This European Review Focus is based on a conference on the topic ‘Institutional Perspectives on Universities’ held at the Wenner-Gren Centre in Stockholm on 21−23 May 2025 with the support of the Wenner-Gren Foundations. The conference was part of a series arranged by the Higher Education, Research and Culture in European Society (HERCulES) group within Academia Europaea.

American universities are increasingly threatened with cuts in government funding unless they eradicate diversity promoting programmes. To contextualize the targeting, this article reflects on two major organizational transformations in higher education in America: the rise and diffusion of university fundraising development offices and the emergence and growth of university diversity offices. The former was part of a long-term multiple stakeholder strategy that would make universities see themselves as less dependent on government. The latter reflected a more recent shift in the direction of valorizing diversity. Operating as organizational actors, universities launched both strategic initiatives. In retrospect universities underestimated their dependence on federal funding and overestimated public support for diversity promoting policies. American universities have both acquiesced and resisted the attacks on their institutional autonomy and the academic freedom of their professors. Calls for university leadership to save the university will ironically lead to more organization and greater management.

Against a remarkable diffusion of commitments to inclusion, equality and diversity in universities, and cases where these commitments are being contested, this study considers the institutional environments that shape universities’ inclusionary commitments. Historical and sociological institutionalist perspectives are used to make sense of how regulatory and resource conditions of the national higher education (HE) systems that universities inhabit blend with global cultural pressures and supply universities with socially desirable ways of pursuing inclusion. A comparative case study of inclusionary commitments in an English and a Norwegian public research university is provided. Despite substantial differences between HE sectors, both universities portray themselves as deliberate and strategic in their pursuit of inclusion, and the state is a key ‘rationalizer’ of this process through equality legislation. Nevertheless, inclusionary commitments appear more organizationally embedded and cognizant of student needs in the English university. In the Norwegian university, structural measures to foster inclusion become more visible within the comparatively rudimentary organizational structure, with regional cooperation and the needs of personnel being highlighted. The findings show that the spread of inclusionary organizational actorhood is marked by differences in regulation, national service and market orientations between HE systems. They are paving distinct possibilities for how universities may relate to their inclusionary commitments if challenged.

Since the late twentieth century, institutional autonomy has become a major issue in the relationship between the government and higher education institutions, with autonomy being presented as a virtuous option that satisfied both government’s regulatory aims and institutional capacities to develop in an increasingly dynamic and complex sector. Due to concerns about the effectiveness of higher education, the development of autonomy was increasingly linked to a market-like logic, with a growing emphasis on competition and efficiency. Thus, what was initially regarded as a path to emancipation of institutions from government’s influence became a mode of relationship that could curtail previous dimensions of autonomy. One of the major regulatory dimensions that helps understand the reversals and nuances of institutional autonomy is funding. Like other regulatory dimensions, recent decades have seen the emergence of new forms of funding that have influenced institutional governance and management. In this text, we analyse these trends in European higher education by mapping changes in governments’ approaches to the sector, specifically the evolution of funding mechanisms and how these highlight a shift in the pendulum between degrees of autonomy and modes of government’s influence in institutions.

The current assault on the legitimacy, relevance and independence of higher-education institutions constitutes a systematic attack on the foundations of democratic society and the radical-liberal project itself. In essence, the social legitimacy and sense of public good of the university are being eroded, with weighty consequences for the future of the sector. To address this issue, this article proposes ‘outsides’ as a theoretical framework for reconceptualizing the university’s legitimacy beyond state-centred political imaginations. We theorize two interconnected forms of outsides. The first is political outsides, or spaces of engagement that generate thinking, action and accountability beyond state apparatuses. The second is university outsides, or solidaristic networks that generate transformative spaces to protect academic autonomy from corporate and managerial encroachment. We propose ‘outsides’ as a progressive and innovative social legitimacy ecosystem that positions universities as an ‘estate’ within democratic architectures, embedded in broader society networks rather than solely dependent on state recognition. This reframing offers pathways for universities to recover and reconfigure their academic autonomy while maintaining genuine accountability to diverse publics, ensuring that the ‘public good’ status of higher education is actively produced through relational engagement rather than assumed as a static institutional privilege. We argue that these outsides strengthen institutional autonomy and accountability, facilitating generative options for programmatic work and action in higher education. Finding ways ‘to think against the state that has no outside’, we argue that outsides have the potential to reframe the social legitimacy of the university in ways that may respond to the current challenges of the higher-education sector.

