This research aimed to examine the perceived governance of selected Ethiopian public universities in the framework of government relationship, autonomy, accountability and empowerment. The conceptual framework outlines the researcher's current thinking about this governance study by providing a place for modern theories and empirical approaches and by encouraging more multiple-level domain investigations. The study employed a convergent parallel mixed research methods .The researcher used a concurrent strategy for data collection and interpretation procedures (simultaneously collecting quantitative and qualitative data). While data on legal issues were collected from purposefully selected legislative documents, the survey questionnaire data were collected from 1474 purposefully selected presidents and directors and randomly selected academic teaching staff, deans and department heads from the nine public universities. Standardized tool for empowerment dimensions and self-developed questionnaires for autonomy, accountability and government-university relationship were used. The empowerment tools were standardized, but modified based on the local context, whereas, autonomy and accountability questionnaires were prepared by the researcher and were subject to pilot test before use. Descriptive statistics such as percentage, frequency, mean and standard deviation were instrumental. Equally, inferential statistics-ANOVA, linear and multiple regression, Spearman correlation, logit model, principal component analysis, and multicollinearity effect were employed based on the nature and types of the basic questions. It has been found that public universities in Ethiopia experience strong government interference and control in internal affairs that resulted problem in information asymmetry and goal conflicts. Furthermore, government fails to materialize steering from distance and self-governance of public universities. The academic leaders under the law a broader room of maneuvers at administrative and financial level lost a considerable degree of institutional and financial autonomy in public universities. On the other hand, the academic communities enjoy measure academic autonomy. Despite, accountability helps to encourage an ethos of transparency, efficiency, and participation to achieve the intended outcomes, the result indicates that, public universities were experiencing lack of strong accountability mechanisms and the accountability practices were not well institutionalized. Furthermore, the multidimensional approaches of empowerment (structural, psychological and leadership) were not conceived well in public universities to become empowered at institutional as well as individual levels to meet the empowerment requirements and sound governance as well. The findings further revealed a lack of well-designed accountability mechanism, lack of empowering environment and initiatives, and lack of transparency as the major challenges based on the logit model. The control mechanisms of government did not conceived the loosely coupled, multidimensional features of public universities and weak government-universality relationship institutionalized. It can be concluded that, despite autonomy, accountability and empowerment being the authoritative tools for effective governance, they were not well communicated in public universities as enacted in policy documents. Thus, public universities were missing sound governance systems in Ethiopia. The researcher, thus, specified some major policy implications to promote sound governance in Ethiopian public universities: Establish strong supervision mechanism and key performance indicators with outcomes-based funding, system granting balanced autonomy and accountability with clear boundaries, institutionalize effective governance structures, design and develop strong accountability mechanism and legal framework, revisit policy directives and initiatives, and adopt empowerment and management programs. <, Key Words: Governance, government-university relationship, autonomy, empowerment, accountability, structural empowerment, psychological empowerment, leader empowering behavior