Academic leadership and pragmatism
At a recent academic leadership workshop I attended, I heard a talk about the irrelevance of ideology in academic leadership. The talk emphasized how academic leaders need to be fundamentally pragmatic. As a critical scholar, this made me reflect upon my interest in issues of academic leadership. What kind of leader do I want to be, given the ideologically based nature of my scholarship, my teaching, my very existence as an academic? Are there even spaces of leadership for those scholars who deconstruct academic practices and their ideological bases? Where are the spaces for leadership for those scholars/paradigms that explicitly note the ideological nature of knowledge producing practices/entities? As I reflected more on this and conversed with my colleagues, it became apparent that such discourses of apolitical/ideologically divorced leadership are misleading because they are fundamentally ideological in their articulation of pragmatism. As one of my colleagues put it, "Machiave