Academic leadership and its discontents: cosmopolitan perspectives

This chapter argues that academic leadership is one of the most hazy and confusing topics in higher education and is consistently posited as the supposed panacea for all of higher education ills. In an opening move, the chapter draws from Trow (1985) to help disentangle the various strands of the symbolic, political, managerial and academic that inhere in the term. Discussion then positions academic leadership within the global and local contexts, to demonstrate how it has become the ‘new planetary vulgate’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2001) in its endorsement of the pernicious imperialism of competition, choice, self-responsibilization and the supremacy of the market. The chapter concludes by proffering critical cosmopolitanism, with its interconnected dimensions of self, other and the world, as a possible basis for a more generous and convivial way of conceiving academic leadership – one that has at its core the capacity to ‘investigate ... the contradictions, dilemmas and unseen side-effects’ (Beck, 2006) of the way higher education is currently being misconstrued.