Seven Key Questions for Improving Communication with Your Dean
Being a department head is one of the hardest jobs on campus. Representing both the unit and the administration can be a real balancing act, and your most vital partner in this complex role is likely to be your dean. New department heads may never have worked closely with the...
Collective Terms Perpetuate Stereotypes and Biases: Change Begins with Leadership
It was a sweltering July morning when an email from one of my librarians arrived in my inbox, its subject line proclaiming, “THE LIBRARIANS ARE HOT!” I had recently taken over management of library faculty and staff, and this was my first crisis. The library’s air conditioning unit had failed,...
The Departmental Gestalt: Fostering Student Major Identity and Program Pride
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on September 4, 2020 © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. Like many others in the trenches of academia, we’ve chaired, taught, and advised in a small, understaffed, underfunded, and oversubscribed program. While other understaffed and oversubscribed departments limped along, ours notably thrived, resulting in strong...
Becoming Stewards: Transforming New Leaders through Reflective Practice
Whether one subscribes to the notion that leadership is simply one of several roles a manager plays in an organization (Mintzberg, 1989) or that management and leadership are two distinct processes, with the latter being the more visionary and inspiring of the two (Kotter, 1990), one cannot dispute the plethora of research on...
How to Encourage Faculty to Adopt Open Educational Resources
The growth of open educational resources (OER) may prove transformative in the way online learning has been. Textbook costs have skyrocketed to the point that finding an alternative is no longer simply an issue of saving students money but of preserving educational outcomes as students forgo textbooks they cannot afford....
Reconceptualizing the Peer Review Process for Online Courses
Over the past two decades, academic deans, directors, and faculty have struggled to develop an effective peer review process for online courses. Most institutional review processes begin and end with the Quality Matters (QM) standard, the most widely accepted quality standard in the field of online education. But while QM...
Where Advocacy and Sound Leadership Must Part Company
The world of higher education is one where advocacy plays out on a daily basis. We see it at the lowest professional levels of our institutions, where faculty are advocates for students, academic programs, policy, colleagues, and curricula as well as for themselves. At the highest level, our presidents are...
Conquering the Fear of Authenticity
I will never forget the time I hired a team of social media experts to provide professional development for my fellow faculty members at a small college. As they deftly covered how to best use Facebook, Twitter, and other social media to connect with students, they suggested that it was...
Promoting and Encouraging Undergraduate Research
In June, I provided an overview of undergraduate research, including how providing research opportunities for undergrads benefits the institution, faculty, and, of course, the students themselves. In this article, I address the challenges of undergraduate research and offer suggestions and techniques on how to best promote and encourage it. Undergraduate...
Being a Young Chair: Advice I Wish I’d Received
Whoever said, “Age ain’t nothing but a number” certainly never served as a division chair. I am equally certain that few division chairs have ever thought, “When I grow up, I plan on being the youngest chair in my division.” Yet after moving up the ranks from adjunct instructor to...
