Review of the Roles of Governments and Universities and Their Interrelationships: An Urgent Need for Governance Reform i
Governments set and administer public policy, and exercise executive, political, and sovereign power via laws, institutions, and custom and practice. Almost all have legislative, executive, and judiciary branches. At a national level, governments determin
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Review of the Roles of Governments and Universities and Their Interrelationships: An Urgent Need for Governance Reform in the Arab World John R. Hillman and Elias Baydoun Abstract Governments set and administer public policy, and exercise executive, political, and sovereign power via laws, institutions, and custom and practice. Almost all have legislative, executive, and judiciary branches. At a national level, governments determine the operating environment for universities and can constrain and even damage development and competitiveness of both higher education and the national economy. Local governments can also influence universities in their sphere of operation. Governments can directly affect university quality, relevance of teaching and research, student employability, and the extent to which university-derived innovation and entrepreneurship can flourish. Of the diverse forms of government in the world, western-style, liberal and essentially free-market democracies have provided the best operating environments for universities and their graduates and postgraduates. Political and economic stability coupled to free speech and strong measures to control corruption are of paramount importance to the functioning of universities in the global economy. Universities vary widely in their types of governance, ownership (public sector or not-for-profit, or profit-making in the private sector), age, size, financial resilience, reputation, contributions to society and the economy, existence of commercial arms and satellite bodies, the extent and breadth of research conducted, the amount of autonomy they have from government, recruitment of international staff and students, ethnic and religious influences, bureaucracy, value for money, quality assurance and relevance assessments, embedded integrity, and degree of competitiveness. As a consequence, there is no single best governance model for universities. Nevertheless, the quality of a university and whether or not it really meets the internationally accepted definition of a university is shaped by the quality of its governance, staff, and student-body while appreciating that finance lies at the heart of J. R. Hillman James Hutton Institute, Dundee, UK e-mail: [email protected] E. Baydoun (B) Department of Biology, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon e-mail: [email protected] © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Badran et al. (eds.), Higher Education in the Arab World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58153-4_1
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J. R. Hillman and E. Baydoun
whether or not the institution can survive. Meeting the oft-unwritten social contracts with the host country and its students is determined by the quality and relevance of education and research carried out, and importantly, the encouragement and facilitation of innovation, creativity, novelty, and entrepreneurship. The employability of graduates and postgraduates is a crucially important indicator of the true value of a univ
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