Who's A Colleague? Professionalizing Academic Leadership as a Platform for Redefining Collegiality
Revitalizing Collegiality: Restoring Faculty Authority in Universities
ISBN: 978-1-80455-821-8, eISBN: 978-1-80455-818-8
ISSN: 0733-558X
Publication date: 12 December 2023
Abstract
The study discusses the professionalization of academic leadership in Israel by analyzing and comparing two different training programs: the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s (HUJI) program and the CHE-Rothschild program. The HUJI program began in 2016 to train the professoriate to take charge of leadership positions alongside a separate program for administrative staff, while the CHE-Rothschild program was launched in 2019 to train academic leaders, both professors and administrators from universities and colleges nationwide. The analysis reveals two “ideal types” of collegiality: While Model A (exemplified by the HUJI program) bifurcates between the professoriate and administrative staff, Model B (exemplified by the CHE-Rothschild program) binds administrative and academic staff members through course composition, pedagogy, and content. The study suggests a pattern of redefinition of collegiality in academia: we find that while academic hierarchies are maintained (between academic faculty and administrative staff and between universities and colleges), collegiality in academia is being redefined as extending beyond the boundaries of the professoriate and emphasizing a partnership approach to collegial ties.
Keywords
Citation
Mizrahi-Shtelman, R. and Drori, G.S. (2023), "Who's A Colleague? Professionalizing Academic Leadership as a Platform for Redefining Collegiality", Sahlin, K. and Eriksson-Zetterquist, U. (Ed.) Revitalizing Collegiality: Restoring Faculty Authority in Universities (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 87), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 111-136. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20230000087005
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2024 Ravit Mizrahi-Shtelman and Gili S. Drori
License
These works are published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of these works (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode.
1. Introduction
Referring to its strong faculty-led governance, the HUJI in Israel is jokingly referred to as “the last German University.” Indeed, despite the swell of managerialism in universities worldwide, the governance of the HUJI’s affairs is largely in the hands of the professoriate. For example, while the university president, who must come from among the professoriate, is elected by the university’s Governing Board, the university rector, who serves as the chief leader for academic affairs, is elected by the faculty senate, which is composed of elected professorial delegates. Likewise, heads of academic units – department heads and faculty deans – are each elected by their departmental or faculty peers, and appointments to other leadership roles (vice-deans and vice-rectors, heads of research institutes, and even heads of central committees) require approval by vote of the High Academic Committee. In these various ways, the principle of academic collegial governance, namely primus/prima inter pares (first among equals), remains a strong ethos and is secured in a series of rules and procedures. Nevertheless, in the mid-2010s, the HUJI’s then-President Prof. Menachem Ben-Sasson decided to initiate a leadership program for academic faculty. Although the authority of academic faculty over university governance remained uncontested, the growing complexity of university operations demanded training of the professoriate to take charge of the expanding responsibilities of leadership positions. Organized and led by two faculty members with expertise in management coaching and policy studies, the first-ever professionalization course for the professoriate to be held in Israel was launched in 2016 at the HUJI. After the Head of the Israeli Council of Higher Education (CHE), Prof. Yaffa Zilbershats, was invited to introduce the Israeli higher education system to course participants, she was inspired to start a national program for training academic leaders. Soon thereafter, with generous funding from the Rothschild Foundation, the national CHE-Rothchild initiative of Movilim BaAcademia (Leadership in Academia) was launched in 2019, with a team of professional management coachers at its helm. To date, these two training courses – the HUJI and the CHE-Rothschild courses – remain the only training programs or fora for academic leadership in Israel. Importantly, these two training courses offer very different frameworks for academic leadership: Through their diverging strategies for composition of participants, leadership partners, and scope of course content, the HUJI and the CHE-Rothschild courses for professionalization of academic leaders each offer a unique definition of leadership within a collegial institution and, through it, a unique definition of collegial governance.
Professional leadership training is strongly associated with managerialism. While managerialism has penetrated deeply into organizations of various sectors worldwide, it is still firmly resisted in academia, taken as an offense against academic traditions that reinforce academic definitions of excellence, namely institutional self-governance coupled with independence and authority of the professoriate. On the matter of professionalizing academic leadership, the tension between academic tradition and managerialism is clear: Whereas the ethos of academia is anchored in guild-like training of junior academics by senior academics, with emphasis on disciplinary methods and theories, managerialism requires the acquisition of executive and administrative skills, as well as leadership and organization knowledge. In addition, over and above the content of the training program, discussions about who is eligible to participate in the program raised questions of who is an academic leader and, importantly, who is a colleague. The study at the core of this paper is an analysis of the various programs for academic leadership in Israel since 2016, extracting two models for defining collegiality and governance in contemporary academia.
In the following paper, we investigate professional leadership training in Israeli academia by analyzing and comparing the HUJI and CHE-Rothchild courses. Specifically, we study the composition of participants, course curricula, and the designed relations among course participants and the expected relations among academic leadership. Our analysis reveals two “ideal types” for collegiality. Model A, which is exemplified by the HUJI’s dual professional training programs, bifurcates between the professoriate and administrative staff. Consequently, collegiality is defined and reinforced within each group; namely, professional collegiality among administrative staff is different from professional collegiality among academic faculty. Model B, which is exemplified by the CHE-Rothschild program, binds administrative and academic staff members – through course composition, course pedagogies, and course content – even if it is engineered to reproduce academic hierarchies (between academic and administration, between universities and colleges, and between majority and minority groups). These findings about the emerging professionalization of academic leadership in Israel allow us to argue that whereas the penetration of managerialism into academia is often described as a replacement of collegiality, where the collegial mode of governance is replaced by managerial governance, our study suggests a pattern of redefinition of collegiality regarding leadership and governance of academia. We find that collegiality (at least, regarding academic leadership) has been extended beyond the boundaries of the professoriate, thus redefining who is an academic colleague, and is described as a partnership, thus redefining the nature of collegial ties.
Following a brief discussion of the literature on collegiality, leadership, and governance in academia during the era of rising managerialism, we turn to an empirical investigation, starting with a description of the case of Israelis’ higher education system and emphasizing issues of governance, leadership, and professionalization to contextualize our discussion of collegiality. In this empirical study, we analyze formal training programs of academic leadership in Israel, focusing on the composition, relations, and content of such courses. We conclude with a discussion of academic collegiality in the context of authority, social divides, and professional ethos.
2. Governance, Collegiality, and Academic Leadership
Governance mode is expressed in the structures and procedures for decision-making and, therefore, in the framework for who decides and the sphere of their authority to decide. The tension between traditional academic governance and the encroaching managerialist governance mode is revealed in the definition of who is counted among the team of academic leaders. In other words, the marking of the circle of leadership in academia – who is included or excluded and, importantly, what communities of practice they represent – indicates the definition of the collegium. This triangulates academic governance (the structures and practices institutionalized to enable decision-making and operations), collegiality in academia (community-based arrangement of the institution of science and thus of academic life), and leadership in academia (governed by the ethos of primus/prima inter pares but increasingly professionalized in professoriate training and the inclusion of non-academic managers/administrators in even the closest decision-making circles).
It is widely acknowledged that managerialism has “seeped into every ‘nook and cranny’ of university life” (Deem et al., 2007) worldwide (see Lee & Ramirez, 2023, Vol. 86; Östh Gustafsson, 2023, Vol. 86, for the Swedish context). As its penetration affects other professions (e.g., Rosa & Almeida, 2020, regarding social work; Waldenström et al., 2019, regarding journalism; Wright et al., 2020, regarding nurses) and public-sector agencies (e.g., Christensen & Lægreid, 2010), managerialism in academia transforms modes of operation and administration and challenges professional principals and traditions. Moreover, in academia, managerialism also challenges well-established practices and structures of collegial governance – faculty tenure appointments (Pineda, 2023, Vol. 86) and recruitment (Gerhardt et al., 2023, Vol. 86), research collaborations (Kosmützky & Krücken, 2023, Vol. 86), senate discussions and decisions (Crace et al., 2023, Vol. 87), peer review procedures (Sahlin & Eriksson-Zetterquist, 2023, Vol. 87), and rituals and norms of academic life (Quattrone, 2023; Sahlin & Eriksson-Zetterquist, 2023, Vol. 86). Collegiality in academia can be understood as the idea of academic freedom, a form of professional moral foundations (Boulous Walker, 2019), as a culture of work (Sahlin & Eriksson-Zetterquist, 2016) or as the essence in which the university is understood (Barnes, 2020). At the same time, collegiality can be seen as a structural form. Sahlin and Eriksson-Zetterquist (2016) characterized the structural form as collective decision-making made by representative boards, appointment to leadership positions according to the principle of primus inter pares, and the critical dialogue through peer review of publications, research funding, and promotions (p. 3). The two facets of collegiality, namely the idea of academia and the structural form, are interdependent; the former provides the ideal for collegial structures and practices (Barnes, 2020), hence differentiating the structural meaning of collegiality from managerialism.
