Current and emerging challenges facing Canadian College presidents

The dissertation evaluators want a rewrite and revision of the literature review with additions that will focus academic perspective of leadership competencies in higher education. In addition there is a request for clarification of the ontological and epistemological stance of the research. The whole dissertation is approximately 140 pages plus references and some charts. Once we land on a writer I will share the whole document. The writer should commit to reviewing the dissertation in order to support the rewrite as requested.

Here is the complete report from the dissertation evaluators.

Overall, the thesis is well written and reasonably well structured. The thesis is strong in its context-sensitive understanding of this higher education sector and its possible implications for leadership, conceptually it mostly engages with various strands of the academic leadership literature in general and in higher education in particular. Based on grounded theory the thesis employs a mixed methods approach using a quantitative survey and interviews. The dissertation arrives at presenting critical factors, competences and strategies for successful leadership that leads the thesis in turn to develop practice-oriented recommendations.

The dissertation raised a number of questions and issues, and we used the viva to discuss them with the candidate. The candidate performed very well in the viva voce examination while the discussion reinforced our view that the thesis would benefit from some substantial revisions. Overall, the thesis reads to us like an interesting investigation of leadership practice while the academic foundations and contributions of the research to the academic debate could be more strongly worked out.

A revision of the literature review can be used to unfold more of an academic debate around leadership and leadership competencies in general and in higher education in particular. The topic of leadership in higher education is a well-developed field of study that would allow to identify different approaches and controversary positions. It would also allow to raise questions about the applicability of this literature to the specific context and conditions of the college sector. In turn various debates / open issues could be identified and be revisited in the discussion section of the thesis (see further below).

The methodology chapter should include a section that clarifies the ontological and epistemological stance of the research before going into the details of the methods used. The chapter would further benefit from a section that brings together and elaborates somewhat more on the ethical issues involved in the research and how they have been dealt with, including the rather unusual practice of not anonymising the institutional affiliations and names of the interviewees. We noticed during the viva that consent was given for this while it should also be discussed in the thesis.

The thesis should further withdraw from the claim of developing theory based on a grounded theory approach or elaborate on this stance in a more appropriate way, including the evolving theoretical contribution. The research would further benefit from engaging with some of the literature on mixed methods approaches to clarify what type of mixed methods has been used, what the purpose of the quantitative and qualitative methods were in relation, for example, to answering the research questions, to data enrichment or triangulation.

The empirical parts of the thesis and the discussion chapter remain largely descriptive and surprisingly unconnected to each other and to the wider leadership literature. The empirical chapters should be revised in order to make them more analytical. We recommend this can be done by making better connections with: (a) the literature review; and (b) and bringing to bear the field knowledge of the researcher himself. Overall, the findings would benefit from further elaboration and bringing leadership in the sector more ‘to life’. This should, in turn, allow the ‘discussion’ to strengthen the writing about the contributions of the thesis to academic debates / open issues and to reflect on the findings in the light of research on academic leadership and leadership competencies. The ‘discussion’ should further be clearer about which insights can be drawn from the quantitative or qualitative data, and where these data are integrated or used to be confronted with each other.

In the light of the above, the conclusions would be revised and strengthened.

From a more formal point of view, we recommend that chapters have somewhat more elaborate concluding sections summarising the contribution of the chapter to the research overall.

Finally, minor issues as regards typos and referencing would benefit from final editing.