UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP AND IMPACT AGENDA: A CRITICAL READING OF THE GEM 2024/2025 REPORT (UNESCO) BASED ON TRISTAN MCCOWAN

Abstract

This article critically analyzes UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report 2024/2025, Leadership in Education: Leading for Learning, through Tristan McCowan’s theory on the social impact of higher education. A qualitative documentary analysis of the report is conducted, supported by the theoretical contributions of Tristan McCowan, Stephen Ball, Gaudêncio Frigotto, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos. The study argues that although UNESCO advances a broadened conception of educational leadership—structured around defining expectations, focusing on learning, promoting collaboration, and developing people—its framework remains largely embedded in a performance-oriented logic of systemic improvement. In contrast, McCowan challenges the global impact agenda by demonstrating that university evaluation is inherently normative, value-laden, and susceptible to technocratic instrumentalization. The article shows that UNESCO’s leadership model can be critically problematized when confronted with McCowan’s critique of linear causality, restricted measurement, and the reduction of university value to efficiency metrics. It concludes that university leadership must be repositioned beyond managerial rationality toward an ethical-political framework that integrates impact, cognitive justice, and social commitment, thereby resisting productivist and performative pressures.