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Blog Posts
How an Academic Leader Changes a Lightbulb
The very first house I bought was a condominium, and the purchase price included 10 hours of service by an electrician. The idea was that each owner would want to customize the unit with special lighting fixtures and built-in appliances, and covering the cost of the electrician was intended to...
Foster Faculty Scholarship with this Agenda
A major role of every academic leader is to help faculty do well. For those of us who work in institutions where becoming a productive scholar is an absolute prerequisite to earning tenure, “doing well” implies developing a scholarship agenda, and “working” a plan. Ensuring that new faculty get off...
How to Build Emotional Intelligence in Emerging Leaders
Part of the responsibility of managers in the enrollment field is to prepare developing professionals for the future. While there are certainly opportunities for formal professional development through national and regional conferences, these opportunities are not sufficient for forming well-rounded leaders. Although budget constraints often limit our ability to send...
Checklists: An Academic Leadership Tool
There are probably few tools we can use in academic leadership that seem less interesting than a checklist. But as Atul Gawande argued in The Checklist Manifesto (2010), checklists aren’t an excuse for mindlessness; they’re a recognition of how complex our lives have become. It’s the humble checklist that keeps us safe...
4 Principles to Manage a Variety of Administrative Issues
In his role as vice president of learning and student success at John Tyler Community College, Bill Fiege faces a wide variety of issues—dealing with student concerns, allocating resources, and managing change. All issues have the potential for more significant conflict, and one of his goals is to address issues...
Student Retention: An International Perspective
On a two-week recruitment trip to China and Japan, I asked our university partners in both countries how they addressed problems of retention. In both cases, my question elicited a blank look. Upon further questioning, I realized that retention is not the same type of challenge we experience at US...
Preparing Future Academic Leaders in Graduate School
Doctoral students typically do not receive preparation for future academic leadership roles, a shortcoming of graduate education that Rutgers University’s PreDoctoral Leadership Development Institute (PLDI) is seeking to fix. In an interview with Academic Leader, Brent Ruben, PLDI director and executive director of the Center for Organizational Development and Leadership,...
The Wrong Way to Talk about Higher Ed
Picture a day when you’ve gathered your faculty together to have a substantive conversation about some pressing issue facing the institution. You explain the situation using terms such as revenue, the business of education, efficiencies, degree production, throughput, and the like. This may seem sensible given that, in part, universities function like businesses. As with...
