Authentic Academic Leadership

Book excerpt: The book explores how to build an approach to academic leadership based on your own personal values, convictions, and principles. Rather than trying to assert that only certain values (or even virtues) are essential for good leadership, the approach taken is to begin with who you really are, “your true self,” and then to build a leadership framework consistent with that identity that makes your institution or program stronger. We explore why hypocrisy is damaging to any form of leadership, but particularly so in higher education where values of scholarship and research are based on the confidence we have in others’ integrity. As a result, authenticity, even more than such commonly promoted “traits of leaders” as vision, courage, and compassion, becomes the core of effective leadership in the academy today. Through hypothetical case studies and thought experiments, the book challenges administrators to identify a small set of core values that truly define who they are as academic leaders and then to use those values as the basis for a philosophy of leadership that guides them through the turbulent changes occurring in higher education today.