The Retreat From Intellectual Leadership: Exploring the Professoriate's Reticence to Profess

ABSTRACT

This article reports on how established academics, the world around, conceptualise intellectual leadership and experience impediments to its practice. It identifies financial enfeeblement, temporal incongruence, and institutional silencing as organisational dysfunctions that induce profound role dissonance between what faculty believe intellectual leadership should be and the reality of conditions that curb such ambition. Drawing on data from an international survey of n  = 598 professors spanning 64 countries, this article presents how a temporality of the present, characterised by pervasive attacks on higher education by populist forces and the stubborn resilience of its neoliberal organisation, has produced a particular milieu of academic arrhythmia that threatens the permanent abandonment of the professoriate as a source for scholarly and public good.