Evaluating academic governance processes and structures: Ethical dilemmas and academic governance development

Abstract

Academic governance is at the core of an educational institution’s business. Its value lies in its ability for the institution to delivery a quality curriculum. As such, it needs to be fully understood and implemented by managers, administrators and academics alike. The need for evaluation of academic governance is clear, although there are many ways in which this may be done. This paper assumes that evaluation of academic governance needs to span the scales of policy, process and practice, and proposes an approach to do so. Shapiro’s ethical dilemmas approach to examine institution staff practices allows a critical engagement with tensions that arise in any practical setting between the ethics of justice, care, critique and the profession, and thus opens opportunity for an evaluative engagement with governance that not only allows for an assessment of the governance system, but builds the capacity of the institution and its staff to develop, change and implement the body of academic governance that reflects and articulates the institution’s core values and vision. The paper illustrates this suggestion with an initial discussion of a critical dilemmas evaluation of academic integrity governance.