This article reports on a study of the selection of academic top leaders from 1900 to 2025 in six highly ranked universities on the 2024 Academic Ranking of World Universities. These institutions represent the United States (Harvard and Stanford) with presidents as leaders, the United Kingdom (Cambridge and Oxford) with vice-chancellors, and Scandinavia (Copenhagen and Oslo) with rectors. For the population as a whole, the study shows an increase in the length of tenure, and in the selection of female leaders and of externals, while there has also been a decline in the number of recruitments per decade, in recruitment ages and the recruitment of persons with a background in STEM disciplines and Medicine (STEMM). A comparison between the six universities has demonstrated that Harvard and Stanford differ from the other four by having much lower numbers of recruitments, longer length of tenures, lower recruitment ages and recruiting externals earlier than their European counterparts. The Europeans started recruiting externals and female leaders in the 1990s. Oslo has so far not recruited any outsider, and Stanford has picked only male leaders. High shares of STEMM leaders are exhibited by Stanford and Oslo, while Harvard and Oxford have had low shares. An analysis of the most recent recruitments demonstrates that Harvard, Stanford and Copenhagen include outsiders in the decision process and keep candidacies secret. The latter is also the case for Cambridge and Oxford, which, however, do not include externals in the decision process. Oslo also leaves it to internals to decide but has a process where candidacies are publicly known. For the future, it is expected that non-US institutions will follow the top US universities more and more, thereby increasingly involving search consultants. The patterns on the Anglo-American market for academic leaders found in the present study are likely to develop further.

Whilst universities have long needed to balance competing demands, the situation seems to have been exacerbated in recent years, particularly in relation to funding, digital disruption and political interference. This article explores implications for the recruitment and development of higher-education leaders. Building on the concept of the ‘leadership pipeline’ we consider the passages that must be navigated on the way to becoming an effective academic leader, alongside associated (often competing) logics and identities. Through vignettes from an empirical study in a Danish university we illustrate the complexities of leadership transitions, leadership disconnections and logic misalignment in educational leadership. The discussion presents an ecosystems model that shows the interdependencies and interconnections between core functions of higher education and the internal and external context. The article concludes by considering implications for leadership recruitment and development, with a particular focus on identity work(spaces) and the need to embrace multiple logics. Through such interventions, it is suggested, it may be possible to foster the required levels of inclusion, collaboration and resilience in higher-education leadership to navigate the challenging path(s) ahead.

During the past few decades, higher-education and research systems have been experiencing profound waves of reformed governance and organization resulting in a stronger emphasis on hierarchy, more well-defined boundaries between universities as organizational actors and their environments, more rigorous performance measurements at the organization level and a changed political control. Administration has been centralized and relations between academic and administrative staff have been transformed. Changes in university governance are sometimes described as a shift from collegiality to enterprise management. However, in previous studies we have found that this development could rather be described as a remixed governance. Universities are subject to mixed modes of governance related to the many tasks and missions they are expected to fulfil. Mixed modes of governance also stem from reforms based on widely held ideals of governance and organization. Much previous research has analysed the changing roles and influence of faculty and leadership that follow on these reforms. The diverse modes of governance also imply diverse roles for administration. Furthermore, with mixed modes of governance, the roles of administrators and their relations with academic faculty may vary depending on issues and situations. Based on observations of the governance mix of universities, in this article I ask: administration for what, how and by whom?

