Traditional Governance Structures - Current Policy Pressures: The Academic Senate and Canadian Universities.

This is a post-print of an article published in Tertiary Education and Management, 2002, copyright Taylor & Francis; Tertiary Education and Management is available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com. Access this article at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13583883.2002.9967067The objective of this paper is to identify current policy pressures in Canadian higher education and explore their implications for academic decision-making bodies based on data we obtained in our national study on university senates. We describe two inter-related sets of public policy pressures that have emerged in recent years in Canada including on-going financial restraint and a renewed interest in university research. We conclude by reviewing a number of important implications for Canadian university governance in the context of contemporary policy pressures