Disciplinary cultures and academic leadership

Abstract

The past 5 years have witnessed a concerted effort to regulate higher education by the government as part of its drive to redress the inequities of the past. One sees the twin problems of co-ordination and control reflected in this effort. From all indications, attention seems to be directed more to quantity of outputs, than to resources and processes with the result that universities appear to have been put in a situation in which they have to show that they are worth government's investment. There is the expectation on them to produce more and better results with ever diminishing resources per student. In the rush to respond positively to state demands, most universities have introduced programme-based degrees in place of discipline-based ones. To guarantee their survival, some universities have had to activate all their powers of innovation to find internal regulatory mechanisms considered suitable to academic work, or ‘invent’ their own models of management compatible with academic values. In the process, disciplinary specialisms and values have been demoted in the ‘order of things’. This paper argues that such a move by the universities is organizationally damaging. Disciplinary cultures and values are very vital in any restructuring of the university. This is because in each discipline, there exists a ‘self-organized’ collective control (regardless of the theoretical, epistemological, methodological and ideological differences) which tends to take quite different forms from that of official regulation at the institutional level of the higher education system.