Leaders as Designers for Higher Education Transformation
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Welcome back to The Co-Lab Brief. In Volume 3, we’re exploring leadership in global higher education, and what's required of leadership in a rapidly changing landscape. If you missed Volume 2 on microcredentials in higher education, you can read and respond to the edition here.
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How can leaders in higher education balance the weight of tradition with the urgency for transformation? What could happen if leaders embraced the need for change and refused to settle for the status quo?
Bold Leadership in a Rapidly Evolving University Landscape
For much of their history, universities have relied on leadership focused on stewardship: administrators who work to preserve academic standards, maintain traditions, and carefully manage complex institutions. Buildings, bureaucracies, and governance structures endure for decades, while students cycle through every few years. Leaders grounded in this ethos offer stability and credibility, but it can also slow adaptation, leaving institutions struggling to respond to rapid societal, technological, and environmental change.
Universities sit at a crossroads. Leaders are expected to honor centuries of tradition while responding to pressures that are unprecedented in scale and speed. How might institutions evolve if leaders embraced transformation rather than defaulting to incremental change? What opportunities could emerge if they refused to accept the familiar and designed boldly for the future? The challenge is urgent: higher education leaders must act with vision and courage to craft universities that can generate impact, respond to societal needs, and thrive in a rapidly changing world.
This edition of The Co-Lab Brief explores how higher education leaders are rising to this challenge. Through insights from UDI Global Fellows and other higher education leaders, we consider how visionary leadership balances respect for tradition with the imperative to innovate. We explore how leaders can cultivate cultures of experimentation, distribute leadership across teams, and safeguard the core values that make universities trusted institutions—all while designing for relevance, equity, and social impact. We examine the strategies, mindsets, and courage required to move beyond stewardship and administration as ends in themselves, and instead lead as designers of institutions capable of transformative impact.
Leaders as Designers in Higher Education
What does it take to be successful as an academic leader in 2025? Is it the depth of knowledge built through years in academia? The ability to inspire and mobilize people toward a shared vision? The courage to make bold choices in uncertain times? Or is it the fusion of expertise, character, and imagination that allows leaders to navigate complexity and design the future of their institutions?
Higher education in 2025 looks very different from what it was 50 years ago, with rapid technological advances, shifting workforce demands, new learner expectations, declining societal trust, and persistent financial pressures. UDI Vice Chair and Managing Director Minu Ipemakes the case that universities need leaders who move beyond administration to embrace a mindset as leaders who are designers – leaders who reimagine institutional structures, prototype new models and build capacity for sustained societal impact.
Leaders must now act as designers—shaping systems, cultures, and strategies that anticipate the future rather than preserve the past. The task is urgent: to confront institutional blind spots, embrace bold alternatives, and design universities capable of meeting the needs of their communities and generating sustaining impact at scale.
Ihron Rensburg, former President of the University of Johannesburg and UDI Global Fellow, emphasizes that the drive to transform an institution into a more responsive, vibrant organization was central to his leadership philosophy:
“The leader has to be a transformer or has to think about transformation, and be energized by it, dynamized by it.”
Rensburg led the University of Johannesburg (UJ) for more than 12 years, during which time he significantly expanded the university’s research output. Today, UJ stands among the most productive research institutions on the African continent—a result, he explains, of holding his cabinet to higher standards while working alongside them to remove barriers that hindered their success. Watch Now >>
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At Arizona State University (ASU), this mindset is put into practice. ASU’s president – and UDI’s Chairman – Dr. Michael Crow became president of ASU 23 years ago. In his inaugural address, he laid out a vision to develop the New American University. His message for institutional and higher education leaders?
"Assume you're going to be fired."
Crow advocates that university leaders should embrace bold and visionary approaches to leading meaningful change in higher education. The result? Over two decades, ASU has transformed into a globally recognized leader in higher education, providing more access to learners, advancing interdisciplinary research with society in mind and developing new ways to engage with corporate and community partners.
From Tradition to Transformation: Leadership by Design on a Global Stage
Around the world, university leaders are forced to grapple with legacy models around governance, curriculum, and culture — shaping not only their institutions, but new possibilities for learners and societies. Below are insightful perspectives from global higher education leaders on how they approach leadership by design.
