Being a department chair did not come easily to me. Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about my experience of working with my department chair, because it is the time of year when I schedule teaching observations for the professors in my department. After several years of serving as department chair and many more as a professor, I can’t seem to figure out how to alleviate the apprehension of those being observed.
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
