University reforms are very much the result of interactions between global influences and national responses. The development of universities is embedded in their socio-economic and political contexts. At the same time, it is also influenced by global trends, which provide a source of policy borrowing and a backdrop of policy choices. In recent years, the development of higher education throughout the world continues to be heavily influenced by the hegemonic economic discourse of neoliberalism. In the context of these development, a team of researchers – the authors of the Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore articles that follow this article – embarked on a research project to examine how neoliberal ideology has influenced various higher education reforms in the Southeast Asian region, particularly in the area of university governance and management.

Neoliberalism has been defined by the British social scientist David Harvey as a “theory of political economic practices that proposes that human wellbeing can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade”. The policy tenets derived from this ideology emphasise the reduction of public expenditure, privatising the public sector, and replacing the concept of “public good” with “individual responsibility”. In brief, neoliberalism privileges the market over the state in the provision of public services.

Under such a neoliberal ideology, many governments are cutting back on their public and social expenditure, which has resulted in drastic budget cuts in government funding to universities.

To overcome these budgetary constraints, universities need to seek alternative sources of funding, and to generate their own revenue through engaging in different kinds of market-related activities. In many aspects, higher education is increasingly seen as a dynamic business which seeks profit from the buying and selling of education “services”. Besides the marketisation of higher education, neoliberal policies also place great emphasis on accountability and performativity.

The role of the state in higher education is to create an appropriate market by providing the conditions, laws and institutions necessary for its operation. The state, in its new role, employs techniques of auditing, accounting and management. Universities are encouraged to formulate clearly defined vision and mission statements, adopt new public management techniques and a result-based management approach. Under neoliberal influence, the relationship between the state and universities is being re-defined, in that the state is demanding more accountability on the one hand, and the universities are insisting on more autonomy on the other hand. The emerging trend is an increase in institutional autonomy in return for more public accountability.

Following this global trend, a number of countries in Southeast Asia have undertaken reforms on the governance and management of their public universities. For instance, Malaysia and Singapore have corporatised their public universities, whereas autonomous universities were established in Thailand and Indonesia. Despite the differing nomenclature, both “corporatisation” and “autonomy” often point to aspects of the same phenomenon. Such developments have also been seen in the wider Asian region. For example, in Japan in 2004, national universities were also corporatised and became independent administrative corporations in the country’s move to revitalise the university system, and in its attempt to create dynamic, internationally competitive universities. Generally, the shift in university governance and management has been towards greater institutional autonomy and public accountability. University leaders and ministry officials have had to work out different ways in relating to and working with one another.

Furthermore, ministries have established external quality assurance mechanisms to supervise and monitor the performance of universities, while university leaders have institutionalised new management practices, so as to ensure increased efficiency and productivity. In examining the reforms in university governance and management in Southeast Asian countries, it is possible to observe a convergence in policies at the systemic level, as well as significant variation when it comes to implementation at the institutional level, because of the decoupling between policy and practice. Although all higher education policies are aimed at increasing institutional autonomy among the corporatised and autonomous universities, how the concept of institutional autonomy is interpreted varies from one country to another. Institutional autonomy among Thai universities is much greater than those among Malaysian and Singaporean universities. For examples, university councils in Thailand have more appointive power and power over academic matters than the boards of directors and boards of trustees in Malaysia and Singapore respectively. In the case of Malaysia, despite the rhetoric of increasing institutional autonomy among the corporatised public universities, the government is still reluctant to give full autonomy to the universities in the present climate of political and economic uncertainty.

All corporatised and autonomous universities are empowered to engage in market-related activities and generate revenue to fund a portion of their operating costs, which can be as high as 70% in Thai universities. On the other hand, the SIM University in Singapore, which started off as a private not-for-profit institute, received government subsidies for its part-time undergraduate enrolment.

Another significant variation is that academics in both Singapore and Thailand are delinked from the civil service, while those in Malaysia remain part of the civil service. However, all academics are subjected to a surveillance culture where their performances are assessed by measurable indicators and targets. They are also under great pressure to do research and publish in international journals, so as to improve the ranking of their universities on the league tables. At the same time, they are required to be enterprising so as to generate revenue for their universities.

The research study concluded that while there is a discernible convergence in university reforms in the Southeast Asia region, the impact and outcomes of those reforms at the institutional level vary considerably among the universities within a country, and also across countries. What is emerging is a hybrid of local variations of neoliberal higher education policies that originated from the West.