By Michael Shattock

Editor’s note: Michael Shattock is a global authority on governance studies in HE; SRHE Blog is delighted to bring you his invitation to researchers in HE to expand their work in governance – a definitive statement about the many contributions that governance research can make to our understanding of higher education.

Introduction

Higher Education Studies is not an academic discipline like History, Politics or Sociology but falls naturally within Marginson’s definition of it as a multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary field of enquiry (Marginson, 2024). The study of the governance of higher education, at national and institutional levels, is, however, an important but often neglected strand of the larger field. Having just completed three books around the topic (Shattock and Horvath, 2020; Shattock, Horvath and Enders, 2023; and Shattock and Horvath, 2023) I thought it might be useful to spell out how the study of governance can frame researching the development of higher education and how changes in its structure or modus operandi, whether introduced from above or below, can influence the underlying principles and practices on which higher education is based. Thus, besides being an important strand in its own right it provides a context for other studies to be pursued in the field.

‘Governance’ is not well defined in the literature. The OED offers no more than “The act or manner of governing” and, misleadingly in respect to universities, defines a governing body as “the managers of the institution” ignoring the concept of ‘shared governance’ between governing bodies and senates implicit historically in the constitutions of most pre-1992 universities. Moodie and Eustace, authors of the classic Power and Authority in British Universities, published in 1974, 50 years ago, duck the question of definition and merely write, complacently as it seems now: “British universities continue to govern themselves and by any test seem to do reasonably well” (p24). In the absence of an authoritative definition we adopted the following form of words:

“Forms of governance [in higher education] at both national and institutional levels critically shape the culture , creativity and academic outcomes of higher education. Governance … is not just a matter of constitutional structures but encompasses how decisions are made and by whom, how different levels of governance interface with one another, what pressures are exerted by internal and external forces and how institutions and their members respond to them” (Shattock and Horvath, 2020 p1).

I have used the UK as the basis of my argument for recognising the importance of governance as a contributory discipline to higher education studies. This is not to undervalue other systems as case studies but to assist the presentation of a coherent account of a single system for illustrative purposes: if we look at continental Europe or at the USA similar principles apply even when their constitutional structures are different. It was, after all the USA which gave us, through the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the phrase ‘shared governance’ to describe the desired relationships between governing boards and the academic community. (This was a phrase that had little traction in the UK until the constitution of the former polytechnics was first published in 1992). In Europe we have the European Universities Association’s (EUA) monumental series of reports which  purport to measure and rank levels of university autonomy across countries. It is, however, difficult to reconcile the UK’s (and particularly England’s) high ranking with the situation on the ground unless the ranking is based on legislative provisions alone rather than other measures (Prevot, Estermann and Poprhadze, 2023). My own research would suggest that from the point of view of an academic many European country systems in practice offer as great or greater  autonomy than is now available in UK universities.

Governance and the State

A good illustration of how changes in governance at system level can change the context and indeed the culture of university work can be found in the decision by the UK Government (but not by the Scottish Government) to abandon the direct recurrent funding of teaching in institutions and substitute a tuition fee regime in which the student borrows the cost of the fee from a Student Loan Company and repays the loan over the next 40 years. Simultaneously the Government removed the cap on home student numbers in each institution administered by the Higher Education Funding Councils thus creating a highly marketized system. There were benefits both for the pro- and anti- sides of the argument about doing this:

• It fulfilled a political ambition of the Government to make the development of higher education more responsive to market forces;
• At a time of financial constraint it provided a way to respond to complaints from institutions about underfunding while keeping the costs off the Government’s annual budget by using the accounting device of counting the fees as debts which were an off line government expenditure;
• It represented a considerable potential increase in university funding at a time when university costs were rising rapidly;
• It gave institutions greater freedom in terms of student expansion and additional resources to support it – universities could plan against targets they had designed themselves. To most people’s surprise the new fee regime did not discourage continuing progress in widening participation.

