Institutional Autonomy Revisited: Autonomy Justified and Accounted
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Institutional Autonomy Revisited: Autonomy Justified and Accounted Ingrid Moses Chancellery, University of Canberra, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]
Australian universities have enjoyed large-scale autonomy. In a society that increasingly regards university education from an instrumentalist point of view, universities’ anxious safeguarding of their autonomy is widely seen as an attempt to evade accountability. Yet there has been an acceptance that a corollary to autonomy is accountability. Over the past 20 years, the boundaries of autonomy have changed and accountability requirements multiplied. This paper explores the developments in Australia within a wider international context. In particular, it notes changes in seven areas of institutional autonomy, staff, students, curriculum and teaching, academic standards, research and publications, governance, and administration and finance. It concludes that Australian universities have been responsive to societal expectations within the boundaries of changing institutional autonomy. Higher Education Policy (2007) 20, 261–274. doi:10.1057/palgrave.hep.8300157 Keywords: autonomy; accountability; academic freedom; Australian higher education
Introduction Universities throughout the world and over the centuries have operated within varying degrees of institutional autonomy and have granted varying degrees of academic freedom to their academic staff. And academic staff, too, have researched and taught with varying degrees of personal autonomy and under conditions ranging from complete academic freedom to complete absence of academic freedom. Students’ academic freedom has similarly varied: they, too, in some places have learnt what they were told to learn and how, and elsewhere had complete freedom in what they enrolled in and how they structured their learning. Why is autonomy important? Modern consensus, at least in the developed world, is that universities’ mission, in general, is not only the transmission, creation and transfer of knowledge and education for lifelong learning, productive employment and engaged citizenship. Universities also have the role as a social conscience of society in their pursuit of truth and in their
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articulation of universal values. One might argue that all of this can be achieved in a tightly regulated university system, as long as academic freedom is granted, as has been demonstrated in the past in many West and North European countries. Yet institutional autonomy, individual autonomy and academic freedom are interrelated, although here I will focus only on institutional autonomy.
Dimensions of Autonomy Anderson and Johnson in their study of university autonomy in 20 countries define autonomy for the purpose of their study as ‘the freedom of an institution to run its own affairs without direction or influence from any level of government’ (Anderson and Johnson, 1998, 8). They examine the following seven areas where government may be legally allowed to in
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