Managing by Meeting
Academics manage by meetings. Half of the day in the life of a department chair is spent in formal meetings (average length: 50 minutes), and another 22 percent in informal meetings. Thus, department chairs find themselves in meetings 70 percent of their day. For deans, the number of meetings exponentially...
The Faculty’s Role in Closing Equity Gaps: Academic Policies and Practices
Since the spring of 2020, predominantly White institutions (PWIs) of higher education have felt understandable pressure to examine everything we do through an equity lens. Colleges and universities have, for example, turned a spotlight on admissions practices that have disproportionately benefited upper-middle class students. We have also begun to rethink financial aid...
Emotionally Intelligent Leadership That Empowers, Moves Culture, and Creates Engagement
The core of these beautifully powerful and elegantly simple concepts on the neuroscience behind emotionally intelligent leadership is the happy wedding of over 40 years of teaching and leading experience with the current research on motivation, learning, and empowerment. My leadership roles as a teaching professor, head college basketball coach,...
Double Deaning: Reflections in a Mirror
Nearly everyone finds twins interesting. That is so, in part, because twins are relatively rare, with only three or four out of 1,000 births producing twins and only about 25 percent of those being monozygotic—the technical term for “identical twins.” Even more rare are those identical twins who are known...
Student Engagement: The Key to Retention
As Steven C. Howey (2012) pointed out years ago, educators across the US are “frustrated with the challenge of how to motivate the ever increasing number of freshmen students entering college who are psychologically, socially, and academically unprepared for the demands of college life.” For the past 40-plus years, the...
Partnering with Student Organizations to Build First-Year Student Engagement: Special Olympics Young Athletes and Merrimack College
Every day, academic leaders make decisions about what kinds of programming college first-year students will find attractive and engaging. Many colleges’ ideas, however, fail to connect to student interest and experience. Part of the reason for this disconnect is generational. The staff and administrators planning these programs are at least...
Celebrating Memories on Social Media to Engage Alumni
Take a moment to think back to the most vivid memories from your college experience. Do it right now: close your eyes and see what comes to mind. OK, what did you see? Maybe it was a high-profile sports game you went to, a graduation ceremony, a girlfriend or boyfriend...
Leadership Development: One College’s Solution
A recent Inside Higher Ed article discussed the need for leadership training for faculty and academic staff as a way to prepare them for higher education’s ongoing challenges, such as competition for students, equity issues, and financial pressures (Cano & Whitfield, 2019). As faculty members in the Touro College and University...
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,...
