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.

Iraq higher education faces a host of challenges, some spurred by the 2003 war and others by more recent developments. Following a general trend of deteriorating freedoms, Iraqi academics in the social sciences and humanities face new policies from the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research that prohibit them from studying any politically sensitive topics and from engaging meaningfully in developments in the country. The ministry itself was recently controlled by the Sadiqoun political party, which is affiliated with Asaib Ahl Al-Haq, an armed group designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the US Department of State, a designation that raises further challenges to international collaboration for Iraqi scholars. Compounding this, and particularly for political scientists, is political party interest in co-opting professors and departments to groom subservient party cadres.

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.

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?

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.

How does the party-state exercise leadership over universities and manage the individuals embedded in the university system without restraining their capacity for excellence and innovation? I argue that the presidential responsibility system has resolved a fundamental agency problem in Chinese universities. The system is supported by a set of mechanisms designed to enforce loyalty to the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. It can easily adapt to political changes and thus maintain authoritarian rule without compromising the overarching agenda of research excellence.

The aim of this paper is to explore the complex situation regarding the state of the international relations (IR) discipline in France. The paper analyses the development of IR within French academe, reviews the scholarly output of IR teaching and research institutions and makes proposals that could contribute to improving the situation.

This article is a critical analysis of principles for the provision of translanguaging in the language policy of North-West University. It draws on the conceptualization of translanguaging as a transformative, inclusive, and empowering practice (Cenoz & Gorter 2022a,b, Kleyn & García 2019, Tai 2022) and attempts to uncover the mood and dispositions of the university toward main-streaming this practice for the inclusion of indigenous African languages in teaching and learning. We discuss how the wording of the provisions reveals the language policy to be power-inflected, reproducing contestations between indigenous and ex-colonial languages. The article ends by suggesting a continuous review of the language policy to eliminate vague and escapist policy provisions.

The article presents an overview of the presence of political science in Italian universities. After a brief historical introduction, detailed figures are given regarding the number and distribution of political scientists in Italy's universities, and the courses currently offered in the field of political science are described and discussed. In the second part of the paper, the authors give their views on the current state of Italian political science, which they consider to be not dissimilar to that of other countries, and they subsequently invite the reader to reflect on the need for an increase in its social status.

Most European universities lag behind the best universities in the Anglo-Saxon world. A key challenge is to raise resources per student in Europe to US levels. The Lisbon agenda demands fundamental reform of the European university system in order to enhance efficiency, yet avoid grade inflation, to foster more competition, to allow for much larger private contributions accompanied by income-contingent student loans, and to attract larger numbers of foreign students. European universities will be pushed to compete with each other, to offer better incentives and to generate substantially more income. Universities will be stimulated to provide sufficient diversity and quality to meet the demands of a growing and diverse student body. Their ambition should be to educate the best minds in society irrespective of whether their parents are rich or poor, academically inclined or uneducated. A shift from grants to loans and an increase in tuition fees are justified by high returns. Reform should lead to a better and more equitable system of European universities.

As the planet confronts an interconnected meta-crisis linked to natural, political, social, and psychological challenges, there are some pedagogical tendencies that should be challenged within university education. Drawing on the philosophical literature of the Ecological University, this article uses an eco-philosophical framework for considering mainstream university pedagogy. We emphasise that the increasing mental health challenges of so many young people at university is both a symptom and a feature of the meta-crisis and a key consideration for how we might respond as university educators. We argue that many of the existing neoliberal and liberal tendencies in university can be interpreted as “Miserable Pedagogies” — which typically fail to engage with the meta-crisis as a threat to the planet’s psychological, social, political, or natural ecosystems. We suggest that our “pedagogies of misery” need to be disrupted and radically contested with an ecological world-view we describe as “Anthropocene Intelligence.” After setting out the key features of Anthropocene Intelligence, we consider how an alternative teaching approach, used by one of the authors, reflects such an ecological worldview and potentially provides a basis for more meaningful and active ways of being and learning on this finite planet.