Introduction

These are bedrock issues for African universities. The term `government' is a misnomer in this context, because the university's relations with the state authority usually involve at least three important systems, political, bureaucratic and security. Each has several sub-systems, like the university itself. Moreover, the boundary between the university and state systems may be far from clear, either in law or fact, and transactions between the two may be affected by various cross-boundary coalitions of interest.

Nevertheless, at the risk of over-simplification, three aspects of the issue of government-university relations appear to be particularly important, and they too are inter-related. No doubt they have different weight in different countries. The first concerns the proper limits of state intervention with respect to the universities, the second concerns the manner in which the common business of governments and universities is conducted, and the third relates to the planning and budgeting function.

This chapter also discusses two matters ostensibly of internal concern to universities, namely governance (or the ordering of university decision-making) and student affairs. In fact, neither matter is distinct from the broader questions relating state and university--far from it. Each is high on the agenda of concern in African universities and has a major influence on whether the universities sink or swim.

Government-university relations