Governance for Higher Education Robustness: Case of Universities

Introduction

Governance in higher education guides learning, teaching, and research processes and ensures that university managements are accountable to their stakeholders. This can be achieved by implementing a new model of governance for democracy that have the potential to increase participation and citizen involvement (University of Vienna, 2022). Such a new model of governance can promote optimum efficiency and effectiveness in university processes which can lead to business sustainability (University of Vienna, 2022). This is in line with what governance stands for, as defined by Asian Development Bank (2005), Governance is.

Governance describes the organizational structure, processes, and policies leading to decision-making in companies such as universities (Darwish et al., 2022). Additionally, university governing boards are interpreted in many ways, such as the university council, administrative council, and senate. The four most common approaches to the concept of governance are corporate governance, global governance, good governance, and modern governance (Hufty, 2011). Moreover, corporate governance involves all internal and external factors that influence business operations, including the processes for appointing staff who are tasked with business operational control towards the production of goods and/or services. Although, Shrivastava and Addas (2014) argue that, in recent years corporate governance has focused on accountability and transparency due to the fraudulence of financial activities recorded at many companies globally. In this case, governance is used as a mechanism to safe-guide company resources from not honest staff who are looking for ways to steal from their companies. In this context, governance is viewed as a tool to ensure profit continuation and used to avoid liquidation of companies due to internal fraudulence financial activities.

Governance plays a critical role in academia, as leaders of higher education institutions (HEIs) such as universities can employ good governance practices to ensure accountability and autonomy at their organizations. In most countries including developing countries such as Namibia. Rathod (2020) points out that, the role of good governance enables universities to manage relationships among stakeholders and to ensure that sustainability is achieved. Sustainability starts and finishes with governance. A university cannot flourish without adherence to its principles. Good governance informs and facilitates decision-making which in turn, enables universities to be more competitive. Additionally, autonomy is being extended to HEIs, in order to increase the flexibility that these institutions require to meet the demands of society and the economy (Pandey, 2004). Pandey (2004) further illustrates that autonomy is the prerogative and ability of an institution to act by its own choices in pursuit of its mission, vision, goals, and objectives. This ensures the optimum allocation of resources for achieving the stated objectives, goals, mission, and vision of the HEIs which are knowledge creation and dissemination. Elmagrhi et al. (2021), argue that from the legitimation perspective, organizations should demonstrate greater accountability, transparency, and value for money to the larger community by integrating socially accepted and expected practices, norms, and standards in their operations. By obvious means, this practice requires top institutional leaders such as the vice chancellor (VC), the deputy VC and the Board of Directors to implement and apply practices that commit high level of governance disclosure in order to sustain good relations with influential stakeholders such as creditors, funding institutions like Namibia Student Financial Assistance Fund (NSFAF), unions and government. In doing so, it will legitimize the operations of HEIs.