The brands of universities are best understood not as trademarks, but as geographical indications. The conventional American theory of trademarks has always been an ill fit for the merchandising uses that universities enforce their brands to protect, because those uses are grounded in anti-misappropriation impulses that traditional American trademark law has always looked on with ambivalence. But the use of a signifier to channel material support from consumers to a productive community (such as a university), out of support for the community itself rather than out of market demand for the community’s outputs, is perfectly consistent with the justifications typically offered for protection of geographical indications. While understanding university brands as geographical indications provides analytical clarity, it also reveals such brands have a potential dark side: they may give the community’s most generous and idiosyncratic benefactors an outsize role in deciding disputes over the community’s priorities and values.

This chapter reports data from a comparative study of academic governance within England, the USA, and Australia showing that, overall, opportunities for academics to contribute to decision making about matters that affect teaching and research have declined. The chapter highlights the reduced opportunities for student participation in university decision making and substantial gaps between those who support students and staff, and those who make decisions about the provision of support services and their mode of delivery. The chapter address the current dimensions of university decision making within the context of institutional level academic governance before analyzing the ways in which university decision making has changed in recent years and the forces causing such changes. The chapter also highlights the potential impact of these changes on the effectiveness of university decision making, addressing four specific consequences and unanticipated risks. The final section briefly explores two alternative models of university decision making and considers the extent to which these models demonstrate some capacity to respond to consequences and unanticipated risks.