Dr. Quang Chau

Since its legalization in 1988, Vietnam’s private higher education sector has passed through three internal governance configurations, each institutionalizing a distinct phase of the country’s political-economic transition. The first-generation “people-founded” universities were governed by self-perpetuating boards mixing capital and intellectual contributors, under rules that never settled what either contribution entitled its holder to; the board thus became an arena of endemic conflict, a product of the era’s cautious privatization and deliberately ambiguous ownership. The state-mandated conversion of all people-founded universities into the joint-stock form (in 2006) replaced this arena with an architecture borrowed from enterprise law – authority proportional to shares, intellectual contributors stripped of their structural seat – as the state institutionalized the market economy at large. Share transferability then enabled the third configuration: as corporations acquired universities, decision-making migrated toward parent corporations, leaving the board’s actual function an open question. Drawing on archival records, institutional memoirs, and elite interviews spanning all three configurations, this talk examines each configuration’s structure and characteristic conflicts, and considers what the sequence – in which changes of ownership repeatedly preceded and produced changes of governance – suggests for how private university governance is theorized.

Quang Chau (PhD) is a lecturer at University of Education, Vietnam National University Hanoi. His research centers on higher education policy, particularly governance and privatization. His recent work examines the internal governance of universities in both the public and private sectors. He serves on the editorial board of the Routledge book series Global Realities in Private Higher Education and is co-editor of the series’ volume Private Higher Education in Asia (Routledge, 2025). He recently completed his PhD at the Department of Educational Policy and Leadership, State University of New York at Albany, where he is a research associate at the Program for Research on Private Higher Education (PROPHE).