Higher-education institutions have long relied on a broad range of internal and external stakeholders, including academic staff, administrators, governmental representatives, donors and industry. In recent decades, this stakeholder landscape has diversified, driven by higher-education reforms that have intensified competition, strengthened accountability and heightened expectations that universities respond to societal needs. At the same time, geopolitical tensions and growing societal distrust in academic institutions have underscored the need to reassess how stakeholders shape governance and strategic directions of universities. Against this backdrop, this article examines the changing role of stakeholders in higher-education governance through the lens of the stakeholder theory, focusing on their power, legitimacy and urgency. While traditional actors remain central, emerging and previously overlooked stakeholders – including students, early career academics, organized academic labour and EdTech platforms – are increasingly playing a role in higher-education decision making. The article explores the changing influence of these actors and what these shifts imply for institutional autonomy and academic freedom.

New Public Management (NPM) could be considered as a rediscovery of bureaucratic organization, which hit the German university sector in the mid-1990s. More university autonomy came at the cost of budget negotiations, agreements on objectives, accountability, steering by indicators, third-party funding competition, etc. In this article, the positions and roles of higher-education and science professionals are used to show how the NPM regime of bureaucratic organization expanded into academic functions. The discussion paper ‘More autonomy – less regulation. Proposals for the de-bureaucratization of the science system’ by the German Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina) is used as a point of departure to discuss increasing external regulation (case: public third-party funding competition) and university-internal bureaucratization (case: professorial hiring). The theory-led discussion is based on the elaboration of bureaucratic organization as a concept defining the social forces of structures, actors and activities. The concept is further detailed by the four sub-concepts official duties, authority relations, employment of qualified personnel and career paths, and individual agency/enterprise, which emphasize that bureaucratic organization provides some leeway for bureaucrats within legal and ethical boundaries. The generic theoretical concept is suitable for all kinds of studies on bureaucratic organization, and is substantiated by core categories/variables.

Drawing on a project conducted between 2017 and 2020 for the UK Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), this article discusses the place of third space professionals within a changing professional workforce in UK higher education. At the same time as routine administrative roles in registry environments have, by and large, been superseded by online registration and data management facilities, new roles have emerged in a ‘third space’ between academic and professional spheres of activity. These have created issues of visibility, place, recognition and reward for those occupying them. Examples are given of a misalignment between such individuals and the organizational structures within which they work, affecting, for example, job descriptions, titles and promotion and progression criteria. The article goes on to reflect on the perceptions of senior institutional managers who are responsible for maintaining institutional structures, as well as of those in third space roles, and suggestions are made as to ways in which adjustments might be made for the future.

The purpose of this article is to give an account of how the values and organizational arrangements sustaining academic freedom and institutional autonomy may be affected by external pressure on academic research. The first part of the article seeks to clarify the concepts of academic freedom and institutional autonomy that guide our argument. The second part deals with external pressures on universities and introduces some distinctions that may help us tell the difference between external pressures that may be beneficial and those that may be harmful to academic research. The third part focuses on how organizational changes in research institutions have affected their ability to handle external pressures. It discusses how changes in leadership and internal decision making have affected the capacity of institutions to resist or deflect harmful effects of pressures. The fourth part analyses the role of public policies and how they may sustain or jeopardize academic freedom, before drawing a prescriptive conclusion about its defence under democratic and authoritarian political conditions.

This article integrates Triple-helix and institutional logics perspectives to diagnose how professional, market and state logics generate risks in university research, and how hybrid governance can mitigate them. Conceptually, it advances a cross-level risk analysis (individual, organizational, system) and a triple-temporal mitigation design that aligns short-term relational routines, mid-term interface infrastructures and long-term institutional and policy change. The synthesis extends existing work on selective coupling and institutional complexity by linking specific risk mechanisms to sequenced interventions. It further refines research on boundary organizations and intermediaries by positioning interface roles within system-level coordination, and clarifies how openness, sovereignty and mission pressures map across logics within responsible research and innovation and open-science agendas. Overall, the study offers a parsimonious and actionable framework for steering collaborative research under conditions of institutional plurality.

This article focuses on the role that risks, together with their prediction, management and mitigation, play in the regulation of higher education. It will attempt to identify some concepts currently associated with risks in the higher-education systems of developed countries; discuss how these are applied through instruments of regulation in diverse public/private economies and raise some questions for consideration about the implications and effectiveness of regulatory requirements for the leadership and governance of universities. In particular, it will look at the English system of higher-education regulation, as administered by the Office for Students.