students.  In Latin America, there is a quite immense literature on things like pedagogy (seriously – go into any decent bookshop and there will be an entire wall-to-ceiling section labelled pedagogia) but is almost entirely devoid of anything that resembles actual data (I have in my possession an entire book on post-graduate employment in Latin America which contains not a single table or graph, something that would be impossible to publish north of the Rio Grande).

And then there is continental Europe, where higher education studies for the most part started out as a branch of management.  The literature there is more about the operations of institutions, how they operate internally or as systems, or how they interact with their external environment.  Over the last two decades, much of this has had a comparative flavour to it as a single “European Higher Education Area” has taken shape despite the fact that organizationally there are at least four (and arguably five or six) different traditions of university management and governance, which means that institutional responses to “uniform” policy changes or environmental shifts may be quite different.

It does not take long reading this literature to realize how impoverished the discussion on university management and governance can be in North America. Here, at best, we discuss things like “academic capitalism” (which is at best a catch-all terms for a very wide variety of institutional processes and initiatives), and throw around phrases like “neoliberal university” as if they actually mean something.  There are some useful ethnographic works which show ways in which academics tend to think and work in similar ways across institutions (especially Julie Posselt’s Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity and Faculty Gatekeeping and Michele Lamont’s How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgement), but they are not about institutional decision-making per se.  There are a lot of works (articles, mainly) which look at decision-making related to single set of events at a single institution which largely amount to journalism with some footnotes related to theory.  Very occasionally these can be somewhat illuminating (for instance, Gaye Tuchman’s Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University), but precisely because there is no comparative element, they tend to fall into the trap of seeing everything through a single lens, such as academic capitalism or neoliberalism or whatever.  Comparative work, which might actually show that there are a whole bunch of other factors at work, are pretty rare (though not non-existent: the University of Pennsylvania’s Peter Eckel’s multi-institutional studies on are a welcome exception to this rule).

One excellent recent book which exemplifies the best of this European research approach is Managing Universities: Policy and Organizational Change from a Western European Comparative Perspective (Blieklie, Enders and Lepori, eds..and yes, I know, the price is eye-watering; lest you think HESA Towers is super well-endowed, just know that I got it for $10 last year when Palgrave was having a sale).   The book is the distillation of a large-scale 8-country research effort known as the Transforming Universities in Europe (TRUE) Project.  To paraphrase, the basic research questions it asks are: i) to what extent have institutions become more centralized over time?  ii) to what extent have university management practices been altered by national higher education policies? and iii) is managerialism more pronounced in countries with stronger orientations towards New Public Management solution?

And they answer these questions using a variety of methods including: in-depth institutional analysis at 26 universities, surveys of institutional leaders at various levels, interviews with key informants both within and outside government, and extensive document review.  I can think of no North American effort to look at decision-making this comprehensive.

What you get a result of all this are some incredibly nuanced takes on a variety of topics.  “Institutional autonomy” is not – as it is usually described in North America – a one-dimensional concept, but rather a multi-dimensional one (managerial, financial, policy, structural, and what the authors call “interventional autonomy” – ie the degree to which institutions are subject to external reporting).  Countries which allow high institutional autonomy in some areas might equally be very strict in others – a fact also true but rarely discussed with respect to inter-provincial policy in Canada.  There is also the question of what differences may exist between “formal” autonomy as described in charter documents and legislation and “in-use” autonomy (ask any current or former Alberta university president about the difference there). 

In the area of finance, the TRUE notes significant differences in allocation strategies across institutions based on the relative strength of department vs. centre (in Canada, we could probably learn a lot by looking at allocation strategies according to the extent to which institutions had implemented various forms of responsibility-centered budgeting). In the area of governance, the book does some fascinating analysis in terms of the way external evaluation of universities (both in terms of accreditation and research fund allocation) affects institutional management styles.  There are also compelling articles on the relationships between autonomy, decentralization, and engagement in policy-making, and overall strategy, and on the actor constellations in various countries that enable major policy changes.

I am not suggesting here that you can bring this kind of research over to North America easily.  We don’t really have the kinds of funding agencies and arrangements to make this kind of thing work, and in any case cross-institutional variation in management in North America is probably less tied to jurisdiction than it is in Europe, which eliminates a whole area of inquiry.  But this kind of research is necessary to better understand how change happens at universities and why what works in some institutions does not work elsewhere.  Without that, whatever your view of how universities need to change, we are largely flying blind. 

But perhaps more pertinently: even if we don’t carry out a lot of this kind of research, it would be extraordinarily helpful to pay attention to the kinds of distinctions European scholars regularly make in terms of autonomy, regulation, and the internal loci of decision-making power/engagement.  The one-note focus on “academic capitalism” or, God help us, “neoliberalism” have to be transcended.