Managerialism in academia challenges well-established practices and structures of collegial governance. For example, academic collegiality determines that academic faculty are elected to hold positions of academic leadership, and that they steer university administration alongside their scientific endeavors (Sahlin & Eriksson-Zetterquist, 2016), and managerialism is defined by management’s discrete function within the university (Shepherd, 2018). While academic collegiality determines that assemblies of the faculty, such as the university senate, are the prime decision-making bodies and that decisions are achieved through seminar-like deliberation of the collegium (Sahlin & Eriksson-Zetterquist, 2016), managerialism is defined by managers having the right to manage (see Crace et al.,2023, Vol. 87; Shepherd, 2018). Whereas academic collegiality is a “form of governance that relies on scientific norms” (Sahlin & Eriksson-Zetterquist, 2016, p. 9), managerialism defines management as generic and universally applicable, as well as rational and value-neutral (Shepherd, 2018). Last, academic collegiality accentuates collegial deliberation (conflict management), and a spirit of collaboration, taking “pulling one’s weight” in collective tasks as the “fourth pillar” of academic evaluation (Hatfield, 2006); it is the basis for the political work of organized professionalism that constitutes professional ethos within academia (see Denis et al., 2019; Sahlin & Eriksson-Zetterquist, 2023, Vol. 87). However, managerialism is defined by “a shift from inputs and processes to outputs and outcomes” and by “more measurement and quantification of outputs” as performance indicators (see Harroche & Musselin, 2023, Vol. 87; Shepherd, 2018). In these various ways, managerialism’s penetration into academia has quaked academic traditions to their core, also regarding the professional or vocational training of academic leaders.
3. Professionalization of Academic Leadership
Among the academic traditions shaken by the penetration of managerialism is that of vocational training: Whereas the ethos of academia is anchored in guild-like training of junior academics by senior academics, with emphasis on disciplinary methods and theories, managerialism requires the knowledge of administration and organization. This means that the traditional academic mode, which trains academics along the stepped process between student, lecturer, and professor, reflects the training process within the medieval guilds between apprentice, journeyman, and master. This also means that there is no formal step or stage in the process of academic training that formally prepares one for taking a leadership role in academia. Rather, if anything, junior academics come to be involved in decision-making within their close academic department (department-level roles such as serving as academic advisor to a BA cohort of the department or as a member of the departmental curriculum committee), and the scope of decisions they are authorized to make expands along their academic promotion to more senior ranks (gradually becoming head of departmental committees; then head of faculty-level committees or of disciplinary departments; then deans, vice-rector, or vice-president and rector or president). In this way, academic rank traces both scientific excellence and recognition, as well as governing authority. Importantly, leaders of such guild-like associations, also in traditional academia (a) are elected by their peers, with the electorate tracing the authority span of the elected academic leader, and (b) do not necessarily have to follow a prescribed leadership “promotion” with an expected sequence of positions. Therefore, elected leaders not only go through the stepped process of professional promotion and leadership experience, but they also must be increasingly active and public within their community of peers to be elected to high-ranking decision-making positions. This coincides with the traditional primus/prima inter pares: Academic leadership is from among the professoriate, such positions are obtained with support of the relevant professoriate community, and no formal training is required for such leadership roles because the assumption is that the professor has already experienced leadership as a member of the community.
Managerialism, on the other hand, allocates decision-making authority based on knowledge and experience of administrative skills, namely of strategic planning, systemic analysis, budgeting and finance, human resource management and negotiation, and alike. These managerialist considerations are not specific to any type of organization or sector, being defined as adaptable to specific settings and conditions. Because managerialist knowledge is general, so is the occupational training for it: Even in academic organizations, managers and administrators are appointed and promoted according to their success in executing managerial tasks.
These two contrasting modes of professionalization processes delineate two contrasting models of who is included in the circle of decision-makers and thus who is considered a colleague. According to the traditional guild-like academic mode of governance and professionalization, only professors are considered colleagues, whereas the managerialist mode of governance and professionalization considers only administrators and managers as colleagues. This bifurcation of governance–professionalism–collegiality modes is evident in, for example, Glynn’s (2000) study of the 1996 strike at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. The strike revealed the contestation between two professional logics, namely between the “elements of economic utility (where financial return symbolizes success) and normative ideology (where artistic creativity and excellence symbolize success)” (Glynn, 2000, p. 295). The conflict came to the surface during the strike as identity claims of two professional groups – professional managers and professional musicians. Similarly, Jandrić et al. (2023, Vol. 87) described how UK higher education was subjected to tensions between leaders in different positions due to disruptions caused by COVID-19. Now more than ever, such contestations between professional logics or groups, and therefore both models of governance–professionalism–collegiality, are influenced by the discourse of diversity in the workplace (Dobbin & Kalev, 2022); in academia, such discussions of diversity also rotate around corrective admissions and recruitment (Long, 2007). This discourse of diversity and inclusion challenges all sorts of social boundaries. By extension, this discourse also blurs the hierarchical distinction among two professional groups in academia, namely professors and managers. One way to manage this tension is the demand for professionalization of academic leadership, namely the call for professoriate to be trained in management and for managers to be introduced to academia.
Seeing the swell of professionalization in professional organizations such as academia, we seek to understand how the emergence of training programs for academic leadership reflects and defines academic collegiality. Specifically, who is included in the professionalized vision of an academic leader? What is the envisioned mode of relations among the trained academic leaders? Importantly for discussions about this complication, how does this definition of professionalized academic leadership speak to the notion of academic collegiality? We investigate the characteristics of various professionalization programs for academic leadership held in Israel since 2016, seeking an answer to the following general question: How does the swell of managerialism and professionalization of academic leadership affect who is a colleague and the nature of collegiality?
4. Israeli Academia: Test Case for Professionalizing Collegiality
Israeli academia was founded in the early 20th century in the spirit of Zionist revival and with strong principles of political independence, institutional autonomy, and academic freedom. These principles, while imprinted in structures and practices, especially in Israel’s universities but also in its more recently founded colleges, are coming under assault, especially lately. The penetration of managerialism into Israeli academia, and specifically the calls for professionalizing academic leadership, are among such challenges to the traditional principles. Seeing the juxtaposition between such a strong academic legacy, also regarding governance and collegiality, and a more recent wave of managerialism sets Israeli academia as a test case for the study of academic governance, collegiality, and professionalization.
4.1. An Overview of Israeli Academia
The first academic organizations were founded in British-Mandate Palestine/The Land of Israel in the mid-1920s, some two decades before the founding of the State of Israel. Today, a short century later, Israeli academia is a sizeable, mature, and vibrant field. At present, the Israeli higher education system comprises 60 higher education organizations accredited by the CHE, enrolling some 340,000 students (in 2021–2022). The field comprises 10 universities (eight public research universities, one public open university, and one private university), 29 academic colleges (20 public and nine private), and 21 teacher colleges (all public). For “science in a small country” (Ben David, 2012), Israeli academia is very successful: For example, Israeli academia is third among European countries in share of ERC grants and three of Israel’s universities are consistently ranked among the Shanghai list’s top 100.
Israeli academia is on par with global excellence: By setting global standards of excellence (in publications and research funding) and encouraging internationalization (in faculty recruitment and student exchange), Israeli academia is oriented toward global higher education; concurrently, regulation of Israeli academia is centralized in the hands of the CHE, and almost all academic instruction is in Hebrew. Despite the overwhelming orientation of Israeli academia toward the American model, the first academic institutions in pre-State Israel were designed to emulate the then-leading Germanic tradition: The Technion was founded in 1924 as a polytechnic, the HUJI was founded in 1925 as a humanist university, and Sieff Institute, later renamed the Weizmann Institute, was founded in 1933 as an institute for advanced scientific research. These academic organizations were also heavily imprinted by the European tradition of academic governance, with secure mechanisms for collegial decision-making and concentrated control in the hands of the professoriate. After the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, this tradition was anchored in state laws, specifically in the 1958 Higher Education Law that secured autonomy (and monopoly) for universities and freedom for individual academics.
