Keywords

1 Introduction

The globalization talks have been filled with neoliberalism and new public management, forming the neoliberal agenda, characterized primarily by applying the philosophies of the market to public sectors. Such discussion has also appeared in higher education. The market terminologies, such as, accountability, efficiency, and excellence, and strategies, such as, internal audit, quality assurance, performance pledges, management-by-objectives, and linking performance with outputs, are introduced and adopted in higher education policy and practices (Mok, 1999). Furthermore, with the emergence of the knowledge-based economy, universities’ potential role in strengthening national competitiveness has been highly recognized (Duderstadt, 2000; Kerr, 1995). The external effects of universities attract governments, particularly those of emerging industrialized Asian countries, to embrace them and invest in them, instead of leaving universities in the hands of the market. University competitiveness, if not seen everywhere but at least in government policy statements, has become a buzz word. As the public funding for universities has declined, universities have been asked to be more accountable for how they use those resources and to respond to increasing external demands. Universities are required to do more with less, but at the same time to demonstrate their performativity. However, the dilemmas exist. On the one side, pursuing closer university-industry relation to attract funds from the market is emphasized. On the other, this trend may compromise the open character of the university and make the mode of governance of the university more closer to the private nature of the institution that may have detrimental effects to society at large (Romero, 2017).

Within the new economic imperative, building closer ties between higher education and industry as well as the job market has become a key issue and the major battleground between competing ideologies and interests. Under the neoliberal agenda, certain similar corporate practices and measures at the institutional level around the world have been observed by the scholars (e.g., Altbach, 2004; Christopher, 2014; Hou, 2011, 2012; Marginson, 2011; Mok, 2010; Shin & Harman, 2009). These practices and measures include (1) pursuing the status of world-class university and ranking; (2) adopting the internationalization strategies to strengthen the status of English as the medium of instruction and for publication in the international academic marketplace; (3) establishing greater new cooperation and partnership with the private sector; (4) generating more income from non-government sources and the market; and (5) pursuing regulatory evaluation and quality assurance. In addition to fitting into the corporate practices while also meeting the needs of multiple stakeholders, certain tensions have emerged from the structural, legalistic, and behavioral aspects in higher education. Mok (2002) observes that the shift from “government” to “governance” has been widely debated and a strong emergent theme in the Asia-Pacific. It happened not only in Japan, Korea, but also in Taiwan.

In Taiwan, two overarching trends emerged in the 1990s related to the development of higher education, democratization and massification, under which a new policy and management environment for higher education have developed. The revision of the University Act in 1994 legally granted universities greater autonomy than in past decades. The Interpretation No. 380 of the Council of Grand Justice in 1995 also formed a set of checks and balances on the Ministry of Education (MOE) and established the principle that those powers not granted by statutes to the MOE, fell within the scope of university autonomy. Strong external and internal demands for accountability and performativity created pressures on institutional governance and management. The changing context created a chance for individual universities to think about their governance. Under the assumption of having greater autonomy and responding quickly to the external competitive environment, the incorporation of national universities has been promoted but remained controversial and unsettled since the 1990s. Under such a policy context, neoliberal values also have pervasive influence on teacher education in Taiwan, seeking an open market for teacher education programs.

The negative and controversial influences of the neoliberal agenda in not only higher education (e.g. Marginson, 2011; Mok, 1999) but also teacher education (e.g., Tang, 2015) have been well documented, but have yet to be complete since such external impositions on higher education institutions are more than a straightforward issue. The issue of how the neoliberal agenda at the macro level is mediated by institutional assets (e.g., historical status and organizational culture), circumstances (e.g., governance model), and conditions (e.g., financial situation and sense of survival), deserves further study. When the changing governance for responding to the neoliberal agenda is put into a context for examination, critical space is created for rethinking the role and meaning of higher education beyond being economized, marketized, and privatized, especially views from institutional practices in those unconventional cases. This study aims to present the National University of Tainan (NUTN) that experienced a transformation from a century-old family-like teacher education status to a comprehensive university, to show how the neoliberal agenda affects its institutional practices.

2 Literature Review

There are two parts in this section. The first part provides an overview of stronger managerial trend with dwindling collegiality in responding the rise of the neoliberal agenda. The second part reviews existing literature on Taiwan’s higher education governance to identify the literature gap to justify the need for the case study.

