How to Evaluate Your Faculty Development Services
Faculty developers across the nation are working on developing methods to evaluate their services. In 2010, the 35th Annual Professional Organizational and Development Network Conference identified assessing the impact of faculty development as a key priority. It was this growing demand that spawned my interest in conducting a 2007 statewide and...
How to Talk Yourself out of a Job
We tend to think of interviews as processes that select suitable candidates for different jobs. But in many ways the purpose of interviews is more accurately to reject unsuitable candidates. After all, by the time a search reaches the stage of meeting a few finalists on campus, the institution has largely been...
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...
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...
Positive Effects of Conflict
Conflict is inevitable—it is the natural outcome of human interaction, the result of competing ideas or options. However, anger, grudges, hurt, and blame are not inevitable. Being disrespectful and uncivil is a conscious choice that causes inefficiency. Fortunately, not all conflict is negative. Positive conflict can improve problem solving, clarify...
Collaboration at the Heart of Successful Change Initiatives
Successful change initiatives are driven by leaders and their teams, not solely by an individual chancellor, president, or dean. In the higher education environment, the individuals at the helm work strategically to develop a bold vision for their institutions and then devise an inclusive pathway of collaboration to achieve that...
How to Create a Values-Driven Department
When Jeffrey Yergler became chair of the undergraduate management department at Golden Gate University, one of his priorities was to establish a values-driven department that emphasized improving faculty members’ well-being, performance, and sense of community within the management discipline.
