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The increasing push towards centralisation and bureaucratisation in higher education, further exacerbated by the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, calls for a better understanding of the nature of collegiality in contemporary universities. We address this issue by looking into the necessary conditions and barriers to sustaining a collegiate environment. The empirical focus is on academics, academic leaders and professional support staff at Anonymous Business School (ABS), a department in a large civic UK university. We interviewed 32 participants across the school, ranging from early-career academics to experienced professors and members of department leadership teams. The findings suggest multiple emerging perspectives on collegiality, with features of horizontal collegiality perceived as key to successful academic responses to the crisis. The findings also indicate how sustaining a collegiate environment within the department requires both choice and effort from leadership and from staff, particularly when decision-making is primarily located at the centre of the university. The choice and effort made across different collegiate pockets contribute to the department becoming an ‘island of collegiality’ within the increasingly centralised and bureaucratised university hierarchy. In this sense, the actions of the department leadership to establish supporting mechanisms, and the actions of the staff to, in turn, embrace and build interpersonal relationships and professional identities, are key to sustaining a collegiate environment.

Background: How many higher education researchers are there in the world? How many academic articles are published by researchers each year? This paper aims to answer these two questions by tracking the number of higher education teachers and the number of publications over the past four decades.

Methods: We collected data on the number of higher education institutions and researchers from the United Nations, the World Bank, and the US, China, and UK governments (three countries with the largest number of academic publications in recent years). We used Scopus to obtain the number of publications per year. The growth of higher education researchers and academic publications were characterized using 4-parameter logistic models.

Results: The number of higher education teachers-cum-researchers increased from 4 million in 1980 to 13.1 million in 2018 worldwide. Concurrently, the number of academic publications increased from 0.65 million in 1980 to 3.16 million in 2018 based on data from Scopus. At the country level, the number of academic publications from the USA increased from 0.15 million in 1980 to 0.70 million in 2018, while that from China increased by almost 1,000 times from 629 in 1980 to 0.60 million in 2018.

Conclusions: The number of higher education researchers would reach 13.6 million and they would publish 3.21 million academic articles in 2020, imposing enormous pressure to publishers, peer-reviewers, and people who want to understand emerging scientific development. Additionally, not all academic publications are easily assessable because most articles are behind pay-walls. In addition, unethical research practices including falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, slicing publication, publication in a predatory journal or conference, etc. may hinder scientific and human development.

This chapter delves into the evolving identity of professionals within the field of research management and administration (RMA), examining the shifts in their roles and expectations in the changing landscape in higher education. After the introductory section, Section 2 offers a conceptual framework that emphasises identity as a dynamic process rather than a static concept. This framework sheds light on the changing roles and expectations that define the RMA profession. In Section 3, we explore the contextual backdrop of shifting expectations surrounding RMA roles while stressing the importance of recognizing the multiplicity of identities to comprehend the nuances of the RMA profession. Section 4 analyzes empirical data and explore the diverse pathways that lead individuals into the RMA profession. We uncover that a notable proportion of RMAs possess scientific training and research experience and highlight the complexities surrounding the identity of RMAs with doctoral training (DRMAs). Lastly, Section 5 discusses key observations that yield valuable insights for future research on the evolving professional identity of RMAs. We emphasise that, through self-exploration and introspection, practitioners in the field can contribute to a deeper understanding of their roles and actively shape their professional identity.

Based on a review of professional staff (PS), which includes research managers and administrators, in 54 academic publications, I propose a novel definition for this category of staff: ‘degree holding university employees who are primarily responsible for developing, maintaining and changing the social, digital and physical infrastructures that enable education, research and knowledge exchange’. The proposed definition facilitates the development of new research questions that target the level of the organisational fields of higher education and science, to complement research on the university and individual levels. This view supports the study of the contributions of PS to higher education and science. I anticipate that such a broader focus will help to counter and nuance accounts of ‘administrative bloat’ by focusing on how PS as a group shape and are shaped by the organisational fields of higher education and science, rather than dismissing them as superfluous or parasitic.

