University Boards, Autonomy and Self-governance

• In Event: Governance and Leadership in Higher Education: Research on Engagement, Autonomy, and Diversity

Proposal

The Hungarian government is one of the leaders of the illiberal turn, and the political-governmental-legal instruments that weaken democracy are often adopted by other political leaders who want to apply solutions that weaken democracy and significantly strengthen their executive power. In doing so, they usually target the value they are designing the new institution to safeguard, at least in political slogans.

The so-called model change, where the Hungarian state described a significant increase in autonomy (Authors 2021) when it transferred almost all former state universities to separate foundations headed by five-member boards of trustees, fits into this Hungarian trend. Originally, many practicing ministers, government-party politicians were appointed to them. Consequently the European Commission suspended these institutions' funding (Horizon, Erasmus). The law gives the boards of trustees the possibility of almost total removal of the senate's decision-making powers. This has led to a debate on university autonomy, highlighting the various possible interpretations.

Berdahl (1990) had previously argued that autonomy means that its subject can govern without external control. In this context, he distinguishes between substantive and procedural autonomy. While the former is the 'power of the university to determine its own goals and programs', the latter is the power of the university to determine how it will achieve its goals and programs. In other words, autonomy is closely linked to institutional governance, i.e., who can decide about the university and by what procedure.

Consequently, it is important to distinguish between autonomy (i.e., university autonomy), self-governance of the academic community, and academic freedom (Authors 2023). According to Authors (2023), autonomy is addressed to the institution, while self-governance and academic freedom are addressed to the academic community. Academic freedom cannot be imagined without self-governance, but it can, in principle, be imagined without autonomy. However, autonomy is an important safeguard for fulfilling academic freedom. It is through autonomy that the university can provide the framework within which the academic community can meaningfully influence the conditions that determine its work, both narrowly (e.g., regulation of teaching and research) and more broadly (strategy, funding) (Karran, Beiter, and Appiagyei-Atua 2017). In the context of the state, where taxpayer money is used to carry out a public task, this is relatively clear: in this case, autonomy is understood as distance from the state (Estermann, Nokkala, and Steinel 2011). However, the question is how far academic freedom can be justified as an expectation in the context of private institutions operating on private property and, thus, how far autonomy can be justified as self-governance. The question arises even more strongly in the case of ecclesiastical institutions.

Autonomy is closely linked to some higher education systems as a distance from the state and as self-government. Where institutional decisions are taken by a senate composed of a majority of elected members of the academic community, the core question of autonomy is what remains with the state and what goes to the institution (i.e., the senate) because self-governance is taken for granted. However, with the transformation of the governance of higher education and the emergence of new public management, the institution's internal governance has been transformed. With the board's emergence and management strengthening, the senate lost its decision-making primacy. In other words, there was a disconnect between the concept of autonomy from the state and the concept of self-government. It has become possible for the institution to receive a lot of power from the state, but this does not necessarily go hand in hand with self-government because decisions are concentrated in the hands of management and the board.

The emergence of private institutions and the blurring of the boundaries between the public and private sectors sharpen the dilemmas associated with both interpretations of autonomy. From a legal point of view, institutions are mostly clearly classified, but in their operations, they show different degrees of characteristics of public and private institutions (Levy 2020).

A further lesson from this dual understanding of autonomy is that institutional autonomy needs to be analyzed regarding the issues on which the institution can make decisions and the actors and processes that decide.

In the study of autonomy, it is also worth distinguishing formal autonomy from living autonomy (Maassen, Gornitzka, and Fumasoli 2017). While the former is more a matter of 'de jure' autonomy, the latter is about autonomy experienced in actual practice. De facto autonomy can differ in any direction from de jure autonomy. In the state-institution relationship, for example, the state may be unwilling or unable to use all available powers. Still, the state may also be limiting the institution's functioning by other means (e.g., through accountability) or informal pressure. Examining perceived autonomy is much more difficult because it is not enough to look at the regulations simply.

Therefore, our research aimed to examine the dual nature of autonomy.

To this end, we formulated the following research question: how has the autonomy of model-changing institutions changed? To this end, we examined the distribution of powers between the board and the senate and the changing role of the senates in the universities concerned.

To do this, we used a mixed methodology approach. On the one hand, we carried out a qualitative document analysis: we reviewed the universities' regulations (n=21). We analyzed about 70 documents comparing the situation before and after the change of ownership. The analysis was based on the following criteria:

- the powers of the senate and the board of trustees in matters determining the functioning of the institution
- changes in the composition of the Senate
- the governance structure of the institution
- the powers relating to the employment of the institution's managers.

Secondly, a quantitative survey was carried out (n=124, a 22.6% completion rate out of a total of 548), contacting the members of the senate of the universities concerned to explore how the changes seen in the regulations are implemented in practice for which a distributional analysis is being carried out (this is still ongoing).

Our research results point to the duality of autonomy, offering a broader interpretation that could provide a basis for further research.

Authors

• Zoltan Ronay, Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Faculty of Education and Psychology

• Gergely Kovats, Corvinus University of Budapest