The Role of Higher Education in Creating Sustainable Leaders

Universities are one of the most important trend setters for the modern society, transcending from their role: they educate, they train, are olso important partners in public governance, both local and national level. In our paper we try to study why sustainable development is the way to follow for a public entity – namely a university. We focused on identifying the evolution and the state of the art for sustainability assessment tools in higher education institutions and leadership. As methodology we utilized chronological literature review, taking into consideration mostly the English written published research, including also the Romanian linguistic space. The main results consist in presenting the evolution of sustainability assessment tools and leadership in higher education institutions. Future's leaders need to see organizations as complex systems and understand how individual actions have a global impact.