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Critical Advice for College and University Chiefs of Staff

by Daniel Fusch

The role of college or university chief of staff looks very different at each institution and requires a unique skill set for continued success. Here is critical advice from current and past chiefs of staff and (one university president). Welcome to this new series of articles, where experienced chiefs of staff offer critical advice on managing the chief of staff role. We will share their answers to questions such as these: Contributors to this series include: We hope you will enjoy the series and share each article with your peers. If you find these articles useful, please consider attending and learning from these and other experts at these virtual trainings: Now, let’s start! Here is our first installment in this series: 1. Liaison vs Gatekeeper: Finding Balance as a Chief of Staff Academic Impressions. You’re charged with being the president’s voice and implementing their initiatives, yet you are also the liaison with faculty. The faculty will come to you with disagreements and objections. How do you make yourself available without appearing as a gatekeeper for the president? Josh Jacobs, Marietta College. Whether you intend to be are or not, it is likely that you will be perceived as a gatekeeper. One strategy […]

Why Are Our Academic Advisors Disengaged or Burned Out? And What Can We Do About It?

by Sue Ohrablo, Ed.D.

Without ongoing support and development, advisors may become disengaged. Here is how you can evaluate, energize, and engage experienced academic advisors. There are many resources devoted to the training and development of new advisors. However, once advisors are “up and running,” it is easy to leave them on their own and assume that they are being effective in their role. Without ongoing attention, support, training, and development, advisors may become complacent and disengaged. Regardless of time on the job, these advisors may not be as effective as they could be and may jeopardize the overall success of the advising department. If you are an academic advising administrator, it is important to review the causes of this problem, conduct ongoing evaluation, and actively seek to re-engage your experienced advisors. In this article, I will share: 3 Reasons Why Academic Advisors May Be Un-energized and Disengaged 1. Lack of initial training and ongoing professional developmentAdvisors, like everyone else, don’t know what they don’t know. If they’ve never been exposed to formal training about policies, procedures, resources, and best practices in advising, they may not realize they are lacking skills and knowledge. When onboarding advisors, make sure to include content and activities that will […]

12 Keys to Making Alumni Interviews in College Admissions Effective

An effective alumni interviews in admissions program can be a win-win-win for alumni, admissions, and college applicants, but it takes some real work to set up a program and continue improving it. Here are the key items you need to know and address from the start. by Kathy Edersheim (President, Impactrics LLC)  For many colleges and universities, especially the “elite” ones, alumni interviewing of applicants has a long history that is somewhat fraught with the question of purpose, reliability, and feasibility. Some schools have abandoned the system in favor of on-campus or admissions department interviews, while others strive to reach 100% of applicants interviewed. There are four primary reasons for alumni interviews: Promote the SchoolIn today’s competitive education market, high school seniors apply to 10 or more colleges. How will you make your school stand out? How will you convince the applicant of your institution’s suitability for them? The interview provides an opportunity for the alum to represent the school and convince the applicant of its excellence. In fact, the alumni interview is a great message in and of itself – it shows dedication and support for the school. A good interviewer will both answer the applicant’s questions and showcase the […]

Why (And How) We Need to Improve Faculty Mentoring in Higher Education

by David Kiel

Formally defined, structured faculty mentoring is more critical now than ever – and not only for early career faculty but for faculty throughout their career. Expert David Kiel explains why this is the case and how we can improve faculty mentoring programs. Often faculty members do not learn core skills in their graduate programs. While they may learn how to be good researchers, they often come to campus unequipped for the classroom and have even less experience in community service.  In addition, without thoughtful guidance they may lack the ability to navigate promotion processes. As their careers progress, they may be asked to take on additional tasks for which they also have no preparation. Consequently, it is critical to improve mentoring and faculty development programs at all levels of institutions of higher education. This article summarizes the reasons why this movement has become so widespread and provides directions for academic leaders who want to improve their efforts at retaining and developing their faculty, arguably their most important asset. I will identify five reasons why well-defined faculty mentoring programs are becoming a “must have” feature of campus life. I also offer ten specific precepts that lay out the direction for positive […]

Professional Development in Higher Education: 3 Powerful Tools for Translating Learning into Action

Professional development in higher education is key to building the capacity of college and university leaders. But we work in such a fast-paced way that often the learning we get at events remains unimplemented and the information we bring back to our campuses from a conference or training gets lost in the day-to-day grind of our work, like so many jumbled puzzle pieces.  Here are a few tools for springing more rapidly from puzzle pieces to completed action. by the staff of Academic Impressions We’ve all been there. We take the time to attend a conference or workshop, and we find ourselves get inspired with new ideas. But once we return to the office, we get reabsorbed quickly into the grind of day-to-day work, so that our ideas never get implemented and our learning has little actual impact on our day-to-day. That’s why we have developed three quick and easy one-page tools that you can use while at any conference session or while watching any webcast to not only record your most crucial and actionable notes but also identify concrete next steps to take. You can see the tools below — and you can also click any of them to open up […]

Challenging Androcentrism in the Academy: 7 Strategies for Leaders of Academic Institutions