2.1 Stronger Managerial Trend with Dwindling Collegiality

University governance is defined as the manner in which universities are organized and managed, including how they relate to governments and how authority is distributed and exercised (Harman, 1992). How governance within universities is conceptualized and operationalized is closely related “to changing organizational and symbolic arrangements within the host society” (Bargh, Scott, & Smith, 1996: 40). Thus, understanding university governance starts to pave the way for detection of the host society’s expectations of, and its interactions with, its universities. The massification of higher education has made resources available to it appear limited. Although greater accountability for universities has not been derived from the neoliberal agenda, it grew with the historical development and achievement of universities in the nineteenth century (Berdahl, 1993). Universities have been “asked to justify their activities and account for their use of resources and their performance, not only to external financial bodies but also to other influential groups in society” (Sizer, 1992: 1306). Furthermore, the market under the neoliberal agenda justifies greater accountability and expects a new mode of intervention instead of less interventionism from the state to play.

Under the neoliberal agenda, the market mechanism, adopted by governments, applies to higher education, a more selective resource allocation policy, and “buying” services from, rather than subsidizing, higher education. The corporate or managerial approach is assumed to be practiced at the institutional level. Universities are becoming a more commercial, more corporate, more technocratic, more utilitarian, more service-oriented industry as well as far more concerned with selling products to generate alternative sources of income. Corporate managerialism, accountability and privatization have been identified as three globalizing practices that have come to dominate higher education policy discourse in most nations across the world (Currie & Newson, 1998). Furthermore, deregulation and decentralization have played key roles in the Asian governments’ efforts to restructure their higher education for competitiveness. The changing relationship between the government and the university has brought transformative changes in institutional governance.

Several main models of university governance—the collegial model, the bureaucratic model, corporate/ managerial model, and the political model, have been proposed. The collegial model is characterized by collective academic decision-making for common interests with a sense of academic community where the faculty is influential in self-governance and, also, implicitly, has little government interference (Tapper & Palfreyman, 1998). For the bureaucratic model, the rules and regulation systems are set for self-rule as it does in the public sector. It emphasizes features such as, stratifying power and legal-rational authority according to assumed function and ability (Becher & Kogan, 1992). The corporate/managerial model places greater emphasis on “the efficient use of resources, performance measurement requiring a demonstrable contribution to the economy, and strengthening institutional management and the policy and planning role of individual institutions” (Christopher, 2014: 560). Albeit implicitly, a political model of university governance has also been observed by academics, such as Baldridge (1971). It is conceptualized as a political process in organizations marked by the presence of multiple stakeholders with competing, often contradictory, values, and interests regarding a range of university issues.

Individual governance models have their strengths and flaws as well as embodied values. The classic arguments for favoring the collegial model, but disfavoring the bureaucratic and managerial models, have been well discussed. The rise of a new regime of bureaucracy/ managerialism in university governance, as Bargh et al. (1996) reflects a lack of trust between the government and the university. The rise of the corporate reforms facing universities leads to stronger managerial trends with dwindling collegiality. However, the question as to how far the collegial model, favored by academic freedom, an integral part of the university (Woodhouse, 2017), realizes the idea of university, deserves asking. As Clark (2001) reminds, the glories of collegiality in the good old days have disappeared as universities have grown enormously in terms of student population and knowledge production. If deeper thought is given to the question regarding which groups were continually excluded from the collegial model, the classic arguments previously mentioned would be hard to justify. Luke’s study (1997) is worth reviewing, although her arguments focus on quality assurance and women in higher education. She observes that quality assurance brings in certain negative consequences and transforms the culture and management style of a regional university in Australia from being an informal and pastor model to one with open systems of accountability and performance targets. This governance change, however, brings about new opportunities for “other groups previously marginalised and silenced” (Luke, 1997: 433) to participate in university governance.

Interestingly, different observations about the governance mode might be made for the same system. For example, Bargh and her colleagues (1996) argue that governance culture in England shifts manifestly from a collegial and consensual one towards a managerial and business-led culture. But Tapper and Palfreyman (1998) found that a collegial tradition in the context of mass higher education “continues to flourish within particular layers or segments of an institution: within research teams, within departments, within faculties, and—of course—within colleges’ (p. 157). In Australia, Currie and Newson (1998) identify corporate practices in university cases, and conclude the decline of collegiality. These practices include: (1) restructuring universities into larger divisions with the appointment of executive deans; (2) expecting executive leadership from the presidents/vice-chancellors, moving away from being “first among equals” or operating through consensual leadership; and (3) the stronger managerial governance widening the gap between management and academics as decision-making becomes more managerial. Thus, Currie and Newson (1998) call for greater debate regarding whether such stronger managerial governance is needed for the twenty first century universities. However, even though higher education has long been treated as a services industry in Australia, Christopher (2014) challenges the current myth that Australian public universities are practicing a corporate approach. He argues that what Australian public universities operate supports only pseudo-management, instead of corporate, culture, by identifying their current constraints on the structural and operational framework.

