This paper discusses recent reforms to university governance and international trends in terms of changes to the academic profession to illuminate how both of these shifts are decreasing the role of the professoriate in academic decision-making. The author argues that there is a need to maintain the relative autonomy of public research universities in order to ensure that those with the appropriate expertise continue to be responsible for governing quality in higher education. The paper concludes with a discussion of the challenges to academic governance in public research universities and identifies a number of possible approaches to maintaining and strengthening academic self-governance.