Existing scholarship tends to understand university governance structurally (emphasizing formal authority and resource environments), culturally (focusing on history, norms, and leadership), or by combining both approaches (Kezar & Eckel, 2004). These models understand governance in instrumental terms, as the means for steering the university. Governance as steering implies baseline consensus about goals and mission. Pursuing these agreed-on goals can be managed through reform and leadership. In this article, the authors argue that higher education leaders and scholars will be better prepared to grapple with contemporary challenges by thinking about governance as the way universities are incorporated into and contribute to the formation of the state and society (see Pusser, 2018). Understood in this way, the underlying goals and mission of higher education are not agreed on. Instead, they are hotly contested because they are linked to partisan political struggles over the kind of society people want to have. To help kick-start a process of retheorizing governance, the authors chronicle a shift in how public universities in the United States are situated vis-à-vis the state. They identify these shifting governance arrangements through the transformation of the liberal university to the neoliberal and, now, postliberal university.