Abstract:

The classical theory of university autonomy aims at clarifying the scope and boundary of state supervision on university autonomy through the legal and even constitutional guarantee of university autonomy. With the coming era of governance, the relationship between state and university has been changing from legal decentralization to functional decentralization. In continental European countries, the emergence of the evaluative state which aims at the unification of university autonomy and responsibility provides more systematic guidance and guarantee for the increase of university corporation’s ability to fulfill responsibility. In Anglo-American countries, the rise of the regulatory state in the field of higher education induces or forces universities to strengthen the prevention and management of compliance risks, improve the self-regulatory system of universities, and enhance their ability of achieving good governance through good law. The modernization of China’s higher education governance system and governance capacity should draw on the governance wisdom of the evaluative state and the regulatory state, and coordinate the two reform approaches of prescriptivism and functionalism, so as to realize the synergistic improvement of the government’s law-based and effective supervision ability and universities’ law-based and effective governance ability.

Key words: higher education governance reform, the evaluative state, the regulatory state, the role of the state, the image of university.