Over the years, this format of collegial governance was increasingly challenged, reaching systemic rapture in the 1990s. First, the 1993 legal reform allowed for the opening of academic colleges, shattering the monopoly held until then by universities and forming the impetus for a series of reforms and struggles in Israeli higher education. Second, the 1997 convening of the Meltz Commission’s directive was to assess the structural and administrative features of Israeli higher education with a goal to change the line of authority within the governance of higher education organizations in Israel, calling for managerial authority to take precedence over academic authority. Both these circumstances paved the way for managerialization of higher education organizations in Israel: They allowed for dramatic expansion of the national higher education system, resulted in increased complexity of the system as a whole and of the administration of each higher education organization, and affirmed the critical importance of administrative capacity. While most of the Meltz recommendations were not equally implemented, mostly because of the great variety and complexity of governance arrangements across the various higher education organizations, all Israeli higher education organizations were placed under an intense, strict new public management regime involving more measurement and quantification of performance, added accounting and reporting, and greater emphasis on service delivery. This shift expedited Israeli higher education organizations’ move toward managerialist reforms in each such organization and across the field as a whole.
Yet, while most of the Meltz Commission recommendations centered on governance and administrative reform, the commission did not address the professionalization of academic leadership of higher education organizations. Rather, the professionalism of university governance is mentioned only twice, and, on both occasions, it is noted indirectly. First, professionalism is indirectly referenced in regard to the Board of Governors, noting that although it is the prime steering body of higher education organizations, it is composed of people who mostly have no experience or training in management and administration of complex organizations (Meltz, 2002, p. 5). The second mention of professionalization of academic leadership comes, oddly enough, in the response of the National Students Union to the Report, which is recorded by law as a part of the Report. Specifically, Point #5 of the National Students Union’s official response (Meltz, 2002, p. 16), which officially calls for adopting the recommendations in full, also states,
Training of Faculty Deans and heads of academic units: The Union supports the proposal that candidates for Deanship would undergo management training prior to taking office and as a part of their work and calls for applying such guidelines also for other offices.
Seeing the centrality of professional administration to managerialist reforms and New Public Management initiatives, also in higher education (see Shepherd, 2018, pp. 1673–1675), it is most curious that the professionalization of higher education organizations’ academic and administrative leadership is absent from the initial (1990s–2000s) managerialist push into Israeli academia.
4.2. Leadership Programs in Israeli Academia
The issue of formal training of academic leadership surfaced only in 2015; until then, it concerned insufficient preparedness on the part of department chairs and deans, even of rectors and university presidents, which was whispered about but not included in strategic discussions. Interviews and e-mail records analyzed for this study reveal that communications about the need for such a course began at the HUJI in 2015, under the leadership and at the behest of then-HUJI President Professor Menachem Ben-Sasson. The initial spur came from observing training programs for civil servants in other countries. The adaptation of such programs to academia in Israel seemed sensible, considering governmental ministries’ growing hostility toward academia for lagging in terms of modernizing its administration. Ensuing discussions highlighted several demands for the professionalization of academic leadership, including the intensifying complexity of higher education organizations and the mounting national and global challenges that such organizations face. Mentioned in such discussions, even if only implicitly, is the gap between traditional academic modes of recruitment for leadership positions and the modern-day duties of the heads of academic units. From the start, these discussions involved power struggles within the university. As one of the program organizers states:
The university’s president wanted to choose the program participants, but the faculty deans protested that they were not consulted. It was on the verge of a rebellion against the program. The debates revolved around questions such as who will participate in the program? What are the criteria according to which the participants will be selected, and are participants willing to commit to this course? (Interviewee #1, HUJI program organizer)
Following such discussions and debates, the decision about nomination of course participants was in the hands of the president, at the advisement of deans.
Consequently, the first formal leadership program for academic faculty was launched at the HUJI in 2016. It included 36 participants from various faculties (see Table 2). The drive to implement an adapted leadership program for the administrative staff, which convened in 2018, came due to the success of the first university program for the professoriate. The objectives of this admin-focused program are deeply rooted in ideas borrowed from management training. Specifically, the course curriculum was designed around three thematic pillars: strategic thinking, managerial dilemmas, and the idea of the university as an organization. As noted earlier, this pair of training courses for academic leadership, albeit separated for the professoriate and for administrative staff, were groundbreaking in immersing the notion of academic leadership in the discourse of professional development, skills and capacities, and systemic–contextual knowledge.
This HUJI initiative inspired the 2019 launch of the first national program, organized and sponsored through a partnership of the CHE and the Rothschild Foundation, which was then formalized in an ad hoc program within CHE titled Movilim BaAcademia. The mission set for this program and displayed on its website and print publications is “to establish and nurture a strong network of senior members of Universities, Colleges and research centers, capable of coping with the transformations that will ensure continuing academic excellence, innovation and social impact.”1 The intent for Movilim BaAcademia was to meet a dire need for national professional capacity in academia, recognizing that leadership and management training is not a part of the professional development of academic faculty and that professionalization is not a priority or prerequisite for being elected or nominated for leadership positions. With such aspirations, Movilim BaAcademia was directed to chart a new path for leadership in academia: In establishing the message of change-oriented leadership, the CHE-Rothchild program follows (O’Reily & Reed, 2010) definition of “leaderism” as a discourse and practices about leading change in public services. Importantly, like in the HUJI program, course participants in the national CHE-Rothschild program are also nominated, rather than selected through an application or election process. Here, too, presidents and rectors of higher education organizations propose the names of participants, who are then interviewed by a course team. The organizers frame this interview as an opportunity to coordinate expectations, and indeed, except for one decline by a prospective participant, the interview acts as a selection mechanism.
As detailed in the following analysis in this paper, the six courses share several core features but are nevertheless very different in their operationalization (curricular and pedagogical) of such principles. The aim of the first HUJI course, which targeted leaders from among the professoriate, is described as “the development of academic leadership among the senior academic faculty for the management of the university, while emphasizing policymaking, process initialization, and the molding of academic management” (excerpt from the “rationale” document for HUJI-Academic A). The aim of the CHE-Rothschild Foundation program is
the creation of a network of change leaders from the academic institutions in Israel that shall act to develop an excellent and innovative system that contributes to basic research, applied research, quality of teaching, and the progress of society and the economy. (Excerpt from the online platform, launched in January 2021, for the CHE-Rothschild program)
Seeing that the emergence of these training programs formally accentuates professional training and adds “leadership” as an ideal and a set of practices to the expressions of managerialism in Israeli academia, we seek to investigate the characteristics of the various professionalization programs for academic leadership held in Israel since 2016 and how they define who is an academic colleague and the nature of academic collegiality. We consider the Israeli training programs as encapsulating a certain understanding of academic leadership under managerialism and as sites for socialization into this new academic code of conduct and governance. Additionally, important to the theme of collegiality, such governance and leadership schemes respond to (and, we hypothesize, reshape) the traditional guild-like definition of academic collegiality.
5. Method and Data
We investigate the characteristics of training programs for academic leadership held in Israel since 2016, extracting each program’s envisioned “ideal type” of academic collegiality. We focus specifically on two programs: the HUJI’s pioneering programs and the CHE-Rothschild Foundation’s national program – not only because of their constitutive role in the notion of academic leadership in Israel but also because they represent two vastly different visions of collegiality. Of these programs, we analyze only courses that were fully completed, which means we exclude all courses currently in-session.2 Therefore, this list of programs is exhaustive: Until the end of 2022, no other 60 Israeli higher education organizations held a formal training program for academic leadership.
