Chapter 8: Higher Education in Crisis: Enabling Complexity Thinking and Adaptive Space for Ethical Decision-Making During the Time of COVID-19

Using the COVID-19 crisis as its foundation, this chapter will explore the value of engaging vanguard leadership constructs, complexity thinking, and adaptive space for improved ethical crisis leadership by higher education practitioners. The chapter gives an overview of crisis, stakeholders, interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary leadership, ethics, and ethical crisis leadership before explaining complexity thinking and adaptive space, and how these constructs can be engaged for ethical, interdisciplinary leadership during a crisis. The chapter concludes by interrogating current issues in higher education governance and examines how complexity thinking and adaptive space could be applied to the COVID-19 crisis in higher education for the reopening of college campuses. Higher education is facing a very real-world problem that has long been in the making and is not going away any time soon. New leadership approaches are needed to confront this crisis and to be better prepared to act ethically concerning the future of higher education.