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Blog Posts
Surviving a Leadership Transition
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on May 14, 2016 © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. Leadership changes in the upper administration can be stressful for chairs and deans. We’ve all seen situations in which a new chancellor or president arrives, and between six months and a year later, there’s an...
Understanding and Managing Perceptions of Academic Rigor
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on August 25, 2017 © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. Faculty and students are not on the same page about what makes a course rigorous. Draeger, del Prado Hill, and Mahler (2015) find that “faculty perceived learning to be most rigorous when students are actively...
Transitioning from Faculty to Chair
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on November 15, 2018. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. Many of us either are asked to serve as chair of our department as a cyclical rotating chair or have made the decision to pursue the chair position on our own. Regardless of the path...
Is Interdisciplinary Scholarship the Future of Higher Education?
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on June 15, 2019. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. To help students understand how global “grand challenges” cut across multiple fields, a growing number of colleges and universities are creating courses, faculty clusters, and even entire academic tracks that take a multidisciplinary approach to...
Building Alliances and Networks of Support in Higher Education: A New Era in Higher Education
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on April 15, 2019. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. An irony of higher education is that as college degree attainment has become more common and necessary for employment and economic growth, governmental investment has declined. Many state legislatures have reduced their support for higher...
Fundraising: Lead with Gift Officers in Mind
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on October 1, 2019. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. In higher education fundraising, the people who identify, cultivate, and solicit charitable contributions are critical assets. These gift officers strengthen the bonds between alumni and their alma maters by facilitating the donation of major...
On Mixed Marriages: Building Community Between Academic Affairs and Student Affairs
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on November 1, 2018. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. My partner and I often joke that we have a mixed marriage. Our joking is not exclusively because one of us is Black and the other is White. It is not because one...
Reflections on “Becoming” a Department Chair
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on November 2, 2020. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. Michelle Obama’s best-selling book, Becoming, offers a glimpse into her life becoming not only the first lady of the United States but also, and more importantly, a strong African American woman. The former first lady...
