You know, dean colleagues, I sometimes wonder what keeps me in this wacky enterprise of academic administration. After all, ours is not the happiest of professions. Indeed, it is frightfully easy for us to dwell on the downside of deaning. When you drag your weary body home at the end of a typical day in the academic vineyard, what do you tell your spouse or companion or dog? How often do you say, “What delightful deaning I did today”?
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
