VIRTUAL EVENT: What is global leadership in higher education?

Professor Brad Blitz (UCL Institute of Education)

Dr Tatiana Fumasoli (UCL Institute of Education)

Leadership in and of higher education is a contested concept, even more when it is characterised as global. This intervention will provide some ideas and theories drawing from the extant literature on the topic.

Professor Rosemary Deem (Royal Holloway, University of London)

COVID-19 has exposed many weaknesses and challenges for the world’s universities. The wide discrepancies between highly marketised and relatively unmarketised higher education systems are becoming ever more evident. Conceptions of university purposes are now both complex and confused in the messages they send to the outside world, with many institutions trapped between competition and collaboration.

Rosemary will explore the current state of university leadership and what the gap is between where we are now and where we ought to be if we are to significantly change the direction of travel of universities as organisations.

Dr Victoria Showunmi (UCL Institute of Education)

In this presentation, Victoria contributes to the literature on leadership and identity by examining how gender, race, and class may confer disadvantage or bestow privilege in accessing leadership positions while in the role of leader. She focuses on the methodology used to explore experiences of Black Minority and Ethnic (BME) and white women leaders understanding of these experiences in public and private sector organisations in England. 

The research offers the use of the author’s autobiographical account as a starting point to develop an intersectional approach to leadership methodology. In addition, it draws on feminist, intersectional and critical auto-biographical theory to analyse the findings. Victoria will begin with an introduction to the literature, moving onto the research design and then discussion on the initial findings, highlighting the core themes emerging from the data.

Dr Federica Rossi (Birkbeck, University of London)

Universities have very diverse profiles of knowledge exchange (KE) in terms of engagement channels and type of stakeholders. These profiles also change over time, getting either diversified or specialized or reoriented in different directions. In this presentation, Federia investigates the nature of micro-managerial interventions that universities implement to enact such changes.

Interventions relating to belief control systems and interactive control systems are particularly important for KE profile diversification, since they encourage staff to identify and grasp a wide range of KE opportunities. Interventions relating to boundary control systems and diagnostic control systems are particularly important for KE profile specialization, since they provide targeted support for staff performing specific KE activities and set targets aligned with those activities. Finally, universities engaging in KE profile reorientation use a mix of approaches.

Dr Giulio Marini (UCL Institute of Education)

In this presentation, Guilio discusses the state of the art of the implications of BDAI (Big Data and Artificial Intelligence) for higher education management, adopting the point of view of the single institutions navigating opportunities and constraints.

Examples of internal applications (students’ experience monitoring, enhancing and predictions; staff management; relationship with providers of data collection and processing) and external commitments (profiling and “fishing” of potential/prospect students; relationships with rankings providers and respective consultancies; stakeholders’ and companies’ gateway to future required profiles, etc.) are briefly discussed in relation to the role of university management. He will propose a first reflection on what BDAI-led metrics do not really measure (i.e. transformational experience, long-term realisation, transversal skills, etc.), overcoming a typical positivistic stance that fails to account for limits in measuring phenomena.

Professor Lesley Gourlay (UCL Institute of Education)

As algorithms play an increasingly all-pervasive role in society, ‘big data’ has become increasingly important in education, and ‘learning analytics’ is one such tendency; a growing approach to the monitoring of student activity online which, while justified in terms of ‘student support’ and the promotion of vulnerable and disadvantaged groups, may in fact be regarded as primarily driven by the logics of national audit systems imposed on higher education.

In this presentation Lesley will propose that this tendency arises from a very particular set of ideas about the university in the ‘digital age’ which centres on notions of academics and students as abstract, disembodied human subjects, removed from their sociomaterial settings, Meanwhile, all dimensions of academic practice are increasingly made subject to performative regimes of surveillance, as can be seen in the UK-based “Research Excellence Framework’ and ‘Teaching Excellence Framework’.

Professor Allison Littlejohn (UCL Institute of Education)

In times of unparalleled uncertainty, universities are uniquely placed to help address global challenges (Littlejohn, Charitonos and Kaatrakoski, 2019). Universities’ mission statements position them as offering outward-facing service to the economy, community, society, social justice and world (Seeber, Barberio, Huisman, and Mampaey, 2017). 

Learning is vital to enable people to navigate through the growing uncertainties characterised by global challenges (Howells, 2018; Littlejohn, Charitonos and Kaatrakoski, 2019). Recognising the value of Higher Education for sustainable development, the United Nations (UN) has included the aim to 'ensure equal access for all women and men to affordable and quality technical, vocational and tertiary education, including university' within its list of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (United Nations, 2015, p. 19). In this brief presentation, Alison will explore attempts to address the UN SDGs through education and learning, examining inherent tensions that inhibit change.

Dr Vincent Carpentier (UCL Institute of Education) and Professor Elaine Unterhalter (UCL Institute of Education)

Ten years ago, Vincent and Elaine co-edited a book 'Global inequalities and higher education in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis'. This was a period of great uncertainty, marked by debates about inequalities within and between countries and institutions. In their introduction, they argued that global higher education was uniquely well placed to serve the interests of redressing inequality and allowing for negotiation between what we termed a tetralemma, the demands for trading off between economic growth, equality, participation and sustainability.

They portrayed higher education as a space that could enhance participatory debate and reflection and hold together the four centrifugal forces of the tetralemma. In this presentation, Vincent and Elaine will reflect on the progress and setbacks for higher education in attempts to address this tetralemma over the last ten years, showing how concerns with economic growth often came to trump other features of the space they hoped the sector would help develop. They will consider whether COVID-19 (or any potential future global challenges) might represent a turning point regarding the search for a resolution of the tetrallema.

Professor Rosemary Deem