Leadership in administration does not operate in a vacuum. Every decision comes with consequences for those tasked to make them, and foreseen career consequences, which often materialize during performance evaluations, may support or constrain administrators' leadership. This article explores how and why administrators factor in foreseen…

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…

There is a growing body of literature on the roles that deans play in challenging times; however, what is often missing are deans' own voices as they reflect on their experiences trying to manage the dilemmas and crises inherent in their work. This is particularly true of the past few years when deans have managed unprecedented levels of…

Despite increasing calls for systemic change in the Canadian higher education sector, Indigenous leaders continue to be under-represented, under-funded, and overworked. This qualitative study investigates the purview of senior Indigenous leaders within Canadian higher education, drawing on interviews conducted with four senior Indigenous leaders…

Academic operations in higher education are essential to improving learner outcomes and helping them pursue academic and professional goals. These operations encompass policy, practice, technology and human resources. The purpose of operational efficiency in higher education is to achieve objectives with the fewest resources possible. The goal is…

This narrative inquiry explores three Chinese university leaders' intercultural competence as a key dimension of their leadership that overseas leadership development programmes enabled them to develop. The leaders visited three different countries -- namely, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada -- storied their experiences in the…

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…

The Action Research Study reviews the 2021 Auditor General Report, which provides insight into the areas of improvement required by the Ministry of Colleges and Universities (MCU) in Ontario. In the Report, it is noted that there is concern regarding the MCU's practices to ensure that Private Career Colleges (PCCs) are operating in compliance with…

"Crossing over to the dark side" is a popular reference to someone's decision to leave the supposed "good, pure, and honest" side of something to go to its "bad, evil, and suspicious" side. This idiom is typically used when an administrator moves into a faculty position or vice versa. While there is a plethora of…

As the "Canadian Journal of Higher Education" celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, this article takes the measure of the research published so far on higher education administration and reflects on future work. The study examined the 38 articles on higher education administration published by the "Journal" between 1971 and 2020…

This paper examines how the stated roles and qualifications of Canadian university presidents and provosts have evolved over the past thirty years and the growing presence of recruiting firms. The study analysed 153 job advertisements published by 22 universities between 1987 and 2017. Roles were categorized according to aspects of organizational…

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…

Teaching quality assurance has become a common concern and a common pursuit for institutions of higher learning around the world. This paper takes teaching quality as a governance issue in higher education, as different governance systems entail different approaches to quality assurance. Through a detailed examination of the Chinese system in…

This article investigates whether the level of academics' societal engagement (ASE) is higher or lower at universities with leading research university (LRU) status compared with institutions at lower status levels within vertically stratified systems. In a theory-based purposeful sampling, we studied the correlation of LRU-status and ASE in…

The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 started a crisis in higher education worldwide, as postsecondary institutions struggled to quickly manage many complex and novel challenges at once to maintain operations. Using a hermeneutic phenomenological research method, the lived experience of 15 administrators in the Ontario college system…