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Higher education offers the potential to support glonacal (global, national, and local) development. This study presents new empirical and conceptual insights into the ways in which higher education can help to achieve and exceed the outcomes enshrined in the Sustainable Development Goals. Open-ended online surveys were used to learn how academics in Georgia and Kazakhstan view the contributions of universities to addressing self-identified development challenges; and how universities work with the government and the private sector for realising their glonacal development potential. While the study provides ample evidence on the national manifestations of the developmental role of universities, it also shows that limited academic freedom and institutional autonomy impede the full realisation of the potential of higher education. The assumptions underpinning the academics’ views on how higher education can support development are discussed in the light of an innovative framework of essentialist and anti-essentialist approaches. Juxtaposing the national with the global development missions of universities, the paper raises questions on the possibility of delinking higher education from the immediate human capital and modernisation needs of the nation-state and becoming concerned with the global, on promoting freedom to cultivate intellectual curiosity through education and research, and stimulating a more holistic imaginary of the developmental purposes of higher education.

Due to the politicisation of universities-within-the-state, the state's governance of higher education in China differentiates itself from other countries. This study examines how the Chinese central government adjusts its governance over universities between 1978 and 2018. Based on an extensive analysis of policy documents and scholarly research, this study proposes an analytic framework, comprising the state's governance logics, governance instruments, and institutional demonstrations. The three strategically selected governance instruments, i.e. laws, policies, and finance, are demonstrated through various aspects integral to China's higher education—the dual-goverance structure, appointment of the principal leadership, access to higher education, university and discipline structures, curriculum and ideology, funding and grants, and tuition fees. Based on an in-depth investigation, the study argues that the underlying governance logics of the state are moving from direct controls to indirect supervision; however, despite the increasing university autonomy and academic freedom in some areas, the state has never abdicated the essential power and authority over higher education institutions. This paper contributes to the theoretical and practical understanding of China's governance of higher education in recent decades.

Over the past decade, universities in the People’s Republic of China have notably progressed in international rankings. Most of the existing literature interested in this development describes the adoption of university rankings in China as a recent import of a global institution, and as being driven by a governmental agenda that seeks to bolster the country’s competitiveness and overall status on the world stage, including in the academic realm. The wider domestic environment that determines Chinese universities’ participation in the global ranking competition is usually left out of the picture. As this article demonstrates, university rankings and other performance indicators have been an organic part of Chinese science and higher education policy and a prominent element in state-directed national reform and development planning processes since at least the 1980s. In addition to the crucial role of the state and a lack of university autonomy, what further distinguishes the case of China from other countries in the rankings is a strong and accepted tradition of utilizing quantification, competition, and rating as political tools. Another reason, we argue, why Chinese universities were able to insert themselves into the ranking race relatively seamlessly and with some quick successes. Yet, after decades of following so-called “Western” standards and indicators for academic performance and reputation evaluation, domestic policy is changing again and taking a seemingly nationalist turn which may bring about some changes in the practice and significance of university rankings in China—and potentially beyond, as we discuss in conclusion.

In this essay, Niels Kerssens and José van Dijck discuss the implications of platformization on the key public value of pedagogical autonomy in K-12 education. They focus on two interconnected concerns: how the integration of education into a global digital infrastructure contests the institutional pedagogical autonomy of schools and how the integration of digital platforms with educational practices in classrooms challenges the professional pedagogical autonomy of teachers. The authors engage with the symposium contributions by Williamson, Gulson, Perrotta & Witzenberger on the Amazon infrastructure and by Pangrazio, Stornaiuolo, Nichols, Garcia & Philip on platform practices at the classroom level. With this dual focus, Kerssens and van Dijck explore how critical research in the emerging field of platform studies in education pertains to both the political-economic level of building educational platform infrastructures and the social-technical level of how teaching and learning are (re)shaped by digital platforms. The essay concludes with a brief discussion of recommendations for the future governance of edtech to serve the pedagogical interest of schools and teachers.

The main aim of this article is to contribute to the understanding of organizational autonomy and control in higher education reform and related expectations as regards the performance of universities. Our analyses draws on principal-agent models as a normative theory of policy reform, and institutionalist approaches in public policy and institutional design as an analytical theory of policy reform. We discuss how the dominant narrative of political reform moves away from traditional beliefs in university autonomy that are built on institutional trust and linked to professional autonomy. In the emerging narrative of political change, autonomy becomes re-defined as the 'new organizational autonomy' of universities as both strategic actors and as an addressee of governmental control. The concept of 'regulatory autonomy' captures the use of organizational autonomy of universities as a tool of a new regime of governmental control. Exemplified by the Dutch case, we analyze autonomy policies for strengthening managerial discretion and internal control of universities that are combined with regulatory policies for external control that steer organizational choices. Regulatory autonomy thus aims at aligning universities more closely with governmental goals and improve respective performance. Our literature review shows, however, that there is scarce, inconclusive and methodologically problematic evidence for a link between 'organizational autonomy and performance'. We point at promising avenues for further research on autonomy and performance as two core concepts in the contemporary higher education debate. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).

