When I interviewed Olivia during the summer of 2024, I was collecting stories from higher education administrators about leadership and burnout. Olivia is a senior leader in academic affairs whose role, thanks to mandates by new leaders and people leaving the institution, includes what was previously the work of three people. Olivia told me she had planned to work into her 70s but now dreams of early retirement every day because of her huge workload and toxic executive leaders. She says,
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
