Introduction

This chapter, based on the literature on higher education (HE) governance and management that has burgeoned in the last four decades or so, sets the context for subsequent chapters. The chapter highlights the governance imperative in HE, presents the competing definitions of HE governance, delineates the scope of HE governance and delves into the HE system and institutional-level governance models. Using Burton Clark’s (The higher education system: Academic organization in a cross-national perspective. University of California Press, 1983) triangle of HE coordination, the chapter discusses the models of HE governance—the state-control, the state-supervising and the marketised models—at system level. It demonstrates how the changes in the HE landscape in the mid-1980s, notably massification of HE, the emergence of the knowledge economy and the imperative to strengthen the nexus between the university and the general society, have led to shifts from the academic self-governance and state-control models to newer HE system-level steering models. The central argument of the chapter, which is consistent with the extant literature, is that one model will always stand out in the national HE system, but this does not negate existence of elements of other models. The models of internal university governance (the collegial, bureaucratic, managerial, entrepreneurial and network models) are equally presented in the chapter.