Category: Uncategorized

What Faculty Are Really Up Against

6 min read You will recognize: The most common mid-career obstacles are systemic, not personal — and naming them is the first step toward moving through them. You Are Not Struggling Because Something Is Wrong with You Mid-career is genuinely hard. Not hard in the way the beginning of your career was hard — where the challenge was proving yourself and learning the rules. Hard in a different way: the rules get murkier, the demands multiply, and the institutional support that existed during the tenure track largely disappears. What often follows is a particular kind of stuckness — a feeling that you should be further along, or clearer about what you want, or better at managing it all. That feeling is common. And it has a lot less to do with individual shortcomings than with the structural conditions of mid-career academic life. “The challenges are systemic. The solution is personal. Career planning is the bridge.” The Five Challenge Categories Research on mid-career faculty consistently surfaces five categories of obstacles. They tend to show up together — and they feed each other. Recognizing which ones are most present in your own experience is the first step toward building a plan that […]

Is Your Career Happening to You?

5 min read You will recognize: Most academic careers are shaped by default decisions, not intention — and why career planning is how you change that. The Road Got Foggy Think about how you got here. Did you map out a deliberate course from graduate student to faculty member, plotting each move with intention? Or did you follow a path that opened in front of you — a mentor’s encouragement, an opportunity at the right moment, a position that felt like the logical next step? If you are honest, it is probably the second one. And that is not a failure of planning. That is just how most academic careers begin. But here is the thing: what works at the start of a career — following open doors, saying yes, proving yourself — does not always serve you in the middle of it. At the mid-career stage, the path gets less clear. The structure that guided you through graduate school and the tenure track starts to disappear. And if you are still operating on default — reacting, obliging, accumulating responsibilities without intention — you can arrive at a genuinely uncomfortable place. What the Data Tells Us Faculty at this stage […]

Three Self-Defeating Habits of Leaders

by Amit Mrig (opens in new tab)

One of the great gifts of working in higher education is that you get to work with leaders who are mission driven. Almost no leader I work with was motivated by climbing the ladder. They were motivated by their research, by working with students, by contributing to a purpose bigger than themselves. Over time, their desire to contribute and their skill have led them to opportunities to lead at higher levels. And in each of these roles, they bring with them their positive intentions, ready to make a difference.   Unfortunately, positive intent doesn’t by itself equate to positive impact. In fact, there are times when leaders’ best intentions — paradoxically — lead to worse results. How can this be? Very simply their desire to make a positive impact and contribution leads them to spend their time in ways that on the surface make sense, but that in the end actually work against them.   Here are the three most common behaviors I see that start from good intentions, but that end with a negative impact on the leader, their team and the task at hand:    1. Disproportionate Focus on Dissenters  Perhaps the most common pitfall I see is the one […]

Disrupting the Status Quo: 5 Counterintuitive Notions for Inspiring Creativity

by Stephen Whitehead (opens in new tab)

Creativity is an essential aspect of human nature, yet many people struggle to embrace it, either from insecurity or fearing its potential unpredictability. While it is tempting to stick to familiar routines that afford the comfort of not dealing with potential failure or uncertainty, there is no room for personal or organizational growth with this mindset. Today, the need to foster creativity that drives innovation and growth in organizations is a highly regarded requirement for leaders. However, simply telling your team to “think outside the box” isn’t exactly inspiring. To quote Ted Lasso, “Takin’ on a challenge is a lot like riding a horse. If you’re comfortable while you’re doing it, you’re probably doing it wrong.” While we all agree that change is scary, what makes creativity so satisfying is the opportunity to see situations from new perspectives. In this article, we will explore five counterintuitive notions that can help to cultivate a creative culture. Embracing creativity is both a challenging and rewarding process. While these examples may appear to be counterintuitive, give them a try and see how they are able to unlock the full potential of your meetings, employees, and organization to help drive innovation. Lean into embracing […]

When Innovation is More Than a Buzz Word

by David Kiel (opens in new tab)

Here’s how department chairs, deans, and unit directors can build and support the innovations that will help their institution thrive in the years to come. On many campuses you will find creative faculty, students, staff, and senior leaders who start programs that grow and eventually become transformative for the institution. These ventures build the school’s reputation, improve services to students and faculty, strengthen the curriculum and co-curriculum, enhance research, and improve community service. Often, they also generate major revenue streams. They make the institution more competitive and attractive in every sense. Yet the internal entrepreneurs (I call them intrapreneurs) who deliver these benefits, lack the support they need to bring their innovative ventures to maturity in a timely way. What would it look like if there were a pipeline of support for such ventures and the intrapreneurs who create and guide them at your institution? What if your college or university leaders had an active process for identifying such promising intrapreneurs, testing their ideas, and helping them with both the skills and resources needed for their ventures to mature? What would it look like if support for such efforts wasn’t haphazard and ad hoc, but structured and planned? To visualize […]

