Thirty years on and still trying: university leadership and the structures that bind

This commentary revisits Allan Bolton’s Citation1997 study of business school deans to examine how university leadership has changed across nearly thirty years of intensifying crisis. While Bolton’s participants described leadership as a largely selfless commitment to enabling the success of academics, students, and institutions, contemporary accounts show a sector harmfully shaped by managerialism, corporatisation, rankings, bureaucratic expansion, and declining collegial governance. This commentary argues that today’s university leaders are not individual agents of crisis, but actors shaped by wider ideological conditions that organise universities. It argues that university leaders retain responsibility for either reproducing or resisting these conditions. Václav Havel’s metaphor of ‘taking the sign out of the window’ is used as a call to university leaders to resist the reproduction of ideological conditions that constrain liberating actions and decisions.