What was less clearly seen were the changes it brought in institutional organisational cultures: the university system became necessarily much more competitive; students became more consumerist; historic inequalities between institutions were enhanced; marketing departments began to play a role in student selection; and, in some universities, in curriculum formation, universities became more top down and directive in their management style, the professional lives of academics were strongly affected. In addition mental health issues among students assumed a new prominence as they found debt and employment prospects weighed heavily on them. In time the greater freedoms offered to institutions have largely evaporated with the Government’s freezing of tuition fees so that in 12 years they have not kept pace with inflation, rising only minimally. The boom period following the introduction of tuition fees in 2012 has been replaced by financial crisis in the system.

While the introduction of full cost fees and the relaxation of student number controls may have been the largest governance change in the last 20 years we should not forget the impact of research selectivity, now crystalised in the Research Excellence Framework (REF), and the impact of the Teaching Excellent Framework (TEF) on the governance and management of the institutions and on the working lives of their staff and students. The REF is perhaps the more important both because of its longevity and the way it has affected the internal academic character of universities. Introduced in 1985-86 under pressure from H M Treasury, on the grounds that there was inadequate accountability  for the research element of the recurrent grant to universities, it was Initially intended as a one off exercise but became a regular feature every five years or so acting as a sorting mechanism between universities and a determinant of the distribution of research resources from central government to institutions.

Data collection for the REF has always been rooted in the research performance of individual members of academic staff discipline by discipline and the process has fed into ranking orders in the media enhancing institutional ambition. Most universities will now have a pro-vice-chancellor  (research) and a research office within its administration and will buy in advisers, often from previous REF subject committees, to assist in the construction of REF submissions. The results represent a key indicator of external institutional reputation as well as a critical component of an institutional budget. No exercise is more calculated to breed stress within the academic community or to shape academic career profiles.

The TEF is not so personal in its outcomes. It was introduced to attempt to offer a counterbalancing  force to the REF, and a populist institutional reward structure of Gold, Silver and Bronze was intended to provide simplified information to the student market. Of course, it also plays to media ranking tables so represents an incentive to institutions to seek high scores. From the internal university point of view the most significant consequence has been the increase in the bureaucracy and internal regulation it has brought about and the creation of new authority structures which have significantly changed the academic workplace. From a governance perspective the TEF’s origin, like the REF’s, began in government concern over accountability:

“‘The taxpayer’, the Minister of Higher Education said, ‘has a right to know what is being provided in return for public funding. Prospective students also have a right to know the quality of courses on offer’”. (quoted in Shattock, 2012 p201)

‘ Accountability’ became redefined as ‘quality assurance’ (and in some circles as ‘standards’) and, after numerous structural compromises in respect to the extent that the processes remained controlled by the universities, was at last made firmly the responsibility of a government body, the Office for Students (OfS). This was a final realisation of the government’s intention to create the legal conditions which enable it to be able to intervene over and above the academic authority of a university on what is taught in universities and how. It contrasts starkly with Moodie and Eustace’s statement of 50 years ago:

“In general the formal limitations upon institutional autonomy [in the UK] are minimal. There is a tradition of non-interference by the state in the affairs of the university”. (Moodie and Eustace, 1974 p46)

The two exercises, REF and TEF combined, represent a severe reorientation of university academic work and the prosecution of their core business of teaching and research. They are augmented by individual interventions on matters such as freedom of speech. The system is being substantially reshaped from above even when it is responding to pressures set by a market framework.

Higher education is now formally regulated by a government body, the OfS, while in 1974, the university sector, as it was then, was self regulated and had an intermediary body, the University Grants Committee (and later the Higher Education Funding Councils), to withstand possible political encroachments on autonomy from the government or elsewhere. System change in governance of this significance affects how higher education is delivered, how teachers and scholars approach their profession and their relationship, and that of their students, to society and provides a crucial sub text to the study of higher education as a whole.

Governance within institutions.

It is often assumed that the study of institutional governance is primarily a matter of the role of university governing bodies but this ignores the hierarchy of bodies within institutions which in effect determine academic strategy, implicitly define priorities and coordinate the academic and financial affairs of a university. Here we are talking about not just the relationships between the governing body  and the senate/academic board but the constitutional roles within the university of a senate/ academic board, a vice-chancellor’s executive committee, the powers of specialist senate/academic board committees, the relationships between faculty boards and with academic departments/ schools of studies. One might also include the constitutional powers of the vice-chancellor, pro-vice-chancellors, deans and heads of departments.

