UCLA

This qualitative case study investigates the effects of governance configuration and organizational design on financial decision-making at a leading public research university on the west coast of the United States. Rather than conceptualizing financial management as a neutral administrative function, the study frames financial authority as constructed through sequence, thresholds, and exposure. Interviewing academic and financial leaders and analyzing institutional documents, the research investigates how reporting hierarchies, revenue structures, and escalation pathways shape the timing, allocation, and compression of decision authority under fiscal constraints. Results reveal that financial expertise enters strategy at structurally determined points, that autonomy expands and contracts within institutional risk thresholds, and that decentralization creates uneven fiscal capacities across units.Governance configuration emerges as the moderating structure of institutional resilience: when the sequence of authority shifts under fiscal pressure, it does not happen randomly, but follows a pattern. By identifying structural sequencing as the primary mechanism of financial authority, this case study contributes to the literature on governance and argues that resilience in public higher education is determined less by sources and volumes of revenue and more by the design of authority through which decisions are made, escalated, and absorbed.