This compelling book explores current attitudes towards failure in academia. Tara Brabazon argues that success and failures are rarely linked and instead failure can be harnessed as both a diagnostic and a literacy to improve research integrity, authenticity, accountability and consciousness. Brabazon demonstrates how instances of failure can facilitate an awareness of asymmetrical power dynamics and injustice in academic life. How To Embrace Academic Failure illustrates how to create personal, professional and organizational change as a result of failure. It offers practical strategies for using failure to enhance academic careers and improve research ethics and teaching. Brabazon concludes by presenting an idealised academic future where a culture of failure provides transparency, rigour, ethical leadership and followership. This insightful book is a vital resource for students and scholars of higher education management, business leadership and the sociology of education. Academics in critical university studies and early career researchers will also benefit from Brabazon’s novel perspective on the post-pandemic, claustropolitan university.