Thus, when the issue of university governance is seen as being related to the balance of power and in the context of new ideology in public service (Bargh et al., 1996), it becomes more subtle and complicated than its definitions and models imply. These so-called similar corporate practices do not appear in a vacuum; instead, the contexts and conditions in which they exist are worthy of further study, particularly empirical case study.

2.2 On Taiwan

A few studies and papers have examined governance changes in Taiwan (e.g., Chan & Lin, 2015; Hou, 2011, 2012; Mok, 2002). The enforcement of the revision of the University Act in 1994 led the central authority to release some decision-making powers to universities, particularly national ones. Mok (2002) observes the change “from nationalization to marketization” by examining the changing role of the state in provision, financing, and regulation in higher education reflecting how a new governance model has evolved in Taiwan. Before the explicit departure point in 1994, the system-wide bureaucratic and political authority took full responsibility for the development of universities. For decades, discipline-based and institutional-based authority in university governance had been weak until 1994.

Although the revised University Act in 1994 granted national universities greater autonomy, the ambiguous status of national universities in relationship with government remained unresolved (Chen, 2005). Whether the government would tackle the problem of the ambiguous status of national universities by granting them a legal corporation status has raised more serious concerns and debates. The Ministry of Education proposed the National University Governance and Autonomy Pilot Program in April 2014 to grant greater power and autonomy in terms of personnel, finance, and development plans for those participating universities. However, the Pilot Program was terminated in the same year. Supporters strongly argue that, unless the national universities are granted legal corporation status, it will be impossible to realize university autonomy and academic freedom. For opponents, university autonomy is also critical, but incorporating universities is not the only sufficient way to achieve it as the practice of public law in Taiwan remains too problematic to resolve any possible conflicts, occurring between the university and the government (Daun, 1997). At present, the pressures for granting legal corporation status to national universities seem to fall outside the policy priority since President Tsai Ing-wen took over her administration in 2016.

The governance of the national university mainly operates within the space given by the legal framework. One of main laws is the University Act. According to the Act revised in 1994, University Council was granted with decision-making powers on key university matters, such as development plans and budget, organizational procedure and key rules, and restructuring of academic and administrative units. However, the University Council does not equate to, and cannot be expected to function as, a governing body, acting as a buffer to protect their autonomy, or, as “two-way interpreters” between the university and its host society. To the contrary, its efficiency and effectiveness were openly challenged by academics and presidents who worry that this so-called “democratic” governance culture made the university more like a political entity, with struggle for individual interests and power. In the past, the political model was widely exercised through the government’s bureaucracy mechanisms in appointing university presidents and curriculum control. Although such central political control retreated, the political model at the disciplinary and institutional levels was in operation, but easily disguised, in such a so-called “democratic” governance culture. Facing the inefficiency and chaotic situation of the Council for a decade, the University Act was revised again in 2004 to strengthen the presidency’s leadership and responsibility for the whole institution’s internal resource allocation, setting up missions and strategic plans (Chen, 2005).

Nevertheless, the participatory academic governance by setting up diverse committees in which the representatives from the academics form the major group is profound and explicit. With regard to academic affairs, the collegial model has begun to appear with, for example, peer review in appointment and promotion of academic staff as well as the selection of department heads, faculty deans, and presidents. The membership among committees reflects the heavy involvement of academics in governing universities. In terms of administrative affairs, a team of senior managers who are also senior academics is led by the president. In theory, collegial collective governance is assumed to be more congenial to academic values than the bureaucratic/managerial governance model. However, the dangers caused by competing and contradictory interests among academics seem to become apparent, before any realization of academic freedom and university autonomy through the practice of that model comes true. This situation merely reflects, what Tapper and Palfreyman (1998) report, that the collegial collective governance “can create the false impression of a collegial world in which social harmony reigns and individual competitiveness is conspicuous by its absence” (pp. 147–148). More internal argument and controversy occurred in the process of institutional self-governance. Several university presidents interviewed as part of Chiang’s study (2000) expressed their concern that any failure of institutional self-government can give a chance for external steering from the central to return.

