Anecdotal evidence suggests that there is growing concern about increasing administrative burden within universities around the world. At the same time, the literature explicitly devoted to the issue of administrative burden within universities remains relatively scant. Drawing on various bodies of literature and reflections on the situation at…

University governing bodies, especially academic boards, play a crucial role in policy formation. However, due to the predominance of managerial values over academic values in the policy-making process, a persistent divide exists between policy formulation and implementation. This divide results from the marginalisation of academics and the…

Purpose: The study aims to investigate the state of higher education (HE) leadership research after the intensified focus on teaching and learning (TL) in academia. Design/methodology/approach: The authors clarify the use of key concepts in English-medium empirical journal articles published between 2017 and 2021 by analysing 64 publications…

If centralising university services is regarded as operationally ineffective, why do managerialised universities continue to organise themselves this way? We investigate an occurrence of this paradox at a regional Australian university, where professional staff services were centralised for a period of 7 years. They were separated from academics…

Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) is perceived as important by universities and industry for equipping students with employability skills. This study contributes to the literature by using a methodological approach that visualises the sustained underinvestment in WIL by both universities and industry, which leaves professional staff who administer…

Universities value the provision of opportunities for students to undertake international mobility experiences. Contemporaneously, they often highlight their commitment to social justice through international experiences, though it is not always clear how their educational activities fulfil this commitment. There has been little focus to date on…

COVID-19 has caused a revelation of change across the world. Higher education leaders faced significant challenges during the unprecedented crisis, particularly in the early stage of the pandemic. We examined the University of Sydney's response to the pandemic using key informant interviews with leaders at different levels of the university…

Higher education's focus is shifting to include societal impact alongside academic excellence. While community-engaged scholarship has a long history, many initiatives focus on individual researchers or institutional practices, without accounting for disciplinary and geopolitical contexts. The Community Engagement for Impact (CEFI) Framework and…

Academic middle leaders play a critical role in facilitating the leadership of learning and teaching in universities. Previous research has reported the undervaluing and under-resourcing of these academic middle leadership roles. To promote a greater understanding of academic middle leaders, middle leading and middle leadership of learning and…

Formal Indigenous leadership within Australian universities has expanded significantly in the last decade. Given this advancement, understanding how to integrate Indigenous leadership into existing institutional governance structures is an area that requires investigation. Recognising the need to further examine Indigenous leadership in the higher…

This article emphasises the challenging nature of the leadership role of Faculty of Education Dean in the twenty-first-century university, noting the demands of the managing up, down and out nature of the role. The author argues that leadership expertise is developmental and evolutionary, requiring continual refinement, with experience acting as a…

This paper explores institutional leaders' perceptions of learning and teaching involved in facilitating and assessing Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET) survey instruments across Australian regional universities. It focuses on how they understand the function of SET, strategies used to mitigate bias, and potential residual harm. Through…

Earlier research has not explicitly emphasised the dynamic integration of entrepreneurship imperatives and transformation in developing the entrepreneurial university. The purpose of this research is to examine the linkage between the strategic intents articulated by universities and their corresponding level of entrepreneurship transformation.…

The 1988 Dawkins reforms were designed, at least in part, to encourage public universities to organize themselves as if they were corporate enterprises, in order to create a more efficient and competitive sector that was less reliant on government funding. This paper assesses whether successive policy changes since the 1988 Dawkins reforms have…

This research aims to reveal trends in the research on the training of educational managers published in the most prominent journals of educational management discipline. A total of 219 articles that were indexed by the Scopus database after the year 1965 were included in the bibliometric analysis. The quantitative properties of these articles…