Intellectual Leadership in Higher Education

Renewing the role of the university professor

Bruce Macfarlane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136729546
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What is 'intellectual leadership' and how might this concept be better understood in the modern university? Drawing on research into the role of full or chair professors, this book argues that it is important to define and reclaim intellectual leadership as a counter-weight to the prevailing managerial culture of higher education. It contends that professors have been converted into narrowly defined knowledge entrepreneurs and often feel excluded or marginalised as leaders by their own universities. To fulfil their role professors need to balance the privileges of academic freedom with the responsibilities of academic duty. They exercise their academic freedom as critics and advocates but they also need to be mentors, guardians, enablers and ambassadors. Four orientations to intellectual leadership are identified: knowledge producer, academic citizen, boundary transgressor and public intellectual. These orientations are illustrated by reference to the careers of professors and show how intellectual leadership can be better understood as a transformational activity. This book tackles the question of what intellectual leadership actually is and analyses the questions most frequently associated with the role of senior academics, including:

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• How can intellectual leadership be distinguished from other forms of leadership and management?

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• How can professors balance their responsibilities both within and beyond the university?

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• How can universities make better use of the expertise of professors as leaders?

It concludes with recommendations for senior institutional managers on how to make more effective use of the expertise and leadership potential of the senior professoriate.

Part 1

Leadership and intellectuals

Chapter 1

Introduction

The leadership crisis

A curious omission

There are lots of books and articles about intellectuals and many others that focus on the meaning of leadership. However, to my knowledge, there are very few that have tried to understand how these terms may be conjoined in a meaningful way. Although intellectual leadership sounds like a nice phrase, it tends to be used as an appeal or an assertion with limited explanation as to what it actually implies in practice. So, what exactly is intellectual leadership? This book sets out to answer this question and others associated with the role of senior academics as intellectual leaders.

My attempt to tackle this subject will draw mainly on my research into the role of university professors, some of which is previously reported elsewhere (Macfarlane, 2011a). By a ‘university professor’ I do not mean everyone holding a substantive role as an academic. I am using the word professor in the more selective sense of those who hold a full professorial title or endowed Chair at a university or other higher education institution. They are essentially the senior faculty members with either the formal or informal responsibility to lead others. Often this expectation is implied rather than stated specifically in a professor’s contract of employment.

It seems strange that there are so few references to professors and intellectual leadership in books about higher education. This does not seem like an odd omission just to me. As others have commented, the professoriate is curiously missing from the scholarly work on academic management and there is no educational theory of leadership linked to the work of professors (Rayner et al., 2010, p. 618). Hence, this is a book about the concept of intellectual leadership linked to gaining a greater understanding of the role of university professors.

Who is an ‘intellectual leader’?

Clearly, university professors are not the only ones who might lay claim to being intellectual leaders. The professorial title alone is just that, a title. Indeed, in the increasingly competitive and individualist world of global higher education being a professor may be seen as little more than a career grade; an affirmation of status and prestige rather than a position carrying additional responsibilities. Professors are, of course, not the only ones who lead. Other academics can also be influential figures but may not, for whatever reason, have been promoted to a full Chair. Moreover, academics are just one, perhaps increasingly marginalized, group of cultural producers in modern society. Others with intellectual influence include journalists, lawyers, government advisors, media commentators and, indeed, anyone prepared to adopt a critical and independent stance and give voice to their analysis of the world through some form of oral or written publication. In 2005 (and again in 2008), Foreign Policy magazine teamed up with Prospect to produce a poll of the world’s top 100 intellectuals (Prospect, 2005). The poll defined an intellectual as someone who has shown distinction in their own field along with the ability to communicate ideas and influence debate outside of it. Many of those listed were from outside academe including religious leaders, politicians and journalists. However, the vast majority still had some former or current connection with academic life.

