If centralising university services is regarded as operationally ineffective, why do managerialised universities continue to organise themselves this way? We investigate an occurrence of this paradox at a regional Australian university, where professional staff services were centralised for a period of 7 years. They were separated from academics…

The neo-institutional theory indicates the impact of the institutional environment on organizations. This leads to the creation of homogeneous institutional structures, due to the existence of dominant institutional logic. University reforms, embedded in ideas of New Public Management, mean that evolution of the institutional logic associated with…

Advancing diversity efforts in higher education has long been a complicated, nearly impossible political terrain for senior leaders to navigate (Kezar, 2007). Though still politically fraught, institutional and organizational investments reflect the growing institutional responsibility and accountability around DEI work (Havey et al., 2022;…

Most studies of academic inbreeding have focused on assessing its impact on scholarly practices, outputs, and outcomes. Few studies have concentrated on the other possible effects of academic inbreeding. This paper draws on a large number of studies on academic inbreeding to explore how the practice has been conceptualized, how it has emerged, and…

Racism and inequity remain widespread in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), hindering ethnic minority (EM) postgraduate researchers' (PGRs) prospects. A deeper understanding of the experience of EM PGRs and the obstacles they face is needed. This study endeavoured to explore the plurality of EM PGRs' experiences and generate PGR-led…

In this paper, we report on formal semi-structured interviews with seven well-established outdoor education (OE) academics from around the world who have navigated the decline and/or closure of an outdoor education program in their university. The interviews sought to understand the reasons why their once-vibrant program had declined or been…

The paper discusses the leadership and management challenges of a public university in Saudi Arabia from the perspective of academic managers. Based on a series of interviews at one of the regional universities established in the mid-2000s, the paper sheds light on one of those rarely investigated contexts where models of public management are…

The multifaceted influences of coloniality in higher education continue to be explored to reshape and transform spaces that can either reproduce structures of coloniality or bring about decoloniality. The University of Puerto Rico, the central higher learning institution of the archipelago, continues to undergo changes that are influenced by its…

The 2016 U.S. presidential election brought to light longstanding tensions and bigotry across the country that were further exacerbated when Donald Trump won the presidency on November 8th. While college and university leaders have traditionally refrained from commenting on election results, looming concerns of possible campus protests and…

The author discusses "the big picture" of higher education, which pertains to the perpetuation of decreasing civil discourse and increasing challenges in higher education. These may be attributed to several factors including decreased funding, increased mental health crises, heavier workloads, and systemic inequities. Even though major…

Women leaders are frequently treated as one class -- a homogenised group with essentialised skills and competencies in binary relationship to male leaders. We explore how feminist ways of knowing gender and leadership, and circulations of affects, shape women's diverse leadership practices and identities within the neoliberal, and neuroliberal…

Higher education institutions in the Arabian Gulf region today, which have mushroomed and proliferated in the past ten to fifteen years, have been constructing themselves along models of Western universities at the levels of governance, programs, and structure. At the outset of the twenty-first century, universities have globally experienced a…

The current socio-political situation in India has gradually shifted the meaning of leader, power and identity in the Indian higher education system. Normalizing the diverse voices, oppression, concretizing the social categories and policing of education created a crisis of ethics. The majoritarian and populist leadership took the shape of an…

Purpose: Distributed leadership has been reported in the literature as an effective management approach for educational organizations such as institutions of higher education. This study aims to investigate the role of distributed leadership in the promotion of sustainability in an Israeli college of teacher education. Design/methodology/approach:…

Publicly engaged scholarship (PES) has emerged as a powerful force, yet institutional policies and cultures have often inhibited its acceptance in the academy. This article considers the benefits of PES for higher education as well as the obstacles to its enactment. It identifies the college level as a critical site for change and offers a rubric…