At the same time, a new trial funding scheme, the National University Endowment Fund Establishment Act (NUEFEA), was introduced, remaining optional until 1998. Under the NUEFEA, the MOE provided only 80% of the total budget of national universities. National universities left out of full dependency on government funding, and were allowed to keep their revenues and the funds they raised. The percentage of which national universities generate their own income grows year by year. With pressures of financial autonomy, they have become more “market-oriented” (Mok, 2002). However, they started to experience limited discretion in using their own earned money, as their private counterparts have encountered. Their discretion over their “earned” income is limited by rigid accounting and auditing legislation and regulations. Regarding this, the NUEFEA scheme was amended on February 4, 2015.

Under such a policy context, neoliberal values also have pervasive influence on teacher education in Taiwan. Market-based teacher preparation and certification were introduced in 1994 when the Teacher Education Act was revised. The monopoly of normal universities and teacher education colleges was dismantled. With this trend, traditional elements of profession were replaced with market mechanism while introducing regulatory frameworks and periodical external evaluation by the government. The role of the state was not weakened but strengthened by controlling the number of student-teachers, disqualifying student-teachers not up to standard as demonstrated by national assessments, and monitoring the performance by evaluation (e.g., Yang & Huang, 2016).

Facing global and international competition, the government set up several policy incentives and projects to upgrade the status of Taiwanese universities, such as the World-class Research University Project, Teaching Excellence Project, and incentives for the internationalization of higher education (Chan & Yang, 2017). However, under the new President Tsai’s government, the preceding projects came to an end in 2017. But at the same time, a brand new national-wide project, titled the Higher Education Deep Root Plan, was proposed. Several major components in the new higher education plan include the innovation on teaching and learning, regional-bound internationalization, locality-engaged university development and social responsibility. To further increase regional and international competitiveness, the new government introduced the New Southbound Policy in 2016, hoping to build stronger trade, academic, and recruitment ties to key markets in Southeast and South Asia, making Taiwan less reliant on Mainland China. The Ministry of Education will work with and support Taiwanese universities to set up offshore programs or branch campuses throughout Southeast Asia and to further develop curricula and new program offerings to better match the regional needs. The MOE also announced a new incentive to guide universities to become more deeply involved with industry, community, and other universities in their location.

After the expansion of higher education, rationalizing the number of higher education institutions will be the next key task for the MOE. After years of declining birth rates, university enrollment in Taiwan started to fall in 2016, dropping to 250,000 from 310,000 in 2013 and 270,000 in 2015. The MOE projects that it will continue to fall by about 30% through the next decade (ICEF Monitor, 2016). A shrinking pool of college-aged students begins to have a clear negative effect on certain Taiwanese universities, particularly low-end entry requirement technical colleges and universities. Taiwan now has more universities than it needs. The MOE announced plans to close up to one third of its universities in the coming decade (ICEF Monitor, 2015).

According to Bleiklie and Kogan (2006), a macro analysis about the role of the state in higher education governance is not too meaningful and limited if its linked fine-grained analyses of changes at the institutional level are not taken into account. In this study, the changing nature of government regulatory control from central to decentralization is framing a new space of action for Taiwanese higher education institutions which have taken on a greater planning role in transmitting political intentions to academic processes and outcomes. The concept of institutional governance starts to attract attention. These recent developments in Taiwanese higher education reflect a similar global trend of decentralization in educational governance; however, the practices might tell a different story.

3 Data Collection and Analysis

The case study as a research strategy aims to focus on in-depth understanding of dynamics present within single settings (Eisenhardt, 1989). This study presents the NUTN case to show how the neoliberal agenda affects the practices at the institutional level. There are some rationales for selecting NUTN for this case study. First, NUTN underwent several status changes for upgrading purposes (see Table 11.1), and its century-old history of teacher education gave itself assets for it to be immune to the market.

Table 11.1 Summary of NUTN background information
Full size table

However, this immunization to the market as well as family-like organizational culture challenged the NUTN’s capacity to cope and be responsive to increasing external changes and demands. Second, when the NUTN was released from being under the full control of the central government, self-rule became a long learning journey of adjustment and negotiation and was also a lesson to learn how to step out of its comfort zone. Through this chapter, two main research questions are addressed.

  1. 1.

    What does NUTN change in its internal governance after transforming from a teacher education college to a comprehensive university?

  2. 2.

    In the process of transformation, to what extent is the NUTN, a century-old institution with family-like organizational culture, practicing the corporate/managerial approach to governance?

