The Cult of Academic Leadership

Abstract

Higher education in the United Kingdom, as in other countries, is being assailed with demands for increased accountability to a variety of stakeholders, particularly with regard to funding, staffing, massification, and relevance of course programmes offered to the future employability of graduates. The author argues that good leadership is needed to bring about these changes; however, what is good leadership? Clearly leadership is not simply management even though it embodies elements of the latter. Above all, a good leader in higher education is one who can induce change through democratic consensus, obtaining very good results from his or her collaborators while maintaining consistently high morale and a feeling of individual accomplishment.