Higher education governance as a key policy issue in the 21st century

Governance is currently a key issue not only for higher education institutions but for society as a whole. The way organizations are managed, the directions they take and the values they hold send clear signals about their role and functions in society. For this reason, the governance structures of universities were unquestioned for most of the twentieth century. Yet in the final decades of that century significant changes were starting to be felt. The most important of these changes related to the way universities were viewed by governments. In particular, the role of universities in contributing to national economies was being recognized. Greater accountability and more intense scrutiny from the outside meant that the traditional values of universities were being challenged. The task of universities, and for society as a whole, is to develop strategies that will retain the best of what universities have traditionally stood for while responding positively to new pressures and priorities. This paper advances the concept of `deliberative partnerships'' as one way to reconstruct university governance in a positive way for the future. Copyright © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers.