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…
