This paper is a critical review of the Anglo-Saxon literature since the 1960s on university leadership and governance. The critique draws on a substantial amount of empirical work on operating procedures and governance in French universities. The intention is to show that the issue of university leadership has been analysed using too personalised, disembodied or normative an approach, and that the analysis of university governance has been too piecemeal. The alternative proposed here is a new definition of university governance to reflect its many facets, namely conflict/ co-operation between leaders, the interdependence of the many collegial bodies involved in decision-making, and the relations between leaders and representative bodies.