For governance and decision-making to operate smoothly and inclusively the procedures need to be well understood and trusted. Such a modus operandi may be dismissed, as it was by the Jarrett Committee on Efficiency Studies in Universities (1985) established to review university governance and management in the light of the 1981 cuts ,or in the Lambert Review on internal decision-making  (2003) which described university committees as “tortuous, time consuming and indecisive”. The fact remains that no university went bankrupt as a result of the 1981 cuts even with one being cut by 47% while, in direct contradiction of Lambert’s views on the effectiveness of academic committees, the senate at another university voted down a proposal by its vice-chancellor to open a campus in Singapore. The proposal was heavily supported by his governing body which regarded the invitation from the Singapore Government as a sign of the university’s international reputation. The senate’s decision to reject the invitation was regarded as decisive however. Two years later it was vindicated by the withdrawal, at a heavy cost, of a major Australian university, which had received a parallel invitation. The importance of good governance in maintaining a flow of opinions on the complex issues confronted by institutions on the boundaries  between academic policy and financial security is that it can make a major contribution to institutional strategy and wellbeing.

There is no doubt that, within a university, the most fundamental set of governance relationships  are between the triangle of the governing body, the senate/academic board and the variously described vice-chancellor’s executive committee. It is often forgotten that the UK university system contains two radically different constitutional models. The first is the historic pre-1992 model of a council (governing body) and a senate (often described in the university’s statutes as the ‘supreme academic authority) and a vice-chancellor, seen primarily as an academic leader, and chair of the senate but who the Jarrett Committee (1985) said was also a university’s ‘chief executive.’ The council and senate worked closely in tandem and in many universities, de facto if not de jure, the council’s decision-making was mostly shaped by senate’s recommendations. One third of the council’s membership comprised members of the senate nominated by the senate effectively to provide support for the vice-chancellor in the presentation of the senate’s report to council. The second model is the post-1992 Higher Education Corporation (HEC) where the vice-chancellor is designated as the ‘chief executive’ answerable to a lay governing body which acts like a board and is responsible for the determination of the educational character and mission of the university. Under this model the academic board was confined to narrowly conceived academic matters with no formal role in academic planning, which was reserved to the chief executive answerable directly to the governing body. Academic membership of the governing body was restricted to one or two members  elected often from the body of the academic staff who in practice acted more like tribunes of the people than supporters of the vice-chancellor. It might be thought that this model, which we might call ‘the business model’ was the creation of the government but in fact it was the product of ideas put forward in 1988 by a group of polytechnic directors in the face of the management situation they were confronting in the transfer of the polytechnics out of local authority control. No attempt was made to amend this constitution when the polytechnics became universities in 1992.

Thirty plus years since 1992 has blurred the distinction between the two governance approaches: most pre-1992 vice-chancellors have adopted the chief executive role exercised in the HECs, the government’s clear preference of the two models. The heavy reinforcement of the governing bodies’ responsibilities for finance, strategy and even academic quality has been influential in ‘modernising’ pre-1992 practice. Many HECs have moved rather closer to recognising the strength of the voice of the academic board. But it remains the fact that the divide has an impact on the organisational culture of the institution, the decision-making processes and the management style: academics and academic concerns can be less integral to the academic direction of the institution; governance is more ‘top down’.

This is reinforced by the practice in both pre-1992 and HEC universities of appointing senior academic officers, pro-vice-chancellors and deans, from outside the institution rather than through internal promotion. Originally intended to import new ideas or new leadership to an academic area, analogous to bringing in a new professor to give new leadership to an academic discipline, these new appointments have tended to become explicitly managerial, answerable to the vice-chancellor not to the academic community and to be part of the vice-chancellor’s management team. They take over responsibility for specific areas of university business, quality assurance, research including the REF submission, student welfare and relations with students, international recruitment or, if deans, the management of groups of academic departments/schools and the unelected chairmanship of faculty boards where they continued to exist. Even more important they become members of the vice-chancellor’s executive or senior management committee and, meeting weekly, suck authority away from senates and academic boards. In almost all universities they become a decision-making hub which can bypass academic protocols and, in some universities, can have a direct relationship with governing bodies. These are not appointments where the holders return to their academic posts when their term of office ends. If they move on it will be to similar or more senior posts elsewhere.

