Leadership and Management Strategies for Creating Agile Universities

Since COVID-19, global higher education sector has changed dramatically in the past few months and universities are, arguably, facing unprecedented challenges as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Many are struggling to navigate this crisis while maintaining high-quality course delivery, ensuring strong student recruitment numbers and providing clear communication to staff and students. Issues have emerged at an exponential rate and challenges such as the contradictions of globalization, power, environmental crisis, crisis of democracies and welfare systems, technological development, poverty and rampant inequality, crisis of international institutions, crisis of values, each day a new fear emerges as a new reality dawns. Coping with the pandemic has been particularly difficult for universities because they serve a number of different, albeit overlapping, functions. In the first instance, they are educational institutions, where students learn and where staff teach, conduct research and carry out commercial activities. They are also major employers and important drivers of local and regional economies. Finally, some service hospitals, placing them at the forefront of the local healthcare system. The aim of this book is to critically reflect on the challenges that higher education and the higher education sector has faced during the pandemic, and the associated projected socio-economic impact yet to be felt, how different universities have addressed the challenges and learn from what has worked and not worked and speculate what future implications exist for the vision of a new higher education sector in a changing world. A second aim of the book is to look forward and examine how the higher education sector might transform itself to ensure it is more capable of dealing with similar challenges in the future. With challenges there are generally new opportunities, and the book also aims to explore these opportunities and how they might be realised. Leadership is a key theme running through the book examining how university leaders, and policy makers, have dealt with the pandemic and associated socio-economic impact, how robust has been crisis management planning, what has been learned, what competencies, management tools, strategic skills are required for future university leaders and what needs to change in universities to be more agile in the future. The target audience for this edited book is broad, ranging from policymakers, leaders, governors and senior decision makers in higher education to, more generally, researchers and scholars, as well as policy makers, in higher education to learn from the different approaches taken by university leaders, including influencers and visionaries in Higher Education, to cope with the coronavirus pandemic and the opportunities that have arisen to transform and reshape different aspects of higher education through this perfect storm of unprecedented change. Through a combination of experiential and theoretical pieces, the novice reader will benefit from expert knowledge and learn from the experiences of both higher education leaders, researchers and practitioners. Experts will stand to gain from reading the book to stay abreast with the latest developments and trends, and to obtain exposure to diverse perspectives and approaches to handling the coronavirus across a range of local, regional, national, and international settings.