Among the top 10 stressors in a national survey of academic chairpersons (Gmelch et al., 2017) are too little time for research/scholarship and excessive workloads. These related issues are likely in play at most colleges and universities, with the exception of top tier research universities and elite liberal arts colleges. Faculty members who have ventured into chair positions at all but the top tier institutions will tell you they sacrificed much for the opportunity to lead, and what was sacrificed was primarily their scholarly work and, to a lesser degree, their teaching—the two activities that likely attracted them to the academy.
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
