The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education governance in Europe

Abstract Universities, as public organisations, exemplify three competing institutional logics regarding governance. First, the state wields considerable control over universities through a Weberian bureaucratic logic. Second, university managers have been granted increased autonomy under a neoliberal, managerial logic. Third, a traditional academic logic involves a high degree of self-regulation and peer control. The country-specific ways in which this balance has been achieved come under pressure in times of crisis, such as the pandemic. In this article, we explore how the challenge of managing an unprecedented crisis has affected higher education systems and institutions and how the balance between the three logics has developed before, during and after the crisis. To this end, we adopt a comparative approach and analyse four different European higher education systems: Denmark, France, Portugal and Germany. The analysis reveals that paths of governance that weaken the academic logic were reinforced during the pandemic as university leadership reacted to the crisis by enacting top-down decision-making processes.