To address the research questions, the study adopted a documentary analysis for data collection as institutional documents have been a staple in qualitative research for many years and there has been an increase in the number of research reports in recent years (Bowen, 2009). Thus, documents used in this study serve the two main functions, as Bowen (2009) identifies. First, they can provide data on the context within which the NUTN operates, helping understand the historical roots of specific issues and the conditions that impinge upon the phenomena currently under investigation. Second, documents provide this study with “a means of tracking change and development” by comparing various drafts of a particular document to identify the changes and get a clear picture of how an organization or a program fared over time by examining periodic and final reports (Bowen, 2009: 30). Variety forms of documents were used for systematic evaluation in this study, including internal policies, regulations, and meeting resolutions and minutes. Appendix 11.1 presents a summary of 32 key NUTN documents from two stages of its development. One stage was the period from 1994 to 2004, when the NUTN faced the open market for teacher education and first time to be responsible for raising part of its own income. The other was the period from 2004 to present, when the NUTN was upgraded from a teacher education college to a comprehensive university.

The analytic procedure entails finding, selecting, evaluating, and synthesizing data contained in documents. A document analysis yields data from excerpts, quotations, or entire passages, organizing them into major themes by thematic analysis. This study underwent a careful and more focused re-reading and review of the data. Coding procedures were employed to make sense of the documentary data by (1) identifying recurrent themes regarding the neoliberal thinking and keywords such as external/internal demands, market, competition, performativity, employability, governance, autonomy versus accountability, excellence, and competitiveness, and (2) exploring the change between two stages of NUTN development.

4 Findings

There are four themes arising from the documentary analysis about the changes in NUTN governance case. They are: (1) moving away from a “given” position into a struggle for self-repositioning; (2) moving away from central external bureaucracy into collegiality-bound bureaucracy; (3) moving away from the monopoly into a development with growth scenario; and (4) using market elements as rhetorical more than practices. These themes are analyzed in the following subsections.

4.1 Moving Away from a “Given” Position into a Struggle for Self-repositioning

The NUTN, founded in 1899, was one of the oldest teacher education colleges in Taiwan. In 1994, it was faced with a major change when the government sought to replace the monopoly with an open market for teacher education programs. In 2004, without any mergers with other institutions, NUTN was transformed into a comprehensive university, benefitting from the political intention to set one national university in each city. At that time, the former Tainan County, merged into Tainan City in 2010, did not have any national university. This gave NUTN a chance to transform into a comprehensive university with the approval from the Tainan County to grant it a big land for new campus. However, to maintain the ecological sustainability of the new campus, NUTN was required to reduce the space for development. This changed its original proposal for moving the whole institution to the new campus (TEDoc8; UDoc8) but moving only some of its colleges. Issues, such as which colleges to move to the new campus, the operational costs for the new campus, and the constant questioning the necessity for expansion, caused many tensions and attracted attention within and outside the institution (UDoc5; UDoc6; UDoc10) as well as shook up its long-rooted family-like organization culture.

The NUTN’s governance culture, as other national universities, changed with the Taiwanese government’s policies on higher education, in accordance with neoliberal trends favoring a market economy, decentralization, and greater accountability. NUTN received clear signals that it should prepare for self-government. Being a teacher education institution for a century, NUTN developed in full compliance to the national goal to prepare the talents for future primary school teachers. Although it did have a simple list of key development objectives (2.5 pages in TEDoc1) and encouraged the staff to pay more attention to external radical changes and should change their compliance habits (TEDoc3), planning for its own development was not the major concern in its good old days. Until 2005, NUTN proposed its first mid-term and long-term development plan (UDoc1) under the MOE’s requirement.

In NUTN’s first mid-term and long-term development plan (UDoc1), the sense of urgency to restructure its original teacher education departments was observed due to the government’s 3-year policy to reduce by half the number of publicly funded students. Surely, the family-like-united organization culture (UDoc10) was challenged when NUTN faced its faculty and student re-allocation during the process of department restructuring.

Away from receiving a centrally assigned position, NUTN sought its position and set its new mission to cultivate the talents with the NUTN unique spirit, life literacy, and professional employability (UDoc4). One of the major features and future development goals for the NUTN is to create a refined exemplary university with local and regional profound characteristics, well-connected with the international community by more closely working with local government and industry, presenting a university manifesting its rich locality and international engagement (UDoc4). NUTN began to rethink its role in local development to work closer with local community and meet local needs with its academic expertise and resources to earn more extra external resources. For example, setting up the Research Center on Tainanology in February 2017 presented NUTN to adopt the whole-institutional approach to integrate knowledge and efforts offered by individual departments and colleges. To vitalize the teaching and learning environment on campus, various practices were implemented, including (but not limited to) the Big Master Forum, and Innovative and Think-Out-of-Box programs. However, some departments performed better and committed more deeply than others despite different departments and colleges having different focuses.

