ABSTRACT
Th e idea of accountability in human aff airs raises complex philosophical and sociological concerns around ideas of agency, rationality and free will (Barnes, 2001). When applied to institutions, accountability raises perhaps a diff erent set of questions, in some cases relatively straightforward (when applied to governmental organisations, while accountability may be considered to be unsatisfactory in practice in given cases, the principle remains fairly clear); more complex when applied to fi rms (to what extent are managers accountable, for example, to the fi rm’s owners or to wider society?); and more complex still when applied to universities. Th is follows from the multi-faceted, multidimensional character of the university itself, refl ecting the reality that in most contemporary societies, the university is expected to perform a wide variety of tasks and to be answerable to diff erent stakeholders while performing them. Usually, public universities have quasi-private aspects. Institutional autonomy and academic freedom, however circumscribed they may be in practice, do not usually have counterparts in other public organisations. Private universities have quasi-public aspects: they oft en conceive themselves as having social missions and normally have to comply with the same inspection régimes as do public ones. Th ese features complicate attempts to defi ne what accountability means for them.
