Leadership and Management Strategies for Creating Agile Universities

The global higher education sector has changed dramatically due to the COVID-19 pandemic, presenting universities with unprecedented challenges. This book critically reflects on the challenges faced by higher education and the sector, explores how different universities have addressed them, and looks forward to the future of higher education. It examines the role of leadership, crisis management planning, and competencies required for future university leaders, and highlights the opportunities for transformation and reshaping. The target audience includes policymakers, leaders, governors, senior decision-makers, researchers, and scholars.

\n Format: Hardback
\n Length: 300 pages
\n Publication date: 15 November 2021
\n Publisher: IGI Global
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The global higher education sector has undergone a significant transformation in recent months, with universities facing unprecedented challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many institutions 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, and a new fear emerging as a new reality dawns each day.

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 have faced during the pandemic, and the associated projected socio-economic impact yet to be felt. How different universities have addressed the challenges and learned 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 the challenges of the future. This will involve exploring innovative approaches to teaching and learning, such as online and hybrid learning, as well as developing new models of collaboration and engagement between universities, industry, and society.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented universities with a unique set of challenges, but it has also provided an opportunity to rethink the sector and develop new strategies for success. By critically reflecting on the past and looking forward, the higher education sector can position itself to thrive in the changing world of the 21st century.

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ISBN-13: 9781799882138\n \n