Board Governance of Public University Systems: Stresses and Needs, by C. Judson King

Modes of board-level governance for public universities and especially public university systems should be re-examined in view of growing major forces that create both challenges and opportunities that are enormous for public higher education. To sustain the public mission and rise to the challenges and opportunities, there is a growing need to enhance funding from a variety of different sources, many of them private, and to map them onto new initiatives, partnerships, and directions of change. Boards of public universities need to develop new dimensions, including several of the characteristics of private-university boards that have been honed over many years. Promising alternatives to consider, alone or in combination, are public boards with mixed public-private membership, delegation of some responsibilities of university-system boards to subsidiary boards for individual campuses, more serious consideration of outsourcing components of public higher education to private universities, and possibly in some cases even conversion of public universities or components of them to private status. Several of the important considerations associated with the establishment of individual campus boards under a main system board are explored in more depth.