Network
NW 22 Research in Higher Education / NW 26 Educational Leadership
Title
Academic Leadership in Higher Education for Building a Fairer World and Fostering Trust in Polarised Times
Abstract
We seek papers exploring the shifting nature of academic leadership in changing, and sometimes disrupting times. Creating opportunities to learn from each other’s work, research, and practices during thematic symposia and develop a contemporary understanding how academic leadership is changing in current times. We aim to develop a broad international network connecting scholars interested in leadership in higher education, both formal and informal, focused on pedagogy, research and societal impact, but mainly motivated by building a fairer world and fostering trust in polarised times.
The Call
This special call seeks papers that engage with personal, intellectual, practical challenges related to leadership in higher education (HE) institutes. In an increasingly competitive HE sector—measured by league tables, research outputs, social impact and graduate employability—both research-intensive universities and universities of applied sciences seeking to attract global talent rely on strong academic leaders. Such leaders are essential for fulfilling universities’ academic, civic, and global commitments and for demonstrating the power of research in addressing pressing global challenges (Beresford-Dey et al., 2024; Tian & Nutbrown, 2021). The emergence of sub-specialisation necessitates a rethinking and re-conceptualisation of academic leadership in HE (Macfarlane, 2011). Due to increasing specialisation and the unbundling of academic tasks, academic leadership encompasses individual agency (Kusters et al., 2025), inclusive leadership (Taal et al., 2025), collaborative pedagogical decision-making (Rumiantsev et al., 2022), and network governance (van Winkel et al., 2018), all of which shape academic practices and discourses related to addressing global challenges.
HE institutes are continuously in transition. These transitions are responses to external societal developments such as disruptions, protests, government policies, wicked regional, or international challenges – as well as internal pressure such as number of students, budget cuts, staffing issues, and resistance to unlearning deep-rooted practices. Many scholars and researchers posit that for any transition within universities collaborations and learning (at the individual, team- and organizational level) are essential to jointly develop curricula, staff, policy, and organizational change. A whole institution approach comprising students, teachers, researchers, and support staff is needed. The way in which leadership is arranged throughout the organization appears the key factor influencing transitions, change, and growth as a learning organization.
In this call we seek papers focussing on the variety and nature of leadership in the HE sector, such as transformational leadership, inclusive leadership, democratic leadership, shared leadership, and distributed leadership, and how we can explore, describe, and study the impact of such leadership on the communities. We purposefully aim for a conceptual broad understanding of leadership, unbounded by the existing variety of, pedagogical leadership, scholarly leadership, civic leadership, formal and informal leadership. Expanding our understanding and broadening our lexicon of the full range of modalities of leadership is apt in order to support and navigate the continuous change in the HE landscape.
Overall, which leadership approaches, organizational cultures, structures, and policies are most effective, strongly depends on the agents and contexts. This joint call will establish shared frames of reference among scholars. In each context different variables, such as beliefs, attitudes, skills, affordances, and policy pressure are critical in relation to which leadership approaches will be prevalent.
Through this open call, we seek papers exploring these new challenges of academic leadership. Papers are asked to address questions, related but not limited to:
- What constitutes academic leadership for tackling global challenges in the natural, digital, and social world?
- How do academic leaders build trust with policymakers, researchers, teachers, students, learned societies, and wider communities in polarised times?
- How do universities support academic leaders and demonstrate the higher education sector’s irreplaceable role in addressing global challenges?
Contact Person(s)
Dr. Meng Tian (University of Birmingham, UK); Network 26; m.tian(at)bham.ac.uk
Prof. Roeland van der Rijst (Leiden University, The Netherlands); Network 22; rrijst(at)iclon.leidenuniv.nl
References
Beresford-Dey, M., Howden, S., & Martindale, L. (2024). Complexity Leadership Theory and its application in higher education: using duoethnography to explore enabling leadership during a time of uncertainty. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603124.2024.2361667
Kusters, M., Rushton, E. A. C., de Vetten, A., Admiraal, W., & van der Rijst, R. M. (2025). Teacher agency in universities: Exploring underlying beliefs and agentic orientations when navigating university teaching practices. Teaching in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2025.2562584
Macfarlane, B. (2011). The Morphing of Academic Practice: Unbundling and the Rise of the Para-academic. Higher Education Quarterly, 65(1), 59-73. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2010.00467.x
Rumiantsev, T. W., Admiraal, W. F., & van der Rijst, R.M. (2020). Conservatoire leaders’ observations and perceptions on curriculum reform. British Journal of Music Education, 37(1), 29-41. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265051719000214
Taal, E., Celik, S. & van der Rijst (2025). Inclusive leadership in higher education: a research proposal. Interuniversity centre for educational research, Roterdam.
Tian, M., & Nutbrown, G. (2021). Retheorising distributed leadership through epistemic injustice. Educational Management Administration & Leadership.https://doi.org/10.1177/17411432211022776
van Winkel, M. A., van der Rijst, R. M., Poell, R., & van Driel, J. H. (2018). Identities of research-active academics in new universities: Towards a complete academic profession cross-cutting different worlds of practice. Journal of Further & Higher Education, 42(4), 539-555. http://doi.org/10.1080/0309877X.2017.1301407