As a comprehensive university, there was a recurrent issue that was often discussed during the annual consultation committees on NUTN development (UDoc7 to UDoc14). That is, NUTN had to ensure its academic and disciplinary organization not only maintaining its good teacher education tradition, but also differentiating it from its strong and top neighboring university, National Cheng Kung University. Obviously, following the major external changes, including the open market for teacher education preparation, the revised University Act, and the implementation of NUEFEA, the planning role at the institutional level as well as college and departmental levels was strengthened and emphasized (UDoc16 to UDoc23).

4.2 Moving Away from Central External Bureaucracy into Collegiality-Bound Bureaucracy

Although colleges enjoyed a similar status as universities for NUTN, to be a comprehensive university instead of a teacher education college was a great achievement, particularly during a time when its attractiveness to students and their family had started to decline due to the open-market policy for teacher education programs. But changes in its upgrading have only played a subordinate role in its transformation. The NUTN started to learn how to self-govern in the space made available by the central government’s deregulation.

Two of the most prevalent features in academic governance existed in the NUTN: a committee system and an internal decentralized structure. Both of them were not new to NUTN (UDoc1 to UDoc4). Before deregulation from the central government, although the committees had certain decision-making power, most of their resolutions should be sent to the MOE for further approval. After the deregulation, the committees in the NUTN began to exercise real and substantial decision-making power. Academics formed the major group in diverse committees on faculty appointment and promotion, finance, curriculum and program, teaching and learning, research, university-industry cooperation, and development plan. In some cases, committees have stronger power than the presidency.

Decentralization made NUTN move away from central bureaucracy. The collegiality started to practice by collectively making decisions for the institution and setting up numerous rules for it to follow. This formed a new collegiality-bound bureaucracy. For self-rule, there are currently 602 items of regulations (e.g., UDoc16 to UDoc23, to name a few) to regulate NUTN daily practices, not only major affairs but also trivial matters. Although decentralized departments and colleges can make their own rules, they still need to follow regulations set at the institutional level. The challenges for NUTN to efficiently manage a body of academic experts within this devolved structure are greater than in past decades when it only needed to follow under the uniform central authority, mainly from the Ministry of Education and partly from its presidency.

Although the collegiality-bound bureaucracy appeared, the central bureaucracy did not completely disappear. The Ministry of Education still has a final say “no” to some agendas, such as student and staff quota and tuition-fee levels that had been approved by the NUTN Council meeting. The MOE rejected the NUTN’ Council’s resolution to raise up tuition fees in 2004 (TEDoc5). Since then, NUTN has not increased its tuition fees for more than a decade. Moreover, NUTN has been required to submit its annual financial planning report (UDoc15) to the MOE since 2015.

4.3 Moving Away from the Monopoly into a Development with Growth Scenario

Gradually moving out of the government’s full protectionism and acting as a comprehensive university, NUTN achieved growth in many aspects of its transformation. First, responding not only to the national goal but also to local development and employability needs, NUTN expanded its academic organization and size. During the period between 2004 and present, NUTN expanded its teacher education-oriented colleges (education, humanity, and science) with 13 departments to currently six colleges (education, humanity, and science, environmental ecology, art, and management) with 21 departments (UDoc1 to UDoc4). During the same period, the number of full-time faculty increased from 185 to 245. More importantly, the percentage of faculty members with Ph.D. degrees dramatically increased from 47% in 1996 and 51% in 1999, to 71% in 2004 and 94% in 2017. Among them, nearly 45% of faculty held overseas Ph.D. degree. The number of students grew from 3295 (3896 undergraduates and 1191 postgraduates) to 5559 (3879 undergraduates and 1680 postgraduates) over time. However, the number of students did not grow as projected in NUTN’s transformation plan to 8000 students.

Second, financially, NUTN started to implement the NUEFEA in 1999 (TEDoc8), 4 years later after the NUEFEA was introduced. NUTN surely received a proportion of its revenues in the form of a government grant. However, its proportion decreased, although it still remained a significant single source. The NUTN generated 38% of its income from non-MOE sources of income in 2004 (UDoc4). The first time this percentage surpassed half (51%) of its income was in 2016. NUTN started to experience competition pressures between institutions as well as pressures to generate diversified income. Nowadays, more of its research money and projects are competitively won or industry attracted. It has to find other sources of revenue.

