Getting Organized
Although academic leaders have looked to the promise of a “paperless office” for many years, that future vision never seems to materialize. While it’s true that many forms of communication that appeared in hard copy now reach us in electronic versions, we still seem to be inundated by a never-ending...
Take a Vacation—Please!
Although workshops on academic leadership frequently devote sessions to the topic of “work-life balance,” that phrase is really misleading. It seems to imply that we’re either working or living but never doing both at the same time. However, this is a false dichotomy for most administrators. We’re obviously living while...
Five Ways to Fail as an Academic Leader
Effective academic leaders teach us a great deal. They serve as inspiring role models, provide examples of best practices, and demonstrate that leadership at its best can utterly transform a college or university. But despite all the benefits we can derive from highly effective academic leaders, failed academic leaders actually...
Why Getting It Done Is Often Better Than Getting It Perfect
Although the remark has been attributed to lots of different people, it was Voltaire who first observed (in his Dictionnaire Philosophique, 1764) that “the perfect is the enemy of the good” (Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien). It has become such a common saying that we recite it almost without thinking....
Tellin’ Ain’t Leadin’
Every now and then, some young person or other—usually a friend’s child—will ask me what I do for a living. I try to make my answer appropriate to the child’s age, often describing a dean’s similarities to and differences from the principal of a school. Frequently, the response I’ll get...
STEM Fatigue
For a little more than a decade, the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) have been enjoying something of a privileged status at American colleges and universities. While enrollments in some other areas are stagnant or declining, they have been rising steadily in many STEM courses. In state systems,...
Checklists As an Academic Leadership Tool
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on July 31, 2015. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. There are probably few tools we can use in academic leadership that seem less interesting than a checklist. We may sometimes even refer to checklists as though they were akin to sleepwalking our way through our...
Mindful Academic Leadership
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on May 1, 2014© Magna Publications. All rights reserved. Mindfulness, which we can define as giving nonjudgmental attentiveness to each experience as it occurs, has begun to receive a great deal of attention in academic circles. The health benefits of mindfulness are well established. Studies...
Academic Leaders as Introverts and Extroverts
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on January 1, 2013. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. In a position such as department chair or dean where interpersonal skills are so important, you might think that all academic leaders would be extroverts. In fact, once while I was out on an interview,...
Surviving a Leadership Transition
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on May 14, 2016 © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. 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...
