The Evaluation of University Good Governance by Autonomy and Accountability

This is a descriptive research and its aim to examine and assess the degree and sufficiency of university autonomy in the four area of institutional, financial, staff, and academic and also the degree of accountability of branches to their external stakeholders. At first, on the base of the library research, the researcher studied many articles and books to find out and determine the essential components of university autonomy and provided for ten higher education specialists to have their opinions about them. Besides, he studied Islamic Azad University rules and regulations and also interviewed with university chancellors, Deans, Head of the Department and academic staff with regard to autonomy and accountability of the branches. Since the gathering of data was done by questionnaire and interviews, therefore it was a mixed method. The instrument for gathering data was a researcher-made questionnaire with a five- point Likert scale and its calculated Alpha was ./953. This means that the instrument was reliable. Data were obtained randomly from academic staffs on the base of Morgan table (105) at Islamic Azad University branches in Qazvin province. The data were analyzed using percentage and five-point Likert scale to objectively determine the degree of accountability and the sufficiency of the university autonomy for good governance of their branches at the four area of autonomy from the view point of academic staffs. The analysis of data in relation to research questions were investigated, using one-sample t-test by means of version 18 of SPSS software. The findings indicated that the degree of autonomy in the four areas was not sufficient to govern the university well and at the end the issue under the investigation was analyzed and some solutions were given to increase the accountability of the Islamic Azad University branches.