News

What College Leaders Need to Know About Responding Rapidly to a Crisis

by Sarah Seigle Peatman

How do you manage a crisis in a world that expects instant response and immediate communication? Colleges and universities all too often face a series of challenges in responding actively and speedily to a crisis or emergency on or affecting the campus, but they needn’t reinvent the wheel: there are proven models developed in the government and military sectors that can be applied to the higher ed context. To help senior leaders in higher education improve their crisis preparedness, we’ve assembled and interviewed a panel of experts, including Dr. Connie Book, provost and dean at The Citadel; Major General Jim Boozer, US Army (Ret.); and Colonel Cardon Crawford, US Army (Ret.) and Director of Government and Community Affairs at The Citadel. Resources: You can read an interview with this panel in this earlier article. And here — in this article — you can listen to a brief audio interview with Colonel Cardon Crawford about the need for “emergent crisis management,” and how emergency crisis management differs from the crisis communications planning of the past. A transcript of the interview follows. You can also meet Colonel Cardon Crawford and Major General Jim Boozer in person for an in-depth training at the […]

Habits of Highly Effective Higher-Ed Professionals, Part 2: Finding Your Purpose

by Steve Riccio, EdD, SPHR, PCC

Recently, I published the article “Habits of Highly Effective Higher-Ed Professionals,” talking about how (and why) higher-ed professionals need to take Stephen R. Covey’s advice about “sharpening the saw” to life. That article stressed the importance of professional development to our careers and our effectiveness. Now I want to take a step further and discuss another habit of highly effective higher-ed professionals: creating a purpose statement to provide your career and life with lasting fulfillment. It sounds simple, but often is anything but. I’ll talk about:  1. Why You Need to Pursue Purpose, Not Happiness Recently, I was having lunch with a friend and former colleague. We were reminiscing about the “good ol’ days” when we worked together as consultants. It had been years since we had met for a meaningful conversation. I found that as I explained the journey that had taken me from full-time consultant/part-time professor to full-time professor/part-time consultant, I realized that I had never been “myself” in front of him…until this moment. Whether in a team meeting or a golf outing with a client, I had always felt that I had to be someone who I really wasn’t. I hadn’t been happy with who I was. I had spent the […]

How to Engage International Alumni Effectively

by Kathy Edersheim, President of Impactrics Markets are global, education is global, and so alumni relations should be global, too. There are three good reasons to pay special attention to “international alumni” – those graduates who have returned home from studying abroad or who are working outside their home country: They are likely to be innovators and connectors. After all, they took the initiative to travel overseas either for education or for work opportunities. Anecdotally, it seems that alumni farther away from campus are often the ones most intent on staying connected to the institution and to other alumni. For alumni based far from home or even far from their school, the alumni community provides a ready-made social group that has shared values and, possibly, provides helpful connections. A robust alumni network with engaging programs can create a very appreciative alum with a strong bond back to the school. Alumni can serve the institution in a number of capacities, wherever they are located. While many institutions are thinking about engaging their international alumni, not all are doing it effectively and efficiently. Here is some advice for successful international alumni relations: Define Your Scope First, determine the impact and the types […]

How to Encourage Academic Grit and a Growth Mindset in Your Students

More Articles for Faculty:One Easy Way Faculty Can Improve Student SuccessCivility in the Classroom: A Better Approach by Princy Quadros-Mennella, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychology, Director of the Neuroscience Program, Bay Path University and Thomas Mennella, PhD, Associate Professor of Biology Director of the M.S. in Applied Laboratory Science and Operations Program, Bay Path University The Question: How Do We Improve Learning Outcomes for All Students? Even though innovative new pedagogies and educational technologies lead to enhanced student engagement and improvement of the classroom experience, we consistently see the learning outcomes of low-performing students remain largely unaffected (3, 7). Meanwhile, high-achieving students continue to learn effectively in more “traditional” lecture-based formats, despite the relative ineffectiveness of that pedagogy (7). Why can’t we seem to improve learning outcomes for all students? More cynical instructors may believe that “some students get it and others don’t.” However, we reject the notion that some students are not smart enough for college-level work. Although some students do not apply the minimal effort needed for academic success, the vast majority of struggling students work hard and strive to be successful, but often fall short of achieving that success. So why can’t we seem to improve the […]

How State Funding for Higher Ed is Changing: A Close Look

by Jon Boeckenstedt

How are states responding to a leveling off of demand for higher education from high school graduates? Here is a data dashboard to help you take a close look. When Americans talk about our higher education systems, we point with pride to the wide diversity of offerings in the US. There are 7,000 post-secondary options that include colleges and programs offering certificates, or associate’s and bachelor’s degrees in wildly divergent fields such as auto mechanics, cosmetology, accounting, computer science, history, mortuary science, political science, chemistry, and welding. And these are offered at public, private, not-for-profit, and for profit institutions. When we look at this wide array of offerings, it seems that there is some program, somewhere, for almost everyone who wants to pursue additional education after high school. But it is really the public institutions that carry most of the weight when it comes to educating students in the US.  Just over 70% of the 20.3 million students enrolled in 2015, for instance, attended public institutions, and that percentage rises slightly when you consider only degree-granting institutions. Access to high-quality, low-cost public education has been a hallmark of America since the end of WWII, when the GI Bill encouraged large […]

