There’s a peculiar moment that arrives in every institution’s life when the choice becomes binary. You either cling to what’s comfortable and slowly fade into irrelevance, or you hand the reins to someone brave enough to burn the old map and chart a new course. What we’ve discovered while putting together this edition of Power Women in Higher Education, 2025 is that the latter rarely happens by committee vote or strategic planning retreat. It happens when a leader walks in and simply refuses to accept that “this is how we’ve always done it” is an acceptable answer to any question worth asking.
The women profiled in these pages share something that transcends geography, institutional context, or even their specific challenges. They possess what we might call operational audacity—the rare ability to look at broken systems everyone else has learned to tolerate and say, “No, actually, we’re fixing this.” Not next year during the budget cycle. Not after the next accreditation review. Now.
Take Rebecca Carter, our cover story. At sixteen, she stood in a university registrar office and decided she wanted to become indispensable. Three decades later, she’s built registrar offices from scratch in Afghanistan, transformed quality assurance frameworks across the Middle East, and is currently rewriting the rules of accreditation at New Uzbekistan University. But here’s what makes her story compelling: she didn’t climb a traditional ladder. She built her own across continents, choosing trust over bureaucracy, people over processes, and innovation over the safety of established practice. In an era where artificial intelligence is reshaping classrooms faster than curriculum committees can meet, Rebecca represents a leadership philosophy that higher education desperately needs—hire exceptional people, trust them completely, then get out of their way. It’s simple. It’s terrifying for traditional institutions. And it works.
This edition also brings you the journeys of other remarkable leaders who’ve created seismic shifts in how universities operate, think, and serve their communities.
Perhaps most revealing is our case study examining how women presidents are navigating institutional transformation during crisis.
What strikes us most about these leaders isn’t their resilience, though they have that in abundance. It’s their refusal to lead scared. This is what courage looks like in higher education leadership; not dramatic speeches or bold declarations, but the daily choice to do what’s right for students, faculty, and the future, even when it’s politically costly.
Higher education stands at a crossroads. Enrollment is declining. Public trust is eroding. Technology is disrupting faster than institutions can adapt. The leaders who will guide universities through this transformation won’t be those who manage decline gracefully. They’ll be those who refuse to accept decline as inevitable. The women in this edition are showing us what that refusal looks like in practice.
The future of higher education is already here, being built by leaders who understood that waiting for perfect conditions is just another way of choosing irrelevance. We’re honored to share their stories with you.
