If you are a dean or a department chair, you are probably spending some energy these days planning the meeting you will have with your faculty to mark the opening of the 2025–26 year. I have written on this topic before, back when I was a well-intentioned dean trying to help my faculty get a good start to what promised to be (and was) a difficult year. Now I am a faculty member anticipating that start-of-the-year meeting from a new perspective.
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
