Should governance reform be horizontal or vertical?

…in the financing system of HE but particularly in the governance of HE, those autonomous organizations, in order to ensure that they can continue to be successful… may need to organise themselves differently.

Some have taken that as a call for further corporatisation of boards – reducing their size, paying chairs, improving skills and knowledge, that sort of thing.

Others have taken it as a call for democratisation of boards – more staff and students, more voting, more transparency and so on.

For example elsewhere on the site today, Steven Jones makes the case for a new ethical code to empower university governors to stand up for students, staff and the public value of higher education.

It promotes active, ethical governance based on equity, diversity, and integrity through six principles – constructive criticism, equity of membership, collaboration and trust, transparent communication, institutional responsibility, and sector responsibility.

Implementation would require inclusive recruitment, leveraging academic expertise, and ethical financial practices, and chairs and secretaries would facilitate effective meetings, ensure accurate records, promote transparency, uphold academic freedom, and manage conflicts with full disclosure – all while avoiding exclusive decision-making and supporting marginalised voices.

Staff and student board members will find much to admire here, given their critiques have featured heavily in previous Council for the Defence of British Universities (CDBU) work.

But what if the problem isn’t governors or governance, but the preposterous range of responsibilities we now place on these bodies?

Astonishing complexity

One of my favourite rattles through trends in university governance reforms in recent decades is this one – a comprehensive study of changes in the Netherlands, Austria, and Portugal.

The 2015 report on Polish higher education reform reveals how European governments fundamentally transformed university board expectations while making governance structures more complex and demanding.

These reforms, driven by failing welfare states, economic recessions, poor institutional responses to societal needs, and globalisation pressures, forced universities to become “entrepreneurial organisations”.

European universities evolved from “corporative universities” dominated by senior professors, through “democratic universities” with broad stakeholder participation, to “managerial universities” with strong institutional leadership and business-like governance.

Reforms created entirely new expectations for governance bodies to oversee not just academics, but complex business operations, international partnerships, research commercialisation, and multi-stakeholder relationships that would challenge experienced corporate boards.

The shift meant collegial bodies were “stripped from managerial power and redesigned into more advisory boards.” While executives appreciated increased decisiveness, academic staff and students became most dissatisfied, finding transparency particularly problematic.

Universities shifted from professional to political accountability – from being accountable to academic communities toward external stakeholders and government priorities. This created “ambivalent accountability” where supervisory boards struggle to “balance conflicting interests of various stakeholders” while accountability mechanisms remain unclear.

Universities became accountable for performance metrics but not genuinely accountable to communities they serve. Supervisory boards “communicate almost exclusively with executive boards” with “very limited” external contact, creating governance isolated from supposed stakeholders.

The report suggests the governance burden had become essentially impossible regardless of governor quality, documenting how universities face “conflicting internal and external expectations” while operating “in increasingly competitive and transitional environments.”

The competing demands made “university governance complex and political accountability extremely hard to handle” – suggesting the problem requires reconsidering what we expect universities and governors to be in modern society.

But my favourite part is the bit that attempts to make the case for similar reforms in Poland – which doesn’t half look naive here in 2025:

In our view, one of the most important obstacles in modernization of the university governance model is that parts of the academic community in Poland have not noticed or do not want to notice that the world outside the university has undergone significant changes. Poland is a free, stable, and democratic country in which there is no serious argument that justifies treating academics as a particularly vulnerable group whose freedom to research and teach is particularly threatened.

Opposing sides

I’ve argued before here that advocates of the current iteration of fees (and increases to them) maintain that competition and a demand-led system have meant more students studying the things they want to study, where they want to study. Aggressively blind to the impacts on place, choice or the way that the need to grow distorts decision making, in that world view, if the government would just nudge up the unit of resource through a fees increase, all would be well.

These are the sort of people who’ve tended to cheer-on the corporatisation of governance.

They’re opposed by fees-free advocates – who yearn for a golden era of the past where decisions were all made for the right reasons, made by academics rather than ex-academics playing at being a corporate CEO, and when planning and place seemed to matter. Blind to the ways in which inefficiency ruled, the student interest tended to be dismissed and the arrogant ways in which failure was able to be ignored as everyone else’s fault, in that world view, if the government would just nudge up the unit of resource through direct funding, all would be well.

These are the sort of people who’ve tended to yearn for a return for more democratic and collegiate forms of governance.

In England, in the form of the Higher Education and Research Act and its Office for Students offspring, there was an attempt to straddle. Both private for-profit and, for want of a better word, “public” providers were to be regulated on the same, “competitive” playing field. A set of “public interest governance” principles supposedly apply across the board, although nobody seems to believe they work.

The mistake was to assume that a set of private and competitive drivers would unleash creativity and quality, and could be tempered by regulatory brakes to protect students and taxpayers. But the brakes have proved to be too slow, the insidiousness of the need to grow widespread and trumping of all other considerations, and the result has been a system that appears (both inside and outside) neither to deliver on public or individual interests, even though it often objectively does both.

