Comprised of eight objects on four continua, Figure 3 creates a grid that may improve the communication between managers and jurists. An analysis of how these eight objects are and should be managed, will show once again the wide variety in the population which is comprised rather of individualistic academics and students, than of groups. It will also show choices to be made. Figure 3 will help to reformulate regulations and filter out useless rules. In fact, it is a simple additional step in a normal strength-weakness-analysis.

Figure 3.

The statement that teachers and researchers dislike management seems sometimes justified, but is not true. It may be against their nature and professional code, keeping them from more important things. What people dislike is lacking logistic support and being over-managed. Academic staff changes its mantle between tutor, researcher and provider of service activities, if is attractive to play hide and seek with the management. When the management is heavily involved in externally oriented steering, the staff finds free space in its own internal processes, and becomes unmanageable. Students' behaviour is usually badly forecasted by analysts and policymakers who are older and less imaginative than the objects they watch. One could argue that this situation is the best guarantee for academic freedom and self-governance. However, there are disadvantages. Unadjusted management causes sub-optimal outputs. Another reason to specify the objects of management is that when political support for higher education and research is crumbling, an often heard complaint that is hard to prove and difficult to deny, optimal decisions and co-ordinated implementation are required. As a rule, the public budget is a function of the societal climate and the political translation of that climate. Evidently, societies all over the world are reluctant to invest in services that they find hard to understand.

lt is difficult to develop, take, and implement tough decisions, not only in higher education. If the legislative structure does not provide the instruments, decision making in a democratic environment becomes very difficult if not impossible, and at its best sub-optimal and slow. If this is the last step before the political assessment that a higher education system is not steerable and a higher education institution not manageable - if that were public opinion - it would have a devastating effect on the readiness to fund higher education and research from public funds. So, it must be properly explained to the public and its politicians why higher education and research needs a wide discretionary space; the sector has an image of not being transparent. A democratic society, in which education is a merit-good, expects maximum transparency, accountability, a frame to be protected from the abuse of academic freedom and institutional autonomy, and always higher quality. There is nothing wrong with that and when this is guaranteed, society will continue to invest large sums of money in higher education and research.
Whereas it is not a business that is being managed, models of public administration do not suffice either. Tailor-made governance requires tailor-made regulatory frameworks. In this respect it is interesting that in Lithuania the institutional by-laws have the same status as the national law. The problem there is which one prevails when there are contradictions; the question whether a national law is still needed. To co-ordinate relations and processes, requires a highly dynamic governance, 'management by exception'. Subsequently, the legislation on institutional governance and the institutional regulations must facilitate operations and provide discretionary space. This takes the legislator further from its usual ambition: clear, logic and unambiguous directives based on straightforward syllogisms. Intelligent regulations acknowledge the allergies of staff and students, of politicians and the public; they guide and facilitate institutional operations and define the objects of central management rather to the left side of Figure 3; faculties and departments a bit to the right. Regulations should allow refocusing to correct atomisation and mismanagement, and stimulate dynamic behaviour.