University leaders’ talk about institutional missions and academic developers’ contributions

Abstract

There are increasing external pressures on 21st-century universities to be engines of economic recovery and growth. In this rapidly altering landscape, how university senior leaders articulate the purpose of university education and the contribution of academic developers to fulfil these education purposes is a matter of empirical interest. Senior leaders and academic developers have particular responsibilities since they impact educational quality at an institutional level. Senior leaders are responsible for orienting their institutions, giving direction to colleagues in the process, while their implicit leadership theories animate effort and interactions. Academic developers are employed to provide educational programmes for academics to develop their pedagogical competence, and are increasingly deployed by university leaders to implement new quality assurance systems. Such responsibilities strongly suggest agency and relative autonomy to forge new alliances and collaborative networks where these did not previously exist; they are simultaneously required to be leaders and followers. Consequently, the portfolios of academic developers have expanded exponentially, strategically walking a tightrope between the potentially coercive message of strategic missions and the relative autonomy of academic staff, brokering new horizons of university education in a collegial, collaborative and horizontal manner. The paper captures the dynamics of leading education in four universities: the brokering responsibilities of academic developers.