Larry Ribstein and Owen Business School Professor Luke Froeb analyze the latest events at Dartmouth as a case study of modern university governance. Larry links to an editorial and an interview with T.J. Rodgers published in the Wall Street Journal today. The editorial is subscriber-only but the interview is available for free on Opinion Journal (I understand that the editorial will be publicly available at some point as well). The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has previously discussed some of these governance issues in more detail here.

I also agree with Larry that Henry Manne's article is probably the single best analysis of the question of university governance that I have read. Highly recommended for those interested in this issue.

My take on one aspect of the issue of university governance, relating to the growth in university bureaucracies over time, is available here. One thing that struck me in writing that paper was that I came to it with the "faculty ownership" model of the university. So I was surprised to discover how much independent power academic bureaucracies and administrators have to replicate themselves and their budgets, not only exploiting agency costs with respect to the Board and students, but even with respect to the faculty.

There appears to have been very little written on the internal political economy of university bureaucracies. The best source that I found is a short book by Ryan Amacher and Roger Meiners, "Faulty Towers." Luke Froeb's blog is a new blog that is tied to the publication of his book Managerial Economics: A Problem Solving Approach. The blog uses current news events and acedmic research as examples and applications of the concepts presented in the book, but the posts are interesting stand-alone discussions as well.