Let’s have some sympathy for university leaders

Criticism of university leaders is frequent and vocal. In an increasingly marketised and highly competitive sector, leaders are often – if perhaps unfairly – arraigned for the alleged malaise into which these trends have plunged higher education, characterised by ever-rising workloads, audit cultures, managerial creep and non-consultative forms of institutional governance.

In the UK, leaders’ high remuneration has not helped in a context of below-inflation wage rises for rank-and-file academics. Nor has the pandemic experience, which saw both workloads and job insecurity increase yet further for many. Indeed, the tension has reached such a pitch that some observers have suggested there is now a prevalent sense of broken trust across UK campuses.

Yet while vilification of university leaders is often encountered and easily made, the complexities and constraints of higher education management are not always well understood – and are even more rarely acknowledged.

While we would not seek to downplay the concerns regarding pay, we believe there is an increasingly pressing case for a forum in which all the emotiveness and conflict can be set aside and the university community can come together to objectively and respectfully discuss the realities of leadership and their aspirations for it. 

This view reflects a recent scoping study of higher education leadership commissioned by Advance HE, involving 109 discussants from 94 organisations in 14 countries, representing all parts of the higher education community. The conversations provided rich and revealing insights into a turbulent and changing landscape. Interestingly, they also showed an unusually nuanced appreciation of the challenges faced by university leaders.

Within and across institutions, leaders were viewed as having to mediate the competing demands and values of students, academics, employers, politicians and regulators. Discussion centred on what leaders’ primary focus should be in that context. Should they prioritise concerns around financial sustainability and growth in the market environment? Or should their first priority be to enable a protective space for the cultivation of critical and creative minds, where the well-being and resilience of staff and students is of primary concern?

Fuller understanding of – and even sympathy for – the pressures and competing demands of the capitalist and stewardship models of institutional leadership yields the potential for better integrated and more fully engaged institutional communities.

Judging what to share, how to share and when to share in the process of decision-making will always be part of the leader’s dilemma. Yet, as our study revealed, a sense of being included in decision-making promotes an appreciation of the leader as trusted, open, humble and approachable. And being “authentic”, “collaborative” and “credible” were identified as hallmarks of good higher education leadership.

Yet how these qualities interact with the need for leaders to make difficult and potentially unpopular decisions at an executive level remains unclear. How do leaders commit to a human-centric and empathetic paradigm while also ensuring their institutions remain resilient to political and economic pressures?

Nevertheless, a whole-community approach to exploring what modern university leadership can and should be offers the hope of getting beyond the blame narrative and thrashing out what “we” want higher education to be.

As one of our discussants observed: “We need a bottom-up approach. We talk about senior management not in a very positive way. It seems to be them and us. And that needs to change. Leadership is happening every day from all of us, no matter how senior we are.”

We should all embrace a collective responsibility for understanding and building consensus around the kinds of leadership that can both serve and protect all those within higher education’s ambit.

Doug Parkin is principal adviser for leadership and management at Advance HE. Richard Watermeyer is professor of higher education and co-director of the Centre for Higher Education Transformations (CHET) at the University of Bristol.