Academics sometimes joke about “going to the dark side” as they transition into university administration. Leadership service does involve drawbacks. The more time one devotes to administrative tasks, the less time they can direct toward potentially more satisfying pursuits in research, teaching, clinical care, or other academic duties. Those downsides contrast, however, with positive impact from leadership, both personally and among those we serve.
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
