It is argued in this paper that university governance should be guided by three principles – the principles of collegiality, respect for truth, and efficiency.
The task of university leaders should be to stimulate, motivate and assist the academic community to develop, using these three principles, in a mode of management, here called “reflective management”, that differs in important ways from the management modes that are thought suitable for business firms and many types of non-academic institutions. Academic leadership is to be realized in the spirit of participatory governance, taking into account the governing structure of modern universities that divides schematically into an academic senate, a governing board, and a management team (which may have different names in different institutions). An effective university leader will act as a “mediator”, engaging the university community in the formation of a common vision built around the principal academic missions of (1) research, (2) education of the individual student, and (3) service to the institution’s home community. In the spirit of reflective management, a university leader will insist that academic activity be devoted to the acquisition, preservation and transmission of the sort of knowledge that has been developed by means of scientific and scholarly thought and practice, from Medieval times to the present.
Call for Leadership and Governance through Reflective Management
