Many arguments for education's autonomy put forward a repeated yet undefined claim that there is an identifiable, dividing line between education and its outside, and that it is within the distinct contours of "the educational" where the nomos of its autonomy lies. Approaching this claim from a literary perspective, I conduct a critical…

Academic freedom is understood as a set of individual protections and community practices for faculty to assess quality, promote truth-seeking, and advance the common good through research, teaching, and other expression. It is also understood as a set of institutional principles for universities when it comes to decision-making about academic…

Federal and highly decentralized political systems open different spaces to interpret, adapt, and enact international policy trends and ideas within the same territory. Spain, a country with a highly decentralized educational system and contentious territorial politics, is a very suitable case to analyze these dynamics. Spain and its different…

The reform of school district system is an important measure in promoting the high-quality, balanced development of compulsory education, as well as promoting the modernization of regional educational governance systems and governance capabilities. China's school districts exhibit characteristics differing from Europe and the United States in…

Whatever their political persuasion, most observers of American higher education now agree that the real or apparent politicization of universities has become a major problem. In this report, the authors proposes an accreditation model designed to strengthen faculty governance by applying clear standards, guiding principles, and evidence-based…

When the Carnegie Foundation was established in 1905, universities in Canada and Newfoundland were eligible for grants, on strict conditions that were seen by some as "colonial," "continentalist," or "imperial" intrusions on autonomy; for example, a Carnegie plan to create a federation of Maritime universities. This…

In addition to the third edition of EUA's Autonomy Scorecard, which was published in March 2023, a series of country profiles were released between Autumn 2023 and Spring 2024. The comprehensive analysis of all indicators in these systems revealed that in some cases there was a need for a different categorisation of specific situations. While the…

In this essay, Niels Kerssens and José van Dijck discuss the implications of platformization on the key public value of pedagogical autonomy in K-12 education. They focus on two interconnected concerns: how the integration of education into a global digital infrastructure contests the institutional pedagogical autonomy of schools and how the…

At the start of the third decade of the 21st century, the United States is entering a period of unprecedented demographic shifts affecting higher education. Not only are many states already seeing fewer high-school graduates, with more facing this trend as the decade progresses, but in all but a few regions overall population growth will level and…

Green sheds light onto the mercurial and ill-defined boundaries of institutional governance within China's unique system of higher education, a national system that remains misunderstood by scholars who continue to position it as little more than a research arm of the party/state. Through a synthesis of systems theory, complexity theory, and…

Agency theory is a theoretical platform used primarily to describe processes related to corporate governance. However, the theory is also being used to describe the processes associated with the functioning of the higher education system. Contractual relationships in this sector make it possible to identify the institutions that may act as either…

Since establishing its first campus in 1868, the University of California (UC), California's land-grant university, developed into the nation's first multi-campus system in the United States, and is today widely recognized as the world's premier network of public research universities. This short essay provides an historical brief on the role that…

France's secular political culture, Catholic heritage, and tumultuous relationship with Islam have had a significant impact on 21st-century interpretations, perceptions, and politicisations of religious education in French society. Since religious education is relegated to the French private school system, it is decentralised, complex, and vastly…

Only three out of five children are enrolled in preschool globally, and only one out of five in low-income countries, yet the expansion of preschool education came to a near standstill in 2020. To restart it, we propose a policy instrument called the Preschool Entitlement. It entails the right of every child to 600 hours of quality…

Across the globe school autonomy reforms have been criticised for opening up public assets to various dangers or risks, from misappropriation of public monies by private sponsors to secretive governance structures maintained by homophilic groups. While these risks are not the exclusive product of school autonomy reforms, they are an endemic…