Triage for Inadvertent Invention Disclosure
For more articles like this, check out an Academic Leader subscription or a free three-week trial! Academic leaders are responsible for obtaining value from innovations developed at a university. Importantly, innovation value can vanish when there is an inadvertent disclosure of an invention. A hallmark requirement for patent protection is an invention’s novelty....
Campus Civility Project: Emotionally Intelligent Conversations
For more articles like this, check out an Academic Leader subscription or a free three-week trial! Because divisive national political rhetoric has spilled over into higher education, Wake Technical Community College launched the Campus Civility Project: Emotionally Intelligent Conversations in 2017. This project was part of a Campus Compact Fund for Positive...
Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Mental Health Effects of Noncollegial Colleagues
Tracy Ford has just completed her PhD and is searching for a full-time position in a university. She is a much sought-after young academic as she has published six articles and presented at a national conference. Also, she has experience in teaching in an adjunct position, and her evaluations were...
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...