Programs for Training of Academic Leadership in Israel.
| Program | Course, Year | No. of Participants | Instructional and Organizing Team |
|---|---|---|---|
| HUJI | Academic 2016–2017 | 36 |
|
| Admin 2018 | 27 | ||
| CHE-Rothschild |
|
30 |
|
|
31 | ||
|
34 | ||
|
33 |
This list of training programs includes six courses dedicated to the training of academic and administrative leadership of Higher education organizations in Israel: Two courses organized by and for the academic professoriate and administrative staff of the HUJI of Jerusalem and four multi-institutional courses organized by Academic Leadership, an ad hoc agency created through a partnership between CHE and the Rothschild Foundation. Table 1 lists the two programs, the courses they offered and the basic characteristics of these six training courses for academic leadership.
We analyze two sets of information for each of the programs and courses. First, we analyze the composition of course participants to identify the boundaries of the collegial group. We identify participants’ staff type (academic or administrative), home unit (by discipline or HQ), and membership in marginalized groups (by gender and Palestinian/Arab). The list of participants in each course was either given on demand (from the HUJI) or publicly available (on the CHE-Rothschild website). Second, we analyze how the composition constructs relations between the various academic groups within the university or the Israeli higher education system. This information is compiled from multiple sources: Interviews with course lead instructors, review of course-curricular material, and participation in the courses. Overall, we take such characteristics to mark the contours of the collegial group in academia, defining who is considered a colleague and what the expected ties among these academic colleagues are.
6. Findings
Given the pressure on professionalization and leadership-management of higher education organizations in Israel, our aim in this study is to identify the definition and configuration of academic collegiality. Analyzing a sample of the constitutive programs for academic leadership, we describe academic collegiality along four dimensions: (1) Coined phrases that identify the contemporary definition of academic collegiality; (2) composition of the group of program participants, which identifies the social and organizational profile of the academic colleague; (3) the relations among the program participants, which identifies the mode of collegial ties; and (4) the curricular content of the programs, which identifies the thematic and topical emphasis that articulate the notion of academic leadership, governance, and collegiality.
6.1. Labeling Academic Leadership and Collegiality
Academic leadership in Israel marked its uniqueness by naming and creating a new Hebrew-language word to describe this form. While the terms “Movilim” or “Movilut” are indeed the exact translation of the English-language term “leadership,” the word is not listed as a Hebrew-language term by the Academy for the Hebrew Language. Instead, the term is a newly coined Hebrew-language word. Therefore, this uncommon yet commonsensical term accentuates its differentiation from authority, command, charisma, management, or administration.
The first use of the term was used in the HUJI’s 2016 program for the professoriate, naming it The President’s Program for Academic Leadership (תוכנית הנשיא למובילות אקדמית, Tokhnit HaNassi Le’Movilut Academit). This newly coined term was subsequently carried forward to the CHE-Rothschild program, starting in 2019: This national program is named Leaders in Academia (Movilim BaAcademia; (מוביליםבאקדמיה). The name for this national program was designed to be sensitive to the notion that this new form of leadership is not inherently “academic” but rather “in” academia. The national program’s name does not account for gender sensitivity: It uses the masculine form, the default form, in all formal and legal communication but is also gendered by definition. Significantly the 2018 HUJI course for an administrative term is titled Managerial Reserves (עתודה מנהלית; Atuda Minhalit), which does not employ the newly coined term that speaks to leadership or its uniqueness in the academic sphere.
Through a naming process, contemporary academic leadership in Israel identified itself as distinct from management or administration and traditional or guild-like forms of collegiality. The new term creates a linguistic rapture for Hebrew speakers while establishing an obvious link with the English-language term and therefore harnesses cosmopolitanism’s connotations to serve as a basis for legitimacy. Moreover, the newly coined term tilts the definition of “leadership” away from charisma (מנהיגות, Manhigut) or establishment (הנהגה, Hanhaga) and toward the iconic academic phrase of primus inter pares, recalling the imagery of one stepping ahead of the group that they lead. In these ways, the invention of the new term and its Hebrew-language connotations serve as a mechanism for marking distinction and disruption, a marker for the redefinition of collegiality. We therefore proceed in the following sections to the courses that are labeled with this new Hebrew term to reveal the meaning that is poured into the new term and that gives the contours for such redefinition.
6.2. Composition of Course Participants as Setting Boundaries for Academic Collegiality
Who is included in the leadership program? The composition of the group for whom the program is designed indicates the boundaries of the collegial community and, therefore, who is considered a colleague.
The HUJI’s 2016 program was designed for academic faculty already in charge of academic units. Among its participants were department chairs, newly appointed faculty deans, and heads of institutes. Only a single member was without a formal leadership title (and soon became head of an institute). As detailed in Table 2, 52% of participants came from the experimental sciences, 22% were women, and 5% were Palestinian/Arab, which only partially traces the proportions within the HUJI’s academic faculty. The composition of the 2016–2017 course for academic faculty favors male leadership (22% of course participants, whereas 33% of academic faculty in the regular track, are women) and perfectly balances the experimental–humanist disciplinary division.3 The HUJI’s 2018 program for academic leadership among administrative staff was designed solely for administrative heads of academic units, all of whom have academic credentials, but none hold a doctoral degree. The composition of this program was highly skewed toward university administration (55%, from such divisions as accounting and HR) over the disciplinary units (e.g., “field units”; 22% for each of the experimental faculties and the human science faculties). This profile of program composition diverges sharply from the HUJI’s administrative staff profile: The training courses for administrative staff far exaggerate the centrality of HQ staff over the admin staff from field units and disproportionally favors women over men.4
Composition of the HUJI’s Programs for Academic Leadership.
| No. of Participants | Share from Experimental Sciences | Share of Human Sciences | Share of HQ | Gender: Share Female | Ethnicity: Share Arab/Palestinian | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Academic 2016–2017 | 36 | 52% | 48% | – | 22% | 5% |
| Admin 2018 | 27 | 22% | 22% | 55% | 77% | 0% |
The HUJI’s two courses for academic leadership demarcate academic faculty from administrative staff. They draw a firm boundary between the two groups by claiming that each group requires a distinct curriculum and pedagogy for leadership training. This confirms the naming distinctions: Academic faculty are destined to become academic leaders, while administrative staff members are destined to serve as managerial reserves. These differentiations affirm academic hierarchies between the professoriate and administrative staffers, customary in other professional bureaucracies (such as hospitals; see Bate, 2000; Bleiklie et al., 2015). Collegiality is set within each group and defined by functional roles within the organization. For example, the professoriate/academic is a collegium distinct from the administration’s community of work colleagues.
The CHE-Rothschild program was engineered around an opposing profile of academic collegiality – and the composition of all four courses from 2019 to 2022 meets the same criteria (see Table 3). According to this profile, 80% to 82% of participants come from research universities (as opposed to academic colleges), 67% to 69% are academic faculty (as opposed to administrative staff), 43% to 51% are women, and 6% to 8% (one or two participants) are Palestinian/Arab. Any deviation in these proportions is due to a mere change of one or two participants. The CHE-Rothschild program is designed to include administration staffers and academic faculty already holding senior positions in their academic institutions. They are drawn from all universities and selected colleges, yet none from teacher colleges (because they are administered by the Ministry of Education rather than governed by CHE). This profile also traces academic hierarchies. First, it gives the professoriate the authority of academic leadership. It also gives the professoriate more voice among the program participants and identifies it as the principal corps of academic leadership. Second, it sets research universities as the prime academic institution: Whereas academic colleges (excluding teacher colleges) account for 34% of all Israeli academic faculty and 33% of all students, showing the large volume of colleges within the Israeli higher education system, only 20% of faculty in the CHE-Rothschild course come from colleges. Third, it paints a picture of gender- and nationality-ethnic parity, an idealized misrepresentation of Israeli academia. Whereas women account for 32% and Arab/Palestinian account for 3% of all Israeli academic faculty, these groups account for 43% to 48% and 6% among the cohort participants in the CHE-Rothschild course. Overall, the composition profile of academic leadership set by the CHE-Rothschild program draws the boundary of collegiality in academia around admin and academics, universities, and colleges. This expansive definition of the academic collegium creates a highly heterogeneous collegial community.
