Part 1: Two Models, One Question
European universities are being asked to do more than at any point in their history. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, driven above all by artificial intelligence, is compressing the distance between fundamental research and commercial application to almost nothing (Schwab, 2017). A breakthrough in machine learning moves from preprint to product in months, not decades. Universities that want to remain relevant in this environment cannot stand apart from industry; they must build deep, durable partnerships with companies whose planning horizons are measured in quarters and whose patience for institutional indecision is close to zero. Every one of these demands runs through the same bottleneck: governance. Whether an institution can decide clearly, quickly, and accountably has become the decisive variable.
Yet before any serious discussion of university governance can begin, one rhetorical obstacle must be named. Every proposal to change how universities are led, however modest, is met with the same one-word verdict: managerialism. An entire academic literature has grown up around the term, treating management in universities primarily as an ideology to be resisted rather than a practice to be improved (Deem, 1998; Deem & Brehony, 2005). In everyday institutional life, the term functions not as an argument but as an incantation. It requires no engagement with the proposal's content, no alternative solution to the problem it addresses, and no defence of the status quo it protects. It simply signals that the speaker is on the side of academic virtue and the proposer is not, and in most institutions that is enough to end the conversation. The word has resisted governance reform more successfully than any committee ever could.
It has an exact counterpart in the wider economic debate, where the same academics deploy "neo-liberalism" to the same effect: any reform of markets, trade, or public services is condemned by label rather than examined on its merits (Olssen & Peters, 2005). In both cases the vocabulary does the work that analysis should do, and in both cases the practical function is identical, to make the existing arrangement unquestionable by making every alternative unspeakable. This article proceeds on a different premise: that governance arrangements are instruments, not identities, and that they can be evaluated by asking what they actually produce. To do that, it is worth understanding the two models that dominate the European and global landscape.
The first is the rector and vice-rectors model, the classical continental European structure, mirrored in the Commonwealth world by the vice-chancellor with deputy and pro vice-chancellors.* The rector is the academic head of the institution, historically primus inter pares, first among professorial equals. Vice-rectors (or Rector Delegates) are typically professors seconded into leadership portfolios, one for research, one for education, sometimes one for innovation or societal impact. Crucially, they are usually not the rector's hires in the corporate sense. They are academic colleagues appointed for fixed terms, often through their own selection procedures, and they derive part of their legitimacy from the academic community rather than from the rector.
This is where the model's deepest flaw hides in plain sight. Because deputies are appointed separately, their terms rarely coincide with the rector's. A vice-rector appointed two years into a rector's term will still be in office two years after the rector leaves. Combine misaligned terms with independent legitimacy and you create a very particular incentive structure: a deputy who disagrees with the rector's direction does not need to argue, resign, or comply. They need only wait. Doing nothing becomes a rational strategy, since the rector will be gone before the deputy's term ends, and the next rector may want something entirely different. The rector, meanwhile, cannot remove them, because they were never the rector's appointment to begin with. Every experienced observer of university leadership knows this figure: the deputy who attends every meeting, objects to nothing openly, and delivers nothing, running out the clock on a leader they never chose. Add a separate director of administration running finance, HR, and facilities on a parallel line, and the rector governs an institution in which almost nobody who reports to them actually depends on them.
The second model is the president and senior vice-presidents structure, the Anglo-American corporate form. The president is unambiguously a chief executive. Senior vice-presidents are executives who serve at the president's pleasure; their tenure in office is tied to the president's confidence and, ultimately, to the president's own tenure. When a new president arrives, the team is theirs to confirm or rebuild. Legitimacy flows downward from the board through the president, not upward from the professoriate. The practical consequence is speed and coherence, purchased at the cost of thinner buy-in from the academic community, which is why these institutions invest heavily in formal shared-governance bodies whose actual power ranges from real to ceremonial (Shattock, 2006).
Both models, properly designed, share one bedrock principle. The governing board holds exactly one person accountable: the rector or president. Deputies answer to the chief executive, not to the board, and any independent accountability of deputies clouds the picture. If a vice-rector can appeal past the rector, or if a board receives reports from deputies around the chief executive, then when things go wrong the rector can point at the deputies, the deputies can point at the rector, and the board can hold no one responsible at all. We should not be afraid to hold the rector accountable, fully and personally, but accountability that is divided is accountability that has evaporated.
The first is the rector and vice-rectors model, the classical continental European structure, mirrored in the Commonwealth world by the vice-chancellor with deputy and pro vice-chancellors.* The rector is the academic head of the institution, historically primus inter pares, first among professorial equals. Vice-rectors (or Rector Delegates) are typically professors seconded into leadership portfolios, one for research, one for education, sometimes one for innovation or societal impact. Crucially, they are usually not the rector's hires in the corporate sense. They are academic colleagues appointed for fixed terms, often through their own selection procedures, and they derive part of their legitimacy from the academic community rather than from the rector.