This chapter provides first insights into identities and communities of educational staff in one of the largest, multi-campus universities in Italy. This group of managers refers to those supporting teaching and learning in the light of emerging demands from the European strategy for universities which is positioning education at the frontline in today’s higher education institutions (HEIs).

These insights are compared with common issues surveyed among research managers and administrators (RMAs) working in the same as well as in other international HEIs using Evans’ ‘restricted’ and ‘extended’ models of professionalism.

Among findings, educational managers (EM) show awareness of their identity only as ‘professionals’ while RMAs may feel like ‘hybrid’ profiles. Unlike RMAs, EM report not having a strong sense of belonging to one community but feeling like they belong to a plethora of groups. In conclusion, there are no dominant ‘extended’ or ‘restricted’ traits for any of the two groups and they have both these attitudes to a certain extent as the results of this chapter will further explain.

Anyone seeking to influence another is a potential leader. Within higher education, determining what an institution should undertake on sustainability can be daunting. Sustainability leaders face labyrinthine, multifaceted sub-cultures, influencers and viewpoints across staff, students, government, business and alumni all with an opinion on whether, how and in what order of priority sustainability should be taken forward. In this paper we take on this challenge by synthesising and critically evaluating core principles and working models for influencing and leading for sustainability in higher education. We identify a series of eight challenges affecting delivery of sustainability and seek to understand how conceptual models and principles in sustainability decision-making and leadership could address these. We draw on the experience of both authors, in tandem with comments from workshop and leadership training programme participants who attended the Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges (EAUC) Leadership Lab training in the UK, as well as reflections arising in a detailed case study from the University of Edinburgh. We bring key insights from theory and practice for the benefits of individuals or teams seeking to influence and persuade key decision-makers to embrace the sustainability agenda.

This chapter explores the results of an international survey (RAAAP-2) to provide global insight into research management and administration (RMA) as a relatively new field of investigation within the area of higher education management (HEM). Building on that extensive survey, the purpose of this chapter is to investigate qualitatively how and why people become and remain research managers and administrators, focussing primarily on their skills, roles, and career paths.

Findings from the analysis confirm that a career in RMA is rarely an intentional choice and can be described as labyrinthine, which could be even compared and contrasted with a concertine academic career described by Whitchurch et al. (2021). While conclusions confirm the gender implications of the profession, which is overall highly ‘female’; further conclusion sheds light on RMAs across regions and suggests how this varied ecosystem could even undermine the recognition of RMA as a profession.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a framework to achieve sustainable development and fulfilling these Goals will take an unprecedented effort by all sectors in society. Many universities and businesses are using the Goals within their strategies and sustainability reporting. However, this is difficult as there is currently no standard methodology to map the 17 goals, 169 targets and 232 indicators. Work at the University of Leicester has focused on developing a robust methodology to map a higher education institution's (HEI's) research contribution to the Goals. We have integrated this unique methodology into an automated software tool to measure a university's academic contribution to the Goals using mathematical text mining techniques. Our ability to quickly and effectively map institutions' research contributions has boosted our ambitions and efforts to develop software to map the full operations of an HEI or business.

Higher education institutions have undergone a transformation over the past few decades, from loosely coupled systems to more centrally managed organizations. Central to this ongoing development is the increasing competition for resources and reputation, driving higher education institutions to rationalize their structures and practices. In our study, we focused on changes in job advertisements for professorships in Germany from 1990 to 2010. Findings showed that the requirements stipulated by universities for professorial positions have become increasingly differentiated (and measurable) over time. In this context, competitive aspects, such as third-party funding, international orientation, or publications, have particularly come to the fore and grown significantly in importance. We discuss these findings in light of an increasing managerialization of higher education institutions, which has a direct effect on collegiality. We argue that the differentiation of professorial job profiles leads to even more formalized appointment processes and may push collegial governance into the background.