The centre of gravity in university governance is shifting from administrative direction to institutional steering, yet many institutions still exhibit a familiar gap: rules are in place, but governance performance lags. Drawing on the new institutionalist division of institutions into regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive pillars, this paper treats institutional governance logic as an operating mechanism in which rule constraints, value commitment, and behavioral expectations are nested within one another, and uses that mechanism to account for the distance between written rules and governing practice. The diagnosis proceeds at three levels. Hollow charters and blurred boundaries of authority and responsibility belong to the regulative level; misplaced incentives in evaluation and promotion systems belong to the normative level; and the weakening of the academic community at the grassroots belongs to the cultural-cognitive level. Against this diagnosis, the paper examines how Guangxi College of Water Resources and Electric Power has aligned its programme clusters with water conservancy and energy industry chains, devolved management responsibilities to secondary colleges, and developed a campus culture rooted in its water-related identity.