While higher education is yet to see its first “director of better”, the bafflingly amorphous position featured in W1A’s satire of BBC management, university leaders seeking to tackle big social challenges have been creating new senior roles in recent years.

Universities across the US have, for the past decade, hired senior executives focused on diversity and inclusion work, a trend that is now being replicated in the UK, Australia and Canada. Meanwhile, Harvard University appointed Barack Obama’s former economic adviser James Stock as its first vice-provost for climate and sustainability in 2021, one of many hires across the sector focused on advancing the environmental agenda. Other roles have been given portfolios including community and inclusion, social purpose and social responsibility.

Seen as a way of showing that the institution is tackling the big issues head-on, the emergence of such roles has added oversight and accountability to proclaimed ambitions for change.

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At the same time, however, critics point to a lack of progress on these goals and worry that universities could be seeing the simple making of such appointments as “job done” – a way of demonstrating that action is being taken without actually having to do anything – and also argue that siloing this work into one person’s remit could result in other leaders disengaging as well as adding to perceived managerial bloat.

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So what’s driving the creation of these contentious new senior roles – and what impact might they have?

An increasing recognition that only people with “heft and political nous” can secure the “really deep cultural change” to tackle systemic structural injustices has prompted the spate of new hires, according to Jacky Lumby, emeritus professor of education at the University of Southampton.

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“Of course, you can have somebody appointed as a token gesture with a very wide portfolio and very little time to focus on the issues, or with no resources,” she added.

“But if that is the case, it is more reflective of whether the vice-chancellor or board of governors is serious about this. If they are, they will put in place a context where that person can succeed.”

Polly Mackenzie, the newly installed chief social purpose officer at the University of the Arts London, also rejected the view that the creation of such roles was “virtue-washing”.

Indeed, she argued, it was the opportunity to implement changes, rather than just think about the changes that could be implemented, that attracted her to the position after serving as chief executive of the Demos thinktank.

She sees her role as helping to shift the university’s approach so that it is more focused on harnessing the creativity, skills and talents of academics and students to tackle the problems the world faces – a key mission when the sector is trying to prove its worth, having found itself “on the wrong side of a culture war”.

“I can sit horizontally across teams and help the university to build a coherent social purpose approach that takes in the operational stuff of how we live, reforms to the curriculum so that sustainability is embedded in our teaching practice, while also thinking about how we use our research,” Ms Mackenzie said.

“The world has problems; creativity helps solve these problems. So we are turning ourselves, in all of our incarnations as an institution, into something that contributes to the solutions.”

Being in a role that spans both the academic and professional services sides of university life – and therefore having influence over everything from the curriculum and research to operations and finance – was also seen as a key advantage for Irish higher education’s first vice-president of sustainability, Jennifer Boyer.

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She took on the position at the Technological University Dublin in September 2021 after serving as the new institution’s assistant head of architecture. Her insider status meant that she was already known as someone who was “going to change some things, not fulfil a token role”, she said.

“Sustainability requires us to close the gap between theory and practice”, Ms Boyer said. “For a long time, the academy would proclaim ‘this is what we should do and why we should do it’, but this was often disconnected from what people were actually doing in practice. I think universities are now feeling the ethical crunch there, and these new roles in sustainability are about closing that gap.”

While the post has become a focal point for anyone at the university engaged in sustainability, Ms Boyer has refused to carry the entire burden on her shoulders because “there’s no way one person can do that”.

“It has to be a distributed, federated model in that people can respond to sustainability in how it relates to their area but with the view that it contributes to something bigger,” she said.

Spreading the load and recognising that work in these areas had previously been done by an engaged group of volunteers before the creation of such lofty positions was vital for ensuring institutional buy-in, practitioners said.

Now associate vice-president for equity and inclusion at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Arig al Shaibah previously worked with the communities of south-eastern Ontario, Canada, in immigration services and domestic violence shelters.

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In making the switch to university administration, she maintained her commitment to social justice and used her spare time to push forward the equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) agenda before her work was recognised with a formal position, first as McMaster University’s inaugural associate vice-president for equity and inclusion and now at UBC.

Creating leadership positions in this space shows an “increasing respect” for the professionalisation of equality and diversity work and a recognition that it requires someone with a multidisciplinary skill set, with an understanding of both the psychology and sociology around the issues as well as knowledge of policies and business management, according to Dr al Shaibah.

“Some say it might be siloing it, but I think it allows for dedicated time and expertise to this very large and complex portfolio, giving it its due and agency,” she said.

“But this doesn’t preclude every other senior administrator also having EDI competency and proficiencies, just like they all need to have financial acumen and political acumen.”

Whereas once her work was marginalised, she said, the title raises its profile. It is symbolic for all who care about diversity and “gives permission and emboldens those who have been doing this on the ground to come out and talk more about it”.

Dr al Shaibah said that she saw education and training of staff as a “necessary but insufficient intervention” and explained that her office was focused on trying to “train the trainers” so that they have a body of people happy to educate others and that her team does not have to spend all its time running “diversity 101” sessions.

“What we’re focused on is systems change, to really help make sense of the strategic processes, the planning, development, implementation and monitoring of various action plans to get at goals that we’ve identified,” she said.

Talk of action plans and strategic visions, however, may alarm some academics who already feel that too much of their time is taken up with such administrative work, to the detriment of their research and teaching.

“Academics these days are so busy, they can barely answer emails,” Professor Lumby said. “A key issue is how you get people to focus on change when they are already overwhelmed, and any further tasks are just unwelcome – not because they are not committed but because it’s like pouring more water into an overfilled pot.”

A focus for any senior manager should therefore be putting in place levers and processes that “will actually change people’s behaviour without everyone having to put this to the top of their agenda”, she added.

For Ms Boyer, part of her job is to sell the benefits of taking action and to engage with staff every step of the way, rather than dictating action from on high.

“If I am setting targets and it is not within our current capability to achieve them, then we need to figure out why and what we can do about it: do we need to seek additional funding or partnerships or pivot our research?

“We have to have these open conversations, and we can only do that if people understand sustainability is actually a chance for everyone to find a way to contribute to a better future for our world.”

This has included convincing fellow members of the executive team via an “induction programme”, which was one of the first things she did in the post.

She described faculty deans coming up to her at the end of the first session to tell her that they now understood how sustainability was wider than environmental issues and that they were now keen to help spread this message.

“Until somebody articulates it and provides examples, the word itself is very opaque and can be interpreted in so many ways,” she said.

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Ms Mackenzie said so much of the role was about good communication: “If you do it wrong, sustainability or diversity initiatives can be a confusion, they can be a burden. But if you do social purpose right, it brings coherence – and that is what we are aiming for.”

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com