252 Ethics in Higher Education: Values-driven Leaders for the Future
morphed into overt activism. Universities themselves, have similarly
(albeit reactively) used social media to defend their positions and
communicate with staff and students. Clearly, social networking is
“wiping out old boundaries, exposing the workplace to greater public
scrutiny and creating risks that never existed before.” (ERC 2013b:11)
Few institutional policies and processes seem to be in place to
empower leadership and management to deal with the raft of new
stakeholders who reside outside of recognized governance structures and
have negligible experience in higher education leadership, management
and policy, but who are increasingly shaping university agendas and
impacting on their financial sustainability. It is an invidious position for
affected higher education institutions, which is exacerbated by an
absence of ethics as a guiding principle.
Risks to the institutions (especially reputational risk) posed by the
cumulative impact of social media use and abuse in promoting these
various agendas have prompted a small number of higher education
institutions to develop social media policies that provide guidelines (and
sanctions) for social media use. However, it seems the impact and risk
for universities posed by social media, is not yet being taken seriously
enough by most universities.
Struwig and Van der Berg (2016) assert:
“We have conducted research – due to be published soon – that
shows South Africa’s higher education institutions should take
this issue more seriously. Most universities don’t have formal
social media policies. Some don’t seem to have considered social
media as a potential risk to their reputation at all.....Our research
involved 23 of South Africa’s 25 public universities. The aim
was to investigate whether they had social media policies at all
and how they generally managed social media. The results show
that: