When a company encounters a governance crisis, there is at least one question to which the answer is usually clear: whose enterprise is this?

A university is a stranger institution.

Who owns it?

Is it the council that governs it? The academics who produce its knowledge? The students whose education gives it purpose? The state that regulates and substantially funds public universities? The employees who sustain its daily life? Or the public from which it draws legitimacy?

The instinctive answer is that the university belongs, in some measure, to all of them.

I suspect the more important answer is that it belongs completely to none of them.

Much of the debate about university governance in South Africa begins with visible dysfunction: councils overreaching into management, executives evading accountability, disputes over institutional autonomy, weak oversight or deteriorating relations between Council and Senate.

These are serious problems. But beneath them lies a deeper uncertainty: we have never fully settled what kind of institution a university actually is.

It is not a corporation, although universities increasingly speak the language of corporations: risk, performance, efficiency and executive accountability. It is not a state, although it makes rules and exercises authority. It is not simply a democracy because questions of knowledge cannot be settled by majority vote. Nor is it merely a community of scholars.

The university is all of these things and yet none of them entirely. Corporate governance has brought valuable disciplines into universities but the corporation remains an inadequate metaphor for the university.

A company may close a division because the numbers no longer justify it. A university may need to preserve a discipline precisely because its value cannot be captured by an immediate financial calculation.

A university has obligations to people who are not represented at its governing table at all. Some of them have not yet been born.

A university founded a century ago was handed to us by people who knew they would never see the institution we inhabit today. Across generations, they built campuses, disciplines, knowledge and reputation.

We did not create everything we now govern. Much of it was inherited. And inheritance is not ownership. This is what I would call a temporal deficit.

Councillors serve terms. Vice-chancellors leave office. Professors retire. Students graduate. Ministers change.

The institution remains.

Yet almost every constituency in university governance is concerned, understandably, with the present: today's students, employees, executives, governments and risks.

But who speaks for the university of 2065?

There is no empty chair in the council chamber marked: Future Generations.

And yet decisions taken around that table may shape the institution long after everyone presently sitting there has gone.

Selling university land, allowing laboratories to decay, accumulating debt, weakening research capability or eroding academic freedom can alter an institution for decades.

Temporary governors routinely make permanent decisions.

What higher education needs is a richer idea of what governing a university means.

I would call it Intergenerational University Governance (IGUG).

The principle is simple: those who exercise authority over a university do so only temporarily. Their responsibility is not exhausted by legality, compliance or immediate convenience. They must also consider what intellectual capacity, academic freedom and institutional possibility they leave behind.

This is trusteeship as a philosophy of governance. It changes what it means to sit on a university council.

A constituency may explain how someone arrived at the table. It should not define the limits of that person's responsibility once there.

Otherwise co-operative governance can become a parliament of constituencies: students protecting students, labour protecting labour, academics protecting academics, executives protecting management, while the university itself becomes strangely unrepresented.

Someone has to govern for the institution that remains after the present protagonists have departed.

Universities could subject consequential decisions to an Intergenerational Governance Test.

Before approving a decision with long-term effects, Council should ask four questions.

What capability are we leaving behind?

What intellectual, financial or physical asset will this decision strengthen, and what might it diminish?

Would we make the same choice if we had to defend it 20 years from now?

And are we solving a problem today by quietly transferring its cost to people who have no voice in the decision?

These are hard governance questions. A university can make its finances appear healthier by postponing maintenance, freezing academic appointments, neglecting laboratories or consuming reserves. The accounts may improve while the institution itself becomes poorer. One does not keep a house warm by burning its foundations.

Intergenerational governance could also help us rethink the relationship between Council and Senate.

Council possesses governing authority. The Senate bears particular responsibility for the academic and research life of the institution. They should not be imagined as rival sovereigns, but as custodians of different dimensions of the same inheritance.

The question is whether knowledge and authority are properly brought together before decisions become irreversible.

The same reasoning applies to institutional autonomy. Autonomy cannot mean that publicly funded universities become private republics answerable only to themselves. But public accountability cannot mean that universities become intellectual departments of the state.

Universities need enough independence to tell governments, markets and even their own leaders things they may prefer not to hear. That independence is part of the inheritance each generation must preserve.

Edmund Burke famously described society as a partnership extending beyond the living to those who came before and those still to come.

Few institutions embody that idea as vividly as the university.

Its dead leave knowledge, reputation and institutional memory. Its living exercise temporary authority. Its unborn inherit the consequences.

This is why good governance cannot finally be reduced to compliance.

A university can submit every report on time, hold properly constituted meetings and comply with every policy while slowly exhausting the resources on which its future depends.

An institution can be procedurally healthy and strategically dying.

The ultimate test of governance is therefore not simply whether the rules were followed.

It is whether those entrusted with the institution left something worth inheriting.

Perhaps that should be the question hanging over every consequential university decision.

Not merely: Do we have the authority to do this?

Not even: Is this convenient for us now?

But: What kind of university will exist because we were here?

We may have spent too long asking who owns the university.

Perhaps universities were never ours to own.

We hold them only for a while.

And the true measure of governance is not the power exercised during that period but the condition in which the institution is handed to those who come next.

Professor Fulufhelo Nemavhola is the deputy vice-chancellor for research, innovation, and engagement at the Durban University of Technology (DUT). Any views or opinions expressed herein are made in his personal capacity. They shall not be attributed to, or construed as representing, the views, policies or positions of the DUT, its council, senate, management or affiliates.