Extending the Boundaries, Communicating the Understanding, Transmitting the Culture: Academic Leadership in the Knowledge Society

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Extending the Boundaries, Communicating the
Understanding, Transmitting the Culture Academic
Leadership in the Knowledge Society
Chris Hawkesworth
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a research-intensive university
A place where inquiry is pushed forward, and
discoveries verified and perfected, and rashness
rendered innocuous, and errors exposed, by the
collision of mind with mind, and knowledge with
knowledge
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Ideals to which a University might aspire - Newman

• Raising the intellectual tone of society
• Cultivating the public mind
• Purifying the national taste
• Supplying the true principles to popular
  enthusiasm
• Giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of
  the age
• Facilitating the exercise of political power

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Context
an idea of the University with culture as its
animating principle has defined the Universitys
shape as a modern institution and its
relationship to the nation-state. the move
from philosophy to literary studies entrusted by
the nation-state with the task of reflecting on
cultural identity. From being philosophical,
culture becomes literary.
Bill Readings
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Role of Universities
Universities serve society best when they
concentrate on their essential purpose. It is
only by doing so that we will produce the very
best graduates who will go on to lead and change
society that will challenge orthodoxy and
produce new knowledge that will transform lives
..
Eric Thomas
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Clear Tensions

• widening participation and greater focusing of
  academic excellence
• vocational training and blue skies research
• enhancing the economy and transforming lives
  (production and education)
• scholarship, in less well funded areas, and
  financial sustainability
• full economic costing (taking on more students
  can put you further into debt)
• leadership and management

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Summary
The culture of universities is about the ways we
do things there is an emphasis on thought, on
ideas and intellectual growth, on the value of
peer review as a process through which we all
learn, and a responsibility to foster the values
and priorities of future generations.
Extending the Boundaries, Communicating the
Understanding, Transmitting the Culture Academic
Leadership in the Knowledge Society
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Implications

• Emphasis on core subjects
• Improved standards of good practice
• Development of multi-disciplinary teaching and
  research
• Flexibility to move into new areas, and out of
  old
• Long term development

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Sedimentary Basins
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University Research Themes
Predictive Live Sciences
Cardiovascular Science
Neuroscience
Mechanistic and Structural Biochemistry
Nanoscience and Quantum Information
Place and Space
Bristol Vision
Colonialism
Infection and Immunology
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Research Assessment Exercise

• focus resources
• information on the quality of research
• improve the quality of research
• flexibility in assessing outputs
• management in universities

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Research Pooling - Scotland
strategic collaborations between universities in
disciplinary or multi-disciplinary areas
involving the international quality departments
or individual researchers across Scotland in
physics, chemistry, geo- and environmental
sciences, economics, engineering and life
sciences and medical imaging
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Leadership and Management
The persistent tendency to equate collegial
styles of leadership and management with
ineffectiveness and corporate styles of strong
top-down decision making with effectiveness
misunderstands the cultural attributes of the
university and how to get the best from its
practices. higher education continues to be
characterized by a fundamental separation of work
and its processes from the formal organisational
structures of management.
Smith et al., 2007
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Intellectual Growth
Industry thrives on expansion, universities
thrive on intellectual growth
if you can measure it, you can manage it,
find a way to measure it, so that it can then
be managed
The concern is that things that can be readily
measured shape what universities seek to do.
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University Structure
Decision Making
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University Structure
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University Structure
hire people cleverer than you are, and delegate
more than you think is good for you, Sir Peter
Parker
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Summary

• Information flow
• Differences in language
• Relationship between intellectual leadership and
  management
• Scales at which things are measured
• Evaluation

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Citationsand UniversityLeadership
P-score - presidents individual Lifetime
citation score normalised for discipline
(Goodall, 2006)
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Leadership
academics respond to inspiration, inspiration is
for the most part intellectual, and intellectual
growth (and hence the success of a university)
requires leadership
a delight in what academics do, people who lead
by example, who dreams our dreams better than we
do ourselves
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Time scales
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Time scales
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The Unpredicted Future
Stirred conventional polycrystalline aggregates

• Unstirred
• hierarchical bundling of co-aligned
• single crystal nanofilaments

Crystallization of barium sulfate in the presence
of a block copolymer - Prof. Stephen Mann
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Ways Forward

• core disciplines
• flexible structures for teaching and research
• strong academic leadership
• improved links with government
• better partnerships with industry
• international centres

Extending the Boundaries, Communicating the
Understanding, Transmitting the Culture Academic
Leadership in the Knowledge Society
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Ways Forward

• core disciplines
• flexible structures for teaching and research
• strong academic leadership
• improved links with government
• better partnerships with industry
• international centres

Scales and time scales - economics
and metrics, immediate and long term return
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Summary
intellectual growth requires leadership
.. do not be seduced by the fallacy of
managerial primacy that things that make
management difficult necessarily need to be
removed or reformed. An easily governed
university is not a university at all. LERU
Report, 2008
Universities are about people, appoint the very
best people and encourage them to define the
subjects of the future
sparrows on the wings of eagles