Higher Education Management

Universities are distinctive as organizational forms in having emerged in early medieval Europe and then spread around the world while remaining recognizably similar. The management of early universities appears to have been based on what has become known as the “collegial” model: shared decision making by the more senior academic staff, with rotating functional responsibilities fitted into normal teaching duties. In England, Oxford and Cambridge colleges (and to some extent the universities they constitute) continue to exhibit this pattern. Early universities were clearly able to take decisions that could be described as “strategic”: commitments to major building projects, for example. As universities began in the 19th century to expand in size and numbers in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere, more senior permanent managerial posts were created to support the underlying collegial arrangements: the University of London’s first paid administrator, the registrar, was appointed in 1838. But it was the expansion of higher education, particularly in western Europe and the United States in the second half of the 20th century, which created the modern profession of higher education management. In most countries in the 21st century, higher education is either state directed or steered at a distance by state agencies (even when actual ownership is private). Yet typically institutional autonomy is publicly prized, often by the same governmental agencies that seek to limit it. This tension, between governmental control (both finance and politics are involved) and institutional autonomy (which is associated with high academic achievements internationally), mean that the skills demanded of university managers are of a distinctive character, and have some broad similarities across countries and cultures. These include the ability to recognize that university academics do not generally see themselves as employees of an enterprise in the usual sense and demand (with varying degrees of success) substantial autonomy in how they carry out their duties. The tension between what academics may see as reasonable demands for individual autonomy and the requirements of operating an organization employing thousands of staff, along with tens of thousands of students, has become more acute in recent years. It should be noted that while the categories chosen for the listing of works in this article would be generally understood by most scholars of higher education, there are considerable conceptual overlaps, as the various category topics inevitably influence one another: strategy cannot be wholly divorced from finance or governance, and so on.