The result is that, instead of being participants in a university’s governance, academics can often be relegated to the role of simply an academic workforce lacking secure academic employment in the event of a market downturn. Of course these changes have been brought about in considerable part through growth in institutional size, the management challenge of responding to income cuts and the demands of government but they have also had the effect of changing the balances of internal governance and of substituting a managerial authority for a culture which was designed to encourage participation and debate in a climate of professional engagement.

There is considerable diversity in actual practice: governing bodies may be dominant and demanding, or collegial and respectful of the concept of ‘shared governance’; senates may have become rubber stamps or may have retained the ability to enforce a view on priorities and principles; academic boards may have become partners in decision-making or continue to have only a narrow remit; vice-chancellors’ executive committees may be consultative over policies or directorial; heads of departments may be disciplinary leaders or simply middle managers working to targets. These variations in internal governance provide the context in which academic work is carried out. Whether staff have freedom to innovate in teaching and research and whether a university’s organisation is sufficiently flexible to take on board ‘left field’ ideas or objections to new and resented management decisions, they become too easily airbrushed out in sectoral surveys or wide scale reviews but may be critical to the way an institution manages itself. Good governance sits at the heart of good staff morale, good academic performance and a sense of institutional wellbeing; flawed governance, on the other hand, can undermine academic performance, poison staff relations and encourage disaffection amongst students.

Universities as communities – the governance implications

All communities need governance arrangements; most do so through a mixture of formal rules and informal understandings. Universities are in principle no different although the degree of internal governance control, binding regulation or managerial hierarchy may differ from institution to institution and by type and history. The charters of the pre-1992 universities normally define the membership of the ultimate authority of the university, the Corporate Body, as the officers, lay and academic, the members of the governing body and the senate, the academic staff and the graduate and undergraduate students of the university. By contrast the articles of governance of the HEC universities are more restrictive vesting Corporate Body status and power in the governing body alone and excluding the academic board or staff or students.

The differences of approach in the practical day to day management of the institution and the application of the Common Seal are negligible and may be unremarked by academic staff and students but the pre-1992 constitution reflects implicitly the view of the university as a self-governing community rather than that of an organisation managed on the basis of an externally dominated governing body, a chief executive and associated managerial staff. The pre-1992 formulation assumes that the academic staff are partners in the organisation, not simply employees, and that students are not just consumers but are contributors to a learning enterprise where their views on its operations are a legitimate and entirely appropriate part of the governance process. It would be a caricature to assume that these stereotypes from over 30 years ago are representative in the diversity of universities  now but in some respects they still provide an underlying set of assumptions, particularly in regard to the position of academic staff in relation to representation in policy consideration and decision-making. The practice of HR in some universities does not reflect to any degree that academic staff might professionally have a sense of partnership with their institution.

The concept of community implies a degree of equality among its members. This is clearly under threat across the university sector. Referred to in the 1960s as ‘an academic civil service’ (Sloman, 1963) university administration found itself responding to a more authority-laden climate and to increasing demands for data on accountability from external sources: ‘administrators’ became ‘managers’ and more managerialist as they became agents of decisions handed down from the decision-making hierarchy  in their universities. (The current favoured designation of them as ‘professional services staff’ is ambiguous in relation to the status of their academic colleagues and by implication derogatory). For both academics and administrators, universities have become less stimulating and more divisive places in which to work.

A key element in a well governed community is trust. Good governance in universities does not breed a highly regulated environment because its organs of governance are trusted and because their individual members act within an understood framework. A newcomer will be told ‘This is the way we do things around here’ not ‘This is the way it is done’. Good governance encourages supportiveness rather than naked competition between colleagues and departments. In 1957, when the Science Research Council (SRC) failed to renew its grant to support the Jodrell Bank radio telescope at the University of Manchester, the senate of the University, then representative of all departments, voted that the University should carry the costs itself even though to do so would have had a crippling effect across all academic activities. (The grant was later restored after the telescope’s successful monitoring of Sputnik).

