The Politics of Governance in Higher Education: the Case of Quality Assurance

The politics of governance in higher education is dominated by a discourse of quality assurance which assumes the external regulation of academic activity to be the natural state of affairs. This article analyses the ideological origins of that discourse and its resonance with more general trends in the public management of welfare, the nature of the opposition from traditional university values, the stages in the translation of ideological advantage into specific forms of regulation, and the consequent shifts in the balance of power between the major players in higher education. Underlying this analysis is a framework which views the governance of higher education as an arena in which there is a continuing struggle for the control of high status knowledge through the functions of standard setting, evaluation and intervention.