David Bass, Advance HE Director of Inclusion and Governance, introduces a blog by Tessa Harrison which "challenges us to look beyond the visible architecture of recruitment and ask how power, reputation and so-called “soft intelligence” shape who is seen as credible, appointable and ready to lead."
“Advance HE is pleased to host this contribution from Tessa Harrison, written as part of the Leadership Futures project: an ESRC-funded international research project exploring how leaders are selected in elite universities, and what those patterns reveal about leadership practice, diversity, inclusion and governance in higher education. Advance HE is the project partner and further information is available on the Leadership Futures website.
“This research speaks directly to global issues that sit at the heart of Advance HE’s mission. Through our work on inclusion, leadership development and governance, we know that progress is often found in the less visible practices, the assumptions, networks, reputational signals and ideas of “fit”, that determine who is encouraged, shortlisted, appointed and trusted with leadership.
“As we start to examine early findings from the research project, Tessa’s blog brings these issues into sharper focus. It challenges us to look beyond the visible architecture of recruitment and ask how power, reputation and so-called “soft intelligence” shape who is seen as credible, appointable and ready to lead. At a time when higher education faces acute financial, political and societal pressures, this is exactly the kind of evidence-informed challenge the sector needs.” David Bass, Advance HE Director of Inclusion and Governance
Who Gets to Lead? The soft intelligence at the heart of university leadership
There is a question that the higher education sector has been reluctant to ask plainly: how much of the process by which we appoint our most senior leaders is actually as rigorous, or as open, as we like to believe?
The formal architecture of vice-chancellor and president recruitment looks robust enough. Long candidate packs, selection committees, executive search firms, governing body oversight. But underneath that formal process lies a parallel system of judgement that is rarely written down and almost never scrutinised. It runs on networks, reputation and what insiders tend to call ‘soft intelligence’; the accumulated views, often circulating informally before a search even begins, about who is considered serious, credible and ready. It is in this shadow system, more than in any job specification, that the real decisions about university leadership are shaped.
This is the territory that the Leadership Futures project, an ESRC-funded international research project led by Professor Sarah Aiston at Teesside University is working to illuminate.
The mould
The early findings from Leadership Futures are both striking and specific. Analysing the biographies of leaders across the 89 universities that appear in two or more major global rankings, the research finds that 74.2% of leaders are male, with an average age at appointment of 58-59 and typically 30 to 31 years of career experience behind them. The research identifies what it terms an ‘elite-to-elite educational pipeline’: 79.8% of current leaders were educated at one of the same 89 elite institutions, and 37.1% at the very institution they now lead. But the employment picture is even more striking. 70.8% were recruited from within the elite 89, and nearly half had worked at the same institution before taking the top role. The most common immediate prior position was VP or Provost, held by 44.8% of current leaders.
The statistical picture is one of profound institutional ‘in-breeding’ (a term the research itself uses) operating at both the educational and career levels simultaneously. There is, in short, a mould and the data shows it reproducing itself with remarkable consistency across generations of leadership. Comparison with predecessors shows similar gender ratios and educational backgrounds, suggesting the pipeline has changed very little despite decades of rhetoric about the need to diversify leadership at the top of HE institutions.
My own research, co-authored with Josh Freeman for the Higher Education Policy Institute in May 2025, found a closely parallel pattern in the UK context: the vast majority of vice-chancellors were already in a senior higher education leadership role immediately before their appointment, and institutions consistently recruit from within their own orbit. The guiding principle, as we put it in that report, appears to be ‘safety first’.
But safety for whom? The HEPI data suggests that the apparently safe choice of appointing a deputy vice-chancellor from a comparable institution does not necessarily reliably translate into improved institutional performance. Those recruited from outside the sector altogether show, on average, stronger results. The familiar candidate may feel less risky to the governing body but that is not the same as being less risky for the institution.
