Leadership in higher education, towards alternative constructs of administration, organization, and knowledge

grantor: University of TorontoLeadership evokes ambivalence. As a term, as a human activity, and as a social practice, leadership is familiar yet imposing; it is sought after but regarded apprehensively; it inspires admiration while eliciting misgivings; it is, in short, equally winsome and worrisome. Given the aspirations of democracy and egalitarianism integral to the Occidental worldview, our consternation about leadership and leaders seems essentially irresolvable. Within the context of education, the ambivalence surrounding leadership is heightened. In the school, the college, and the university, where a professional collegiality has shaped practices peculiar to such organizations, "educational leadership" and the administrative mastery it implies can seem oxymoronic, if not simply illusory. Yet calls for renewed leadership as a crucial element of educational improvement continue unabated. This dissertation is an attempt to make leadership and the paradoxes it evinces comprehensible. The form of leadership examined is that which is implicit in the administration of educational institutions. The institutions, in this case, are contemporary Canadian universities, and the administrative practice is the university presidency. The underlying premise is that leadership and the organizations in which it is actualized are social constructs, as is the knowledge we may have of each. The argument made is that our established vocabularies may needlessly and unhelpfully limit the kind of conversation we might have about administration, organization, and knowledge, and, therefore, that these vocabularies need revision, and, perhaps, replacement. The pragmatic recognition that knowledge is made narratively from vocabularies imbued with cultural and historical contingencies, contextualizes the conversations with five practicing university presidents that are the primary data for this study. The information collected through interviews and questionnaires and the hermeneutic context of its appreciation make possible broader speculation about the nature of leadership as an inescapably moral praxis, and of administration as an ambivalent cipher for the control of individual and organization. This speculation inevitably speaks to the prospects of our cultural moment and to the modernist preoccupation with mastery, that, as I argue, drives this moment forward.Ed.D