My first weeks as a dean were exciting, confusing, and a bit intimidating, as I imagine most people’s are. As the dean and director of education at a small, vocationally oriented college, I knew I could draw on my experiences to help me succeed in the job. Deciding what sort of dean I was destined to be, however, was more challenging.
Beyond the Credential Factory: Why Higher Education Must Shift from Management to Flourishing
For decades, higher education leadership has obsessed over “student success” as a purely operational metric. We track retention and graduation rates and postgraduation outcomes with the same linear precision that
Yoshitaka Iwasaki
August 3, 2026
