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In higher education, the creative lead and manage the creative. Higher education’s executives, like their faculty colleagues, often have demonstrated their creativity through scholarship and research in a disciplinary or professional academic specialization. They adapt naturally as leaders and managers to the tenure-based institutional management model designed to catalyze the creative, unfettered pursuit of knowledge development and dissemination and protect it from external political and ideological forces. Unnatural leadership, however, is the expectation today. If traditional academic creativity is not to become its own worst enemy, higher education executives will have to lead and manage in ways that are sometimes counterintuitive in a culture based on shared governance and tenure-based academic freedom. They will have to help the faculty channel some of its creativity into solving today’s pressing institutional performance challenges. How creatively disruptive will higher education leaders have to be if technology is to be applied innovatively to instruction, academic programs, and various support services to improve institutional performance?
Will higher education leaders have to dismantle tenure? No, but they should invoke academic freedom only to defend what it was intended to defend: the politically and ideologically unfettered pursuit of knowledge creation and dissemination within the professor’s scholarly and instructional obligations to the institution and the discipline/profession. Academic freedom should not be invoked, for example, as a reason for rejecting opportunities to make instruction more effective (as measured by learning outcomes that can be publicly reported) and efficient (as measured by direct instructional expenses that can be reported). Nor should academic freedom be allowed to hinder an institution’s migration to more flexible program delivery models giving students the same kind of options enjoyed by customers of other service organizations, such as banks—e.g., a) fewer requirements for real-time interactions in any medium (classroom, office, interactive video, internet); b) a portal-accessible array of customizable online self-service options for matriculating, registering, studying, interacting with teachers and other students, accessing records, paying bills, and so on; c) 24x7x365, toll-free, first-line support services; and d) in-depth expert academic and staff help provided as-needed and as conveniently as possible during business hours by phone, chat session, or in main- or branch-campus centers.
Will higher education leaders have to become technology experts and innovators? No, but they have to ensure that technology is a) well managed and cost-effectively supported by an internal or outsourced central technology unit, and b) innovatively applied, with expert help, to redesign academic and administrative programs and services to improve institutional performance indicators.
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