While the term intellectual tends to be used by people by exception, it is broad-ranging in other ways. Intellectuals may come from many parts of society and are not necessarily holders of high public office or those with conventional academic qualifications. Indeed, a number of writers have argued that the modern academic, increasingly corralled into fragmented sub-disciplines and subject to the conformist pressures of professionalization, is anything but intellectual in orientation (Fuller, 2005). The growth of the internet means that blogging, podcasts and social networking are avenues by which anyone can establish themselves as an authority on a subject and potentially gain a following. The opportunity to be influential may not be open to all but helps to give a voice to many more. In this way the internet has a democratizing effect as a communication tool. Alert academics are also realizing the potential of technology to reach a wider and more global audience for their ideas.

Despite the opportunity for more to engage in public debate, the university, even in its modern form, is an environment from which we might still expect many intellectuals to emerge (Roberts, 2007). Pierre Bourdieu, Germaine Greer and Noam Chomsky, for example, all forged their careers in academia before reaching wider attention as public intellectuals. Furthermore, the (full) professorial title does single out an individual academic as possessing a serious scholarly reputation at the very least. Professors are senior figures within universities who have historically played an influential role in the life of the university, and wider society. It is for this reason that it seems entirely appropriate to mainly focus my attention on this group of individuals. What is the role of the modern university professor? How can their activities and commitments help us to better understand what intellectual leadership means? How can intellectual leadership be reasserted or reestablished? Seeking an answer to these and other questions related to the meaning of intellectual leadership will form the core purpose of this book.

Intellectual leadership is an expression frequently invoked in books, articles and speeches but surprisingly few manage to say much about what it means. It is, obviously, ‘a good thing’ but is too often used as little more than an appealing mantra or hurrah phrase. Worse, intellectual leadership can be used as a slightly pompous or patronizing entreaty to, for example, raise the ‘tone’ of debate or develop a more ‘cultured’ society. This harks back to an elitist idea of culture as promoted by the poet and cultural commentator Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth century (Arnold, 1869).

There have been isolated attempts to define what intellectual leadership means in connection with higher education. J. Patrick Conroy’s book, Intellectual Leadership in Education (Conroy, 2000), for example, offers a guide to the history of Western intellectual traditions rather than an exploration of academic leadership. A recent and more relevant example to my project is a study of the work of deans of education (Wepner et al., 2008). This identified a conceptual model consisting of four leadership dimensions: intellectual, emotional, social and moral. Of the four dimensions, the intellectual was the most frequently used by the deans of education who were the subject of the study. According to this study, the intellectual dimension comprised themes including tolerating ambiguity, the ability to see reality as complex and contradictory, recognizing individual differences, defining problems, making decisions and seeking information (Wepner et al., 2008).

This list of qualities or traits associated with intellectual leadership is indicative of what I would call educated uncertainty rather than certainty. The tolerance of ambiguity demands an ability to understand that reality is a contested and complex concept. While ‘making decisions’ is included in the list, much of the emphasis is on being able to conceptualize and empathize. It is, in other words, far removed from the often macho image of the ‘great leader’. What is notable is that few of these qualities are straightforward or even teachable skills. This is indicative of the familiar assertion that while a leader can be taught certain managerial or technical skills, such as budgeting or recruitment procedures, a manager cannot be taught to lead. The presumption here is that a leader is ‘born’ rather than ‘made’. While this list of qualities pertaining to intellectual leadership is helpful, it does not have anything special to say about leadership in an academic context, with which I am concerned. The qualities identified might equally be found in some business leaders or politicians. My aim is to define intellectual leadership in a way that is more relevant to an academic context as opposed to any context.

Intellectual leadership is clearly about more than a set of functions that any educated individual can be trained to perform. Yet this does not exclude the idea that people can become better leaders through acquiring new skills. I will argue that while someone may have the credentials to be an intellectual leader, partly through the power of their intellect and prior academic achievements, this in itself is not enough. Leadership further demands a care and a concern for others. As such, there are dispositions and skills associated with academic duty that an intellectual leader also needs (see Chapter 8).

