As most of us are in academia because we find it a place where we can increase our knowledge in many areas including those in which we have developed an expertise.  Academics should be the prototype of what’s been called the life-long learner.  As an administrator you will be faced with issues in which you have little knowledge or background.  In these situations, it is best to become a student and do whatever you need to do to educate yourself about those issues. 

You might read about those issues or spend time with someone who is an expert in dealing with those issues.  I have always found it an advantage of being an administrator in a school with several different disciplines.  Interactions with members of those disciplines have taught me a lot and that knowledge has made me a better administrator because it provides me with the information, I need to make informed and equitable decisions.  I have also learned that you can learn from colleagues who are at different stages in their careers.  Junior colleagues may have background and insights that some senior colleagues don’t have. 

Introduction

Student success is often associated with student affairs, but its foundation lies in academic affairs. For CAOs, this represents both a responsibility and an opportunity.

Curriculum design plays a central role. Clear pathways, well-structured programs, and aligned learning outcomes can reduce barriers to completion. High-impact practices—such as first-year seminars and capstone experiences—can further enhance engagement.

 INTRODUCTION

Campus interviews for senior leadership roles—particularly presidencies and cabinet-level positions—are among the most complex and high-stakes moments in higher education careers. They are not simply interviews; they are public performances, stakeholder engagements, and strategic demonstrations of leadership all at once.

Introduction

Many institutions have invested heavily in data systems and dashboards. Yet for Chief Academic Officers, the challenge is not access to data, but its effective use.

Data-informed decision making begins with asking the right questions. What programs are contributing most to student success? Where are equity gaps most pronounced? Which initiatives are delivering measurable outcomes?

Introduction

Higher education is operating in an increasingly politicized environment. Issues such as curriculum content, free speech, and institutional values are under heightened scrutiny. For CAOs, this presents both challenges and opportunities.

Effective leadership in this context requires clarity of purpose. Institutions must articulate their academic values—intellectual rigor, open inquiry, and respect for diverse perspectives—and consistently align decisions with those principles.

Introduction

The pressure to demonstrate the economic value of higher education has intensified. For Chief Academic Officers, this often translates into calls for stronger alignment between academic programs and workforce needs. The challenge is to do so without eroding the foundational role of the liberal arts.

The solution lies not in choosing between the two, but in integrating them. Employers consistently emphasize skills such as critical thinking, communication, and problem-solving—hallmarks of a liberal arts education. The task, then, is to make these connections more explicit.

Introduction

Accreditation is often viewed as a compliance exercise, but it can also be a catalyst for improvement. For CAOs, the goal is to shift the focus from meeting requirements to leveraging the process for strategic benefit.

Early preparation is critical. Aligning accreditation standards with institutional priorities can streamline the process and enhance its impact.

INTRODUCTION
A great employment application cover letter does more than summarize your résumé — it tells your story, connects your experiences to the employer’s needs, and conveys your motivation and personality. Most cover letters spend too much time talking about the candidate’s interests and too little addressing the employer’s needs (as expressed in their advertisement).  Cover letters should be forward looking, while resumes recite what you’ve done in the past.

Here’s what makes a cover letter stand out:

Recently, I’ve been approached by senior leaders seeking clarity on various aspects of the search process. Common areas of confusion include the role of search firms, strategies for internal candidates, and how to express interest in new opportunities when no specific position has been posted. Below is a summary of frequently asked questions and responses intended to help demystify the process.

Getting Noticed by Search Firms

Introduction
Many colleges and universities maintain policies governing the ownership and management of intellectual property (IP), including copyrights, patents, and trademarks. If you haven’t reviewed your institution’s IP policy recently, now may be a good time. The following checklist outlines key considerations to evaluate:

