ABSTRACT
The achievement of vigorous self-government is the historic design contribution of the American university. Self-government is the chief prerequisite for an institution’s vitality and sustainability. It forms a firewall against the isomorphic pressures of bureaucracy and markets. Under self-government, institutional innovations can emerge from decentralized processes of institutional learning, through self-organization and trial-and-error experimentation, in which, at any given point, multiple alternatives are tried and tested. Self-government emancipates the university from the pressure of what James C. Scott called “seeing like a state”1 and, arguably for the first time, allows it to see like a university.
