ABSTRACT
The university has long played a major role in discovering knowledge without being subject to any clear quality criteria. Universities used to be supervised by a city, province or state, king or Pope, or whoever had set up the university. This supervision was often delegated to a board, which undertook the actual supervision on behalf of the founding person or institution. Today, though, universities across the world have entered new waters as a result of the culture of continuous public accountability for quality and production. This sometimes takes the form of strict state supervision of quality and financial accountability, but there is also increasing pressure from the rankings, which compare universities across the world based on what are often unclear criteria, and have a disruptive effect on the entire system.
