Submission Guidelines

Academic Leader helps academic deans, department chairs, program directors, and other decision-makers provide effective leadership within their departments, schools, or colleges. As such, we’re always looking for concise and insightful articles on the ever-evolving role of academic administration.

Topics may include program assessment, accreditation, faculty support, faculty development, conflict management, budgets and finance, personnel issues, leadership styles, communication, strategic planning, leadership development, curriculum, student support, legal issues, and institutional culture.

Submission tips:

• Write directly to the audience, remembering that this is an online publication read by your peers. The tone should be conversational yet professional. Prose should be free of jargon.
• Keep the article short—generally between 800 and 1,500 words (excluding references). Please reference only key sources. Fewer is better; comprehensive literature reviews are unnecessary. Focus on sources that interested readers might want to review. Provide links when applicable.
• Provide practical, actionable advice to help academic leaders do their jobs more effectively. Case studies and first-person accounts are welcome, but we prefer articles with a “what you can do” rather than “what I did” bent.

Be encouraged to write for Academic Leader even if you aren’t a widely published author. Don’t downplay the relevance and usefulness of strategies and approaches that you’ve developed and that would be of interest to others with similar leadership responsibilities. Academic Leader prides itself on being a place where administrators can learn from and with each other.

Once you’ve written your article, please upload it as a Word doc through our submission portal below. We do not review submissions under consideration elsewhere. The review process typically takes four to five weeks.

If you are not a subscriber, click here to download a collection of sample articles.

View our upcoming themes and deadlines.

If you have questions about submissions or submission status, please write to Academic Leader’s managing editor, Jon Crylen (jon.crylen@magnapubs.com).