Some reflections on university governance
Reading this week’s announcement that the Committee of University Chairs is reviewing its governance code, I found the historical parallel to 1985 striking. The Jarratt report addressed a specific issue: universities struggling to make complex strategic decisions in the face of funding cuts. Its solution was to strengthen executive authority and position vice-chancellors as chief executives with real power to drive institutional change.
Forty years later, we face financial sustainability challenges of comparable magnitude. The instinctive response has followed a familiar pattern: more commercial expertise on boards, enhanced training, stricter compliance requirements. Yet across my two decades in senior university leadership, I have come to wonder whether this orthodoxy addresses the governance challenges we actually face.
The reforms of the 1980s settled the question of what governors are accountable for: strategy, financial sustainability and academic standards. What they left less resolved was the question of who governors are accountable to, and which voices have structural power over institutional decisions. This distinction matters more than it might initially appear.
The architecture of information
In my experience working with and observing university boards, the relationship between senior executive teams and governing bodies operates through carefully constructed information architectures. Papers arrive in advance, shaped through multiple drafts and review cycles. Executive teams present coherent narratives supported by evidence. Boards ask questions and test assumptions. The system functions as designed.
Yet this very functionality contains a structural limitation. Boards necessarily depend on executive management to frame institutional realities in a way that enables strategic oversight. Even with the best intentions, this framing process involves countless interpretive choices about which aspects of institutional life to foreground and which to background. The question is not whether executives are trustworthy, but whether any system that channels all institutional intelligence through a single point of interpretation can adequately serve the scrutiny function that governance requires.
I have sat in enough senior leadership meetings to recognise how this plays out in practice. A new policy initiative generates implementation challenges that surface through informal conversations, student feedback, or staff concerns raised in passing. These signals reach executive teams, who must then decide whether they represent teething problems requiring patience, implementation issues requiring adjustment, or fundamental flaws requiring reconsideration. That interpretive judgment occurs before boards see any formal report.
The problem is not that executives make these judgments poorly. Rather, it is that boards often lack independent mechanisms to test whether executive interpretations adequately capture the full range of institutional experience. A paper might describe an initiative as successfully embedded, citing implementation milestones and structured consultation. The analysis may be entirely sincere. But if the lived experience of students or staff suggests a more complicated picture, how do boards access that alternative perspective?
When professional diversity is not enough
The white paper’s emphasis on boards with “diverse skills and capability to oversee strategy, plan prudently, understand and manage risk” represents a worthwhile aspiration. Having worked closely with board members from various professional backgrounds, I have seen the value that commercial expertise, financial acumen and strategic experience bring to institutional governance. Yet, I have also observed that a diversity of professional backgrounds does not necessarily translate into a diversity of institutional perspectives.
A board comprising people with extensive corporate experience but limited direct connection to the lived reality of students, academic staff, or professional services teams may possess a sophisticated understanding of risk management frameworks, whilst remaining somewhat blind to the specific risks their institution actually faces. The risks apparent in executive summaries and financial reports may differ substantially from those apparent in seminar rooms, student support services, or research labs.
Learning from other sectors
This week’s sector commentary referenced European models of participatory governance, alongside examples from football governance and neighbourhood planning. My initial instinct, shaped by my own attempts to deliver strategic change, was that such arrangements would prove cumbersome and impede necessary decisions. Yet reflecting more carefully, I recognise that the most significant strategic errors I have witnessed have not resulted from too many voices being heard, but from too few.
The examples cited are instructive not as democratic exercises, but as practical mechanisms for improving institutional intelligence. When supporters have formal participation in football governance, boards gain access to information about supporter sentiment that executive reports might filter or misinterpret. When neighbourhood boards include local residents, strategic decisions can be tested against local knowledge that professional planners might lack. The friction introduced into decision-making processes serves a function: it forces governing bodies to engage with competing narratives rather than receiving solely executive interpretations.
Relationships that shape what boards can see
The relationship between vice-chancellors and board chairs becomes particularly significant in this context. These relationships vary considerably across institutions, shaped by personalities, institutional cultures and specific circumstances. At their best, they enable board chairs to develop an independent understanding of institutional dynamics that complements executive reports. At their most problematic, they can become echo chambers where executive perspectives are reinforced rather than tested.