This is where the model's deepest flaw hides in plain sight. Because deputies are appointed separately, their terms rarely coincide with the rector's. A vice-rector appointed two years into a rector's term will still be in office two years after the rector leaves. Combine misaligned terms with independent legitimacy and you create a very particular incentive structure: a deputy who disagrees with the rector's direction does not need to argue, resign, or comply. They need only wait. Doing nothing becomes a rational strategy, since the rector will be gone before the deputy's term ends, and the next rector may want something entirely different. The rector, meanwhile, cannot remove them, because they were never the rector's appointment to begin with. Every experienced observer of university leadership knows this figure: the deputy who attends every meeting, objects to nothing openly, and delivers nothing, running out the clock on a leader they never chose. Add a separate director of administration running finance, HR, and facilities on a parallel line, and the rector governs an institution in which almost nobody who reports to them actually depends on them.
The second model is the president and senior vice-presidents structure, the Anglo-American corporate form. The president is unambiguously a chief executive. Senior vice-presidents are executives who serve at the president's pleasure; their tenure in office is tied to the president's confidence and, ultimately, to the president's own tenure. When a new president arrives, the team is theirs to confirm or rebuild. Legitimacy flows downward from the board through the president, not upward from the professoriate. The practical consequence is speed and coherence, purchased at the cost of thinner buy-in from the academic community, which is why these institutions invest heavily in formal shared-governance bodies whose actual power ranges from real to ceremonial (Shattock, 2006).
Both models, properly designed, share one bedrock principle. The governing board holds exactly one person accountable: the rector or president. Deputies answer to the chief executive, not to the board, and any independent accountability of deputies clouds the picture. If a vice-rector can appeal past the rector, or if a board receives reports from deputies around the chief executive, then when things go wrong the rector can point at the deputies, the deputies can point at the rector, and the board can hold no one responsible at all. We should not be afraid to hold the rector accountable, fully and personally, but accountability that is divided is accountability that has evaporated.
Part 2: What the Fourth Industrial Revolution Demands of University Governance
Every industrial revolution has redrawn the relationship between knowledge institutions and the economy. The first mechanised production and created demand for engineering education. The second, built on electricity and chemistry, gave rise to the industrial research laboratory and the technical university. The third, the computing revolution, produced the modern innovation ecosystem, with Stanford and MIT as its archetypes. The fourth, centred on artificial intelligence, is different in one crucial respect: the underlying capabilities are advancing so fast that the traditional academic clock, with its annual budget cycles, multi-year hiring plans, and consensus-driven committee approvals, is simply out of phase with the world it is supposed to engage (Schwab, 2017).Consider what a serious university-industry partnership now looks like in practice. A company proposes a joint AI research centre: shared staff, shared infrastructure, co-supervised doctoral students, agreements on intellectual property, data governance, and publication rights. The research literature on academic engagement with industry shows that such collaborations depend heavily on institutional conditions, not just individual scientists' willingness (Perkmann et al., 2013). To close such a deal, a university must be able to commit resources, sign binding terms, resolve internal objections, and appoint leadership for the venture, all within a timeframe the partner can live with. Each of those steps is a governance test. Who has the authority to commit the institution? Who resolves the conflict when one faculty objects to the IP terms another faculty negotiated? Who is accountable if the partnership fails, and who is empowered to fix it before it does?
In the executive model, the answers are clear even when the decisions are hard. The president commits the institution, the senior vice-presidents execute because their positions depend on executing, and the board holds the president accountable for the outcome. In the classical model, the answers are often genuinely unclear, and the misaligned-terms problem turns lack of clarity into active resistance. Suppose the rector champions the AI centre but the vice-rector for research, appointed under a predecessor and secure until after the rector's term expires, considers it a distraction from fundamental science. The vice-rector need not oppose it. They need only process it: refer it to committees, request further consultation, raise procedural concerns, each step defensible, each step slow. The industrial partner, watching months pass without a binding answer, concludes what partners increasingly conclude across Europe, and takes the project to an institution, or a corporate lab, that can decide.
The pattern repeats at every level. Deputies who cannot be removed and will outlast the leader have no stake in the leader's success and no penalty for the leader's failure. They can turn every decision into a forever research project, arguing they need more and better information before taking a decision. The result is not dramatic collapse but drift: universities that do not fail visibly, yet gradually lose relevance in the fields that will define the coming decades, while talent, funding, and the most consequential partnerships flow elsewhere.
This is the point at which the managerialism charge is usually filed, so let it be met directly. None of this is an argument that universities should become companies. Universities exist to pursue truth on long horizons, to educate rather than merely train, and to serve publics that markets ignore. Precisely because those missions matter, universities need governance capable of defending them in a fast-moving environment. An institution that cannot make timely decisions cannot protect its independence in negotiations with more agile counterparts; it can only accept terms or walk away late. Clear and quick decision-making is not a betrayal of academic values. It is the precondition for asserting them. Calling that managerialism does not refute it; it merely declines to answer it.