It turns out that even charities need incentive drivers to deliver student and taxpayer interests, and need regulatory brakes to prevent recklessness.

Look East

It’s why I always return to Wet versterking bestuurskracht onderwijsinstellingen (Education Governance Strengthening Act), passed in 2016 in the Netherlands. It was designed to address decades of accumulated governance failures and aimed to restore trust in university administration – all while balancing institutional autonomy with democratic participation and public accountability.

The 1997 Modernization of University Board Structure Act (MUB) had replaced democratic university governance with managerial hierarchies based on New Public Management principles. The early 2000s then saw a cavalcade of governance failures. In the universities of applied sciences, investigations uncovered that 12 of 48 vocational universities had committed student registration fraud to increase state funding.

The Saxion University case exemplified the crisis – it recruited 600 Chinese and Vietnamese students instead of the approved 240, telling arriving students they must accept different courses than promised or “take the first plane home.” These were attributed to perverse incentives in performance-based funding formulas that rewarded enrolment numbers over educational quality.

Research integrity scandals then further exposed governance weaknesses. The 2011 Diederik Stapel case at Tilburg University, where a dean fabricated data across dozens of publications over multiple years, showed up fundamental breakdowns in research supervision. By 2015, fifty-eight of Stapel’s publications had been retracted, making it one of the largest academic fraud cases globally. Despite holding a position of trust and authority, the fraud went undetected for years, suggesting systemic oversight failures.

Quality assurance systems also failed repeatedly. The Dutch Inspectorate of Education documented cases where “86 out of 360 students should not have received a diploma” at some institutions. Internal supervision mechanisms had proven inadequate – despite formal supervisory board structures, checks and balances were insufficient to prevent mismanagement and fraud. Decision-making processes lacked transparency, and accountability chains were unclear.

The concentration of power in executive boards – without meaningful participation from academic staff and students – had created democratic deficits incompatible with Dutch traditions of consultation and consensus. Something had to change – but it wasn’t (yet) another increase in external regulation.

A third way

Enter the 2016 Wet versterking bestuurskracht onderwijsinstellingen – the Education Governance Strengthening Act.

The Act introduced sweeping changes. For executive boards, reforms mandated public appointment profiles for all board positions and granted formal advisory rights to participation councils in board appointments and dismissals.

Supervisory boards received enhanced oversight responsibilities with clearer separation from executive functions. The Act introduced mandatory reporting to the Education Inspectorate for suspected mismanagement, and required transparent selection processes for board members.

The Act elevated study program committees from informal advisory bodies to formal participation bodies with statutory rights. Committees gained consent rights over parts of education and examination regulations, primary responsibility for advising on educational quality, and direct election of members by students and staff.

Participation received a comprehensive strengthening across all levels. University and institutional councils gained expanded advisory rights in executive appointments, enhanced information and consultation privileges, and strengthened roles in strategic policy development.

And the Act created a multi-level participation structure spanning from central university councils through faculty bodies to program-level committees, ensuring democratic input from students and staff at every governance level.

At the time, government officials justified the reforms through multiple policy rationales – the primary argument centered on restoring public trust after years of scandals while maintaining the benefits of institutional autonomy. Officials stressed that structural changes alone were insufficient – a cultural transformation toward “good governance” was essential.

And rather than imposing rigid rules, the framework promoted “horizontal dialogue” where students, staff, management, and supervisors engage in ongoing conversations about educational quality.

Education Ministry officials argued that the reforms would enable institutions to better handle demographic decline and economic challenges while improving educational outcomes. And the policy explicitly rejected both excessive state control and unfettered institutional autonomy, seeking a “third way” balancing freedom with accountability.

At the time, universities strongly opposed aspects they viewed as undermining institutional autonomy. UNL’s president warned about damage to the Netherlands’ international competitiveness and feared “talent drain from excessive regulation.”

But the government explicitly rejected both extremes – seeking what officials called a “third way” balancing freedom with accountability.

A 2021 evaluation found that participation reforms were generally functioning well – formal participation bodies had succeeded, creating meaningful channels for student and staff input on educational quality. Governance culture showed improvement – with better dialogue quality between different stakeholder groups.

For or to?

The point is that Codes are all very well, ministerial finger-wagging is what it is, and of course it is the case that institutions weighed down by endless committees will find it hard to respond quickly to internal pressures.

But the idea that all of that – or indeed any of that – is all solved by narrowing public authority governance into the hands of a small number of skilled (yet still unpaid) professionals is dated and flawed.

It doesn’t address unsustainable complexity and burden, does little to restore public, staff or student trust in the decisions being made, and may result in objectively worse decision-making too.

Above all else, however strong governance is on accountability for things, if we must push so many billions of taxpayer money and student fee income through universities themselves, we should ask what messages we send to students, staff and the public when accountability to them often feels so weak. We are supposed to be a democratic society after all.