Lynn McAlpine’s research while affiliated with University of Oxford and other places

Globally, the past 10–15 years has seen universities experiencing increasing governmental reforms, including expectations for greater societal engagement. This places demands on the most senior university leaders to address and be seen to address these expectations. How do they situate themselves and negotiate their demanding role both inwardly and outwardly? We addressed this question in a case study of four rektors in four (of the eight) universities in Denmark. Using in-depth multi-mode data collection and analysis processes, we documented their lived experience negotiating the societal expectations of universities within the affordances and constraints of their roles in particular universities. Each was deeply committed to enhancing ‘their’ university’s societal engagement, externally representing the reality of ‘their’ university’s past, current and future visions of U-SE – against societal perception of the lack of such engagement. This involved outward, tête-à-tête, relationships with a range of societal actors, alongside downward, ‘leader-of-leaders’ distanced interaction throughout the institution. As the portal between the university and society, they were tracking, filtering, shaping the movement of knowledge between the two. The study contributes a richer conceptualisation of university leadership and university-societal engagement, alongside demonstrating the value of an analytic approach focused on examining individual and structural interactions.

Purpose Increasingly governmental policy around PhD education has resulted in greater university oversight of programs and student experience – often through creating central PhD Schools. While student experience is well researched, the experiences of Heads of these units, who are responsible for creating student experience, have been invisible. This exploratory Danish case study begins such a conversation: its purpose to examine the perceptions of five Heads of PhD Humanities Schools, each responsible for steering institutional decisions within Danish PhD policy landscapes. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative approach integrated three distinct analyses: a review of Danish PhD education policies and university procedures, each university’s job specifications for the Heads of the Schools and the Heads’ views on their responsibilities. Findings The Heads differentiated between their own and today’s PhD student experience. They had held prior leadership roles and fully supported institutional regulations. They cared deeply for the students under their charge and were working to achieve personal goals to enhance PhD experience. Their leadership perspective was relational: enhancing individual student learning through engaging with multiple PhD actors (e.g. program leaders) – when possible at a personal level – to improve PhD practices. Originality/value This study contributes an expanded perspective on how PhD School Heads constitute their roles by empirically linking: macro-national policies and institutional regulations and individuals’ biographies to their support of the PhD regimes – with implications for academic leadership generally. The authors argue research into PhD School leadership is essential, as it is such individuals who create the organisational settings that students experience.

As instructors in higher education, we are responsible for student learning whether in undergraduate, master's or PhD programs. The extent to which we are successful in this responsibility depends on our ability to design and enact effective instruction. This paper draws on research about learning, particularly the notion of significant learning, as well as a research-based model for designing instruction to propose a range of ways to ensure students actively engage in embedding the knowledge we hope they will.

This study provides an empirically grounded definition of peer learning within classroom settings. By analyzing class recordings and collecting perceptions from both teachers and students across 15 Bachelor’s and Master’s sessions in the humanities, social sciences, and medicine at a European Union university, this research underscores the critical role of teacher strategic planning in fostering peer learning. The findings highlight why certain peer learning designs are more successful than others.

Globally, the issue of research impact has grown as governments articulate policies around research as a contributor to economic and societal development, often through an econometric justification. This has triggered much discussion amongst humanities scholars in public formally-reasoned peer-reviewed texts that are rarely empirically-based. This Denmark-based empirical study used an individual biographical and historical structural framework to explore how humanities academics in face-to-face semi-formal interactive interviews viewed this issue. The results highlighted a nuanced understanding of what we call the humanities-impact landscape, with three potential interactions falling along a continuum suggesting further inquiry is warranted. The study contributes a rich tapestry of the interwoven individual and structural elements at play when academics articulate how they locate themselves within the landscape, ones that might not be seen in more conceptual arguments.

A growing literature examines PhD graduates working beyond academia. These studies are critiqued for rarely addressing the sectoral and organisational structural factors that influence actual work. So, we examined how the non-academic, contextually situated, organisational job specifications of fifteen PhD graduates interacted with their daily work experiences – looking particularly at the role of (a) communication since effective communication is reported as an employer concern, and (b) research since this is an expected outcome of PhD programmes. References to data collection and analysis were largely absent in interviews and job specifications, but research-related capabilities, for example, analytic thinking, were present, intertwined with communication in multiple ways, with dialogue and reading central. The graduates recognised these capabilities as having been finely honed in the PhD and inherent to their jobs.

The institutional leadership of doctoral education, in this chapter referred to as research education leadership, is often understood one-sidedly as forms of structural centralization through graduate schools, with the inevitable consequence of managerialism and enactment of institutional hierarchies. We do not aim to debunk this understanding but to supplement it with the notion of research education leadership as highly institutionally and personally entangled. Through two cases of research education leadership, we show how individual choices, stage of academic careers and wider life-worlds all play into the enactment of the practices understood as institutional leadership in doctoral education. The will and opportunity to lead cannot be reduced to institutional hierarchical practices or personalized idiosyncratic choices but happen in the interplay between opportunity structures in the institution and horizons for action opening up (or reducing/shutting down) in the individual engagements and choices made. The chapter calls for more nuanced understandings of what makes individuals take on leadership responsibilities, how they develop an institutional recognition (or ethos) that makes it possible for them to navigate and act institutionally, and how these decisions influence the personal meaning-making of the leaders in relation to both their institutional role and wider life-world.