In the United States in recent years in almost every state there has been a strong move toward more centralized coordination and control of higher education, a movement growing out of the rapidly rising costs of higher education as well as, perhaps, some public disillusion with the universities. This move toward centralized control means, of course, a shift of power away from individual universities.

A group in the Institute of Higher Education at Berkeley (Glenny et al., 1971) strongly favors coordination of universities; Lewis Mayhew (1972) of Stanford predicts that many states will opt for centralized control rather than coordination. The long tradition in the United States of nonacademic control of individual universities through boards of trustees made up of business and professional people rather than academic leaders probably has made the shift to centralized control by the nonacademic boards of entire state systems of colleges and universities more acceptable within and without the universities than has been true in most other countries where the legal decision-making power, the administrative and academic autonomy of the university, has been in the hands of members of the academic community.