Understanding Those Who Need Us: 4 Types of Students and How to Help Them

by Sue Ohrablo, Ed.D. (opens in new tab)

As next semester’s registration period ramps up, advisors will see an increase in student traffic, experiencing long days juggling back-to-back appointments, walk-ins, phone calls, and emails. It’s a time of year filled with stress. Students are concerned that they won’t get the classes that they need, worried that they may not pass a prerequisite course, and eager to get some direction from an advisor. Advisors are busy trying to triage the student traffic, struggling to respond to and assist all the students who are seeking their help, and managing a myriad of administrative duties between students. It’s the same thing every semester. Or is it? Does it have to be? These are the thoughts and questions I’ve posed to myself throughout my career in higher education. There must be a better way to avoid the mad rush of registration leading up to the start of the semester. While institutions struggle with managing this workflow throughout the year, I have not found any system that effectively reduces or eliminates the rush. Such is the nature of human beings in need. They seek us out, which is a very good thing. The problem is, there are usually not enough of us to […]

Advising: Meeting Student Needs?

by Carol Moore (opens in new tab)

Several months ago, the Chronicle featured an article on advising focused on the work of Dr. Ned Laff, who detailed the importance of broad-based advising and the gaps between what today’s students need and what they frequently receive. Drawing upon an advising career at multiple colleges, Laff focused his comments on the disconnect between advising and career services. I resonate with his analysis, and, with more than four decades of my own in higher education, I contend that the gaps reach even deeper. At the root of the problem is the failure of colleges to keep up with evolving market demands. Neither the fundamental concepts of college advising nor the associated reward system have been updated in decades, resulting in a disconnect between market demands and what the academy is delivering. We need to do a better job for today’s students. Why aren’t we delivering? It is my observation that we will not deliver what students need until we connect advising to faculty evaluation. Multiple surveys over a decade or more indicate that today’s students and parents expect a college diploma to come packaged with a clear-cut career path—not just a major and a broad general education, but experiences that […]

4 Essential Leadership Competencies Department Chairs Need to Lead in the New Normal

by Jennifer Scott Mobley, PhD (opens in new tab)

Introduction As a higher education leader for almost 20 years and a former department chair for ten, I have witnessed time and time again how the right department leader can animate an academic program. As John C. Maxwell once said, “The reality is that 99 percent of all leadership occurs not from the top, but from the middle of an organization.” Sitting at the nexus of the student body, the faculty, and the administration, department chairs are poised to provide crucial leadership in the effort to help students progress toward graduation and their institutions toward transformation. Despite their important positioning, department chairs are rarely taught how to lead nor are they typically rewarded for good leadership. Nearly 50,000 currently serve as department chairs in the United States with about a quarter of them being replaced each year (Gmlech and Buller, 2015). And yet only 3.3 percent of department chairs came to their positions with formal coursework in the administrative skills they need (Cipiano and Riccardi, 2012). While challenges facing higher education grow in intensity and become more complex, many department chairs enter the role woefully unprepared for the challenges that await them. The convergence of interconnected crises in recent years—including […]

The Great Resignation or the Great Joy in Higher Education: Emerging Lessons from the Pandemic

by Kathleen Vinson (opens in new tab)

I. Introduction The Great Resignation, the Great Attrition, the Great Disengagement, and the Big Quit are a few of the names for the phenomenon occurring throughout different industries, including higher education.1 Higher education is not immune from this great exodus and is at a turning point as retention of faculty, administrators, and staff is more important than ever.2 What’s joy got to do with it?3 Can it drive those who work in higher education to stay, leave, or return?4 Money is not enough by itself to retain workers.5 Over the last two years, higher education, like other industries, is facing a fundamental shift in how people view their work, their employer, and their life.6 Perhaps this is an opportunity for the Great Joy: to (re)discover joy in your work; reevaluate what you want from work, be open minded, and possibly reinvent how you work, where you work, who you work with, and what you work on. This article explores the challenges higher education faces as the pandemic continues to alter attitudes on work. It then offers some strategies to (re)discover joy in work. Finally, it discusses ways to maximize joy in work. II. The Struggle Exhausted, isolated, disconnected, burnt out, […]

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