Becoming a Mindful Leader
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on April 30, 2015 © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. We live in a world of distraction. Technology bombards us with new information every second of the day, making it hard to focus on any one thing. Yet one of the most critical leadership skills...
Interim Administrative Appointments in Higher Education: Considerations for Potential Applicants
In a recent article, we delineated several institutional motivations for and benefits of interim administrative appointments. Initially, the appointing administrator elects to immediately launch a full search or to make an internal (or even external) interim appointment. Relevant considerations might include the costs of a search, including adding a new...
Academic Administrative Teams: Forming, Sustaining, and Changing
Most academic leaders will serve more than one institution across their careers. In fact, it will be rare that many do not work for at least four or five institutions. If one must create and then recreate an academic team in different institutional circumstances and under differing scenarios of succeeding...
Stepping Out of Silos: Building Best Practices for Academic Affairs and Institutional Effectiveness
Academic Affairs and Institutional Effectiveness are two of the most important units within any higher education entity and are necessary to ensure an institution is focused on accomplishing the mission. Academic Affairs is familiar to those who have functioned in the college environment. Traditionally, Academic Affairs is the division known...
Establishing and Supporting a Faculty Mentoring Program
For many new hires, tenure-track or not, there isn’t a road map for navigating that challenging first year of teaching. A faculty mentor program can help ensure every new hire has a guide, friend, confidante, and role model. The end result of such a program should be a more confident...
Creating a Strong Chair-Dean Partnership: What Chairs Can Do from Their End (Part 2)
In Part 1 of this two-part series on strengthening the relationship between chairs and deans, we discussed prioritizing student success and satisfaction, capitalizing on the institution’s greatest investment—the faculty— and developing a vision that goes beyond departmental considerations. Here we will continue with three additional points detailing what a chair...
Creating a Strong Chair-Dean Partnership: What Chairs Can Do from Their End (Part 1)
In viewing the organizational structure of our colleges and universities, there is a common hierarchy of faculty, chairs, deans, and higher administration that includes a president or campus leader and may include a provost or the equivalent. Much has been written about the interaction of chairs with their faculty. Inherent...
Auditing Diversity: Academic Leadership’s Instrumental Role
In an era of rapid demographic change in the U.S. population coupled with declining demand for higher education, many colleges and universities are grappling with the urgent need to attract and retain diverse student, faculty, and staff populations and provide an inclusive learning, living, and working environment on campus. Such...
How to Manage Your Email Inbox
How much time do you waste scrolling through your inbox looking for that certain email that contains essential information you need right away? If you follow Keith Krieger’s advice, the answer is none. Krieger, technical training program director at Johnson County Community College, advocates managing email messages to minimize the...
5 Tips on Closing Programs
There comes a time in the life of an academic program when it is no longer viable due to dropping enrollments, lack of faculty resources, budget cuts, changing external contexts, or other factors. When the decision is made to close a program, the department chair’s attention to planning will be...
