As higher education institutions transition into a post-pandemic period, many will still face the challenge, now more acute, of keeping the lights on. And predictably, many leaders and boards will reengage in “faster horse” strategies ...
Planning is often criticized in management books as well as in universities and corporations. History provides many examples of failures in planning. The Maginot Line in World War II was built to address the challenges ...
In late 2015 I sent my provost a short email (one evening after a couple glasses of wine, to be honest) expressing frustration with our byzantine general education program and asking why we couldn’t have ...
Meetings are not foreign to academic leaders, but strategic planning meetings and meetings aimed at complex problem-solving with partners are weightier than others. In these situations, choosing to use an experienced facilitator who is outside ...
The group around the table had been meeting regularly for six months, tackling the issue of faculty overloads. At this institution, faculty who taught more than the default workload accumulated extra credits that they could ...
To provide some basic budgeting and finance information to new chairs with little or no experience in this area, in my June article I recommended some questions for them to ask their dean prior to ...
Declining enrollment is a problem in higher education, and it's only going to get worse. As Nathan Grawe explains in his book "Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education," when the economy slowed in 2008, ...
During my time as a dean, I’ve learned a lot about budgets, fundraising, strategy, recruitment, retention, and personnel matters, but I’ve also discovered seven big ideas about how my outlook and approach influence my leadership.
Few appreciate how fundamentally different the fiscal future of colleges and universities in the United States will become. The 2017 tax law changes will increase pressures on higher education to deliver better outcomes for students ...
A recent article, “Higher Education’s Data Experts Face a Crossroads,” in the Chronicle of Higher Education examines the changing profile of institutional researchers. Akin to the characters in the movie Ghostbusters, historically, they were ...