Academic Leadership

Faculty Collegiality as a Synergistic Agent

I have had the privilege to be invited to many campuses to speak about strategies for incorporating a collegial-mindset within the university. A campus culture that values collegiality and civility is among the most important contributions a university can make. Academic departments recognize the desirability of a collegial environment for faculty members, students, and professional employees and that such an environment should be maintained and strengthened throughout the university. In an environment enhanced by trust, respect, and transparency faculty members can be revivified so that they can play an active and responsible role in academic matters. A collegial relationship is most effective when peers work together to carry out their duties and responsibilities in a professional manner.

Robert E. Cipriano EdD August 15, 2012

Preventing Bullying in the Academic Workplace

Does your institution have a policy that addresses bullying? If it does not, there are some pretty compelling reasons to consider creating such a policy. In an interview with Academic Leader, Suzanne Milton, chair of the faculty bargaining unit at Eastern Washington University, talked about bullying and its consequences, and ways to address it to create a workplace more conducive to getting work done without a lot of problems.

Rob Kelly June 28, 2012

Understanding Collegial Relationships within Academic Departments

In a mixed-methods study, Meghan Pifer, assistant professor in the Academic Development and Counseling Department at Lock Haven University, looked at the dynamics of informal intradepartmental relationships in two departments to determine how networks can affect faculty members’ access to resources, and ultimately their career success and satisfaction.

Rob Kelly May 8, 2012

Top 10 Strategies for Preparing the Annual Tenure and Promotion Dossier

Assembling the annual tenure and promotion dossier to best represent one’s teaching, research, and service can be overwhelming and anxiety-ridden for some junior faculty. Yet, prior to earning tenure, junior faculty in colleges and universities across the country spend untold hours preparing the annual dossier to present and illustrate accomplishments and productivity across teaching, research, and service.

Joy J. Burnham, PhD, Lisa M. Hooper, PhD, and Vivian H. Wright, PhD April 25, 2012

Promoting Research While Advancing Instruction, Part 3

Perhaps the most fundamental reason why teaching and research are viewed as competing rather than interrelated activities—and a key cause of why it’s so difficult to reunite these processes in faculty load assignments and evaluation systems—is that colleges and universities themselves are structured as though instruction and scholarship were utterly distinct enterprises.

Jeffrey Buller PhD. March 1, 2012

Promoting Research While Advancing Instruction, Part 2

In Part 1, we examined several reasons why it’s important for universities to look at faculty work not in terms of the actions that are taken but rather in terms of the benefits that result. Of course, it’s one thing to say that changing how we view faculty roles can help promote research while advancing teaching; it’s another thing entirely to bring about such a massive change.

Jeffrey Buller PhD. February 16, 2012

Promoting Research while Advancing Instruction, Part 1

It’s an issue many colleges and universities are facing today: How do you expand research capacity while still preserving an institution’s traditional emphasis on effective teaching? How is it possible to improve your reputation in one of these areas without abandoning your reputation in the other? How can you expand your mission in an environment of increasingly strained budgets, greater competition among institutions (including public, private, for-profit, and virtual universities), and rigorous accountability? And how do you balance the expectation of so many legislatures and governing boards that you demonstrate student success with their simultaneous expectation that you obtain more and more external funding from sponsored research and the frequent pursuit of grants?

Jeffrey Buller PhD. February 14, 2012

Rearranging the Academic Furniture: When is the Best Time to Implement Change?

At the start of a new position, it’s natural to wonder how many new initiatives you should get under way quickly and which are better

Jeffrey Buller PhD. August 23, 2011

Handling Complaints: Advice for Academic Leaders

Handling complaints is one of the defining roles of academic administration. It demands perseverance, good listening skills, tact, and adherence to institutional policies and legal requirements. In an interview with Academic Leader, C.K. Gunsalus, author of The Academic Administrator’s Survival Guide (which includes an entire chapter on complaints), offered advice on how to manage this important role.

Rob Kelly May 31, 2011

How to Rid Your Meetings of Groupthink

With the spate of books and articles that deal with the issue of incivility in higher education, it’s easy to conclude that destructive disharmony is the single biggest problem facing colleges and universities today. To be sure, lack of collegiality has become a significant challenge, and nearly every academic leader can recall at least one department or college that became increasingly dysfunctional because of its inability to work together in a mutually supportive manner. But the great deal of attention we pay to the challenges of incivility can cause us to underestimate the dangers of an opposing threat that also exists in many academic units: groupthink.

Jeffrey Buller PhD. May 10, 2011

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