Leading the post-bureaucratic university

This chapter explores how, in order to realize the government’s ambition for effective and responsive universities, the 2003 University Reform prioritized the role of visionary and transformational leaders. In a major break with history, rectors, and their faculty deans and heads of department would be appointed by the governing boards of the universities rather than through internal elections. This chapter examines early recruitment patterns amongst university rectors and, using ethnographic material, explores the challenges these ‘heroic’ individuals encountered in enacting their positions in institutions shaped by a competitive market place for higher education and a growing raft of accountability measures. These figures were not acting alone. Senior management groups emerged as a pervasive but often invisible layer of executive control, further insulating university decision-making from the concerns of academic staff and students, in effect acting on their behalf. This ‘leaderism’ connects individual ambition and motivation, university mission and social purpose, consolidating universities into deep networks of neo-liberal governance in the service of new understandings of the public good.