Leadership matters when knowledge production and diffusion is aimed at creating a wiser world. The best and wisest knowledge leadership should come from universities. Universities are the institutions that have the longest history and deepest experience in producing and diffusing knowledge that would make a wiser world. Universities have a public responsibility to provide wise leadership and the fact that current leaders are practicing harmful management is unacceptable.
If you read my earlier blogs you will know that knowledge is fundamentally dependent of social foundations like culture, communication, and effective social relations. Dishonest and self-serving game-playing, which is essentially what Carr is accusing research managers of doing, is selfish, anti-intellectual and anti-social. Carr seems to understand this and therefore wants to stamp it out. The universities should not need to be told how to behave as good citizens in a global knowledge economy and society. The fact that they do need to be told suggests that the national university leadership ranks urgently need to be refreshed. It also suggests that the values of our leaders are still hitched to a now outmoded 20th century dogma of commercialisation, functionalism, micromanagement, economic rationalism, and corporatism.
I have frequently written that universities do and should continue play an important economic role. But I have also been clear that universities need to do much more than this. For a start, universities need to be hubs where creativity and innovation flourish, where risks are gladly taken, and where uncomfortable ideas can grow and challenge taken for granted assumptions. The question is, where will we find the new generation of university leaders who can actually do this, who don’t simply talk about how important these things are while they do the opposite. And how do we encourage the current leaders who earn corporate sized salaries despite what the ministers sees as serious underperformance in knowledge leadership to make room for a new generation.
A good first step is to recreate universities as democratic and collegial intellectual communities. At the same time universities must move to a wisdom model rather than the knowledge-as-commodity model that is in current use. This would also entail using a wise leadership model in all aspects of university work.
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