European Integration Under The Background Of University Governance

After World War II, as the United States rises, Europe, which is thesource of modern higher education, has lost his glory as the symbol ofthe world’s higher education center moving to the USA. Recently, withintensification of globalization, almost every country pays attention toglobal governance in order to maintain the international order. In thebackground, Europe Union puts forward to improve higher educationgovernance. It not only strengthens higher education exchange withinEuropean countries, perfects idea and model in higher education, andcoordinates university, government and society; but also emphasizescompetition with the USA. Higher education governance in the contextof European integration is in order to build world-class universities,educate talents in the period of knowledge-based economy, remodelthe glory of European university and enhance EU competitiveness, andfinally reach the goal of winning the world dominance.Higher education governance benefits the power transformationfrom the nation to the university and promotes the administrativeefficacy of university. To realize autonomy of a wider range and ahigher level, European universities positively reform in eight aspects: themanagement reform in defining the mission and strategy of highereducation institutions, internal governance and managementstructures, development of new study programs, quality assurance,finance and resource allocation within institutions, human resourcemanagement, student access and selection and public-privatepartnerships. In the circumstance of European integration, highereducation governance has got some marked achievements, forinstance, structural change, personnel mobility and autonomyenhancement. However, higher education governance faces sometroubles, such as country’s control of university’s development, principal’s expansion of power to endanger academic freedom,university’s commercialization due to external stakeholders.In this paper, European higher education governance is placed inthe background of globalization and Europe integration. Through thehistorical development process of European higher education, theauthor analyzes the situation of European higher educationgovernance reform, and sums up higher education governance’scharacteristics and difficulties, in order to explore objective laws, exploitessence, and obtain inspiration.The author considers that China can be enlightened in two aspectsfrom higher education governance under the circumstance ofEuropean integration. First of all, as the similar role as Europe in theglobalization, China should learn from Europe to reform highereducation governance. Secondly, Europe takes initiative to go for theworld dominance, and it will threaten the survival of Chinese universitydirectly. Therefore, it is necessary for China to pay close attention to thedevelopment of European higher education governance. It is a classicsample of higher education governance in the context of Europeanintegration, and China needs to reform higher education governanceaccording to actual conditions.