340 Global Ethics for Leadership
triangle’^273 insofar as expanding access, mitigating cost, and maintaining
or enhancing quality cannot be questioned: it is the manner and extent to
which they will be harnessed insightfully, that will determine the out-
come bearing in mind that the very students at whom the affordances of
technology are aimed as an enabler of access to quality education are
also the cohort of potential students to be excluded for reasons set out in
the earlier discussion.
Students will always be key stakeholders of a university and respon-
sible leadership needs to fundamentally focus on the renewal of higher
education towards a clear student centred-approach. Article 9 of the
Unesco World Declaration (i) directly calls for universities to educate
students to be ‘well informed and deeply motivated citizens’, and (ii)
specifically to recast curricula’ using innovative pedagogic and didactic
modalities and ‘go beyond cognitive mastery of disciplines’^274 This is
critical, for as Harkavy^275 succinctly states, ‘More than any other institu-
tion, the university determines the character of the overall schooling
system’ given that the underlying character of the schooling system is in
a large measure influenced by what is taught to the teachers in the uni-
versity. ‘[T]hrough the school system every family [...] is brought into
touch with the university; for from it proceeds the teachers, or the teach-
er’s teachers.’
However, the notion of university stakeholders has evolved beyond
just the student and staff, and academic governance standards require an
emphasis on broader co-operative governance and stakeholder manage-
ment. The rationale for this is the longstanding commercial dogma that
good stakeholder management imitates reputation which directly and
indirectly impacts on the financial returns of the organisation. Therefore,
if the university is seen as responsible by its stakeholders, this enhances
273
274 Daniels et al 2009a^
275 Unesco 1998d:11-12.^
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