Confronting gender bias in the academy and seeking gender equity and gender balance requires concerted efforts by senior leadership. Here are seven ways to make a difference. by Rosalind Spigel, Organizational Development Consultant and Leadership Coach, Spigel Consulting In this series of seven articles, we have considered leadership qualities and how they are practiced, deployed, and interpreted differently for women and men. Those qualities are: To support gender balance, we have provided suggestions for individuals, teams, and organizations. (Note: For the purposes of this series, the perspective is cisgendered, able bodied and living in the US.  I have not addressed multiple genders, gender fluid individuals, race or other intersections of marginalization. Representation within gender is an important conversation. Although this series does not address this conversation directly, it is important to note that bringing only white women into leadership is nether gender equity nor gender balance.) Summary: Where Androcentrism Holds Us Back from Truly Supporting Women’s Leadership in the Academy What we have seen over the course of this series is that in terms of leadership distinctions, women are perceived to be stronger in some (empathy, collaboration) and men stronger in others (confidence, assertiveness).  In our androcentric world, and the academy […]

We Need to Value How Women Use Vision and Conceptual Thinking to Lead

It’s no secret that more women in the workforce has not equaled more women in leadership. Women opt out because they don’t feel their work is meaningful, they object to the direction their institution or institutional culture is headed, or they believe their contributions aren’t valued. Countering this requires a systemic approach. by Rosalind Spigel, Organizational Development Consultant and Leadership Coach, Spigel Consulting  In this sixth article in our series in Challenging Androcentrism in the Academy, we’ll look at one set of leadership traits and behaviors we identified earlier in the series: vision and conceptual thinking. We’ll examine: In preparation for this article, I was fortunate to have interview conversations with many women in higher education. In our conversations about conceptual thinking, I discovered a distinction between “big ideas” and “vision.” Big ideas tend to excite. Vision can also excite, but for the women I spoke with, vision also includes more mundane aspects of operationalization which then receive less than enthusiastic responses from their male bosses. I would like to add that there were women I spoke with who did not perceive themselves or others being marginalized for their conceptual thinking. Nonetheless, if an institution is interested in higher levels of […]

Mergers and Acquisitions: Strategic Questions Every University Leader Should Ask Now – Not When It’s Too Late

by Daniel Fusch

Higher education mergers are often seen as a sign of personal and institutional defeat, to be avoided at all costs. Yet the truth is that waiting until the last possible moment, when the institution is in full tail spin, is the true sign of failure. The time to be watching for strategic partnerships or opportunities for merger or acquisition—specifically those opportunities that make the institution stronger, not weaker—is always now. An interview with Ricardo Azziz and Nivine Megahed Recently, we spoke with Dr. Ricardo Azziz, the Chief Officer, Academic Health & Hospital Affairs, State University of New York (SUNY) System Administration, who oversaw the merger that resulted in Georgia Regents University (now Augusta University), serving as founding president, and with Dr. Nivine Megahed, Ph.D., the President of National Louis University, who oversaw the university’s acquisition of Kendall college (a for-profit Laureate Education college). Dr. Azziz and Dr. Megahed also joined other experts in leading our 2019 conference Preparing for the Future: Institutional Mergers and Strategic Alliances in Higher Education. We wanted to ask a few key questions before the event. Here’s what Ricardo Azziz and Nivine Megahed shared with us. We hope you will find their perspectives useful and thought-provoking and […]

How Do Universities Need to Approach Student Data Differently?

by Linda Baer

Are we looking at student data in ways that help us improve our efforts? What holds us back from measuring and improving student success? What holds us back from measuring student success and implementing measures to improve it? How should every institution be looking at its student data differently? These are pressing questions to answer. Let me share a few of the things I’ll be talking about at our upcoming conference Building Your Data Strategy to Improve Student Success Programs and Interventions. I want to share four steps all institutions need to take—and three examples of who is already doing this. 4 Things to Do We need to have institution-wide strategies to improve student success programs and interventions. And for these strategies to work, we have to define the strategic needs and priorities that you we expect from analytics and align investments in financial and human resources to build the analytics required to improve student success. (For more on what that might look like, see Ronald Yanowski’s article “The Analytics Landscape in Higher Education.” Here are four things every institution needs to do: 1. Focus on the right questions and adopt a comprehensive analytics strategy to address them. Often in […]

What Every Higher Ed Leader Needs to Know About Supporting Women in Leadership

by Daniel Fusch

How can higher ed leaders support women’s leadership within their institutions? What do leaders need to know? Academic Impressions staff and leaders in the academy offer their advice and perspective. Several times a year at our Women’s Leadership Success in Higher Education conference, we bring together 200 women in leadership positions (or aspiring to leadership positions) in higher education to network, connect with mentors and success coaches, and share perspectives on the challenges of the academy. As we approach our next iteration of the event, we wanted to ask members of our previous faculty panel (as well as our internal team who designed the conference) what advice they most want to give this year to leaders in higher education who are committed to doing more to support women’s leadership growth and success. Here’s what they would like to share with you: 1. What’s one piece of advice you would offer those working in higher ed to support women in leadership roles? Karen Whitney. “If you really want to see more women in leadership, and in particular at the highest levels of leadership, then be prepared to be both honest and clear. “First, if a leader has asked for your support either as […]

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