Mechanism to Promote Student Participation in the University Management System with Emphasis on the Development of Cultural Components

In Iranian higher education, the university management system (UMS) has taken on an overly pyramidal and centralized structure and has created a minimal intervention space for stakeholders, especially students which have challenged some of the functional areas of universities. This research shows the lack of proper development of participatory culture in universities as one of the main reasons. The objective of the paper is to design a mechanism to promote student participation in the UMS based on the development of cultural components. Using the heuristic mixed method, first in the qualitative section to identify culturally effective components on student participation in a purposeful judgmental method, a sample of 15 studies was selected and 50 components were counted systematically by fuzzy Delphi method through experts consisting of 17 people. In the quantitative section, the current status of student participation based on cultural components were identified in the form of descriptive-survey method, through a researcher-made questionnaire from the perspective of 381 people from the stakeholder community of the Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch, selected by simple random sampling method and then assessed using SPSS software. Students' participation in the Iranian UMS based on cultural components is not favorable. The formation of non-interactive processes, unwillingness to work in a team, centralization of universities, lack of appropriate participatory structures along with the weakness of cultural components are all important obstacles. This study indicates that 41 cultural and social components in 4 institutional dimensions (12 components), attitude dimension (13 components), behavioral dimension (8 components) and value dimension (9 components) affect the promotion of student participation in the Iranian UMS. Strengthening these components can lead to the promotion of the university management system in the form of a "council system".