Global University President Leadership

Insights on Higher Education Futures

Hamish Coates, Zheping Xie, Wen Wen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000527827
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Liderazgo en educación

This book unlocks mysteries surrounding university presidents. Presidents have a large and growing influence on world and academic affairs. Yet until now, little has been revealed about how they enact their roles, how they capture motivation and academic energy, and their views on higher education.

This book sheds light on these critical topics, revealing insights from in-depth interviews with presidents of nineteen globally focused universities from thirteen countries. The book presents the interview transcripts and surrounds these with interpretative commentary. Underpinned by leadership theory and framed by analysis, the book provides glimpses into how top leaders think, how presidents manoeuvre through their careers, how leaders form and run productive teams, and opportunities for research and innovation. Common themes and challenges are identified. The presidents reflect on university landscapes, strategic outlooks, the formation of executive teams, online teaching, funding, industry engagement, sustainability, grand challenges, and interdisciplinarity.

This book is for professionals and scholars who are interested in education, universities, public policy, science and humanities, and global affairs.

Part 1 Framing perspectives

1 University president voices

DOI: 10.4324/9781003248286-2

Introduction

While universities may have always had international characteristics, in recent decades, certain universities have emphasized their global perspective and role. Globally focused universities can be characterized by a deeply international vision or perspective, geographic and cultural dispersion, international renown, playing a national flagship role, being research-intensive, and often (though not always) being ‘world-class.’ Mohrman et al. (2008, 5), for instance, identified such institutions as having a “global mission, research intensity, new roles for professors, diversified funding, worldwide recruitment, increasing complexity, new relationships with government and industry, and global collaboration with similar institutions.”

Reviewing the website of any such university reveals a large, complex organization requiring substantial leadership. Enormous value is produced therefore by studying university leadership and leaders. Indeed, much has been written about university leadership and management. Research and commentary have adopted various perspectives, such as internal governance, organizational culture, and gender (e.g. Coates, 2017; Coate et al., 2018; Huang, 2017; Scott et al., 2010) and about presidents’ opinions of universities (Bosetti & Walker, 2010). Yet very little research has sought to reveal the characteristics and work of university presidents. Anglospheric research exists (e.g. ACE, 2007; Bosetti & Walker, 2010; Bryman, 2007; Scott et al., 2008; Shattock, 2013), but there is little research outside this context (e.g. Huang, 2017; Sirat et al., 2012) and even less about presidents from across the world.

This is a notable gap. Indeed it is somewhat strange that relatively little is known about important aspects of global university presidents. There is particular value in studying university presidents given their enormous authority, expertise, and prominence.

To address this lacuna, this book contributes initial insights from a study of the nature, perspectives, and work of globally influential university presidents. The study rests on interviews conducted with a selection of university presidents who have visited Tsinghua University. It presents interviews with nineteen presidents, touching on leadership, Chinese higher education, and global developments. As the 2020 pandemic has shown, these presidents play a hugely important role, not just in their universities or countries but also in the world. This book helps reveal their voices.

Tsinghua University launched the University President Interviews (UPI) project in 2019. This project absorbs the experience and best practices of university leaders, promotes understanding and cooperation with partners, and builds insight into global higher education. By combining minds, experiences, and practices from around the globe, this project plays a role in serving social advancement, intellectual well-being, and international cooperation. The project is a continuation of work launched before Tsinghua’s 2011 centennial. Presidents are keen to engage and contribute to a unique global leadership resource.

It is helpful to provide a little detail on the research approach. As a leading university (ARWU, 2019; Yang et al., 2020), Tsinghua is visited by many people who run global universities. They are typically referred to as ‘presidents,’ ‘rectors,’ ‘vice chancellors,’ or ‘principals.’ As part of the visit preparation, the UPI team requests that the visiting president participates in a one-hour interview. A semi-structured interview schedule is used, which includes around twenty questions about presidents and executive teams, the president’s university, Tsinghua University, Chinese higher education, and global higher education. Not all questions are asked, other questions may arise as the dialogue proceeds, and presidents typically talk associatively, which is encouraged as a means of giving life to the points being made. After signing a consent form, the interviews are conducted in English, recorded, transcribed, and then translated into Chinese. A total of nineteen interviews have been conducted. The bilingual transcripts are returned for review and revision by each president, often multiple times. The proofed data is used in a range of ways. The full transcripts are distributed to Tsinghua’s senior leaders. The transcripts are subjected to qualitative analysis for scholarly research.

Listening to presidents’ voices

There is substantial research and practical value in studying university presidents and their leadership. Such work shifts the study of university presidents out of the secretive ethers and into the zone of scientific research. This research contributes insights that help current presidents understand their peers and their work, can help deepen international engagement and collaboration among top universities, can inform the development of future presidents, and can serve as conceptual and empirical foundations for future international research. Indeed, finding out about global university presidents is becoming more important given the changing political economy of higher education in many countries whereby the locus of power and responsibility is shifting from systems to institutions, emphasizing the work of university leaders (Badillo-Vega et al., 2019; Shattock, 2013). It is particularly the case, of course, that the people presiding over the world’s top universities are operating in ways which might be characterized as ‘post-systemic.’

