After seven years as a department chair, I still proudly identify as a servant leader. But I have also learned the hard way that the label itself isn’t enough.
Leadership is the art of navigating constant complexity, where every decision balances people, purpose, and an ever-changing landscape. Colleges and universities operate through shared governance, professional autonomy, and firmly rooted
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
Over the past several years, faculty across the country have watched the rise of so-called anti-woke legislation restricting what professors may say in the classroom, especially in regard to topics
During a recent sabbatical studying inclusive postsecondary education in Ireland, I visited four universities—University College Cork, Trinity College Dublin, Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, and Mary Immaculate
In the first installment of this series, I argued that academic leaders should treat faculty development not as scattered programming but as infrastructure. Structured onboarding and mentoring create the first
Most academic leaders inherit student academic surveys as a process rather than a strategy. Surveys arrive at predictable times, generate familiar reports, and are often filed away after a quick
Academic leaders are often trained to focus on vision, communication, decision-making, and change management. Those skills matter. Still, every leadership decision eventually depends on the people asked to carry it
Academic leaders often approach faculty development as a sequence of workshops, webinars, or one-time teaching tips. Those offerings matter, but they do not, by themselves, create the kind of teaching
Many academic leaders remember the Character Counts! initiative from the 1990s and early 2000s. It was visible in schools and youth programs nationwide, emphasizing as core values the Six Pillars
