Strategic academic development in Asia: embracing a ‘layered’ approach to ‘wicked problems’

In late August 2021, academics and students of two prestigious liberal arts programmes at the National University of Singapore (NUS) received an email message. Yale-NUS College and the University Scholars Programme are two distinctly different programmes intended to provide students with a high-quality cross-disciplinary education, a core priority of NUS. While not entirely unexpected, faculty, students, and parents were nevertheless taken aback by news of a merger between these two programmes, and the matter ended up being discussed very widely, including in parliament. The ‘merger’ was officially justified as part of a larger reorganization of the university into colleges that would enable greater crossand indeed, transdisciplinary collaboration in research and education. The point of starting our editorial with this anecdote is twofold. First, it suggests the ‘supercomplexity’ (Barnett, 2000) of the contemporary university and the higher education landscape within which we, as academic developers, find (or sometimes lose) ourselves. Second, it explicitly connects this high level of complexity with what Bass (2020, p. 6) calls the ‘wicked problem of learning’. Recognizing learning as a wicked rather than a tame problem means recognizing that higher education has ‘many interdependent complexities and a dynamic set of questions requiring extensive, ambitious, and unrelenting interdisciplinary investigation, innovation, and imagination, as all wicked problems demand’ (Bass, 2020, pp. 11–12). This requires a bigpicture orientation to transdisciplinarity and ‘convergence research’: it is precisely because of this that NUS is reorganizing. As the ‘broader context surrounding the core activities of academic development – teaching and learning – is becoming more organizationally complex’ (Stensaker, 2018, p. 257), how might we as academic developers address this complexity proactively and meaningfully? How might we be part of, and indeed shape, this complexity? Doing so requires a strategic orientation to academic development. The idea for this special issue first arose in 2018 during a course on strategic academic development (hereafter AD) in the context of Singapore higher education. The course, run by the Swedish academic developers Katarina Mårtensson and Torgny Roxå, was conceptualised as a professional development opportunity for participants, all of them academic/educational/faculty developers from across Singapore institutions. It was further planned as a vehicle for connecting participants in order to cultivate a scholarly community of practice of academic developers. Course participants could submit papers – developed from their course projects – for possible inclusion in the special issue, although the call for papers went beyond these participants and the majority of contributions do not derive from them. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR ACADEMIC DEVELOPMENT 2021, VOL. 26, NO. 4, 389–404 https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2021.1995120