In Michael Shattock’s The Governance of European Higher Education, we learn that the governance of higher education systems has not been converging despite the Bologna Process – instead, there’s divergence based on national priorities and historical legacies.

That universities are being restructured to operate more like companies – with strengthened university boards dominated by external members, enhanced executive power, and internal authority shifted away from senates toward central management – is well rehearsed.

The sector-wide trend toward more centralised managerial governance reflects governments seeking greater oversight over financial sustainability and market responsiveness.

But universities aren’t just complex organisations – they are communities of academics, students, and professional staff bound by shared purposes and long timelines.

The persistence of faculty governance in continental European systems fascinates me. Below the big top bodies where the focus always lies, in Germany and Norway, faculties still elect deans and hold real authority over curriculum design and staff appointments. French, Portuguese, and Italian faculties remain “resistant to reform,” frustrating government-led modernisation agendas.

In some countries’ contexts, faculties act as what might be termed sites of “horizontal accountability” – spaces where competing imperatives can be debated and managed before they reach crisis point. They help make institutional strategy legible and liveable to the people who must implement it.

But even where faculty structures remain strong, their role is often defensive rather than generative – focused on protecting inherited norms rather than navigating the complex interplay between academic values and institutional sustainability.

A community of communities

Everything I’ve ever read suggests that while it’s perfectly possible to corporately govern a large business centrally, when it’s a community of people you need smaller bodies like faculties (or whatever we’re calling them this week) to act as your democratic infrastructure – to involve people; draw the real links between strategy and regulation, and experience and practise; and resolve competing interests.

In the UK, faculties – frequently reorganised in recent years – have often become little more than administrative units, with decisions centralised in executive management and boards reduced to advisory status. But maybe there’s another way.

Students shouldn’t fit a corporate model – so more often than not, they feature more as objects of governance through metrics like the National Student Survey than as subjects within it. Surveys and outcomes metrics frame students as consumers providing feedback rather than partners in institutional development.

But in many continental systems students play formalised and politically meaningful roles, with generous voting rights and representation within faculties. Students bring unique perspectives on purpose, pedagogical innovation, and civic engagement. In an era when universities face mounting pressures around relevance, accessibility, and public value, including authentic student voices at this level of governance can make democracy real and help to drive strategy.

Universities at their best are more than degree-granting institutions or research enterprises. They are spaces where different forms of knowledge and ways of being encounter each other – where critique and creativity flourish, where democratic values are modelled and sustained. They are, or at least should be, communities.

Embedding that understanding isn’t about nostalgia or resistance to change. It’s about recognising that the problems universities face – climate change, artificial intelligence, inequality, mental health crises – are not technical challenges that can be solved through better management systems. They require sense-making, sustained dialogue, and the kind of long-term thinking that emerges from genuine community engagement.

Trust sustains these processes. When academic staff feel reduced to deliverers of key performance indicators, or students feel like customers in a transaction, the social fabric that enables real learning and discovery begins to fray.

Reimagining faculty governance

So what might faculty governance look like if it drew inspiration from community-led development approaches rather than corporate management models?

Faculties could operate as “knowledge commons” – bringing together staff, students, and external partners to shape teaching and research agendas with social purpose. Rather than formal, bureaucratic structures, they could embrace relational governance based on high-trust processes, shared leadership, and consensus-building.

This might involve faculty governance structured around three complementary functions – oversight (quality, resources, risks), foresight (emerging strategic directions, partnership potentials), and insight (sense-making around pedagogical shifts, research relevance, student voice).

That kind of approach would expand faculty governance beyond managing programmes or quality compliance to actively imagining the future of disciplines and their public relevance.

It could mean “teaching festivals” and open research briefings, digital platforms for crowdsourcing ideas from students and staff, and adopting “constellation governance” where multiple self-organising groups lead work with devolved decision-making under light-touch strategic coordination.

As Shattock observes, the resilience of faculty governance in other countries is tied to professional identity – academics viewing their authority as grounded in disciplinary expertise and peer legitimacy rather than institutional hierarchy. But in 2025, that authority should be exercised constructively and in way that looks to the future, not just defensively with an eye on the rear-view mirror.

Faculty-level governance matters because it could represent something bigger than administrative efficiency or organisational charts. It could be about whether universities remain spaces where academic communities can shape their own futures, where students are genuine partners in learning, and where democratic values are practiced rather than merely preached.

The challenge is to articulate a renewed purpose for faculty governance – one that helps navigate the knowledge, pedagogic, and civic missions of universities while balancing academic values with sustainability imperatives. That means engaging with financial and regulatory realities without being captured by their logic.

Large universities will always struggle to model genuine democratic participation at their centre. Faculty reform offers a better opportunity to practice it – where the daily work of teaching, learning, and discovery actually happens.

The question isn’t whether the “faculty” will survive the managerial turn, but whether it could evolve to meet the challenges ahead. The answer will shape not just the internal life of universities, but their capacity to serve as democratic institutions in an increasingly undemocratic world.