Cahier de recherche N°14 - ESC Pau

of expertise, workload, unpaid time commitment, infrequent meetings, under-training of members facedwith the increasing complexity of governing tasks and over-reliance of governors on senior managers forreliable, timely and full information (Knight, 2002), will be amplified in difficult times.At the same time, at the failed Bear Stearns Bank more than half of the thirteen directors had a bankingbackground (OECD, 2009). Since technical sector-specific know-how is not enough, implying the importanceof the behavioural aspect of governance, the OECD’s observations suggest that universities payspecial attention to the composition of their boards. Trakman (2008) writes of the ‘captivating rationaleof corporate efficiency’ referring to the understandable and rational desire of universities to concentrategoverning body work on fiscal and managerial responsibilities in response to external pressures (Salter,2002). Although HEFCE’s guidelines advise that boards have the ‘balance of skills and experience....to meet its primary responsibilities and to ensure stakeholder confidence’ (2009), it is not made explicitthat members of the board have high level academic experience. This point may be as taken, in view ofthe dominance of the largely shared governance systems particularly characteristic of pre-1992 universities(Knight, 2002). However, if we are to follow Shattock’s reasoning (2006: 123), corporate-academicgovernance is insufficient and needs to be reinforced by a strong central steering committee made up ofa senior management team ‘written into the university’s governance machinery’ and able to counter theexecutive since they are the only people ‘who have command of the complex information involved’.Figure 1: Shared Governance Model (adapted from Lapworth, 2004)Since top-down bank corporate governance models failed, a case can be made for reinforcing the sharedgovernance models of universities. Lapworth (2002) takes the concept of shared governance further byproposing the 5-dimensional model in figure 1, where Shattock’s (2002) strengthened steering coresimultaneously drives institutional decision-making and draws upon the strengths of the four other mutuallyreinforcing elements thus encouraging the dialogue necessary to rebalance university governance(Shattock, 2002).Lapworth’s model highlights the importance and difficulty of establishing clear, effective communicationchannels between council and the rest of the institution. Banks failed to provide their boards with ‘accurate,relevant and timely information’ (OECD, 2009), but as long as the different levels of governancein universities are working together effectively, this particular potential problem is more likely to beavoided.CAHIERdeRECHERCHE N°1437