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Blog Posts
Fundraising: Lead with Gift Officers in Mind
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on October 1, 2019. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. In higher education fundraising, the people who identify, cultivate, and solicit charitable contributions are critical assets. These gift officers strengthen the bonds between alumni and their alma maters by facilitating the donation of major...
On Mixed Marriages: Building Community Between Academic Affairs and Student Affairs
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on November 1, 2018. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. My partner and I often joke that we have a mixed marriage. Our joking is not exclusively because one of us is Black and the other is White. It is not because one...
Reflections on “Becoming” a Department Chair
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on November 2, 2020. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. Michelle Obama’s best-selling book, Becoming, offers a glimpse into her life becoming not only the first lady of the United States but also, and more importantly, a strong African American woman. The former first lady...
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...
Well-Being and Well-Thinking: How to Stay Healthy in Academia
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on March 16, 2020. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. Resilience is about growing both personally and professionally when we face difficult situations. It is about coming out the other side as a stronger or more prepared person rather than bouncing back to...
Leading Your Academic Department Toward Inclusion: How to Ensure Faculty are LGBTQ+ Competent
During my six years at the University of Connecticut, I had the opportunity to interact with many different faculty members across our campus community. This was particularly true during my final two years, when I coordinated our Rainbow Center’s Out to Lunch (OTL) Lecture Series. The OTL Lecture Series—our center’s...
Four Strategies to Improve Faculty Buy-In for Online Education
As an online administrator, I can tell you that it feels like we have been talking about ways to improve faculty buy-in for online education for the past 10 to 15 years. And we have. While online courses and degree programs are becoming more accepted and mainstream at many institutions,...
Follow-up Budget Questions for New Chairs: Flexibility, Carry Over, and Incentives, Part II
Incentives in the Budgeting System After the first two questions posed in a previous article on budgeting and finance, namely identifying the sources of academic income and how the department’s budget is established, have been answered, the new chair should quickly align the answers to see if the department’s budget...