The role of academic staff representatives on boards offers one model for introducing alternative perspectives, though it comes with inherent limitations. Such representatives cannot claim to speak for a unified constituency, as academic staff hold diverse views on institutional matters. Yet they can offer something valuable: direct, unfiltered access to how policies and strategies are being experienced beyond executive corridors. The challenge lies in creating structural conditions that enable such voices to be heard without positioning them as oppositional to executive leadership.
What modest reform might look like
I find myself wondering what university governance might look like if it incorporated more systematic mechanisms for ensuring boards have access to multiple interpretations of institutional reality. Not through grand democratic restructuring, but through modest adjustments that provide legitimate interests with structural channels to raise concerns directly, rather than through executive interpretation. This might involve enhanced roles for student representation beyond current arrangements, systematic inclusion of early-career academic voices, or structured opportunities for professional services staff to engage with governance processes.
Such arrangements feel uncomfortable to those of us shaped by the post-Jarratt settlement. They introduce friction into decision-making processes. They require boards to engage with institutional complexity rather than receiving coherent executive recommendations. They may slow certain decisions and make governance meetings longer and more challenging. Yet my experience suggests that this friction might prove valuable precisely because it forces governing bodies to grapple with the irreducible complexity of the institutions they oversee.
The pressure to tighten rather than open
The current moment, with its emphasis on financial sustainability and regulatory scrutiny, creates pressure to tighten rather than loosen governance arrangements. The temptation is to double down on executive authority and board expertise. I understand this instinct. Universities facing sustainability challenges need decisive leadership and effective oversight. Yet I wonder whether this response, whilst understandable, may prove counterproductive.
Institutions facing sustainability challenges need governing bodies capable of rigorous scrutiny. Such scrutiny requires not only skilled governors but also structural mechanisms that ensure boards have access to information beyond what executives choose to present. When financial pressures necessitate difficult decisions about course closures, staffing levels, or strategic priorities, the quality of those decisions depends heavily on whether boards have access to the full range of relevant information, including perspectives that executives might find uncomfortable or unhelpful.
Which kind of corporate enterprise
The question is not whether universities should be run as corporate enterprises. That debate was settled in 1985. Rather, the question is what kind of corporate enterprise a university should be. Some corporations maintain arms-length relationships with their stakeholders, communicating through carefully managed channels. Others embed stakeholder voices directly into governance arrangements, accepting the messiness this creates in exchange for richer insights into operational realities.
My twenty years in senior university leadership have convinced me that the challenges we face require not less complexity in our governance arrangements, but more thoughtful engagement with the complexity that already exists. The Jarratt report was correct that universities needed stronger executive leadership and clearer strategic decision-making. But perhaps what 2025 requires is not simply more of what 1985 prescribed, but a recognition that effective governance depends not just on who makes decisions, but on whose voices shape the understanding that informs those decisions.
I remain uncertain about the precise form such mechanisms might take. Participatory governance encompasses numerous models, each with distinct implications. Some European approaches may prove impractical within UK institutional cultures. The Committee of University Chairs’ review may identify innovations that preserve executive effectiveness whilst enhancing board access to diverse institutional perspectives. What seems increasingly clear, however, is that the current orthodoxy, strengthening boards by recruiting members with commercial experience while maintaining executive control over information flows, addresses only part of the governance challenge we face.
The social licence question
The question of who governors are accountable to matters because it determines which institutional realities become visible to those charged with institutional oversight. If boards are accountable primarily to regulatory frameworks and financial sustainability metrics, certain aspects of institutional life will remain perpetually in focus, whilst others fade into the background. If boards view themselves as accountable to a broader set of institutional stakeholders, including students, staff, local communities, and disciplinary traditions, different aspects of institutional reality require attention.
This is not an argument for boards micromanaging operations or second-guessing executive decisions on operational matters. The Jarratt reforms were right to strengthen executive authority for implementation. Rather, it is an argument that strategic oversight requires boards to access institutional intelligence through multiple channels, rather than solely relying on executive interpretation. The challenge facing the Committee of University Chairs is not simply to codify best practice within existing governance models, but to consider whether those models adequately serve the accountability functions that institutional autonomy demands.
Universities operate with significant autonomy precisely because society trusts governing bodies to exercise effective oversight in the public interest. That trust depends on governance arrangements that enable genuine scrutiny rather than simply processing executive recommendations. As we face another period of financial pressure and strategic challenge, the question is whether our governance structures enable the kind of rigorous, well-informed decision-making that institutional autonomy requires, or whether they inadvertently shield us from perspectives that might prove uncomfortable but necessary.