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Leadership in Higher Education – coping with AI and the turbulence of our times

Abstract Today’s world is clearly fractured whether we are looking at it through economic, political, cultural or educational lenses. This is in no way something new. The world has always been in this state, but the speed with which it reacted to real or perceived threats and tried to change accordingly was barely perceivable and, therefore, easier to adopt and adapt to. Today those changes happen with incredible speed and our reactions to them may not be informed or educated and are usually taken by leaders who are, at best, controversial and at worst obviously partial to their own, petty interests against the greater public good they vowed to serve. What can higher education do in such a world? Artificial intelligence (AI) is making huge progress and, although education at all levels is lagging behind in meaningfully adopting AI and working with it, the educational system is expected to react to a world divided by the fear of AI using big data, claiming jobs, and ushering in the era of loss of human supremacy or by the glorification of AI which is only a tool, fast developing indeed, but permanently controlled by human intelligence. Even if that human intelligence is concentrated into fewer and fewer human decision makers thus contributing to the already huge gap of inequality existing in today’s world. The present paper will explore issues related to the way in which the leadership of higher education chooses to handle today’s challenges and will use the home university of the authors to illustrate what happens in Romanian universities. The discussion will be informed by the authors’ own experience in the higher education system as well as by an analysis of various discourses and narratives belonging to different stakeholders, discussing those issues in various inter/national media. The paper will offer some recommendations.