REGULATED AUTONOMY ACROSS ADMINISTRATIVE TRADITIONS: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR COMPARING HIGHER EDUCATION GOVERNANCE IN INDONESIA AND THE UNITED STATES

Abstract

University autonomy is increasingly accompanied by performance requirements, regulatory controls, conditional funding, accountability mechanisms, and political intervention, creating a governance condition that this study conceptualizes as regulated autonomy. This study develops the Regulated Autonomy Configuration (RAC) framework to compare higher education governance in Indonesia and the United States. Adopting a conceptual research design grounded in theory synthesis and a most-different systems comparative logic, the study examines governance developments from 2012 to September 2026 using legal and policy documents, official higher education funding information, peer-reviewed scholarship, and selected policy sources. The analysis focuses on five dimensions: locus of authority, legal form of autonomy, dominant accountability instrument, funding logic, and degree of politicisation. The findings identify two contrasting configurations. Indonesia exhibits delegated autonomy in a centralized state, where PTN-BH institutions receive formal legal autonomy but remain substantially embedded within national regulatory and fiscal structures. The United States exhibits emergent autonomy under conditional centralisation, where federalism, state authority, institutional governance, and multiple principals create substantial discretion while dependence on strategically important public resources enables external intervention. The study develops six propositions concerning administrative tradition as a filter, reversibility, the revenue paradox, the multi-principal shield and exposure, instrument convergence with authority divergence, and the displacement of performance by politicisation. The RAC framework contributes a comparative approach that conceptualizes autonomy as a multidimensional configuration rather than a single level and provides a foundation for future empirical testing across higher education systems.