Trust builds confidence in a decision-making process even when negative decisions have to be taken. It also builds a climate of mutual respect for academic endeavour across the institution so that young academics feel encouraged to propose new teaching modules in their own areas of interest or young scientists feel emboldened to bid for additional lab space to accommodate promising research ideas. Above all it provides a route whereby issues can be ventilated and discussed in an orderly way and new ideas can be transmitted upwards in the decision-making structure and perhaps be captured as new sources of progress and change. Good governance is thus a stimulus to innovation and new thinking. By encouraging a heterarchical approach to issues  (Stark et al, 2009) it unlocks flexibility and new ideas in institutions while at the day to day level it provides a consistent and regular format for the conduct of institutional business.

Nowhere is this more important than in relations with students. Students’ interests in governance are markedly different from academic staff: at the academic level the primary student interest is to be a partner in the teaching enterprise, to have the opportunity at departmental and faculty level to address issues in the educational process but in social and political matters their priorities are more short term and are more appropriately considered in discussion centrally with university officers or at meetings of senate or governing body. A critical element here is the stability of the governance machinery, the consistency in the way issues are handled and the seriousness and respect with which they are addressed. Widespread student dissent can be destructive of a university’s sense of community.

Conclusion

We live in unsettled times in higher education both in the UK and across an international spectrum of systems: questions of governance are becoming more pressing. Good and bad governance at system and institutional levels are linked and can sometimes reinforce one another but neither captures as much discussion and research attention as it deserves. Large issues remain unexplored, for example:

• In the UK does the separation at government level of research management from the management of the rest of higher education benefit the government’s innovation agenda more than it dislocates the higher education system?
• Has the application of market principles in the management of UK higher education been in force for a sufficient period to be made the subject of a searching review?
• Should higher and further education in England be brought together in a single tertiary system and be decentralised?
• How should institutional governance best adapt itself to institutional growth?
• What principles of governance should guide universities in respect to satellite campuses?
• How far should resources be devolved to academic areas (faculties, departments or schools) while maintaining an appropriate balance between encouraging academic autonomy and initiative and central accountability?

These and many other governance issues can be lost in more short term concerns. But besides offering fruitful areas of research in its own right, governance also offers an underlying context to much else within the field of higher education studies. As such it is arguable that it is fundamental to study in the field.

Michael Shattock holds an OBE and an MA Oxon and honorary degrees from Aberdeen, Leicester, Reading and Warwick Universities and the University of Education, Ghana.  He is a Fellow of SRHE and was Registrar of the University of Warwick 1983-99. He is currently a Visiting Professor in Higher Education at UCL Institute of Education and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Education, Oxford, and was the leader of the Governance Group in the Centre for Global Higher Education, Oxford 2017-24.

References

Lambert, R (2003) Lambert Review of Business-University Collaboration, Final Report London: HMSO

Marginson, S (2024) Higher Education and the Public and Common Good  CGHE Working Paper No 114, April

Moodie, G and Eustace, R (1974) Power and Authority in British Universities London: George Allen and Unwin

Shattock, ML (2012) Making Policy in British Higher Education 1945-2011 Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill

Shattock, ML and Horvath, A (2020) The Governance of British Higher Education: The impact of governmental, financial and market pressures London: Bloomsbury

Shattock, ML, Horvath, A and Enders, J (2023) The Governance of European Higher Education: Convergence or Divergence London: Bloomsbury

Shattock, ML and Horvath, A (2023) Universities and Regions: The impact of locality and region on university governance and strategies London: Bloomsbury

Sloman, AE (1963) A University in the Making London: BBC

Stark, D, Beunza, D, Girard, M and Lukacs, J (2009) The Sense of Dissonance Princeton: Princeton University Press Prevot, EB, Estermann, T and Popkhadze, N (2023) University Autonomy in Europe IV  The Scorecard 2023 Brussels: EUA