Document Analysis of Tridarma Governance Practice at a Maritime Institution: A Replicable Case Study

Abstract

Indonesian higher-education law obliges every institution to operationalise a national Tridarma mandate into concrete lecturer-level practice, yet institutions vary considerably in how comprehensively they translate that legal obligation into actionable internal guidance, and this variation is rarely documented through direct analysis of the guidance documents institutions actually produce. This study conducts a qualitative document analysis of one Indonesian maritime higher-education institution's internal Tridarma guidance presentation, coding its fifteen slides against a four-criterion policy-document evaluation framework — completeness, clarity, actionability, and alignment with national legal and regulatory standards — and comparing the resulting profile against general Indonesian commentary on Tridarma implementation. The analysis finds the guidance document unusually comprehensive in translating the three Tridarma domains into concrete per-semester lecturer actions, with a particularly detailed seven-part research and publication roadmap, but identifies specific gaps in explicit integrity/compliance safeguards and in formalising its own roadmap into a standing, versioned institutional policy document rather than a single internal presentation. The study offers a transferable, replicable evaluation template that other institutions can apply to their own internal Tridarma guidance materials at negligible cost.