Composition of CHE-Rothschild Program for Academic Leadership.
| CHE-Rothschild Program | No. of Participants | Share from Universities* | Share of Academics** | Gender: Share Female | Ethnicity: Share Arab/Palestinian |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
30 | 80% | 67% | 43% | 6% |
|
31 | 80% | 67% | 48% | 6% |
|
34 | 82% | 67% | 47% | 8% |
|
33 | 81% | 69% | 51% | 6% |
*Share of participants who are from the nine public research universities (vs. from colleges)
**Share of participants who are academics faculty, namely from the professoriate (vs. admin staff)
Who is not included in these profiles of the academic leader and, therefore, in the collegial community of Israeli academia? First, neither program involves students – even if the American model of student involvement ties students long after graduation through “aggressive” alumni activity. Second, neither program includes adjunct faculty – even if to students and indeed to the public, the distinction among instructors is often very obscure. Third, neither program invites members of the public at large – even if governing bodies of all Higher education organizations in Israel include representatives of the public, such as leaders of the industry, civil society, or political figures. Fourth, neither program regards employees of academia’s contracting firms as partners to academic leadership – even if many such outsourced academic services are long-lasting. Lastly, while Israeli academia is highly international in terms of scientific standards for publication and funding and in the recruitment of academic faculty, all leadership courses are run in Hebrew only. This does not accommodate non-Hebrew speakers and therefore distances non-Israelis from the circle of academic leadership, even if not from their disciplinary collegium. In general, the profile of academic leadership is not exceptionally responsive to the expansion of academia’s constituencies: While academia is increasingly tied to multiple constituencies, especially in the age of four academic missions,5 the training programs of future leaders of higher education organizations in Israel set a tight boundary, mainly around the professoriate. This means that while these groups – students, adjunct faculty, representatives of the public at large, and others – are involved in the governance of academia in Israel, albeit in different fora and forms, they are placed outside the professional preparation for leadership roles and thus also outside the boundary of collegial governance. In this sense, it is not only the time horizon of permanence that defines authority and influence in academia but also membership in the traditional guild-like community of academics, namely the professoriate.
It is important to note that although the composition of both programs is "engineered" and determined "from above," such a prescription is carried out by professor-administrators. In other words, because the administrative leadership of Israeli academia is in the hands of professors (university presidents, head of CHE), this entire professionalization project seems to be initiated by the administration of either the HUJI or the national CHE. Still, it is initiated and led by a member of the collegium, namely the elected or nominated primus/prima inter pares.
The programs for professionalizing academic leadership in Israel generally set two “ideal types” for collegiality. Model A, exemplified by the HUJI’s program, develops separate training courses for administrative staff and the professoriate. Consequently, collegiality is set within each group. Professional collegiality among administrative staff is distinct from professional collegiality among academic faculty. Consequently, Model A defines academic leadership as bifurcated. Furthermore, seeing that the program continues to be designed for HUJI alone, it also separates its academic leadership from other academic organizations. Model B, exemplified by the CHE-Rothschild program, binds administrative and academic staff members – even if engineered to reproduce academic hierarchies (between academic and admin, universities and colleges, and majority and minority groups). Overall, the sequence of the two professionalization programs demonstrates the pattern of redefinition of academic collegiality. The fact that the CHE-Rothschild program came after the HUJI program and made it redundant, and the replacement of Model A with Model B reveals the redefinition of the traditional definition of academic collegiality – namely, a transition from the traditional Model A where collegiality is reserved to the professoriate to Model B where collegiality is the bond among all who lead an academic organization.
6.3. Setting Relations of Collegiality
Collegiality is inherently relational: It defines one person through the relationships they keep with co-workers. In other words, saying that a co-worker is a colleague implies fellowship, conference, correspondence, affinity, partnership, collaboration, and a high level of equity and parity. Much of these implied relations are captured in the primus/prima inter pares (first among equals) principle of collegial leadership and governance. This adage infuses temporal scales into collegiality. Academic leaders step forward from the line of colleagues to assume their post as academic leaders for a given period, after which they return to the line of colleagues. Therefore, collegial ties last far longer than leadership tenure.
In addition to this analysis of these fundamental ideas of academic collegiality, the composition of the programs reflects the expected mode of relations between administrative staff and the professoriate. We, therefore, ask: What collegial ties do professionalization programs foster? We find that while both training programs – the HUJI’s two separate courses for administrative staff and the professoriate and the CHE-Rothschild program’s series of four courses – all speak the language of “partnership” between the administration and the professoriate, they still paint a different picture not only of the “ideal” colleague but also of the sort of collegial tie. This rallies around the notion of “partnership” despite the apparent differences between the two modes of composition. Therefore, Models A and B of collegiality redirect the question toward investigating relational modes.
Collaboration is evident given that administrative and academic staff work in the same organization and for the same goals. Nevertheless, the desired degree of such collaboration, from minimal tactical alliances to intense collaboration and teamwork, is debated. Fig. 1, which was used as the basis for a discussion in one of the sessions of the 2022 CHE-Rothschild course, shows the matrix of options for collaboration between administrative staff and the professoriate. This display illustrates six optional modes for relations between administrative staff and the professoriate. Five of the six illustrations (except #1) acknowledge the differences between the administration and the professoriate because they draw two different circles. Nevertheless, each of these five illustrations describes the collaborations between the professoriate and the administrative staff differently. Illustrations #2 and #3 show distinctions complemented by zones of overlapping responsibilities, and illustration #5 shows separation. However, all are within the same organization, and illustration #6 describes the hierarchy of core (academic, professoriate) and periphery (administrative staff, support tasks). In extreme modes, illustration #1 represents a unitary vision of academic collegiality, while illustration #4 describes the distinction between the professoriate and administrative staff.
In addition, the size and position of the circle in the illustrations signal academic hierarchies. Most clearly, while illustrations #2 and #3 generally show similar relations of collaboration (with both distinct- and overlapping zones of authority for the two groups), they describe different images of hierarchical authority: Illustration #2 shows one group superior to the other, while illustration #3 shows equal positioning. Likewise, size also signals differences in authority. Illustration #5 shows that even within the same organization, one group is more significant and likely more authoritative than the other. Overall, the illustrations vary by (1) the extent of shared or overlapping responsibilities or spheres of leadership and (2) the priority of one group over the other, marking greater authority by vertical position or by size. Most importantly, these illustrations show potential relationships between groups and within the university’s leadership team. By doing this, future leaders will be socialized into the fundamental concepts of governance and collegiality.
6.4. Curricular Content as Prescribing Collegiality
While it is mainly the composition of leadership courses that prescribes the parameters for collegiality in academia, course content can (re)define a colleague through the lenses of leadership and governance. In the following section, we briefly describe the curricular content of the various academic leadership courses, confirming the claim that increasingly academic collegiality is expansive and building collegial ties between administrative staff and the professoriate while reproducing academic hierarchies. Our analyses of curricula material reveal three main findings that speak to collegiality.
First, we find that all courses for academic leadership offer a mix of sessions on scientific and academic issues and administrative and leadership matters, albeit with some variation in emphasis across courses and over time. The various courses include such sessions as “the history of higher education in Israel”; “challenges of the public university”; “multiculturalism and gender in academia”; “intro to biomedical and bioengineering”; many lab and institute visits; and numerous meetings with Rectors and Presidents, to discuss their vision for the future of academia. In contrast, these professionalization courses also include sessions titled “principles of strategic thinking”; “work plan as tools for managers”; “mapping adaptive challenges”; “development of management resources in the public sector”; “budgeting systems at University X”; or “national budgeting for higher education,” in addition to sessions with Rectors and Presidents that debated leadership style and managerial challenges. Subsequently, leadership training courses reflect managerialism and collegiality modes of leadership and governance.
Second, we find that the balance between the curricular emphasis on scientific issues and the emphasis on managerial issues changes. In proportional terms, the trend has been away from purely scientific and academic topics that focus on the characteristics of science and its institutions. Such scientific-academic topics occupied 36% of all sessions and 36% of all in-session hours in HUJI’s 2016 course for the professoriate but only 14.5% of the total number of sessions and 15% of total in-session hours in the 2019 CHE-Rothschild course. In this sense, matters that are principal bonds to the scientific guild are diminishing in importance regarding the leadership and governance of the guild-like modern organization.
