After a number of years as CAO of a small southeastern college, I was asked to participate in the Council of Independent Colleges’ workshop for new CAOs. The organizers asked if I would lead group discussions on the theme of “Surviving and Thriving as a New CAO.” I agreed, though I warned the organizers that while I could speak as one who had survived (so far), thriving is always an aspiration. In some ways, thriving as CAO is a bit like someone who takes the stage and announces that she’s a comedian, only to be told by an audience member, “We’ll be the judge of that.”
That paperless academic environment we’ve been promised for the past few decades never quite seems to arrive. Each year, academic leaders find themselves inundated with more and more forms. Although many of these can now be completed online, a surprising amount of paperwork that has to be completed by hand still crosses our desks. Every week seems to bring a new form, many of them seemingly created by people without much design skill who haven’t given a great deal of thought to the person who’s going to be completing the document. With that in mind, therefore, I thought it would be worthwhile to articulate a few general principles of etiquette that we might adopt whenever we’re adding to the stack of forms we expect those at our institutions to complete.
