The Politics of State Higher Education Governance Reform

During the 1990s, state governments considered in excess of 100 initiatives to reorganize, restructure, or "reform" higher education governance arrangements. The recent wave of governance change has revealed an important insight about reform activity: Large-scale redesign of a state's higher education governance system occurs in a distinctively and decidedly political context--namely, at the intersection of legislative institutions, state higher education agencies, electoral cycles, and campus politics. This article describes the landscape of public higher education governance in the states and assesses recent trends, reviews the modest research literature on the politics of reform, and reports selective results from a recent national survey of higher education governance reform in the 50 states. The article concludes with suggestions for the framing of future research on the politics of governance reform.