Distributed Leadership that Supports Academic Integrity in Higher Education: Perspectives from Diverse Leaders

As noted by Sutherland-Smith (2024) academic integrity leadership should be distributed involving individuals, organisations, governments or communities of learners and educators, but it can be challenging to ensure that leadership particularly of educative approaches towards academic integrity is enacted in a way that approaches the issue educatively and enables widespread adoption. The recent Advance HE Framework for Leading in Higher Education notes that “the leadership experience [and impact] of leaders in HE does not always correspond to their level of responsibility” (Lawson, 2025, p.5). This is especially true in relation to academic integrity where sometimes junior academic and professional staff need to exercise distributed leadership navigating and leading others to respond to “complex, uncertain and high intensity/risk situations” such as challenges related to contract cheating and generative artificial intelligence “working with and influencing whole/eco-systems” in a way that would typically be expected of leaders at far higher levels (Lawson, 2025, p.7).  These leaders require support from their institutions and professional development to exercise their influence with impact (Hofmeyer, et al., 2015).

Although the issue of leadership in academic integrity has been recently addressed in a section of the Second Handbook of Academic Integrity and was previously touched on in the seminal work on the culture of academic integrity (e.g. Bretag, 2019, 2020; Bretag et al., 2011), how distributed academic integrity leadership can best be enacted is relatively underexplored in the Australasian university context. In particular, the leadership of academic and professional staff who hold positions related to academic integrity, but do not hold other senior leadership positions and effectively need to ‘manage up’ requires further investigation along with informal communities of practice.

This joint project between CAULLT and the Australasian Academic Integrity network (AAIN) aims to capture the voices of these diverse academic integrity leaders and identify their challenges in leading academic integrity as well as the strategies that have influenced whole/eco-systems at their institutions and beyond. This project will then feed into recommendations for formal university leadership on how to leverage their expertise.