Third, while science academia is weakening as a pure and stand-alone curricular item, the balance does not necessarily tilt to pure managerialism. Instead, the courses increasingly converge on a hybrid form of what information, topics, and debates are helpful for current academic leaders. In other words, despite the differences in institutional scope (HUJI vs national) and staff (HUJI professors vs an ad hoc national agency led by coachers), we find a greater concentration of curricular material in the “hybrid zone,” namely a sphere where academic and managerial themes are fused. Sessions that convey the hybrid curricular mode, mixing scientific and administrative discussions, carry such titles as “academic excellence and impact – combinatory models”; “college challenges vis-à-vis its neighboring area”; and “leadership narrative: I am a change leader in academia.” These also reflect an expansive curriculum that accentuates partnerships and thus reflects the expanded notion of “the colleague.” The hybrid curricular mode upholds that traditional academic logic is the supremacy of research over teaching and focuses on conferring leadership and managerial skills in line with managerialism.6
Last, we also found that the curricular items of site visits are also laden with an implied definition of who a colleague is. All six courses of the two programs include numerous site visits to help participants learn and experience scientific and administrative practices, operations, and behaviors outside their daily sight. For example, they visit other higher education organizations than their own, visit disciplinary units different than theirs, and come outside the gates of the Ivory Tower to see science labs in commercial firms and public research centers, as well as the administrative capacities of such diverse bodies, both private and public, as the Israeli military, governmental ministries, and even large infrastructure projects. The CHE-Rothschild program also takes its participants for two studies abroad to learn and experience academic leadership in top academic organizations in Europe and North America. In introducing course participants to these exemplary cases of leadership, we find their mark role models for the successful public sector and worldwide leadership. The programs also encourage building network contacts with the hosts, framing this advice as a valuable link to renowned and successful cases of 21st-century leadership of complex organizations challenged by a rapidly evolving social environment. We argue that this component of the curriculum extends the boundary of academic collegial leadership far beyond academia. It is explicitly stated that to be the best academic leader, one needs to or wishes to be and learn from whoever has something to teach us.
6.5. Summary of Findings
Our analysis dissects various components of six courses from two different programs, all designed for the professionalization of university staff and faculty in Israel. We find that each such component constructs and institutionalizes a new notion of academic leadership and new formats for academic governance and collegiality. First, by coining a new term for “leadership,” these programs orient academic leadership away from traditional charismatic or bureaucratic leadership, giving rise to a new idea of leadership unique to collegial organizations. This new leadership is shaped through professional training. It is, therefore, also a re-definition of collegiality. Second, the composition of the various professionalization courses also drives a redefinition of academic collegiality. We show that each model sets a different rule for the composition of the group – solely the professoriate or administrative staff of a single university or a diverse but engineered assembly of academics and administrators from both colleges and universities – and, in doing so, each program prescribes a unique meaning for who is a partner to the leadership and governance of an academic organization and, by implication, a unique definition for who is an academic colleague. Third, we find that course curricula suggested various models for collaborative work, showing different formats for academic collegiality and governance. Fourth, in examining the curricular content, as well as pedagogies of instruction, of the six professionalization courses in the two programs, we find varying degrees of hybridity. All courses mix purely scientific-academic topics or sessions, purely managerial-administrative topics or sessions, and “hybrid” sessions that integrate such topics. Highlights of these findings are summarized in Table 4.
Professionalizing Leadership, Defining Collegiality.
| Case | Model A of Professionalization of Academic Leadership | Model B of Professionalization of Academic Leadership | |
|---|---|---|---|
| HUJI | CHE-Rothschild | ||
| Professionalization course | Composition |
|
|
| Relations | Separating professoriate from admin staff | Collaboration between professoriate and admin staff | |
| Content |
|
|
|
| Collegiality | Model | Bifurcated | Partnership |
| Mode | Traditional | Redefined |
Over the timespan of progression from one course to another, the “hybrid” content category fuses scientific-academic with managerial-administrative. Together, we see the change toward a new academic colleague: one who is a partner in academic work and also in the leadership of academic organizations that are broadly defined, but most important, committed to the principles of scientific discovery and innovation, excellence, and collegial mechanisms of assessment and decision-making. Corresponding to Denis et al. (2023, Vol. 87), the hybrid form of collegiality we identify in professionalization courses intertwines managerial and scholarly logic and fragments intra-organizational networks of collaborative work.
All six courses of both programs for the professionalization of academic leadership construct a rather expansive definition of academic colleagues across disciplinary boundaries and academic units, academic organizations, and globally. Importantly, these professionalization courses apply this notion of crossing boundaries to bind professional groups: professional professoriate and scientists with professional administrators and managers, tying them into a combined collegium. This expansive reach stands in opposition to (Palfreyman & Tapper, 2014)7 image of collegiality, which does not refer to governance tasks and does not include the administrative staff of universities, and with that paints an opposite image than the answer given by the Israeli CHE-Rothschild program to the question “who is a colleague?”
7. Concluding Discussion
Through a naming process, academic leadership in Israel identified itself as distinct from management or administration and traditional or guild-like forms of collegiality. The naming process carves a new sphere for academic leadership, using the new Hebrew-language term as a mechanism for marking distinction (for academia, from other sectors) and disruption (of traditional modes of academic governance and modes of management). Nevertheless, this new sphere of academic leadership reaffirms long-entrenched social hierarchies: Universities versus colleges, professoriate versus administrative staffers, men versus women, and in Israel also Jewish Israelis versus Arab-Palestinian Israelis.
In training and molding academic leadership, professionalization courses also redefine academic collegiality. Our findings regarding such professionalization courses in Israel reveal the existence of two models for who is identified as a colleague. Model A of academic collegiality, inherent to the HUJI’s professionalization courses, sets administrative staff distinct from the professoriate, reinforcing relations of collegiality within each group. Therefore, Model A confirms the traditional governance mode of academia, reinforcing the university’s definition as a professional organization governed by a guild-like professional group, namely the professoriate. Model B, propagated by the CHE-Rothschild professionalization program, challenges the academic tradition, bringing collaboration ideas from management education. Model B gathers administrative and academic staff members into a single program, setting the boundary of collegiality encompassing both groups. Even though there is a new mode of collaboration between professors and administrative staff, it is still based on the traditions of the academic hierarchy. Despite these fundamental differences between the bifurcated and combined notions of who is considered a colleague, all programs speak the language of cooperation and partnership among administrative staff and the professoriate. Such language does not, however, confirm what shape such collaboration or partnership takes, describing-cum-prescribing various options for collaborative governance and thus for collegiality.
The overall trend toward professionalization of academic leadership is not contested. Professional management penetrates every aspect of academic life, even in old and traditional universities where the legacies of institutional autonomy and academic freedom are strongly institutionalized. Nevertheless, such change does not necessarily mean an abandonment of collegiality. The new model of academic collegiality binds administrators and professors into a cooperative mode of academic leadership and frames their relations as a partnership. In contrast, the old model of academic collegiality referred only to the professoriate and left administrators as support staff for the academic mission and executors of the professoriate’s vision and decisions. In this context, the transition of governance modes in academia is not merely an encroachment of managerialism onto academic affairs and a take-over by professional managers but a redefinition of who is a colleague in academia, identifying the boundaries of the academic community, and understanding the nature of the collegial tie in academia.
The overarching theme of this newly defined academic leadership that united the professoriate with administrative staff is science: that the primary considerations are academic, that organizational performance is science and science, and that budget and operations are in service of the academy. The importance of academic-scientific-scholarly considerations, rather than operational utility and efficiency, bolsters our conclusion that the Israeli professionalization courses for academic leadership demonstrate a redefinition of collegiality rather than a direct and insidious corruption of collegiality by managerialism.
The authority to define the form of academic collegiality is largely in the hands of the convenors of professional training courses, as these courses play a symbolic and operational role in setting the boundaries for the collegiate group. At the HUJI, a decision about the design of professionalization courses is in the hands of the university administration. The course for the professoriate was initiated and designed by the university president. In contrast, the course for admin staff was initiated and designed by the HR department, which is an administrative unit. This confirms the bifurcation because the two professionalization programs we have initiated by different academic leaders have been uniquely designed for the leadership responsibility of each group. Therefore, reifying the separation of the two collegiate groups. In contrast, the national CHE-Rothschild program was designed by a team of professional coaches who serve as lead instructors. At the same time, national considerations engage in its design, for example, the imbalance between universities and colleges. However, the insistence on gender and ethnic representation demonstrates that cooperation among the professoriate and administrative staff is constitutive to the program. This idea is intended to erase the boundary between the two groups and redefine collegiality as inclusive of both professors and administrators.
