University Boards as Public Decision-Makers: Clarifying Representative Governance, Obligations, and Enforcement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article challenges the view that university governance at the board level may be understood through the legal principles that apply to business corporations, the governance of which is dominated by shareholders alone. Conversely, most Canadian universities are legally required to follow a stakeholder governance model, in which various constituencies are entitled to representation on the board. The author argues that the boards of most Canadian universities are public decision-makers because they oversee institutions that governments consider to be public and task with policy objectives. Canadian universities also have privileges and links to government that business corporations rarely have, and their boards routinely make policy decisions and exercise quasi-judicial power based on statutory authority. When universities are viewed as public institutions, it becomes clear that board members are permitted to advance that which their constituents believe to be in the best interests of the institution. At the same time, this public law analysis recognizes that representative governance cannot be used to harm the university. The author identifies five obligations of board members and demonstrates that these obligations are legally enforceable by a potentially wide array of parties.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.057 | 0.091 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".