University Administrators as Caring Academic Leaders in an HBCU Setting: Investigating Student Perceptions

Introduction

Due to the current capitalistic and bureaucratic climate of higher education, universities face institutional obstacles in providing authentic caring in their academic services. Authentic university academic caring (AUAC) can be described as the provision of genuine humanistic concern, disciplined nurturing, and required educational resources within a university’s academic services. AUAC is established through sequences of caring-about (emotive attention; motive), care-for (disciplined nurturing), caregiving (practice; activity; profession) and care receiving (response). AUAC is a culmination of organizational and professional values, structured relationships, institutional activities and responsiveness, academic integrity, ethical obligations, formal rationality, allocated resources, fiscal responsibility, and customer satisfaction. Many of these obligations require adequate authoritative or administrative presence, participation, and performance. Thus, university administrative leadership can play an integral role in contending with the obligations of AUAC. University administrative leadership can be considered as professionals within administrative positions that lead (e.g., influence, motivate, guide and politicking) universities into carrying out institutional activities that serve the needs of students. However, the research examining these matters is scarce, especially regarding the relational and bureaucratic bearing of caring administrative leadership.

This chapter contributes by filling the scholarly gap on the matter of university administrators (e.g., President, Provost, Vice Provost, Campus Director, and Dean), as caring leaders and their involvement in the delivery of AUAC. In providing the necessary context to caring administrative leadership, this chapter begins by sharing literary findings on universities as caring organizations, in addition to the bureaucratic nature of AUAC. With this outlook firmly established, this chapter also explains the relational bureaucratic value of caring university administrative leadership and its association with the concerns of student-customers. While leadership is usually depicted based on personality disposition or employee engagement. Student-customers can offer a means of characterizing and substantiating AUAC, as well as the various organizational behaviors and interactions that represent and support it. Accordingly, this chapter highlights a research study that used the perceptions of students to empirically explore the organizational and relational relevance of caring administrative academic leadership on AUAC.

This research was conducted at the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI). UVI is a historically black college and university (HBCU). HBCUs are well-known for their traditions of academic caring. The overarching question motivating this research was: “Do students perceive caring administrative leadership as having a strong relationship with authentic university academic caring (AUAC)?” To tackle this query, a quantitative research was conducted to examine the associations between four identified dimensions of AUAC (operational, academic managerial, instructional and advisement) and caring administrative leadership. Taking everything into account, this chapter is a synthesis of literature review, methodology, data analysis, empirical findings, limitations and conclusion.