ABSTRACT
While many stakeholders of higher education across the globe would wholeheartedly support the assertion that all universities serve a public purpose, others would disagree. Challengers to this claim could point in several directions: to investors that seek to derive owner or shareholder profit from their universities and colleges,; to governments that emphasise the private benefits of graduate status over the public return on investment in higher education systems and to governments that are increasing regulatory pressures on higher education to achieve greater accountability for their tax payers’ dollars. There are critical voices inside the academy – and outside – which argue that higher education can and should play a larger role in helping to solve big social and environmental challenges, from climate change and healthcare, to poverty and inequality, to mass migration. In practice, perhaps, it is the nature of the public purposes which higher education serves that is changing, just as the expectations of the contributions that higher education should make to a range of public purposes are shifting. If so, such changes will have implications for many levels of higher education operations including the curricula and qualifications offered, staff roles and working conditions, teaching styles and opportunities for students, and research agendas. There will also be implications for leadership and governance of institutions and for the contributions of individuals and groups to such leadership. In this chapter, we explore these ideas both conceptually, in notions of ‘critical leadership’ and ‘shifting public purposes’, and in practice, through a case study of transformational change and leadership taking place in the city of Medellin in Colombia, South America.
