ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we inquire further into our two universities’ respective governance practices. There is no doubt that universities such as NTNU and UCLA face strong external forces that make them comply with neoliberal ideas about governance and the way universities shall provide public goods, including ‘excellence’. However, what are the possibilities of implementing ‘top-down’ decisions in organizations with a strong tradition for local autonomy? We begin the chapter by discussing the hierarchical aspects of universities before we focus on academic freedom as a factor that modifies external forces. In turn, this leads to an analysis of collegial organizing. We think that the critique of neoliberal governance of universities should be supplemented by an assessment of how local autonomy is practiced and with what consequences. We argue in this chapter that NTNU and UCLA through institutionalized forms of local, as well as individual autonomy, offer important spaces of self-governance that allow for resistance and resilience, but also for conflict and harassment. The conflicts usually are embedded in epistemic politics and factions through local competition for resources and recognition, as well as constructions of expertise and authority. We argue it is important to observe such spaces to be able to defend them, but also to understand how they might be improved. The chapter develops this argument by drawing on the concepts of academic freedom, collegiality, factions, meritocracy, and academic citizenship, all in the context of epistemic politics. While we observe how bureaucratizing and corporatizing circumscribe everyday life of universities, these interrelated concepts help us to observe important enactments and intersections related to local autonomy and the consequences for the enactments and circumscriptions of academic expertise and the academic work culture. At the same time, universities are hierarchal organizations with a wide array of hierarchical practices embedded in them. That is, to some extent, local academic hierarchies are the outcome of sedimented collegial practices and assessments.