This is How We Need to Rethink the Work of Student Affairs

by Daniel Fusch, Private: Caleb Tegtmeier

The challenges facing our students and our institutions are more complex than in the past, and no single, siloed office can address these challenges adequately. That’s why some institutions have been forming student affairs innovation hubs to bring together a more diverse crew of creative minds from across campus and put them to work on improving the student experience. One of these institutions is Seattle University, and we recently interviewed Seattle U’s vice president for student development, Michele C. Murray, Ph.D., and Seattle U’s assistant vice president for student development, Monica Nixon, Ed.D. Rethinking Our Work Murray and Nixon suggest that the one-stop shop approach to serving specific student demographics (such as transfer students, for instance) has several flaws. When Seattle University set up an office to serve its transfer students, Murray notes, “the great thing was that we had one full-time staff person completely committed to those transfer students. The downside was that the transfer students felt siloed. They weren’t introduced to the fullness of the student experience, and that issue was replicated across multiple student populations.” “Another unintended consequence of the siloed way of using one-stop shop areas to serve specific student demographics — is that the students feel […]

Hiring and Onboarding Diverse Talent: Where are the Gaps?

by Daniel Fusch

Recruiting and retaining diverse faculty and staff talent must be a key priority for colleges and universities. However, hiring diverse and high-performing talent can be challenging due to limited resources, perspective, and commitment. To dig deeper into some of the challenges, we reached out to a panel of three experts: We asked each panelist to discuss the gaps they see in how institutions are hiring and onboarding diverse talent. What are most institutions not thinking about? What should they be thinking about? Here are their answers: Liz Ortiz, DePaul University. The gap that I see is: Why do our intentions not match our results? If I had a room full of search chairs and I asked, “Is diversity important in your searches?” — the answer would be yes. Yet the results we see are often the same hire after hire with little to no diversity in the final selection. Often we hear it is a pipeline problem or a competition problem as qualified candidates are highly sought after and therefore out of reach. However, it could be a systems problem that is recreating the same results over and over again. In my experience, there are several factors that can lead to […]

Operationalizing and Sustaining New Academic Programs

by Melissa Morriss-Olson, Ph.D.

Also in this series: Is it Time to Launch that New Academic Program? The Art and Science of Answering that Question Feasibility Checklist: The Science of Bringing New Academic Programs to Life Financial Modeling for New Academic Programs Sustaining New Academic Programs: 5 Key Factors In my previous articles in this series, I outlined a blueprint for new academic program development and stressed the importance of a balanced approach. Understanding that it is impossible to capture all variables on the front end, the potential viability of a program is difficult to assess until that program is up and running. While having a discipline around new program development ensures that you will anticipate most of the important potential impact issues, maintaining a culture of flexibility and responsiveness once the program is launched is equally critical for the program’s success. As the great American novelist Thomas Berger once wrote, “The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.”  Indeed, cultivating a spirit of ‘question asking’ and ‘wide-eyed vigilance’ as a program is embedded within your organizational culture and context, while not easy, is nevertheless a foundational pre-requisite for long-term viability. Over the past decade, we have successfully implemented […]

7 Ways Academic Leaders Can Cultivate Creativity

by Melissa Morriss-Olson, Ph.D.

This article continues a series focused on Creating an Innovative Institutional Mindset. More articles will follow. The previous article in this series is: Creative thinking skills are more important than ever if we are to deal with the vast and complex array of challenges facing many colleges and universities. In my last article I discussed the difficulty of creating and nurturing innovation within an academic organization. In my experience, the forces for preserving the status quo are especially powerful within academic organizations and are institutionalized in ways that make change very difficult.  Moreover, those who are well positioned and authorized by role and formal authority to lead change are often weighed down with workloads and responsibilities that can kill the creative impulse. Perhaps it is no wonder that, according to a national study, the average tenure of a chief academic officer or provost is only 4.7 years, compared to the significantly longer 8.5 average tenure of all college presidents. According to this same study, the top frustrations for chief academic officers include lack of resources, difficulty cultivating leadership in others, curmudgeonly faculty, campus infighting, and unresponsive campus governance structures. Only 31% of respondents view ‘leading change and fostering innovation’ as job priorities; […]

4 Things STEAM Could Achieve on Your Campus

by Jill Sible

Ask any ten academic professionals, “What is STEAM?” and you are likely to get ten different answers. Yet, intuitively, they would agree that STEAM is important and probably have incorporated at least one STEAM facility into their master planning. (Broadly speaking, STEAM represents the productive intersection of STEM with the arts and humanities.  Other definitions for STEAM are equally valid – one size does not fit all.) I do believe that any plan to bring STEAM programming and facilities to a campus will benefit tremendously from a step back to consider the ‘why’: To prime your thinking, I offer four possible outcomes for a STEAM program at your college and university and some examples of how these outcomes are pursued at my own institution, Virginia Tech. 1. Promoting inter- and trans-disciplinarity Collaborations among scientists, engineers, artists, and scholars of the humanities bring a much larger toolkit of skills, techniques, and strategies to address complex problems. For example, at Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT) housed within the Moss Arts Center, current projects include a collaboration between educators, civil engineers and visual artists to develop 3D technology to automatically measure and map cracks on highway bridges to more […]