Research On Internal Governance Of American First - Class Private Research Universities

University governance refers to the structure and process of authoritative decision making across issues that are significant for external as well as internal stakeholders within a university. It can be perceived at least two respects:External university governance-External factors achieve the governance over university by interacting with the organization; Institutional governance-university performs self governance by responding to changing environment, resource constraints, many stakeholders and other governing organizations. The institutional governance functions in two directions. For one, in responding to volatility of the external environment, with aims to reduce its impact on the university, university takes various governing strategies. For those irreversible changes, university develops new governance arrangements, including such sustainable strategies, as interaction with stakeholders, approaches to obtain the resources, etc. For the other, university may find the internal structural adjustment, such as arranging personnel, setting organization, making rules and regulations, configurating power. The two directions of the institutional governance reveals the fact, that is, as an open system, university may adjust the self governance due to the necessity of self-organizing or the forces from greater external system.The shared governance system in a private university is mainly composed of the Board of Trustees, the executive leader team, faculty’s collegiate system. The board makes sure that its members perform the statutory obligations with different self-organizing ways, such as obtaining trustees with specialty, designing and setting the Trustees and its committees, following rules and regulations. University president, carefully elected by the Board, is university’s chief executive officer. He/She is in charge of all university affairs and responsible for safety and effectiveness of the organization. His executive team is of hierarchy, with mutual penetration of academic and administration power. Faculty’s collegiate system concerns the rules and regulations on academic affairs and faculty personnel. Though the systems in different universities bear different functions, take on various organization modes, and lie in different levels, they are important mechanism to communicate with administrative staff and improve and perfect the institutional rules.To survive and achieve excellence in the market-driven system by institutional governance, the priority that a university needs to do is to obtain the finance and talents that are always in short in running the organization. Each private university my research focused on has the abundant assets, diverse income sources, stable financial statues. Professional management, academic and professional power, Federal Tax Code, all contribute to it. University obtains new faculty by searching, supports their academic work by counseling and mentoring, providing time and resources necessary for their academic work, facilitates their professional development with specified rank promotion system, and retains and stabilizes the faculty by surveying on equity and quality of their life. Besides, university’s huge assets and finance help in seeking for more funding, obtaining the land, buildings, equipment and facilities, human resources. University’s faculty governance promotes academic power. The high quality of faculty, specialties and schools make it possible for the organization to provide abundant academic resources to students with various approaches. The university’s financial strength and fruitful academic resources contribute to attracting the excellent students in the fierce competition.In the process, university mission consolidates the various groups, who take different attitudes, follow different values and bear different expectations, and makes it a more full-featured, academic-centered system. Basing on the mission, the community deliberates over the strategic goals to advance the university. The institutional system of the norms-micro operating rules influencing the actors’choice of behavior, codes influencing the operating ones, ethical norms influencing the designing of the regulations-regulate the different groups of people, which is beneficial for university as an actor subject to norms to cope with environmental uncertainty.Board Trustees connecting university with external stakeholders, executive team led by president, faculty occupying academic power, make up the subsystems in an individual university. The administrative and academic power controlled by respective groups functions in two directions and improves the institutional governing structure.The main way to improve the administrative power is taken in a strict hierarchy system, although the university will seek talents from the outside of university, the main mode is to grant statutory authority by top-down appointment and commissioning certain duties. Academic scholars in executive positions root in different disciplines and thus meet with the individual faculty in academic departments. The academic governing mechanism which the departments follow improves the academic power in the individual university in a bottom-up way. The two kinds of forces play the important role in enhancing the individual university’s capacity, by which university obtains finance and assets, builds faculty strength, attracts excellent students, and regulates the organizational behavior. Thus university has more capacity to supply the graduates with more potential to lead a new generation, to better advance the economic development, to provide high quality services to the community through leading-edge research.Private universities evolving from the colonial colleges in U.S.A. have been sharing clear educational purpose since the birth--to train devout priest, sophisticated persons to deal with government and public affairs, academic talents engaging in research and knowledge exploration. To maintain colonial colleges "learning spaces" has been the responsibility of self-perpetuating governing boards. The experience of struggling to survive in the competition has created the university’s vitality. But things are different in China. Private higher education institutions come into being in a context dominated by the public ones. The disturbing fact that the private sector, with less historical succession, brings to the academia is that it has actually become an economic investment area in China’s overall socio-economic development. If private sector want to achieve a context in that they manage to co-develop with public ones, there should be private universities which at least have the capacity to compete with the first-class public ones in China. For those seeking for the break-through and aiming to be a university, the runners and presidents need to have definite idea of university, university vision and governing philosophy, cope wisely with autonomy, consolidate the administrative power and academic power in balance, and bear perspective of diversification, democratization and internationalization in mind.