ABSTRACT
The governance and management of universities in Asia has undergone significant changes, predominantly driven by the global trend of granting of institutional autonomy or corporatising public universities. This concluding chapter summarises the findings of the study according to the themes of governance and structure, appointive power, finance and funding, corporate managerialism, academic matters, and tensions and conflicts. Although higher education policies in this vein are aimed at improving the efficiency and productivity of the universities, such changes have also brought about unintended and unforeseen outcomes. For instance, the granting of institutional autonomy from the government to individual universities is a form of decentralisation, yet from the perspective of the academics at the institutional level, such a new form of autonomy is simply a shift of centralised governance from the government to the university, where the vice chancellor or president is tellingly referred to as the “chief executive officer” (CEO). In other areas, the outcomes of such changes are more predictable where the setting of research priorities is increasingly determined by senior managers rather than academic staff, because of the former’s preference for applied research that would attract more external funding from the private sector.
