The recent Higher Education Leadership and Management (HELM) Summit 2022 included a session where three universities’ deans from three different time zones discussed the challenges of mid-level managers in higher education, moderated by another dean in a fourth time zone.
Despite their diverse institutions and contexts, many of their ideas about research impact converged.
“There’s a real need to ensure that we don’t create a culture where academics just write for other academics,” said Professor Kumar Ramakrishna, who is the Provost’s Chair in National Security Studies and Associate Dean in charge of Policy Studies, as well as Head of the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research, in the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. RSIS is a graduate school with no undergraduates but about 250 postgraduate students. With about 70 senior researchers and 30 staff, the institution also functions as a think tank.