At Winthrop, we had never undertaken true, multi-year athletic department strategic planning. Here’s what we learned when we transitioned from annual work plans to defining annual objectives. by Ken Halpin and L. Jeffrey Perez, Winthrop University Those of us in higher education are sick and tired of hearing we face an unprecedented set of challenges: […]
Lisa Smith has been with the Chemistry Department at North Hennepin Community College since 2008. She has worked on initiatives that include First Year Experience, Closing the Achievement Gap, and most recently became the Institutional Assessment Coordinator. Motivated to improve the student pass rate, Lisa took a successful STEM mentoring model she had worked on […]
Phil is an independent consultant to higher education institutions with more than 35 years of experience and service to the higher education community. His areas of emphasis are assisting boards and finance committees in financial strategy, financial planning and metrics, financial reporting processes, and understanding stewardship responsibilities related to donor funds. He has also assisted […]
Testing your campus’s crisis response plans frequently and rigorously is key to ensuring that you can protect campus resources and recover speedily following a crisis, and as of July 1, 2010, annual testing is mandated under the updated Clery Act. Nonetheless, annual testing represents a significant shift in practice for many institutions. Nearly a quarter […]
As our article “The Library of the 21st Century” attests, the academic library continues to evolve at a rapid pace, and library administrators across higher education continue to wrestle with the question of how best to adapt their libraries to changing student and other user needs on campus. There is a lot of uncertainty about how […]
NSSE’s 2009 annual report cites low participation in high-impact activities (such as study abroad, service learning, internship, undergraduate research, or senior experience) among transfer students as one measure of engagement and likely persistence. The lowest engagement was from vertical transfers (students who enter four-year institutions from community colleges). In the survey, 62% of native seniors had participated […]
To meet the challenges facing higher education, we need to start finding leaders who don’t fit the charismatic stereotype. A recent program developed in the for-profit sector may provide a model for finding our colleagues who have enormous potential for leadership but who frequently remain invisible to us. Patrick Sanaghan explains. Several years ago, a […]
Department chairs are busy people, and hiring and onboarding adjunct faculty is just one of many tasks on their plate (sometimes right before the start of a new semester). To make it easier, here is a checklist of essential information that chairs should share with new adjunct faculty when hiring them, including course syllabi, textbooks, […]
READ THE WHOLE SERIES:Developing a High-Performing and Productive Advising Department In the first two installments in the series, “Developing a High-Performing and Productive Advising Department,” I’ve discussed strategies for identifying, assessing, and meeting student, staff, and advisors’ needs. In this installment, I will discuss best practices to successfully implement some of the key strategies identified […]
Moving at-risk students out of academic probation quickly is a worthy challenge—and at Western Michigan University, two recent retention efforts at the Haworth College of Business (HCoB) have seen positive outcomes in this regard. Students who complete HCoB’s Phoenix Success Course as well as mandatory study hours in the University’s new award-winning Bronco Study Zone […]
