This paper examines a paradox of contemporary higher education governance: even as successive waves of governance reform within higher education have been articulated in the language of democratisation, participation, and institutional autonomy, universities operate within expanded systems of evaluation, performance measurement, and managerial oversight. These principles remain formally affirmed, yet the conditions under which they are exercised are increasingly structured through accountability architectures.

The paper analyses how evaluation and performance regimes acquire new significance once they move beyond their initial introduction. Rather than treating reform as a series of discrete interventions, it distinguishes between reform as explicit institutional reconfiguration and its subsequent phase of stabilisation — when new instruments settle into routine and begin to organise practice from within. The issue is not simply whether reforms endure, but how their incorporation into everyday procedures reshapes what counts as authority, competence, and legitimate participation in academic life.

Methodologically, the analysis combines political-theoretical and policy inquiry with a secondary engagement with qualitative material from an earlier study (2022). Rather than serving as the primary empirical basis, this material functions diagnostically, offering a situated vantage point from which to observe how performance-oriented frameworks reshape professional agency and mediate participation within institutional governance.

In such settings, alignment with institutional priorities increasingly counts as professionalism, while collegial judgement becomes harder to sustain as a recognised source of authority. Autonomy is not withdrawn; it is redirected through accountability mechanisms that define who may exercise judgment and under what conditions. Also, participation persists, but within expectations that structure academic subjectivity and narrow the range of institutionally recognised action. What marks this phase is not a dramatic structural change, but the way particular arrangements become ordinary. As reforms stabilise, they cease to appear as deliberate political choices and instead frame the conditions under which academic judgement is exercised. What once arrived as reform becomes part of how things are ordinarily done.

The paper contributes to debates on higher education governance by showing how performance regimes reorganise academic authority not through rupture, but through routinisation. In doing so, it offers a way of understanding how reforms articulated in the language of autonomy and participation may coexist with intensified regulation, and how institutional forms can remain intact while the practical space for independent judgement and contestation is gradually redrawn. Universities thus provide an intensive site for observing a broader institutional condition in which democratic forms persist even as the horizons of agency are gradually narrowed.

Competition in higher education is rarely questioned and research has long been considered an inherently competitive activity. The recent decades, however, have been marked by increasing expansion of competition and competitive schemes, influenced by growing internationalisation efforts and emergence of international rankings. While the latter receive some criticism, the disengagement from various rankings and evaluations is by no means widespread. C. Musselin (2018) argues that competition in higher education has shifted from the individual and national level to the institution. This shift transforms universities in competitors competing on multiple levels.

G. Krücken (2021) takes this argument further and introduces the notion of multiple competitions:
„Individual and collective actors compete, for example, for scarce material and symbolic resources like research grants, high-quality publications, ranking positions, attention from external stakeholders and societal impact. As a consequence, universities as organisations and academics as individual actors are simultaneously embedded in different, nested and interdependent competitions, i.e., multiple competitions“ (p. 163)

As ephemeral as the concept of quality of higher education may be, its prescriptive power can hardly be overstated. C. Musselin (2018) notes that the ever-present competition in higher education is framed as a competition for quality. However, since quality is difficult to assess and describe, status is used as a proxy for quality and the proclaimed competition for quality becomes competition for status. Krücken (2021) also considers multiple competitions more of an attempt to gain political legitimacy and organisational status rather than a consequence of the research system, and questions whether they are more beneficial or detrimental to creativity and innovation in science.

International cooperation can also be framed as a way to improve quality as well, particularly in more peripheral higher education systems. Quality, in turn, is often rhetorically used to legitimise policy decisions (Orechova, 2025). Musselin’s (2018) argument of status as a proxy for quality is also extended to international cooperation and alliances wherein cooperation with a more prestigious institution extends this prestige to other partners.

Are these current practices conducive to trust between higher education and society? Or does it create a university for university's sake, stuck in a race for better status dressed as quality? This roundtable aims to discuss these conundrums of competition, cooperation and quality from the lens of purpose of higher education. In the context of multiple nested competitions, various rankings, and race for improved status, the question arises: who or what are we building higher education for?

The format of the roundtable is chosen to include as much variety of opinions and suggestions as possible. The invited discussants will include both scholars in the field of higher education (2-3) and policymakers (1-2). The discussion will be structured with short thesis statements of no more than 5 minutes and then the floor will be opened to general discussion.