Third, NUTN started to emphasize its research performance. For example, approximately 50 research projects annually received grants from the research council between 1995 and 2004, but this number doubled to more than 100 in 2016 (UDoc4). This growth situation was also evident in the number of the projects funded not only by the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Science and Technology, other governmental agencies, but also by the private sector. Total research funding increased from NT$ 18,173,000 in 2004 to NT$ 25,110,000 in 2016 (UDoc 7 to UDoc14). Acting as a comprehensive university, NUTN demonstrated its growth in its academic publication performance. The number of papers published in international (e.g., SCI, SSCI, EI) and domestic highly cited journals (e.g., TSSCI) increased from 23 in 2002 and 35 in 2004, to 126 in 2016 (UDoc7 to UDoc14). New levels of cooperation and partnerships with the private sectors in research and educational and training programs were also observed in the NUTN.

Fourth, in terms of internationalization, NUTN promoted its international cooperation with universities worldwide. The scope of mutual cooperation includes faculty exchanges, student exchanges, international academic conferences, joint research projects, overseas internships, and double degree programs. NUTN has also had an incentive to encourage its faulty to use English as medium of instruction (UDoc19) since 2007. The percentage of non-local students in the student population grew from zero to now 3% in NUTN (UDoc14). NUTN also signed official agreements with 124 foreign universities in 23 countries. However, the effectiveness of such internationalization efforts should be re-evaluated (UDoc6; UDoc11).

The growth scenario demonstrated that NUTN had to gradually adapt to the external competition settings that required it to be accountable to taxpayers’ money by operating within acceptable norms and performance. Nevertheless, within its traditional state-controlled teacher education agendas and cultures, the limited intellectual and physical capital constrains NUTN to exploit new and lucrative market or funding opportunities. Obviously, the NUTN found its choices more restricted. To date, either the kind of active innovative strategic management or entrepreneurial behaviors start to grow but does not profoundly be integrated into the NUTN governance culture.

4.4 Using Market Elements as Rhetorical More Than Practice

Universities have owned the right to naming and structuring the administrative units and their heads for two decades. The exact analogy between the national university and the corporate company was found in neither the names of the formal organization nor the titles of NUTN’s senior officers (UDoc1 to UDoc4).

To understand the external competitive environment, the annual meeting of the consultation committee on institutional development, composed of the elites from educational, governmental, and science parks, and the chief executive officers from the industrial fields, was held. Annual reports and meeting agendas were sent to the committee members two or three weeks before the meeting. The meeting, chaired by president, the senior administrative team and college deans were called to attend. After the meeting, the administrative and academic units were called to respond to certain issues raised during the meeting. By 2015, the meeting had been held eight times. From the consultation meeting minutes, certain suggestions, summarized as follows, were repeatedly made: first, facing severe external competition, NUTN had to ensure the continuity of its traditional teacher education spirits in the whole-person education into its current development plan while also differentiating itself from other national universities. Second, NUTN was reminded to pay greater attention to the issue and impact when its academic units expanded with limited resources, and to face the soaring operational costs in running three separate campuses. Third, NUTN should have a clear focus to deepen its connection, cooperation and engagement with its local city and fulfill its social responsibility for local community development. In light of the decline birth-rate, NUTN should pay greater attention to identifying its market niche and characteristics to attract students.

Market definitions and mechanisms of educational provision were on the whole more alien to NUTN with its century-old monopoly of teacher education. NUTN’s efforts to maintain quality education won the recognition by consultation committee members. However, adopting selective, competitive and focused strategies for well using its limited resources (UDoc11; UDoc12; UDoc14) became a difficult and challenging choice in its “family-like” academic governance culture, a heritage of teacher education tradition. Certain market terms, such as competition and competitiveness, performativity of faculty, students, and alumni, public relations with press media for visibility, and responsive to student market change, were addressed in reports (UDoc1 to UDoc4). In practice, however, allocating the resources to individual units followed the equal principle instead of being based on their performance. Therefore, it was not surprising to see how late the first explicit and competitive rules to award departments by their performance in research, teaching, and recruitment of foreign students were made in 2005 (UDoc16), in 2007 (UDoc18), and in 2016 (UDoc23) respectively. Paradoxically, such incentive rules seemed to have no impact on those conservative departments with mediocre performance. Until recently, a newly made regulation on student place re-allocation (UDoc22) forced the departments to be serious about their performance, attractiveness and competitiveness in the declining student market.