Policy Currency and Scope

As Provost, you have many departments that report to you.  These departments house different academic disciplines.  Given this situation,  you will be faced with some new and unfamiliar experiences.  Before you became Provst you most likely have spent a significant part of  your career working in departments that have a defined specialty.  It is important that you take the time to learn about and understand each of the departments that report to you.  I found a very effective method is to meet with the department chair and or dean and ask them to educate you about their discipline with particular reference to the challenges they face in educating their students.  You should ask questions and make notes so that it will be clear that you really want to understand what each department does and what challenges they face doing it.  It is a good idea for you to ask each of the chairs or deans to tell you about the people that report to them.   You will want to learn who are the most contributing members of the schools, as well as faculty and/or administrators who might present issues for the chair or dean.  Listen carefully, ask questions, and don’t be judgmental or critical.  You might offer some advice but keep that to a minimum.  You will want to make it clear that you want to hear and understand what the chair or dean is telling you.  If you take this approach, you will begin to create a relationship with the chair or dean in which she or he sees you as a person who values what she or he has to say and is willing to learn something that will help you in doing your job.  It is a good idea to have conversations with the faculty members or chairs from time to time.  In those conversations, you should ask them about their teaching and research.  It is likely that any issues they have will come up in the meeting.  It is important that you present yourself as an impartial listener.  You can always follow up with a meeting with the department chair or dean if you believe that an issue the faculty member has raised needs to follow up.  Make no decisions and take no action until you get the complete picture of the issue.  Remember, people present their own perspective of an issue.  Their perspective is not likely to be unbiased and complete. Acting on incomplete and biased information will create a major problem for you.  It damages your relationship with the department chair or dean and ultimately it will result in you being perceived as a biased and impulsive leader.  That is not an image you want to project. 

  I recommend that you recommend that department chairs use the same procedure outlined above with each of their faculty members.   You can point out that, even though they are in the same discipline, it is not likely they are familiar with all the areas of the discipline, and they can learn a lot by talking to faculty whose specialty is different from yours. 

Chief Academic Officers have been challenged over the last four months to keep up with the rapidly changing legal, regulatory, and fiscal impacts of new state and federal policies impacting higher education.  While we all consider caps on indirect costs from federal grants, the cancellation of existing grants and contracts and the real potential for nonrenewal of existing and in some cases longstanding grants and contracts, caps on student loans, elimination of loan forgiveness programs, new ways of thinking about inclusion on campuses, wondering about the future with and without international students, and impacts on curriculum, whether control over higher education will indeed devolve to the states, and what will happen to our institutional and specialized accreditors and what it means in reality for our programs, we should remember that these are not concerns for those of us inside higher education alone.  

Our host communities have just as much at stake in ensuring the financial viability of our colleges and universities because if nothing else, the local economy depends upon higher education.  With more than 5,000 colleges and universities across the country located in large cities and small towns, often institutions of higher education (IHE) are the major economic drivers in suburban and rural communities.  IHEs are significant employers, students are major consumers in the local rental, retail, and entertainment markets, and IHEs support access to education and cultural opportunities for residents of their host communities.   When IHEs go into retrenchment it is felt first but the host community, and closures are devasting to local economies.  

As a Provost, you have most likely been in academia for a long time.  Those of us who are in academia choose this profession because we find it a place where we can increase our knowledge in many areas,  including those in which we have developed expertise.  Academics should be the prototype of what’s been called the life-long learner.  As an administrator, you will be faced with issues in which you have little knowledge or background.  In these situations, it is best to become a student and do whatever you need to do to educate yourself about those issues.  You might read about those issues or spend time with someone who has had success in dealing with those issues.  

I have always found it very helpful to be an administrator in a school with several different disciplines that were different from my own.  When I took over the School of Health Sciences, I knew very little about the issues in educating students in various health science disciplines.  I met with each Department Chair individually and asked them to tell me about the challenges they faced with educating students in their discipline.  I also asked how I could best help them and what problems would likely come to me as the Dean. Those interactions lead to very fruitful relationships and has allowed me to be a help without interfering. Those interactions with members of those disciplines have taught me a lot and that knowledge has made me a better administrator because it provided me with the information that I need to make informed and equitable decisions.  

We all have our own set of values and standards for our work.  We have gotten those standards from our parents, education, religion, and life experiences.  It is necessary for us to do some careful self-evaluation so that we can identify our values and standards.  If we are not aware of our own values and standards, we will often have conflict with those whose values and standards differ from our own.  You may believe that the only acceptable outcome for your efforts is total success, and you view anything other than that as failure.  When you are an administrator and in charge of supervising the work of others, you need to understand that not everybody has the same standards and values that you have.  If you believe that only total success is acceptable, you will be unhappy with those who do not achieve it.  This will put you in conflict with someone who believes that the solutions that generally work are more than acceptable. 

