Co-creating a new university model through participation and co-decision-making: the case of Sapienza University of Rome

Abstract

This paper develops a sociological interpretation of the participatory governance practices that emerged at Sapienza University of Rome during the COVID-19 emergency between 2020 and 2022. Rather than treating student participation as a merely consultative or symbolic dimension of academic life, the article argues that the case of Sapienza suggests a more demanding analytical possibility: under specific organisational conditions, elected student representatives can become mediating actors in institutional governance, contributing to organisational listening, information circulation, trust-building and adaptive co-decision-making. The paper is designed as an exploratory qualitative case study and interprets the case through scholarship on the civic university, student representation, co-production, collaborative governance, public value, organisational sensemaking and trust in expert systems. The central contribution is the notion of student-mediated institutional governance, understood not as a fully generalised model but as an interpretive construct generated from the case. It describes a configuration in which student representation operates as a relational infrastructure that reduces informational asymmetries between students and universities and supports institutional learning in such a complex organisation.