This redefinition of academic collegiality, which we trace in our study of professionalization programs for academic leadership in Israel, speaks directly to the themes of this assembly of studies in this double volume. First, the boundaries of who is considered a colleague are broadened to include the professoriate and administrative staff. As noted earlier, this is not necessarily a full expansion of the parameters of collegiality. Students and public representatives, included in other governing bodies of Israeli academia, are not considered professionalized, most likely because they are not considered full-time or long-term members of the institution. This touches on the terminological choice to specify “academic collegiality” or “collegiality in academia.” Sahlin and Eriksson-Zetterquist (2023, Vol. 86), in the Introduction paper to this compilation, defined “academic collegiality” based on the importance of the scientific logic, therefore marking collegiality as inherent solely to those who are academics “by vocation,” namely what we call here “the professoriate.” Model A and the HUJI professionalization format exemplify this. “In academia” terminology, on the other hand, allows collegiality to extend beyond the professoriate and therefore is exemplified in Model B and the CHE-Rothschild professionalization format.
Second, our study shows the redefinition of collegiality along its vertical and horizontal dimensions. At the HUJI, with its bifurcated Model A, we find the preservation of horizontal collegiality, which is defined as “relations and interactions in the scholarly communities” and which is constituted around the “cognitive notion that expertise is built on science” (Sahlin & Eriksson-Zetterquist, 2023, Vol. 86; see van Schalkwyk & Cloete, 2023, Vol. 86). Such horizontal collegiality is reserved for the professoriate, reinforcing the traditional mode of academic governance. On the vertical dimension, the HUJI program for academics is designed mainly to strengthen the managerial capacity of the professoriate and, therefore, implicitly to resist the complete breakdown of vertical collegiality if and when “decision-making comes to be completely in the hands of administrators” (Sahlin & Eriksson-Zetterquist, 2023, Vol. 86). Seeing this definition of horizontal collegiality and its curricular focus on leadership skills and strategies, the national CHE-Rothschild program is not much concerned, let alone challenge, such horizontal collegiality. The rapture introduced by the CHE-Rothschild program, and possibly by Model B in principle, is focused on vertical collegiality. By enabling the operational and leadership partnership between the professoriate and the administrative staff, this program binds the “collegium” around decision-making structures. In addition to the professoriate-administrative partnership, the CHE-Rothschild program stretches the collegium across organizational boundaries and possibly also across national borders, because it encourages the borrowing of models from the vast global field of higher education. By operating in this way, the CHE-Rothschild program challenges traditional academic governance and offers a new vision of collegiality in academia. The choice to name the CHE-Rothschild program Leadership in Academia rather than academic leadership is most telling: The leadership team is professionally diverse (the professoriate and administrators), and “in academia” marks the sphere of vertical collegiality.
What binds the collegium in these distinct models? Traditional academic collegiality – here, Model A, exemplified by the twin HUJI programs – is organized vertically and horizontally around science’s norms, or cognitive framework. In other words, the relations of affinity (horizontal) and the governance structures (vertical) are led by Mertonian notions of adherence to the vocation of science. This is made clear through the bifurcation of courses that separate the professoriate for the administrative staff. The newly redefined version of collegiality in academia, exemplified by the CHE-Rothschild program and Model B, breaks away from tradition by creating a new ethos of vertical partnership. While Model A binds vertical academic collegiality around the norm of science, Model B binds vertical collegiality in academia around the goal of science. If we set science as a unifying goal, the organization’s ultimate "product" would be science. This would allow both the professoriate and administrative staff to work together toward this goal and tame the contest between the two groups, even if not resolved.
In conclusion, while the professional training of organizational leaders is strongly associated with managerialism, we find that the creeping professionalization of leadership in Israeli academia is also used to reinforce traditional modes of collegiality and to amend vertical collegiality. The professionalization courses for academic leadership constitute an arena for both horizontal and vertical dimensions of collegiality, tying together professionalization, collegiality, and governance.
8. Postscript
February 2023
The professionalization of academic leadership in Israel is ongoing. While our analysis covers all courses held until 2022, in early 2023, several new “spillover” programs were initiated. The first two are university-specific: One is held at the HUJI, it is designed for high-ranking administrative staff, and it is called Movilim BaIvrit (translated to Leadership at the Hebrew U); the other is held at the Technion, it is designed for academic faculty and administrative staff, and it is called Movilim BaCampus (translated to Leadership on campus). These two university-specific leadership programs run in parallel to the fifth round of the national CHE-Rothschild program of Movilim BaAcademia (translated to Leadership in Academia). Last, a fourth program targets academic leaders by their role in the administration. Lately, the CHE-Rothschild team has held two one-day workshops for incoming faculty deans from across Israel’s higher education organizations. This proliferation of programs signals the institutionalization of professional academic leaders. The proliferation of the title phrase Movilim signals the acceptance of this new term to describe a new leadership model. The current pattern also marks the fracture of the notions of expanded collegiality, at least from the prism of professionalization. These various “spillover” programs seem to be designed for multiple slices of the overall or expansive community – by the university by admin/professoriate or by leadership position. Last, these various spillover programs are led by the same team that crafted and led the CHE-Rothschild program Movilim BaAcademia, whom, we remind, are management coaches rather than from among the professoriate. These various expansions to the Movilim programs are overwhelming any alternative voice about collegiality. After centuries where collegiality has been taken for granted, and after decades of fragmentation of academic collegiality by neoliberal practices (such as personalized contracts and quantification of performance), the hybridization of scholarly and managerial logics is becoming the new mode of academic professionalism, leadership, collegiality, and governance.
Notes
Namely, Course #5 of CHE that is currently still in session and two newly created university-specific programs; for more details, refer to Postscript section.
The overall proportion of Arab/Palestinian academic faculty is 2.5%, while the inclusion of a single Arab/Palestinian faculty member in the training course makes for 5%.
Whereas HQ staff account for 5.5% of all university administrative corps, 55% of the 2018 course participants come from these units of central university administration. Also, women account for 68% of all university administrative staff, 77% of the 2018 course participants are women.
The first academic mission of teaching and learning designates the constituency of students (and increasingly their parents). The second academic mission of research designates the constituency of science and of its beneficiary as humanity at large. The third academic mission of production of commercializable knowledge designates industry and government as constituents. And the fourth academic mission of social impact designates regional and national communities, as well as world society, as constituents. For review, see Oliver-Lumerman and Drori (2021).
For more details on the curricular aspects of the new mode of academic leadership, on the axis between scientific – managerial as well as additional axes within the curricula, see Mizrahi-Shtelman and Drori (2021).
In their book, Palfreyman and Tapper (2014) categorize four core elements of collegiality in universities (see Introduction), concluding with a vastly different portrait of who is a colleague in academia. They extract four core elements that define a colleague: (1) remain within the professorial community, even if across departments and universities; (2) remain within the bounds of the university; (3) focuses on research and knowledge; and (4) reaching out beyond the professoriate is inclusive of students only.
References
Barnes 2020Barnes, J. (2020). Collegial governance in postwar Australian universities. History of Education Review, 49(2), 149–164.
Bate 2000Bate, P. (2000). Changing the culture of a hospital: From hierarchy to networked community. Public Administration, 78(3), 485–512.
Ben David 2012Ben David, J. (2012). Science in a small country. In L. Greenfield (Ed.), The ideals of Joseph Ben-David: The Scientist’s Role and Centers of Learning Revisited (pp. 19–28). Routledge.
Bleiklie, Enders, & Lepori 2015Bleiklie, I., Enders, J., & Lepori, B. (2015). Organizations as penetrated hierarchies: Environmental pressures and control in professional organizations. Organization Studies, 36(7), 873–896.
Boulous Walker 2019Boulous Walker, M. (2019). The fragility of collegiality: ’What remains of me at the university, within the university?’. Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy, 30, 18–28.
Christensen, & Lægreid 2010Christensen, T., & Lægreid, P. (2010). Increased complexity in public organizations – The challenges of combining NPM and post-NPM. In Governance of public sector organizations: Proligeration, autonomy and performance (pp. 255–275). Palgrave Macmillan.