Fear, crisis and the narrowing of the field
This distinction between what feels safe and what is actually effective becomes particularly acute in times of institutional stress, which for much of the global higher education sector is precisely the moment we are in. In the UK, around three-quarters of English providers are projected to be in deficit. Institutions across Australia are navigating significant financial and regulatory turbulence. In the US, elite universities face an unprecedented combination of federal funding pressure, political scrutiny and reputational challenge.
It is at moments like these that the instinct to narrow the field becomes strongest and most dangerous. Governing bodies facing genuine uncertainty tend to reach for the known quantity: the person who has ‘done the job before’, who comes with familiar endorsements, whose name circulates confidently in the soft intelligence networks that precede any formal search. Executive search firms, under pressure to deliver a successful appointment quickly and with minimum controversy, are not immune to this logic. The incentive structures of search, particularly at times of perceived crisis, can reinforce conservatism rather than challenge it.
The result is a system that talks the language of diversity and merit, but operationalises something narrower: a form of pattern-matching against an existing template, dressed up as objective assessment. As Leadership Futures frames it, drawing on Michael Sandel’s work, merit itself can function as a form of bias; a mechanism through which existing hierarchies of advantage are reproduced under the guise of rigorous selection.
The international dimension
One of the most distinctive contributions of Leadership Futures is that it does not treat the leadership diversity problem as a single, uniform phenomenon. The research uses advanced statistical techniques including multiple correspondence analysis and latent class analysis to identify three distinct leadership typologies across its global sample, and the regional patterns that emerge are significant.
The most socially closed and least diverse typology, characterised by male dominance, elite education and internal promotion, is most strongly associated with Asia and parts of Europe. At the other end, the most socially open and gender-diverse typology, drawing from non-elite backgrounds and external recruitment is most evident in Oceania and parts of the Americas. A moderately diverse middle ground, elite-educated but with some cross-institutional mobility and gender diversity, sits across the Americas and Europe more broadly.
The gender data is particularly sharp in its regional contrasts. Women represent just 5.6% of leaders at elite universities in Asia, compared to 66.7% in Oceania, a difference so stark it demands explanation rather than simple description. What are the structural, cultural and governance factors that produce such divergent outcomes within what is nominally the same tier of global higher education?
These regional patterns are important precisely because they begin to complicate the story. If the pipeline problem were purely a function of unconscious bias in individual selection decisions, we might expect more consistency across systems. The fact that outcomes differ so markedly by region suggests that governance structures, the role of the state, the presence or absence of executive search firms, and wider cultural norms around leadership and gender all play a significant part. Understanding exactly how those factors interact with the soft intelligence dynamics that shape every search process is where the deeper work of this research lies.
The findings as they develop across the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Asia and beyond are likely to be as illuminating for what they reveal about each system individually as for what the contrasts between them tell us about the structural drivers of the problem globally.
Making the implicit explicit
The ambition of Leadership Futures is not merely to document these patterns but to change them. By mapping the gap between what institutions say they want in a leader as expressed in candidate packs and person specifications and what they actually appoint, the research aims to expose the unwritten assumptions that currently do so much of the work. By interviewing leaders, search firms and governing body chairs, it aims to give those assumptions a name.
This matters because you cannot challenge what you cannot see. As long as soft intelligence operates in the informal spaces around a formal process, it will tend to reinforce the status quo. Making it visible and subjecting it to the same scrutiny as the stated criteria is the first step towards a recruitment system that is genuinely as open as it claims to be.
The Leadership Futures project is working towards a co-produced, empirically grounded recruitment framework that can be used across international contexts to reduce bias and widen the candidate pool. It is practical, evidence-based work and given the pressures the sector is under, it has rarely been more timely.
Tessa Harrison is Director of her own leadership coaching practice, Tessa Harrison Executive Coach Ltd, bringing over 30 years’ experience as a leader in higher education alongside her work as a former Partner at executive search firm GatenbySanderson. She serves on the International Advisory Board of the Leadership Futures project and is co-author of the HEPI Policy Note ‘Who leads our universities? Inside the recruitment of vice-chancellors’ (May 2025).
