Those in deanships in higher education change on average every four to six years (Henk, Wepner, and Ali 2022). Given the turnover rate, one would think institutions would have a practiced hand on how to treat dean-level candidates. My experience, sadly, has not always been ideal in the 13–15 experiences I have had online, at “airport” interviews, and in person. The positive outcome, though, has been in knowing how to treat candidates. But first the horror stories.
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
