Study On The Academic Governance System In Australian Research Universities

Research universities play a major role in the highly developed society of knowledgeeconomy.And the effective governance of academic affairs such as teaching,research,and social services will determine the role of research universities in the era of knowledge economy.The reason is that the process and results of academic governance influence the academic quality,related to the university's academic reputation,prestige,and rank in the world.What's more,it will influence market and employers' views on universities when they choose and employ graduate.The research and teaching of Australian research universities enjoy a distinguished reputation in the world,which benefits from its excellent academic governance system.Therefore,it is necessary to conduct in-depth research on the academic governance system of Australian research universities and provide useful experience for the reform of university governance in China.The thesis sorts out the history of academic governance in Australian research universities.It has gone through three stages of development: the period of professor governance from the late 1950 s to the 1950s;the period of traditional collegial governance from the 1950 s to the 1980s;after the 1980 s,the period of multiple governance.The thesis which is based on the theory of new public administration and governance theory,uses methods of literature analysis,international comparative and case study to analyze the status of the academic governance system from two perspectives.On the one hand,from the static perspective,on the basis of academic governance structure,the thesis analyzes the member,organization structure and responsibilities and other elements of core academic governance institutions,parallel academic governance institutions and secondary academic governance institutions.On the other hand,based on the process of academic governance,the thesis analyzes the process of decision-making,implementation and supervision when academic institutions deal with academic issues such as course projects,promotion of academic staff,and academic misconduct from the dynamic perspective.The thesis find that the main features of the academic governance system in Australian research universities are following: decentralized governance,pluralistic governance body,strict governance procedure;the deficiencies that need to be improved are the overlap between the responsibilities of the management committee and the academic committee,and the separation of academic strategies from academic practice.This raises the following three implications for the construction of China's academic governance system: absorb multiple stakeholders to participate in academic governance;strengthen the subjectivity of academic staff;perfecting the mechanism of prevention and punishment of academic misconduct.