The Academic Freedom Index is the first conceptually thorough assessment of academic freedom worldwide and a times series dataset going back to 1900. While some previous datasets exist, they are geographically limited and methodologically or conceptually insufficient to offer a comprehensive picture of the levels of academic freedom across time and space. This paper introduces the new expert-coded dataset that includes the overall Academic Freedom Index alongside several specific indicators, to which more than 2050 country experts around the world have contributed and which is freely available as part of V-Dem’s time-series data releases. The paper discusses its advantages compared to other types of data on academic freedom, details the conceptualization of the new indicators, and offers a content and convergent validation of the results. The dataset provides ample opportunities for scholars to conduct in-depth research on academic freedom and its infringements, and for policymakers and advocates to monitor and analyze patterns and trends of academic freedom around the world.

Legislation in the 1970s, 1990s and 2003 made major changes to the status and operations of Danish universities and the role they should play in creating different imaginaries of Denmark and its place in the world. In the education literature, ‘institutional autonomy’ is key indicator of shifts in the idea and role of the university but this was not always the term used in Denmark. Instead, key terms are the ‘self-steering’ university, the ‘self-owning’ university, ‘aim and frame’ steering and ‘commando-way’ steering. The Danish words are explored ethnographically, and ‘autonomy’ is used as an analytical, not an emic, term. Whereas institutional autonomy literally means self-legislating, the analysis starts from the premise that it is never absolute: it always involves a negotiated relationship between the university and government, and these negotiations are influenced by how ‘the university’ is constituted at different times. This article focuses on changes to the legal construction of the university, its relation to government, internal organisation and leadership in different reforms. Each period will explore the ways in which the university was (or was not) ‘autonomous’, and why each new status was thought suitable for the role universities were to pay in the realisation of different visions of Denmark’s future.

Over the past three decades, governments have recurrently intervened in higher education. Over time, significant changes have occurred in inherited national governance modes. These reforms have been assessed in different ways, such as by emphasising the shift to the more supervisory role of the State, or the increasing privatisation and marketisation following the neoliberal paradigm, or the overall process of re-regulation. This paper sheds light on these different judgements by addressing the governance shift by focusing on the sequences of policy instrument mixes adopted over time in 16 European countries. By analysing 25 years of policy developments, it is shown how the content of national governance reforms consistently varied over time and that no common template has been followed.

Why does the military intervene in the politics of some countries but remain under firm civilian control in others? The paper argues that the origins of military intervention in politics lie in a fundamental moral hazard problem associated with authoritarian repression. Dictators must deter those who are excluded from power from challenging them. When underlying, polity-wide conflict results in threats to the regime that take the particular form of mass, organized, and potentially violent opposition, the military is the only force capable of defeating them. The military exploits this pivotal position by demanding greater institutional autonomy as well as a say in policy, and it threatens to intervene if the civilian leadership departs from a subsequent compromise on these issues. A game-theoretic analysis of such contracting on violence implies that the likelihood of military intervention in politics should be greatest at intermediate levels of mass threats. Original, large-N data on military intervention support these claims.

Scholars have documented a tendency of (semi-)authoritarian regimes to undermine university autonomy, mainly through organizational (de jure) changes. This paper presents a case study of a publicly triggered plagiarism investigation by the University of Belgrade into the doctoral thesis of the Serbian Minister of Finance, one of the key members of the increasingly authoritarian regime. The analysis finds a proceduralized and delayed response of the university’s leadership, which indicates lowered de facto autonomy from politics, despite the university’s continually high de jure autonomy. The investigation was closed only after a mobilization within the academic community which resulted in a university’s blockade that forced its leadership to retract the contentious thesis. The case study shows that, in contexts of democratic backsliding, political capture can extend farther than usually thought, impacting even the implementation of internal university standards. On the other hand, the analysis also shows that political capture is not necessarily irreversible and that academic community can mobilize to ‘undo’ it. This reinforces the notion of academic communities as value-driven groups capable of exerting peer pressure to override even authoritarian pressures. In order to understand the dynamic of the plagiarism inquiry in its entirety, we apply insights from theory of power to complement and overcome the limitations of the conventional theoretical frameworks on democratic backsliding and academic autonomy.