AHEP Development Monthly #53 | Leading Through Change: Rethinking Universities for a New Era
When I started in the profession, a female Vice Chancellor was a rarity and now women make up around a third of VCs in the UK. There are currently many more brilliant women in university leadership roles, whether VC roles or others. Yet it has not escaped notice that women are much more numerous in these various types of leaderships roles at the same time as funding for universities has fallen below levels that can sustain the system as it is — and at the same time as calls for VC’s salaries to be reduced are everywhere. 1
Why would women academics (or any academic for that matter) abandon the world of their own research and teaching to go into a university leadership role (whether as a VC or one of the many other leadership roles) at this challenging time?
Currently whole-system change is an uncomfortable financial necessity, but I believe it’s also, crucially, a broader mission imperative. And particularly so in relation to the ways in which we organise knowledge, which is what I want to reflect on here. Times have changed, the nature of the challenges we’re trying to address has changed, and society’s needs have changed. Yet our universities are still based around infrastructures of knowledge that were largely formed a hundred and more years ago: our disciplinary configurations.
Our disciplines have always been contingent and evolving. Yet the danger is that a time of financial crisis in the sector is encouraging a defensive reaction that doubles down on the value of what is rather than looking up and out at what could be. The real case to be made for the value of universities is in showing how we can evolve to stay relevant as the world changes: we could be as entrepreneurial as we are innovative, and we could do much more to support the lifelong learning needs of a population that now needs to flex their skills more to remain in the workplace. Above all, we could, and should, do more to meet people where they are rather than expecting them to come to where we are.
As institutions dedicated to research and innovation we do have some surprising resistance to change. I’m thinking here particularly of the debate around Generative AI that is raging as I write. Is it really feasible for us to continue to try to ban students from using Generative AI? I hope by the time this is published it will have become broadly apparent that we need to teach students how to use Gen AI well (and set assignments that encourage awareness of its limitations as well as its utility) rather than devoting our time to playing whack-a-mole.
Equally, I think we do find it rather difficult to admit that we might need to change the structures that we have grown up with and that give us our professional identity. Perhaps unsurprisingly so. Yet our disciplinary identities have long encouraged certain types of work and not others – and made it natural to find certain kinds of solutions to the grand challenges we explore and not others. That’s natural: any organisation of our knowledge fields will create higher barriers between some areas than others – particularly when our disciplines have dictated the working structure of our universities for so long: departments, schools, faculties, colleges, all formed around cognate disciplines.
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