Academic boards: less intellectual and more academic capital in higher education governance?

Abstract

A historically informed analysis of the academic board or senate in Australian universities, and in the wider higher education environment, particularly the UK, indicates that the role and function of academic boards has fundamentally changed in the past 30 years. Within the context of universities being repositioned to serve global knowledge economies, a comparison between contemporary university governance structures and those from the 1960s and the 1990s provides evidence of a significant diminution of the power and status of boards relative to executive management, and a heightened focus on the functions of academic quality assurance. As Bourdieu would suggest, academic boards continue to hold more symbolic than real power, due to the rise of academic rather than intellectual capital. Consequently, academic boards have become a key site of struggle over the role and function of the multinational corporate university and academic work.

Keywords:

• governance
• organisational change
• Bourdieu
• management
• quality

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges Professor Jill Blackmore and Dr Shaun Rawolle for their comments on earlier drafts of this article, and two anonymous referees.