5 Discussions and Conclusions

The empowerment of academics, power of self-accreditation, and autonomy in curriculum design, were identified in the changing university governance in Taiwan (Mok, 2002). When Chan and Yang (2017) select the NUTN as a case for understanding the hybrid university in Taiwan, their results indicate its teacher education tradition and values as mediator to western and global influence. Adding to it, the current NUTN case reveals more subtle practices. The foregoing analysis highlights four main changes in NUTN’s institutional governance. First, NUTN’s most pronounced change was struggling to reposition itself for transformation away from a “given” position. Second, free from the control of the central government, NUTN had to be responsible for self-government and engaged in a more complicated rule-setting. The case of NUTN presented the strengthened collegiality but bounded by its-made bureaucratic rules and regulations. Third, the growth scenario appeared explicit when entering into the competition for funding and for students. Fourth, market terms started to be addressed in the daily life than before but still implicit in its policy and regulation practices. It was not common in NUTN to propose and implement competition funding programs and incentives to make it more visible and competitive in the local and international market. Thus, exploring how a century-old family-like university responds to the neoliberal agenda is effective for testing certain prior assumptions to enrich the field of governance of higher education heuristically with the help of unexpected findings.

The relationship between the government and the university in Taiwan is shifting from the prescriptive towards the fairly relaxed. NUTN’s roles and responsibilities have been shifting from being more prescribed by the central government to its own determination to oversee institutional goal-setting and ensure it properly managed in order to fulfill its missions. During the transition of the governance culture, this shifting is not unproblematic in itself, but has made governance uneasy between internal constituencies- senior management team, academics (knowledge producers), and consumers (students and employers), dealing with the diverse and potentially conflicting interests among them. Facing such a demanding environment, NUTN is reminded that institutional viability can no longer be taken for granted; instead, it should actively assume its responsibility for ensuring it. NUTN realizes that the degree of autonomy it might enjoy depends more upon its capability to respond to the growing imbalance in the environment-university relationship, and fulfill its missions (Caglar, 1993; Clark, 1998; Kerr, 1995).

The case result shows that the institution is using market ideology under the neoliberal agenda to grow a climate for change in its long-rooted family-like organization culture that makes the collegiality perform more comfortably. The external changes and demands would be left out of its daily life until the sense of NUTN’s viability and financial security was challenged. This study’s findings occur with Tuck (2013) who calls on the need to remember and reclaim other more usable and fruitful models for changes in teacher education rather than neoliberalism. However, for a university with family-like organization culture, the market ideology in the neoliberal agenda would be wisely used to initiate a change for inspiration and solution.

The NUTN study reflects that the devolution of authority from the central government to the institutional level was positively received by the institutional leaders. However, not all institutional level members were prepared for the complexity of tasks and the intense tempo of the job. All national universities, including NUTN, were left to define the game and formulate the detailed regulations within. NUTN, being upgraded from a teacher education college to a comprehensive university, did not reflect any gap between “academic manager” or the “managed academic” for identity schisms in facing the discourse of corporate managerialism values and goals prevailing at the institutional level (Winter, 2009). Nowadays, responsibility for academics who have more decision-making power in the committee system and devolved departments, instead of freedom, should be further emphasized. As many scholars (e.g., Clark, 1998; Slaughter & Leslie, 1997) argue, at a time when external mounting demands begin to dominate the capacity of universities to respond, universities need to become entrepreneurial, maintaining a state of creative equilibrium with the organizational environment, to protect their expertise and prestige and to recover the space for self-rule.

The formal organization structure may change due to the revision of the legislation and occur in a relatively short time period, but academic governance culture may change more slowly and gradually. Although the collegiality tradition was challenged by corporate practices in England (Bargh et al., 1996; Kogan, Bauer, Bleiklie, & Henkel, 2006) and in Australia (Currie & Newson, 1998), it starts to flourish in national universities in Taiwan. Nevertheless, the pushing and pulling forces from diverse competing agendas have already revealed how hard a national university operates, as NUTN’s case presents. How to find the antidote to all the ills of (unresponsive) collegiality and (inefficient) collegiality-bound bureaucracy would help justify its position for self-governance. Finally, if modern universities, as Mayor (1993) observes, like “Alice in Wonderland, have to run very fast indeed in order to stay where they are” (p. 6)’, the situation is more embarrassing for NUTN. Forced to move out of the government monopoly, it is high time for NUTN to use the external neoliberal agenda wisely and strategically to allow the collegiality-bound bureaucracy governance model to be responsive to increasing external demands and changes.