Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze and to classify university governance regimes, their dynamics and trends in international perspective. Governance refers here to the manner in which these institutions are organized and internally operated -i.e., their authority and management structures and processes- and to their external relations with various stakeholders in order to ensure the higher educations aims. A hypothesis commonly found in specialized literature is used as a starting point: that successful university organizations are those able to modify their governance -that is, their institutional command and control structures and management, to adapt to the changing demands of their environment and the transformation of its basic structures. A basic typology of higher education governance regimes is offered -i.e., bureaucratic, collegial, of stakeholders and entrepreneurial-, and their change-producing forces and evolutionary trends are identified, as well as the displacements of their corresponding center of gravity both within and between regimes. To this end examples are drawn from the history of modern universities in developed countries, both in the so-called Humboldtian and Napoleonic traditions. Finally, changing university governance circumstances and their peculiarities in Latin America are discussed. We explore tensions between traditional values of university self-governance based on broad electoral participation and values pertaining to entrepreneurial management; also between values assigned to higher education as a public good and shortcomings attributed to the private production of higher education.