Working Together to Foster Education Innovation: The Student Dimension in University Governance

A major challenge for both building and sustaining successful universities is considering how university governance can foster innovation, facilitating universities to be prominent players on a global higher education stage. A recent case study of a young Chinese university, Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), illustrates how drawing on the greatest resource at a university‘s disposal, namely, its students, is central to this endeavor, by allowing for a model of shared university governance to play a key role in stimulating education innovation. The path to education innovation is discussed, indicating the challenges and opportunities involved with university governance in an ever-changing Chinese societal context. At the same time, several dramatic changes have taken place in higher education globally, also impacting on China‘s higher education. Among the new developments is the growing effect of internationalization on higher education activities, policies and planning. Its diverse and unprecedented effects make it one of the major forces shaping higher education in the 21st century. One of the main issues facing the sector is its innovation capacity and the ability to use this for the transformation of the higher education landscape, through effective university governance. How are students part of this? Among the themes that have emerged from this study are leadership, execution of clearly-defined institutional goals, funding, development of a strong academic and institutional culture, and recruitment of talented academic staff and students. Recommendations are made to deal with the challenge of transforming organizational culture, especially given the recent focus on internationalization. This study illustrates how becoming a world-class university, at the frontier of education innovation, can happen when government, universities and society come together to transform words into concrete action. The student dimension represents one of the central keys to successful university governance and, more generally, innovation in higher education.