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, and a distinguished professor of Communication, talked about the rationale for the program and progress to date.
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 our counterparts in the for-profit corporate world, we in education experience the reality of balancing budgets and making tough choices about how to steward limited financial resources.