Leadership and management

It is also important to say what this book is not about. It is not a book about management in the sense in which this word is commonly used. What I mean by this is that the word management tends to be largely associated with formal roles, where the role holder is often called a manager and has a job description that details responsibilities linked to this expectation. Research studies about leadership in higher education tend to be dominated by this focus (Middlehurst, 2008). In practice, in a higher education context, academic leadership is highly distributed (Bolden et al., 2008). In other words, it can be found anywhere in an organization and much of it is social, tacit and situated in nature. There are rows of books about what it means to be a university or college president and a growing literature about being a head of department (e.g. Knight and Trowler, 2001) or dean (e.g. Bright and Richards, 2001; Harman, 2002) but very little about the informal leadership offered by the professoriate and other academics. This is a critical point.

But where can we start? Even the leadership literature has comparatively little specific to say about intellectual leadership, and it is rarely mentioned even in books that assemble an encyclopaedia of concepts (e.g. Marturano and Gosling, 2008). There is, however, a possible link between intellectual leadership and the concept of transformational leadership. This latter concept is associated with a number of characteristics including charisma, a strong ability to inspire others, stimulating others intellectually and giving people personal attention, or what is described as ‘individualized consideration’ in the leadership jargon (Burns, 1978; Yukl, 2002). These characteristics have been summarized as visioning, challenging, enabling, modelling and encouraging (Kouzes and Posner, 1993). These are things one might also expect to find in an intellectual leader including, hopefully, university professors. Beyond this, I believe that intellectual leadership is further connected to someone being seen to have moral power or authority.

Transformational leadership is normally contrasted with its less glamorous counterpart, transactional leadership. This depends for authority on followers’ acceptance of hierarchy and the deployment of rewards and penalties. Transactional leadership is essentially an economic exchange based on self-interest, whilst transformational leadership is about mutuality of interest. It depends on more than just carrots and sticks to punish and motivate people in other words. Being a transformational leader involves the ability to inspire others and bring about some form of change. In the same way, one might expect academics who are leaders in their field to help to bring about a paradigmatic transformation in the way that knowledge about the world is understood (McGee Banks, 1995). Hence, transformational leadership is possibly the closest cousin to intellectual leadership and might reasonably be applied to the role of professors as leaders (Hogg, 2007).

In exploring further what leadership means in the context of academic life it is useful to draw on Martin Trow’s identification of four dimensions: symbolic, political, managerial and academic (Trow, 2010a). Even though these four dimensions are based on the presumption that the leader is a college or university president or vice chancellor, they provide a means of understanding different elements of what it means to be any kind of leader in a higher education context. Symbolic leadership is the way in which someone can come to represent a particular organization, movement or project. This might not involve their active participation in the day-to-day affairs of leadership but their personality or reputation somehow embodies it. Aung San Suu Kyi became an internationally recognized symbol of the political opposition in Burma whilst kept under house arrest by the military regime there for many years. During the time in which she was detained a series of international honours and awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize, were bestowed on her. The Nobel Peace Prize is perhaps the most well-known international honour, and the publicity generated by the award can have a powerful effect in further bolstering the symbolic leadership of a recipient. In 2010 the Chinese human rights campaigner Liu Xiaobo was the recipient, having been sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2009. Universities often have symbolic heads who mainly undertake ceremonial functions and whose image or fame provides a marketing value. Chancellors of English universities perform this role, for example.

Trow defines political leadership as the ability to deal with the conflicting demands and pressures of different constituencies both within and external to the university. This demands adroitness, persuasion and diplomatic skills in keeping a variety of parties or stakeholders happy whilst still being able to make effective decisions. Managerial leadership, on the other hand, involves financial and budgetary skills, effective control over human and physical resources, and planning for the future. Finally, academic management involves other qualities such as the ability to spot, recruit and give appropriate support to talented individuals in relation to teaching and research. New managerialism (see Chapter 3) has tended to elevate the importance of leadership by managers at the expense of academics. I will argue that it is important to rebalance things a little by reevaluating the role of professors as leaders.

One of the problems with the phrase academic leadership (or academic management) is whether it means the leadership of academics or leadership by academics. It can, of course, refer to both, but often there is some ambiguity as to whether it implies that academics are managing or leading themselves or being led by a professional manager. When I refer to intellectual leadership I am limiting my discussion mainly to the ways in which professors as senior members of the academic profession are performing as leaders often in an informal sense. What I mean by informal is that they are untitled leaders unlike deans or vice chancellors but are nonetheless providing a focal point and enacting behaviours that are central to leadership.

