LSE HE Blog Fellow Richard Watermeyer challenges us to move on from the blame game and villainisation of university leaders as he lays bare the systemic failure of leadership within universities
In recent years, expectations of academics’ productive output have escalated in tandem with the efforts of university leaders to ensure institutional competitiveness and resilience within a highly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous higher education (HE) landscape. Fuelled by university leaders’ commitment to competitive accountability and the status and legitimacy conferred by performance league tables and rankings, there has been a productivity mania within universities, with academics treated as high-output assembly workers.
From ivory tower to knowledge factory
Work intensification within universities arguably reached its height with the Covid-19 pandemic for both academic and professional services staff: the move to online working resulted in university staff being always on call. This, unsurprisingly, further exacerbated a pre-existing trend of mental and physical exhaustion among university staff and prompted many to reconsider the terms of their employment. Working life in universities remains largely unfavourable and, while some consider academia to be no longer tolerable and have left, many who remain seem a disconsolate community. In some HE settings such as the UK, frustration over working conditions and university management has resulted over the last few years in repeated industrial action. During these protests, university leaders have been held responsible for staff unhappiness, resulting in them becoming prominent symbols of mismanagement.
Scarce leadership
Much of the complaint levelled at university leaders stems from common (and often hyperbolic) assessments of their excessive remuneration; their lack of moral authority, ethical integrity, compassion, empathy, and care for others; their non-consultative crisis-management model of governance; and their appropriation of universities as personal legacy and vanity projects. They are also associated with the normalisation of exploitative and precarious labour practices; an epidemic of staff bullying, harassment, and discrimination (habitually by managers they are seen to protect); and the perpetuation of structural inequalities within universities. As if such accusations were not enough, they are also blamed for indecision and apathy not only in the face of government aggression and policy hostility, but also in defending the value proposition of the university as a public good and in responding to challenges of digital disruption and financial vulnerability. When viewed as absentee landlords, the contribution of university leaders, in respect of substantive leadership, is made further hard to ascertain or confirm.
However, if leadership is found wanting within universities, it is not just among those in positions of apex authority. The problem is more diffuse and deep-rooted. Notwithstanding, it has culminated in a blame game and villainisation of university leaders that oversimplifies and fails to redress a systemic failure of leadership within universities; the reasons for which are polymorphous.
A poverty of followership
To begin, we might consider a poverty of followership and the suspicion and resistance inherent to many academics in response to manifestations of authority and control. They are a tribe unwilling, perhaps even unable, to be led; such is their claim to professional autonomy and critical self-sovereignty. In short, they are hardwired to refuse leadership. Concomitantly, their own leadership may be found to be lacking where they, themselves, either through self-preservation or self-promotion, individualise competitive accountability and prioritise their personal interests over collective needs. Many of the work-related grievances articulated by academics may not, therefore, be the fault of toxic management so much as an inability to self-regulate and manage their diverse work portfolio – many aspects of which they may have committed to voluntarily, if precariously. A failure of self-responsibility may thus be argued to erode and subjugate collegiality, in the latter instance to a working culture that (tacitly) valorises over-working and occupational burnout.
Crisis of the professoriate
Within an academic hierarchy there is also, ostensibly. a failure of leadership. In the context of senior professors, there appear to be widening gaps of intellectual leadership. The extent of professors’ service as role models and mentors is perhaps increasingly ambiguous. So, too, is how they stand up for the rights of the more precarious and peripheral – those deprived of institutional capital – and commit themselves to acts of institutional remediation and reparative justice.
Motivating leadership in universities also requires divesting highly partisan, one-dimensional, and excessively emotive framings. A more balanced appraisal of working life in university is necessary. As forthcoming research reveals, academics’ descriptions of occupational shortcomings in universities are balanced out with their narratives of occupational advantages. For instance, academics bemoan the intrusions of managerialism at the same time as celebrating the extent to which they exercise professional freedom. However, this trade-off of sorts is rarely addressed; arguably because it defuses the potency of complaint as a means of occupational resilience and politicking.
Rebuilding trust
As such, there is a pressing need to quarantine blame, to reform the cultural dissonance and factionalism of us-and-them that blights university communities, and to (re)build intra-institutional trust. Senior university leaders are not necessarily guiltless of the claims made against them – but every member of university communities has some degree of culpability and therefore some degree of leadership to enact. We need to recognise that those in positions of apex leadership are also the most visible people within their communities and therefore most susceptible to fall hardest and furthest when things go awry. Yet, equally, there is need to reconsider the scope of their powers, which for the most part may be vastly over-estimated, and so too the extent to which they are change agents or conformists.
University senior leaders are drawn from a very shallow talent pool, which their demonisation serves only to further drain. The HE community requires not fewer leaders, but more leadership. This may only be achieved through a cultural investment in leadership as a universal responsibility. Sharing the onus of leadership is integral to discovering the openings within a dialectic of control, beyond intra-institutional factionalism and fighting. This would allow the university as a whole and heterogeneous community to countervail the oppressive forms of power, within and without, that seek to delimit its future. Intra-institutional reconciliation and the forging of a shared identity and purpose of leadership may, therefore, initiate more purposeful steps away from the contaminations of competitive accountability and debilitations of prestige. The best chance of beating the polycrisis of higher education is surely by working together, rather than apart.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________ This post is opinion-based and does not reflect the views of the London School of Economics and Political Science or any of its constituent departments and divisions. _____________________________________________________________________________________________
