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Bruce Macfarlane

Summary

Bruce John Macfarlane (born 15 November) is an English academic specialising in the theory and practice of higher education. He has written a number of books that have analysed the ethics of academic practice including Teaching with Integrity (2004), Researching with Integrity (2009), The Academic Citizen (2009), Intellectual Leadership in Higher Education (2012) and Freedom to Learn (2016). He has held professorial positions at three UK universities including the University of Bristol where he was the Head of the School of Education (2017-2020) and at two public universities in Hong Kong including the Education University of Hong Kong where he is currently the Dean of the Faculty of Education and Human Development and Chair Professor of Educational Leadership (since 2021). He has also worked as a visiting professor in Sweden, Australia, Japan and South Africa. Career After completing his first degree in Government at the University of Essex, he worked as a management trainee for Lloyds Bank, a schoolteacher in Hong Kong and as a lecturer in law at Mid Kent College of Further and Higher Education. He began his academic career at Canterbury Christ Church University in 1989 as a lecturer in business studies. He developed the former college’s first Business Studies degree and was also a founding member of the Business and Management Department. During the 1990s he took both an MA in Curriculum Studies at the University of Kent and a PhD in Higher Education part-time at the Institute of Education, University College London. During the 2000s he shifted from business and management studies to educational development working at City University, London (2000-2004), the University of West London (2004-08) and the University of Portsmouth (2008-10). He was the Head of Educational Development at both West London and Portsmouth. He became a full professor in 2004 and Director of Centre for Research in Tertiary Education whilst at the University of West London. In 2010 he moved to the University of Hong Kong taking a role as an associate professor of higher education and liberal studies and, later, Associate Dean for Learning and Teaching. He was promoted back to full professor in 2014. In 2015 he moved back to the UK and became a professor in higher education at the University of Southampton where he was Director of the Centre for Educational Policy. In 2017 he became the Head of School of Education at the University of Bristol moving back once again to Hong Kong in 2021 where he is currently the Dean of the Faculty of Education and Human Development and Chair Professor of Educational Leadership at the Education University of Hong Kong. In 2024 he co-founded the Centre for Higher Education Leadership and Policy Studies (CHELPS), the first higher education centre in Hong Kong.

Personal Life

Bruce Macfarlane lives and works in Hong Kong.

Scholarly work

Bruce Macfarlane’s research and publications centre on developing conceptual understandings in relation to higher education and exploring the ethical aspects of what it means to be an academic. He has published widely since 1992. In addition to writing more than 100 journal papers and book chapters his single authored monographs include Teaching with Integrity (2004), Researching with Integrity (2009), The Academic Citizen (2009), Intellectual Leadership in Higher Education (2012) and Freedom to Learn (2016), all published by Routledge. His more recent work has focused on the ethics of multiple (or co) authorship, and conceptual and historically grounded analyses of the academic sabbatical, research into higher education, myths about university students, higher education ‘crises’, and academic leadership. He is the co-editor of the book series Perspectives on Leadership in Higher Education published by Bloomsbury and is currently writing a book about the university leadership. Bruce Macfarlane’s research work is distinctive for its conceptual originality and in developing, or re-framing, concepts, such as academic freedom, academic citizenship, intellectual leadership, and academic social class. He is further well known for his conceptual mapping of the higher education field. In 2012 he was awarded a Fellowship by the Society for Research into Higher Education in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the field of higher education studies.