Part of my purpose is to offer some ideas about how the role of professors as leaders might be better understood in response to the dearth of literature on the subject. Another part of the argument of this book is that senior academics have a responsibility to lead and to ‘get their hands dirty’ as leaders rather than standing aloof. The notion that intellectuals should not sully their hands with the responsibilities of leadership is a conceit that deserves to be challenged. As I will argue, intellectual leadership is about duty as well as freedom. However, it is not only incumbent on intellectuals to get involved in leadership. It is also important for universities to recognize that leaders will not be followed (or perhaps even respected) without intellectual credibility or authority. In other words, successful university leadership depends as much upon who you are as on what someone may be able to offer in terms of managerial and other technical skills. Unless someone first possesses an academic and intellectual reputation for their scholarly achievements it is less likely that faculty members will be prepared to follow that person and respect their authority as a formally designated leader.

Research shows that the best university leaders of research-based institutions are scholars rather than administrators (Goodall, 2009). According to this analysis, institutional performance is improved when top scholars are put in charge of universities. This is attributed to the fact that human nature leads people to prioritize things that they are most interested in. For university academics the priority is research. Hence, when you place a researcher in charge of a university they focus on the university’s research performance. This has become the way that elite institutions distinguish themselves from competitors. Other professionals, such as lawyers or medical doctors, are accustomed to being led by their peers. Why should academics be any different?

The crisis of confidence

In some ways the very idea of leadership by professionals is in crisis. A view has taken hold that professionals, especially those working in the public services, cannot be trusted to lead themselves. Instead, the view of recent governments seems to have been that leadership responsibilities need to be hived off to professional managers in the health service, in doctor’s practices and in universities. But what have been the consequences of this thinking? One has been that management roles have lost respect as a result of their professionalization and separation from those undertaking the main professional role in the organization, be they a doctor, a police officer, a teacher or a university academic. This is now acting as a barrier in getting the best academics to take on leadership and management roles. Why would anyone want to undertake a role that garners so little respect? It is not an exaggeration, I believe, to call this a leadership crisis.

In investigating what it means to be an intellectual leader in higher education I have drawn on a variety of primary and secondary sources of evidence. The book is partly based on research conducted for a project funded by the UK Leadership foundation for higher education in 2008 and 2009. This included interviews with university professors from a range of disciplines. It also draws on a larger survey of 233 mainly UK-based professors asked to comment on how they perceived their role as professors and leaders. Finally, the book relies on a collection of obituaries about leading academics as a means of illustrating the concept of intellectual leadership by reference to a wider group of influential academics (see Chapter 9).

Conclusion

In summary, I believe it is an important time to re-evaluate what we mean by intellectual leadership for a number of reasons. First, the university’s role in society is being increasingly challenged as a transmitter, preserver and creator of knowledge. The internet search engine Google is arguably now a more powerful transmitter of knowledge than the university. This does not mean that universities do not have a critical role as knowledge producers, but it does imply that they need to refocus their energies on creativity and criticality as intellectual enterprises. Second, university leadership and management is still equated almost exclusively with the role and responsibilities of those occupying formal management roles such as heads of department, deans, vice presidents and pro vice chancellors, presidents and vice chancellors. Yet this characterization seems out of step with the emphasis in the contemporary literature in thinking about leadership as both informal and distributed. Finally, as participation in higher education has grown on a global basis, there has been a considerable increase of academic faculty as new universities have been formed and old ones expanded.

In this context, there is now a much larger professoriate. In the UK, over 17,000 members of faculty hold a full professorial title (HESA, 2009). What is the role of these senior members of the academic profession? What expectations do universities have of them and how do they see their own role? I will also reflect on how, having better unders...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Series editors’ introduction
• Foreword by Professor Sir David Watson
• Acknowledgements
• PART I. Leadership and intellectuals
• PART II. The entrepreneurial academy
• PART III. Freedom and duty
• PART IV. Reengagement
• Bibliography
• Index