Part 3: The Case for Systemic Reform
If the diagnosis is a mismatch between governance and environment, the remedy is systemic reform, not cosmetic adjustment. Three defects in current European arrangements stand out, and a serious reform agenda should address all of them together.The first is the deputy problem itself. The fix is straightforward in design, if not in politics. Vice-rectors, deputy vice-chancellors, and pro vice-chancellors should be appointed by the rector, serve at the rector's discretion, and hold terms coterminous with the rector's own. When the rector goes, the team's mandate goes, and the incoming rector builds their own. This ends the waiting game at a stroke: a deputy's success is bound to the rector's success, and obstruction carries a price. It also purifies accountability. The board holds one person responsible for everything, the rector, and the rector cannot deflect blame onto deputies they did not choose, because every deputy is their choice. Deputies lose their independent claim on the board, and the board gains, in exchange, the unambiguous right to judge the rector on results. This is not a diminution of the deputies' standing; it is a clarification of it. They become what the title implies, delegates of the rector, not rival power centres with their own clocks.
The second defect is state entanglement in appointments, and the Netherlands offers the clearest example. On the surface, Dutch governance looks modern: the rector magnificus is appointed by the university's supervisory board, not elected by the professoriate. But at the public universities, the members of that supervisory board are themselves appointed by the Minister of Education, a power laid down in the Dutch higher education act (Wet op het hoger onderwijs en wetenschappelijk onderzoek, 1992). The body that hires, evaluates, and can dismiss the university's leadership is composed by the government of the day. However restrained ministers have been in practice, the design is wrong in principle, and it matters for the partnership agenda: companies making decade-long research commitments want counterparts whose leadership is insulated from political turnover. Reform would move board appointments to an independent nomination process in which the university community and the sitting board play the decisive role, with the state's legitimate interest secured through funding conditions and quality assurance rather than personnel control.
The third defect runs in the opposite direction: the internal election of rectors, still the norm in Italy, Spain, and much of Germany and Austria, as the European University Association's comparative analysis of rector selection procedures across 35 systems documents (Pruvot et al., 2023). The rector is chosen by ballot of the academic community, in campaigns that resemble municipal politics complete with platforms, factions, and promises to constituencies. The democratic appearance is attractive, but the consequences are corrosive. An elected rector owes the position to internal coalitions and must govern with one eye on re-election, which rewards deferring hard decisions and distributing resources by political weight rather than strategic value. A rector campaigning for a second term will not close a weak department to fund an AI institute, however compelling the case. Election also narrows the talent pool to insiders and makes accountability circular: a board cannot credibly remove what the community has elected. Worse, an electoral system at the top legitimises electoral logic all the way down, which is precisely how deputies acquire the independent mandates that paralyse institutions.
The direction of reform follows from the diagnosis. Universities need boards small enough to govern, competent enough to add value, and independent enough to appoint leadership on merit. Those boards should include the academic community as full members, the legitimate heir of the collegial tradition and a far better one than campus elections. They should be chaired by figures outside the academic hierarchy whose job is to lead the board, employ or dismiss the rector and determine the compensation package, and guard the boundary between non-executive and executive role (the rector), not to run the institution (Shattock, 2006).
Rectors should be appointed by and accountable to those boards alone, and should in turn appoint their own deputies, for their own term, removable at their own discretion, so that when an industrial partner asks who can commit the institution, the answer takes one sentence, and when the board asks who is responsible for the outcome, the answer takes one name.
Universities that cannot decide clearly and quickly will not shape the age of AI; they will be shaped by it. This debate belongs to everyone with a stake in European higher education: academics, students, administrators, board members, industry partners, and policymakers. If you serve on a university body, ask whether your accountability lines are as clean as they should be. If you have watched a governance proposal die under the single word managerialism, ask what argument the word was standing in for.
Share your experience in the comments, challenge the argument, and tell us: what would it take to reform university governance in your system?
References
Deem, R. (1998). 'New managerialism' and higher education: The management of performances and cultures in universities in the United Kingdom. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 8(1), 47–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/0962021980020014Deem, R., & Brehony, K. J. (2005). Management as ideology: The case of 'new managerialism' in higher education. Oxford Review of Education, 31(2), 217–235.
Olssen, M., & Peters, M. A. (2005). Neoliberalism, higher education and the knowledge economy: From the free market to knowledge capitalism. Journal of Education Policy, 20(3), 313–345. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680930500108718
Perkmann, M., Tartari, V., McKelvey, M., Autio, E., Broström, A., D'Este, P., Fini, R., Geuna, A., Grimaldi, R., Hughes, A., Krabel, S., Kitson, M., Llerena, P., Lissoni, F., Salter, A., & Sobrero, M. (2013). Academic engagement and commercialisation: A review of the literature on university-industry relations. Research Policy, 42(2), 423–442. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2012.09.007
Pruvot, E. B., Estermann, T., & Popkhadze, N. (2023). University autonomy in Europe IV: The Scorecard 2023. European University Association.
Schwab, K. (2017). The fourth industrial revolution. Crown Business.
Shattock, M. (2006). Managing good governance in higher education. Open University Press.
Wet op het hoger onderwijs en wetenschappelijk onderzoek [Higher Education and Research Act]. (1992). https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0005682
* In the commonwealth, Rector is equivalent with Vice-Chancellor, Chair of the Board is equivalent to Chancellor or Pro-Chancellor where the Chancellor is someone considered beyond reproach like a member of the royal family.
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