Filling an Empty Toolbox
The convention in many video games is for the players to begin with only a few rudimentary tools or weapons and then increase their arsenal as they complete more complex challenges. Administrative positions are amazingly similar. Most of us start out with few, if any, tools in our leadership toolboxes...
Approaches to Building and Sustaining a Diverse Adjunct Workforce
With nontenure-track faculty now comprising 70 percent of the faculty workforce, academic leaders face daunting challenges in creating proactive workplace strategies that address this new reality. Even though more than a quarter of nontenure-track faculty are now in full-time nontenure-track appointments, the majority still teach part time. Despite the urgency...
Surviving a Leadership Transition
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 entirely new team of vice presidents. Sometimes entire divisions are reorganized. Offices are moved from...
Peacemaking 101
You are the chair of a department of six full-time faculty members. You have been chair for three years, are tenured, and hold the rank of full professor. Four of your faculty members are tenured, three hold the rank of associate professor, and one, Dr. Bill Dudas, is a full...
How to Lead Assessment in Your Unit
Being in charge of assessment within one’s unit involves more than measuring student learning outcomes. It’s about leading cultural change, a process that is best undertaken in collaboration with those who know the discipline, program, and students best—the faculty and staff. In an interview with Academic Leader, Linda Neavel Dickens,...
Preparing Academic Leaders Through Simulation and Role-Play
When it comes to how we interact with our students, most of us have made the transition from teaching to learning. We understand that, in order for students to master a subject, they can’t be spectators; they have to engage actively and consistently in the learning process. Even when we...
Five Newbie Mistakes Made by Academic Leaders
The first six months (or even year) of a position is often called an academic leader’s “honeymoon period.” People are more likely to overlook an administrator’s mistakes and to cut the person a little bit of slack about taking the institution or program in a new direction. That’s a good...
The Traumatic Impact of Interpersonal Crime on the Campus Sexual Assault Victim/Survivor
The word victim is derived from the Latin word meaning sacrifice. Suffering seems to be caused by the nature of the crime as it relates to the social character of the specific victim. And it is important to note that when a person is victimized, there may be other issues...
Seven Steps for Dealing with Problem Faculty
In a survey of America’s academic chairs almost 3,000 participants identified “dealing with problem faculty” as their greatest concern (Crookston, p. 13). The title of this article is not “seven easy steps for dealing with problem faculty.” The task was number one for a reason; rehabilitation is difficult and in rare cases...
Listening: The Greatest Compliment
My responsibilities as associate provost and dean of instruction position me to serve as a sort of academic ombudsman, a person who receives concerns raised by both faculty and students and who, when necessary, facilitates the proper execution of the university's grievance procedures. Given the typical demeanor of an aggrieved...