There is particular value in going beyond received or public information about university presidents and engaging in deep qualitative analysis. Presidents have specific executive and academic authority, rendering distinguishing individual value in these people. Their privileged position gives them unique information and insight. Studying their candid stories in their own voices takes analysis well beyond sanitized information available from university websites or third-party analyses. It also helps move beyond observational studies into leadership traits and characteristics (e.g. Bolden, 2014) and unpack instead the lived experience of presidential leadership. Of course, leadership is always distributed in large research universities; there are limitations with the ‘great man’ [sic] perspectives on leadership, and arguments have even been advanced that formal leadership roles are inflated or redundant (Bolden et al., 2015; Davis & Maldonado, 2014; Hoffman et al., 2011). Such angles, however, do not discount the value generated in exploring the insights of very senior members of the world’s higher education community.

Focus of the interviews

Careful research underpins the choice of interview topics. This research focused on leaders, leadership, university governance, encounters with Chinese higher education, and global developments (Croucher et al., 2019; Liu et al., 2020). The interviews touch on these specific topics:

• The president
• The university leadership team
• The president’s university
• Tsinghua University
• Chinese higher education
• Global higher education

Questions about the president as a person are included based on research which affirms the uniquely important role they play. While leadership in any major university is highly devolved and distributed, presidents’ personal characteristics remain important. Often presidents are selected because of who they are and what they have done. Their personal characteristics are significant. At the same time, presidents often have unique insight into higher education, their universities, and their roles. The interviews then asked presidents how they invest their energy as a leader, how their disciplinary background shapes their leadership, and about key steps into their presidency.

No president leads alone. These days, leadership teams are incredibly important. To get insight into the important but rarely researched role played by leadership teams, presidents were asked how they build and manage such teams; how they manage competing priorities associated with performance, operations, people, and innovation; how they juggle the internal and external; and who controls university financial affairs and university academic affairs.

Of course, presidents have many unique insights into their own universities. Presidents are asked about important university cultures and traditions, distinguishing initiatives and reforms being planned, big institutional challenges, important national contributions, balancing financial and non-financial interests, and innovative and emerging social contributions. Insights on these matters are important. They help prise open the university’s daily life, aspirations, and anxieties and get beneath corporate publications or websites.

The presidents visit Tsinghua University for many reasons, including personal connections, university-level meetings, and broader academic events. Their views on Tsinghua and its nature and future are keenly sought. Presidents are asked what interests them most about Tsinghua, how Tsinghua can best contribute to global higher education, and what challenges are likely to shape Tsinghua’s future. The responses provide important insight into how globally relevant stakeholders view Tsinghua.

The presidents come to Tsinghua with varying histories of visiting and engaging with China. Chinese higher education has developed rapidly in recent decades, and while certain visiting presidents have been actively engaged, others have had far less direct contact. During interviews, they are asked to report their main impressions of, and the big challenges facing, Chinese higher education.

Finally, presidents are asked to report on global higher education, though this topic tends to arise throughout the interviews. They are asked what is distinctive about global universities, about the main contributions of research universities over the next thirty years, about specific reforms to undergraduate education, about best strategies for boosting productivity of university innovation and research, productive changes to doctoral education, and salient characteristics of future leadership.

The timing of these interviews is important and must be clarified to help make sense of the transcripts. Interviews were conducted mostly in the second half of 2019. Of course, 2020 has been the most disrupted period in higher education’s recent history. These interviews thus reveal insights from top university leaders at what may be considered the peak of higher education’s pre-pandemic era. The insights touch on presidents’ concerns and opportunities before the pandemic crisis and serve as a plinth for analyzing contemporary developments and future progress.

Structure of this book

This book presents interview transcripts from university presidents. As background, the next chapter documents important contexts and concepts. Interviews with nineteen presidents are then presented. Each chapter begins with a first section which introduces the president, the university, and the interview. The transcripts are presented, edited to help with readability and to present the most interesting insights.

This book can be read and used in a range of ways. It can be read from start to finish, providing a whirlwind tour of the thoughts and experiences of higher education leaders. Interviews can be read one by one. The book provides a wealth of ‘data’ which can be read to inform a host of subsequent research endeavours.

Converting an interview into a book-ready transcript is not a straightforward task. Thoughts and words manifest differently when presented for the ear rather than the eye. Even highly accomplished public speakers communicate differently when they are talking, especially in the context of a discursive interview which is roaming around complex and creative ideas. While the interviews deployed a reasonably uniform script, the interviewers encouraged the presidents to...