It is important to realize that achievement of goals does not necessarily result in total success.  In most cases, solutions to problems are never totally successful.  Every solution misses some aspect of the problem,  and, like a drug, solutions have side effects. For example, if a staff member is continually late for appointments, you may ask her or Supervisor to deal with the issue.  The Supervisor decides that the best way to handle this problem is to monitor the staff member by having others watch him and report back on his punctuality.  Each time the staff member is late for an appointment, the Supervisor calls him or her into the Supervisor’s Office and reports the lateness and expresses displeasure and may even threaten to withhold some resources unless the tardiness stops.  Even if this results in decreasing or eliminating the staff member’s tardiness, it will create issues of morale and distraction for the staff member.  You may have a totally different approach to this issue.  You may think that having a long talk with the staff member and getting her or his assurance that the tardiness will stop may be enough.  The differences in your approach and the Supervisor’s approach is the way you view human behavior and how best to create change.  You may believe that a reasoned approach in which you point out the issues that the tardiness creates along with a discussion about how things will change is the best solution.  The Supervisor believes that only careful monitoring and confrontation will get the person to change her or his behavior.  If faced with a situation like this, you need to spend time with the Supervisor discussing the different approaches s/he might take to deal with this problem.  It is important that you recognize that the two of you see things very differently.  It is also important that you agree to a strategy once you have explored all the issues and possible problems with each of your approaches.  In this way you can come up with a plan you are both willing to try.  You may need to be willing to try a solution with which you are not totally comfortable.  If you dismiss outright the Supervisor’s solution, you will create an antagonistic relationship between the two of you, that has lots of negative consequences.  The general point here is that people solve problems using their personal values and standards as guiding principles.  When two people have different approaches to solving a problem, they need to have a discussion and try to come up with a solution that is acceptable to both parties recognizing that whatever they come up will not necessarily be totally successful and may have negative side effects.

Introduction

Each year, colleges and universities generate thousands of records that document institutional decisions and capture key elements of the academic enterprise. But what should be done with all these records?

In a previous blog post, I discussed the importance of record maintenance and confidentiality. This post offers practical guidelines for record retention. While most institutions have official retention policies, these are often inconsistently applied—especially in the face of frequent staff turnover. As a result, valuable documents may be lost, misfiled, or discarded due to storage limitations.

It is my view that human beings are primarily controlled by their thoughts and beliefs. Given that, it is important to make distinctions among three important cognitive processes, intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom.  The concept of intelligence has been the subject of a great deal of debate.  Much of the debate centers around the idea as to whether intelligence is controlled by inherited factors (genetics) or whether it is created through experience.  No matter what is true, people vary in their ability to learn.  Anyone who has taught at any grade level can attest to this fact.  People vary in intelligence along a continuum and one can rank order people in terms of their ability to learn.  Knowledge is the accumulation of information and results from experience. That experience can be in a formal setting (school) or from life experience.  It is probably true that the more intelligent a person is, the more knowledge they can acquire from their experiences. People who are lower in intelligence can still learn and acquire knowledge but not at the same level as those who are high in intelligence. The lack of knowledge is called ignorance.  We are ignorant about something, and I like to think of life as a continual opportunity to reduce one’s ignorance.  Higher Education has embraced the concept of life-long learning.   Higher Education sets as one its goals is to have their students become life-long learners.   People in all fields and professions can be life-long learners if they are willing to keep themselves open to learning new information and developing new skills. Some people have turned themselves off to acquiring new knowledge and acquiring new skills and simply want to use the knowledge and skills they have acquired even though their knowledge and skills no longer provide them with the tools to be productive.  

