Higher education is in ‘a time of profound, unrelenting change of a magnitude and scope unequalled since the Industrial Revolution’(Levine & Van Pelt, 2021, p. ix). This present ‘flux’ (Bebbington 2021), ‘in-between time’, or ‘interregnum,’ is challenging public universities’ traditional ways of fulfilling their social responsibilities to serve public good (Grant, 2021, p. 3). The term ‘public’ in ‘public good’ is seriously contentious (Clarke, Mills, Mockler, & Singh, 2022). Consequently, leading universities is highly complex and uncertain, but remains a major responsibility, rendered more fraught by a persistent habit of using the terms ‘management’ and ‘leadership’ interchangeably. We concur with Branson et al. (2020, 4-7) that ‘management’ is about ‘controlling and directing’ by following policies, rules, and prescribed procedures to be ‘publicly accountable’. In previous research conducted in five research intensive universities, we identified and described ‘deliberative leadership’ as both a sustainable approach in higher education, with potential also to be transformative, thus conceivably an asset also in promoting interdisciplinarity (Solbrekke & Sugrue, 2020).

Recognising that leadership is ‘complex, multilevel, and socially constructed’ (Xie 2019, 76), has led to the emergence of ‘adjectivalism’: ‘substituting an endless supply of successive candidate adjectives’ (Gronn 2009, p.18), including servant, spiritual, transformational, transactional, and transrelational, a list by no means exhaustive (Xie, 2019). A more recent inclusion has been ‘distributed’ (Youngs, 2017).  Others advocate for sustainability (Rieg, Gatersleben, & Christie 2021), gender (van Helden, den Dulk, Steijn, & Vernooij 2021), and inclusion (Aboramadan, Dahleez, and Farao 2022). Still others have focused on the consequences of NPM for leading public universities (Barnett, 2011; Pinheiro, Geschwind, Hansen, & Pulkkinen, 2019). Internally, these dynamics have increased the extent of the academic ‘precariat’ (Fitzsimons, Henry, & O’ Neill 2021), while increasing external pressures post Bologna (1999) have resulted in demands for stronger management masquarading as leadership (Karseth & Solbrekke, 2016; Kohtamaki 2022). These and other external demands have spawned increasing ‘managerialism’ and ‘leaderism’ (vozhdism) (Brankovic 2018). In a more rudderless higher education landscape, there is advocacy too for greater attention to values, ‘integrity, fairness, kindness, excellence, sustainability, passion and reason,’ drawing attention to ‘what is important in life’ (Carney, 2021, pp. 4-17). Building on theories of ‘professional responsibility,’ Solbrekke and Englund (2011) indicate the tensions between external governance policies of professional work, including the work of public universities captured in the language and logic of ‘accountability’ and ‘responsibility’.

Into this cauldron of competing and conflicting pressures and demands, academic hospitality in tandem with interdisciplinarity are posited as a means of providing some situated certainty for securing a more sustainable higher education sector while preparing graduates more appropriately for work and society. Academic hospitality has different forms, identified as material (hosting conferences, collaborating with peers), epistemic (being open or hospitable to new ideas), linguistic (translating into other languages, being sensitive to the language of ‘other’ disciplines) and touristic (being welcoming and hospitable to fellow academics) (Phipps & Barnett, 2007). Additionally, interdisciplinarity has been presented as an elixir: “a solution to a series of contemporary problems, in particular the relations between science and society, the development of accountability and the need to foster innovation in the knowledge economy” (Barry, Born, & Weszkalnys, 2008, p. 21). This paper opens an exploratory study of the leadership challenges presented in higher education, when both interdisciplinarity and academic hospitality are inserted more systematically into its reform agenda. In doing so, it addresses the following research questions:

• How do interdisciplinary programme teams and leaders, and senior university leaders (with responsibility for promoting interdisciplinarity) talk about leading interdisciplinary education in their respective institutions?
• What insights do their accounts offer into institutional leadership and institutional transformation?

Data analysed for this paper are part of a larger study on ‘Academic Hospitality in Higher Education’, a research project funded by the Norwegian Research Council, involving six research intensive universities, two Norwegian, one Swedish, Australian, Scottish, and Irish. It is a mixed methods study investigating academic hospitality in interdisciplinary collaboration within a selected programme in each of the six participating universities. While focused directly on those programmes to identify their pedagogies, academics and students are participants. Additionally, senior leaders within the universities with particular responsibility for education and the promotion of interdisciplinarity are participants, thus the focus is not merely on pedagogies of interdisciplinarity, but also how such practices are crafted as well as the shaping influences on institutional structures, contexts and leaders in cultivating hospitable environments conducive to interdisciplinary teaching, learning and leading. As this project is in an early phase of data gathering, analysis here is confined to five transcripts from each of three of the six participating universities; interviews conducted with leaders of interdisciplinary programmes, and their institutional leaders with particular responsibilities for leading interdisciplinarity education in their respective institutions. In addition to individual interviews with these leaders, focus group interviews with programme teams were also completed. Interviews have been completed adopting an insider/outsider perspective; an outsider being a colleague from another university in the study in partnership with a researcher colleague in the institution where data are being gathered. (Corbin Dwyer & Buckle, 2009). Each interview was approximately one hour, recorded and subsequently transcribed. While the analytical stance is ‘abductive’ (Alvesson & Skolberg, 2000), moving freely between conceptual and theoretical literature and engagement with the data, initial coding of transcripts was undertaken by the three authors individually, and when codes were negotiated and agreed, transcripts were then coded electronically using MAXQDA, continuing to engage abductively with the material.

While interdisciplinarity for some time has been trumpeted as a means of addressing some contemporary challenges in higher education, perhaps even more intensively in research intensive universities, there is a relative dearth of evidence on how it is promoted institutionally, and the challenges such promotion represents to senior leaders in particular, as well as to established structures and routines of practice. Analysis in this paper seeks to shed light on this phenomenon within three institutions in this initial analysis of data. Preliminary analysis suggests a number of themes under which the findings will be presented, while interpreting these through the theoretical and analytical framework articulated above. These are: Understandings of interdisciplinarity: responsibility for its promotion Institutional constraints: overcoming frustrations, leading alternatives Pedagogies of interdisciplinarity: innovative practices or new wine in old bottles? From disciplinary silos to institutional Balkanisation? Currently, these are emergent themes as we become more familiar with the data and as additional data is added to the project’s existing archive. In the discussion/ conclusion element of the paper, the focus will be on emerging insights into institutional leaders roles and responsibilities as universities seek to address contemporary challenges and these will be interrogated through the lens indicated above with an emphasis on insights into practices that emerge as having transformative potential, while recognising that such routines are shaped considerably by actors, institutional contexts and external policy environments. The theoretical hinterland articulate above will be drawn on selectively in this section, consistent with an abductive approach. The presentation will be succinct to maximise time for discussion and input from those present, contributions that will be important and received hospitably.

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