Crace, Gehman, & Lounsbury 2023Crace, L., Gehman, J., & Lounsbury, M. (2023). An unsettling crisis of collegial governance: Reality breakdowns as antecedents of institutional awareness. In K. Sahlin & U. Eriksson-Zetterquist (Eds.), Revitalizing collegiality: Restoring faculty authority in universities (Vol. 87, pp. 77–109. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Deem, Hillyard, Reed, & Reed 2007Deem, R., Hillyard, S., Reed, M., & Reed, M. (2007). Knowledge, higher education, and the new managerialism: The changing management of UK universities. Oxford University Press.
Denis, Côté, & Hébert 2023Denis, J.-L., Côté, N., & Hébert, M. (2023). Manifestations of collegiality within universities: Delocalisation and structural hybridity as governance forms and practices. In K. Sahlin & U. Eriksson-Zetterquist (Eds.), Revitalizing collegiality: Restoring faculty authority in universities (Vol. 87, pp. 137–156. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Denis, Veronesi, Régis, & Germain 2019Denis, J.-L., Veronesi, G., Régis, C., & Germain, S. (2019). Collegiality as political work: Professions in today’s world of organizations. Journal of Professions and Organization, 6(3), 323–341.
Dobbin, & Kalev 2022Dobbin, F., & Kalev, A. (2022). Getting to diversity: What works and what doesn’t. Harvard University Press.
Gerhardt, Goldenstein, Oertel, Poschmann, & Walgenbach 2023Gerhardt, L.-M., Goldenstein, J., Oertel, S., Poschmann, P., & Walgenbach, P. (2023). The managerialization of higher education in Germany and its consequences: Changes in job advertisements for professorships in German universities, 1990 to 2010. In K. Sahlin & U. Eriksson-Zetterquist (Eds.), University collegiality and the erosion of faculty authority (Vol. 86, pp. 59–85. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Glynn 2000Glynn, M. A. (2000). When cymbals become symbols: Conflict over organizational identity within a symphony orchestra. Organization Science, 11(3), 285–298.
Harroche, & Musselin 2023Harroche, A., & Musselin, C. (2023). How to remain collegial when pressure for change is high? In K. Sahlin & U. Eriksson-Zetterquist (Eds.), Revitalizing collegiality: Restoring faculty authority in universities (Vol. 87, pp. 29–50. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Hatfield 2006Hatfield, R. D. (2006). Collegiality in higher education: Toward an understanding of the factors involved in collegiality. Journal of Organizational Culture, Communications and Conflict, 10(1), 11.
Jandrić, Delbridge, & Quattrone 2023Jandrić, J., Delbridge, R., & Quattrone, P. (2023). Sustaining a collegiate environment: Colleagueship, community and choice at an anonymous business school. In K. Sahlin & U. Eriksson-Zetterquist (Eds.), Revitalizing collegiality: Restoring faculty authority in universities (Vol. 87, pp. 51–73. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Kosmütsky, & Krücken 2023Kosmütsky, A., & Krücken, G. (2023). Governing research. New forms of competition and cooperation in academia. In K. Sahlin & U. Eriksson-Zetterquist (Eds.), University collegiality and the erosion of faculty authority (Vol. 86, pp. 31–57. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Lee, & Ramirez 2023Lee, S. S., & Ramirez, F. O. (2023). Globalization of universities as organizational actors? In K. Sahlin & U. Eriksson-Zetterquist (Eds.), University collegiality and the erosion of faculty authority (Vol. 86, pp. 87–104. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Long 2007Long, M. C. (2007). Affirmative action and its alternatives in public universities: What do we know? Public Administration Review, 67(2), 315–330.
Meltz 2002Meltz. (2002). Recommendations of a public Commission for Assessment of the Organizational Structure of Higher Education Institutions, Chaired by the Honorable Supreme Court Judge (ret.) Jacob Meltz [Meltz Commission Report]. Knesset Center for Research and Information. https://fs.knesset.gov.il/globaldocs/MMM/476122f1-9232-e811-80de-00155d0a0235/2_476122f1-9232-e811-80de-00155d0a0235_11_7703.pdf
Mizrahi-Shtelman, & Drori 2021Mizrahi-Shtelman, R., & Drori, G. S. (2021). World-rank and/or locally relevant? Organizational identity in the mission statements of higher education organizations in Israel, 2008–2018. Minerva, 59(1), 1–25.
O’Reily, & Reed 2010O’Reily, D., & Reed, M. (2010). ‘Leaderism’: An evolution of managerialism in UK public service reform. Public Administration, 88(4), 960–978.
Oliver-Lumerman, & Drori 2021Oliver-Lumerman, A., & Drori, G. S. (2021). From ivory tower to academic commitment and leadership: The changing public mission of universities. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Östh Gustafsson 2023Östh Gustafsson, H. (2023). A slow form of governance? Collegial organization and temporal synchronization in the context of Swedish university reforms. In K. Sahlin & U. Eriksson-Zetterquist (Eds.), University collegiality and the erosion of faculty authority (Vol. 86, pp. 105–126. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Palfreyman, & Tapper 2014Palfreyman, D., & Tapper, T. (2014). Reshaping the university: The rise of the regulated market in higher education. Oxford University Press.
Pineda 2023Pineda, P. (2023). The social creation of temporary academic positions in Chile, Colombia, Germany and the USA. In K. Sahlin & U. Eriksson-Zetterquist (Eds.), University collegiality and the erosion of faculty authority (Vol. 86, pp. 199–227. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Quattrone 2023Quattrone, P. (2023). The house of collegiality and what can burn it? Collegiate governance and institutional persistence in a UK university college [Working Paper]. Alliance Manchester Business School, UK
Rosa, & Almeida 2020Rosa, B., & Almeida, H. N. (2020). The influences of managerialism in the professional intervention of social workers. European Journal of Social Sciences, 3(1), 45–52.
Sahlin, & Eriksson-Zetterquist 2016Sahlin, K., & Eriksson-Zetterquist, U. (2016). Collegiality in modern universities–the composition of governance ideals and practices. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 2016(2–3), 33640.
Sahlin, & Eriksson-Zetterquist 2023Sahlin, K., & Eriksson-Zetterquist, U. (2023). Collegiality washing? New translations of collegial practices. In K. Sahlin & U. Eriksson-Zetterquist (Eds.), Revitalizing collegiality: Restoring faculty authority in universities (Vol. 87, pp. 157–180. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Sahlin, & Eriksson-Zetterquist 2023Sahlin, K., & Eriksson-Zetterquist, U. (2023). Introduction. In K. Sahlin & U. Eriksson-Zetterquist (Eds.), University collegiality and the erosion of faculty authority (Vol. 86, pp. 1–27. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Shepherd 2018Shepherd, S. (2018). Managerialism: an ideal type. Studies in Higher Education, 43(9), 1668–1678.
van Schalwyk, & Cloete 2023van Schalwyk, F., & Cloete, N. (2023). Collegiality and communication: This time it’s personal. In K. Sahlin & U. Eriksson-Zetterquist (Eds.), University collegiality and the erosion of faculty authority (Vol. 86, pp. 143–170. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Waldenström, Wiik, & Andersson 2019Waldenström, A., Wiik, J., & Andersson, U. (2019). Conditional autonomy: Journalistic practice in the tension field between professionalism and managerialism. Journalism Practice, 13(4), 493–508.
Wright, Irving, & Selvan Thevatas 2020Wright, A. L., Irving, G., & Selvan Thevatas, K. (2020). Professional values and managerialist practices: Values work by nurses in the emergency department. Organization Studies, 42(9), 1435–1456.
- Prelims
- Introduction: Revitalizing Collegiality: Restoring Faculty Authority in Universities
- Section 1: Maintaining Collegiality
- How to Remain Collegial When Pressure for Change is High?
- Sustaining a Collegiate Environment: Colleagueship, Community and Choice at an Anonymous Business School
- Section 2: Revitalizing Collegiality
- An Unsettling Crisis of Collegial Governance: Reality Breakdowns as Antecedents of Institutional Awareness
- Who's A Colleague? Professionalizing Academic Leadership as a Platform for Redefining Collegiality
- Manifestations of Collegiality Within Universities: Delocalisation and Structural Hybridity as Governance Forms and Practices
- Collegiality Washing? New Translations of Collegial Practices
- “Outroduction”: A Research Agenda on Collegiality In university Settings