Wisdom is the ability to know what to do and when to do.  It is the quality to know how to get things done.   Philosophers distinguish between two types of wisdom, theoretical wisdom and practical wisdom.  Theoretical wisdom refers to higher level functions  such as ethics and moral issues.  Practical wisdom refers to practical applications such as mechanical problems and the ability to create a plan to solve practical problems.  The opposite of wisdom is foolishness. Foolishness refers to the lack of insight as to what to do in moral, ethical, or practical situations.  Wisdom is the ability to be able to predict the consequences of one’s choices and to make choices based on those predicted consequences.  Understanding how to weigh the possible outcomes of one’s choice is a function of wisdom and essential for good decision making. Wisdom is something you should look for in anyone who you want to be a member of your team.  It often perplexes people when they see a highly intelligent and knowledgeable person acting in a foolish manner.  It is probably true that one needs a certain level of intelligence and knowledge to be wise, but there are intelligent, knowledgeable, and foolish people in every walk of life.  Wisdom should be highly prized and is essential for anyone to be a successful administrator and one should choose those people as team members.  Humans vary in their intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom.  It is best to pick team members based on high levels of each of these characteristics although wisdom is most important.

In Episode 10 of Season 2 of the EdUp Provost podcast, host Gregor Thuswaldner interviewed Alain-Philippe Durand, Dorrance Dean of the College of Humanities and Professor of French at the University of Arizona. Here is an excerpt from the episode:

Question: You emphasized in your TEDx talk the versatility of a humanities degree. Can you tell us a little about that talk and why you believe the flexibility of the humanities degree is especially relevant in today’s job market?

Introduction

While many international programs are straightforward, those in high-risk areas require additional planning to minimize risks to students, faculty, staff, and the institution’s reputation. This checklist outlines key considerations for preparation and risk mitigation.

       Insurance Coverage

When I was a young man my dad said to me, “You can learn something from everybody you meet, even if it is what not to do.” I took that advice to heart and when I encounter somebody who I think is a positive role model, I watch carefully what they do and try to integrate what I learn into my own attitudes and behavior. I have met a number of great administrators. The ideas I found useful came from my observations and interaction with those administrators who  were successful in their jobs and in their personal lives. I learned to pay careful attention to my surroundings. I learned to listen thoughtfully and try to make my decisions based on the merits of the requests and not let my personal impressions and ideas influence me. I learned that you could like, and even admire somebody, but not give them what they request because their request was not justified. I learned that you need to treat all of those who report to you equitably even though they think about the world differently than I do. I learned that a good administrator makes decisions that benefit the organization they work for and those that report to her or him. I learned to hire people for talent and loyalty and to mentor those who work for me. I learned to be open to feedback and to be willing to change my decisions when the evidence presented to me suggests I do. I learned to make connections and understand the issues and problems of those I encountered every day. I learned to listen to the concerns of those who I dealt with every day and tried to give the best advice I could. I learned to ask for feedback on the decisions I made and tried to understand the consequences of my decisions. I learned all of this from those who I saw as competent and successful administrators.  

I have also met administrators who acted in a way contrary to everything I hold as important. Those administrators practiced the opposite of all the things that I found helpful. They rarely paid careful attention to their surroundings. They did not listen thoughtfully to those who reported to them and made decisions based on their personal likes and dislikes and not what was best for the people and the organization for which they worked. They did not treat all of those who reported to them equitably and that they did not tolerate the ideas of those who thought differently than they did. They did not take the time to understand the issues and problems of those who they encountered every day. They rarely asked for feedback on the decisions they made and that they did not try to understand the consequences of those decisions. I learned all of this from those that I saw as not being competent and successful administrators. I watched those administrators lose the respect of those that reported to them and what they did eventually hampered the efficiency and productivity of all of those they encountered.  I thank those administrators for teaching me what not to do. My dad was correct, you can learn something from everybody you meet, including what not to do.

In Episode 27 of the EdUp Provost podcast, host Gregor Thuswaldner interviewed Eboo Patel, who leads Interfaith America as its founder and president. Their conversation explored Patel's current engagement with pluralism. Here is an excerpt of the episode:

EdUp Provost: Your current work focuses on pluralism. And you've recently written very thought-provoking essays on the importance of pluralism in the context of higher education. One essay published in Persuasion is entitled 'How I Learned to Stop Criticizing Everything.' Another one that appeared in Inside Higher Ed has the intriguing title, 'Pluralism U.' So why the turn towards pluralism and what role should provosts play in advocating for pluralism at the executive level?