Governing Universities in a Digital Era

In the United States, colleges and universities have always enjoyed a peculiar sovereignty.  While they are supported and patronized substantially by governments, they largely govern themselves through a complex composite of academic, professional, and bureaucratic regimes.  Increasing calls to measure university performance more precisely, coupled with new capacities for quantitatively describing the production, diffusion, and remunerative value of knowledge and learning, offer new challenges to university sovereignty.  At the same time, the growing technical complexity and scientization of measurement in the digital era offers new opportunities for universities to assert jurisdiction over measurement generally