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For Àngels Fitó, placing people back at the centre of universities' transformation agendas is not a rhetorical choice, but a strategic one, as diversity-aware leadership fosters decisions anchored in inclusion, responsibility and long-term institutional sustainability.
As universities across Europe navigate a period of profound transformation, they must organise themselves to remain relevant, resilient and socially responsible. In this context, strategy has become a central concept in university governance. Yet too often, strategic discourse risks drifting away from the people it is ultimately meant to serve.
The success or failure of institutional transformation depends less on the sophistication of strategic plans than on the leadership capacity to keep people – our students, staff, faculty and wider communities – at the centre of change. As a woman leading a university, I have also experienced how expectations around leadership, legitimacy and inclusion are often shaped by deeply embedded norms and biases. This is precisely where leadership grounded in diversity becomes not an accessory, but a structural necessity.
In recent years, universities have made major efforts to respond to emerging demands such as lifelong learning, micro-credentials and reskilling at scale. These developments are essential. Yet we have also seen how easily the focus can shift towards products, frameworks and certifications, while the support structures that make learning genuinely transformative – the pedagogical, professional and emotional dimensions of accompaniment – receive less attention.
At my university, this tension has been particularly visible in discussions around continuous education and micro-credentials. Designing flexible learning pathways, ensuring traceability between programmes and enabling mobility across educational cycles are crucial steps. But they only become transformative when combined with personalised guidance, mentoring and long-term accompaniment.
Strategy that overlooks these human dimensions risks reinforcing inequalities instead of reducing them. This tension becomes even more significant with the growing presence of artificial intelligence. AI can expand institutional capacity and support richer, more flexible and more personalised learning pathways. But it cannot replace the human agency that judges, decides, assumes responsibility and gives meaning to education. Precisely for that reason, one of the central governance challenges of our time is not whether to choose between human agency and AI, but how to articulate a relationship between them that protects academic integrity, strengthens critical judgement and preserves the deeply human purpose of higher education.
Leadership grounded in diversity brings precisely this corrective lens. It challenges linear, output-driven approaches and asks deeper questions:
These questions are not secondary. They shape the real impact of institutional decisions.
Over the past years, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) has worked to integrate diversity not as a parallel policy, but as a core condition for academic quality, organisational resilience and social relevance. This approach is rooted in a simple but demanding premise: diversity must be embedded in governance, organisational design and everyday practices if it is to generate lasting change. In this sense, diversity encompasses gender, intergenerationality, cultural diversity and the plurality of experiences that shape how people learn, work and participate in institutions.
Far from being limited to representation, diversity is also a driver of innovation. It expands the range of questions universities are able to ask, enriches collective processes of ideation and enables the design of roadmaps that are more robust, more inclusive and better aligned with social complexity. Institutions that take diversity seriously are better equipped not only to respond to change, but to imagine it differently and govern it more responsibly.
As the world’s first fully online university, the UOC is acutely aware that digitalisation does not automatically lead to inclusion. Without intentional design, digital environments can reproduce and even amplify existing inequalities. This awareness has guided the development of institutional policies that address recruitment, career progression, learning design, data use and community building through an inclusive lens.
Leadership grounded in diversity has been key in sustaining this long-term vision. Rather than focusing on isolated actions, it requires questioning existing structures and redesigning them so that inclusion is built in from the outset. This systemic approach aligns values, governance mechanisms and operational decisions, ensuring that inclusion does not depend on individual goodwill alone, but is supported by institutional frameworks capable of generating continuity and accountability.
One of the most demanding aspects of institutional transformation is aligning strategy, governance and organisational structures in a coherent and participatory way. At the UOC, this has involved revisiting decision-making processes, simplifying coordination mechanisms and strengthening data-informed governance, while at the same time fostering shared responsibility across the institution.
Diversity-informed leadership plays a critical role in this process. It promotes participatory governance, values distributed leadership and recognises that sustainable change depends on trust, dialogue and engagement across diverse groups. Our approach to inclusion must be conceived, implemented and monitored through the involvement of faculty, administrative staff and students, reinforcing collective ownership and long-term commitment.
This way of leading also reshapes organisational culture. It makes power dynamics more visible, normalises collaboration and strengthens accountability. In a context where universities must become more agile, transdisciplinary and permeable, these cultural shifts are as important as formal structural reforms.
There is also an inescapably personal dimension to leadership grounded in diversity. Leadership matters not only because of who occupies positions of responsibility, but because of the ways in which institutions create space for different trajectories, sensibilities and forms of contribution. This reality brings both responsibility and opportunity: responsibility to make inequalities visible, and opportunity to model alternative ways of leading.
Visibility matters – not as individual recognition, but as a signal that leadership can reflect a plurality of experiences and social positions. Leading a public-mandate university with a strong social mission requires empathy, contextual awareness and the capacity to build alliances. These competencies are particularly relevant in collaborative European frameworks, such as European Universities alliances, where leadership is exercised through cooperation rather than hierarchy.
Leadership grounded in diversity ultimately reminds us of something fundamental: institutions do not transform themselves, people do. Strategy becomes meaningful only when it enables those people to learn, work, lead and thrive in environments that recognise their full humanity.
Yet leadership itself cannot be understood as fixed or self-sufficient. It must be cultivated, strengthened and evaluated over time. Just as we advocate lifelong learning as an essential principle for students and professionals, we must also embrace lifelong leadership development, because the institutional, social and technological contexts in which leadership is exercised are in constant transformation.
In this sense, EUA's Leadership Development Programme offers a particularly valuable opportunity. As leaders of universities, we cannot ask others to remain open to continuous learning if we are not willing to do the same ourselves. To lead responsibly today means to remain willing to learn, to question one’s own assumptions and to grow alongside the institutions and communities we serve.
At a time when universities are called upon to respond to rapid and complex change, placing people back at the centre is not a rhetorical choice, but a strategic one. Diversity-aware leadership offers both a compass and a methodology for navigating this transformation – anchored in inclusion, responsibility and long-term institutional sustainability.
