May, 2008

Academic Leader - May, 2008 - Full Issue PDF
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Rethinking Our Approach to Traditional Academic Science Departments
By Laura Lorentzen, PhD, and Kristie Reilly, PhD
It is all too easy for a scientist of a given discipline to focus on his or her home department and like-minded colleagues. In fact, the organizational design of the university often dictates the collegial relationships that occur on a daily basis. We saw the need to break with academic tradition and more closely model what is now seen in the workplace in many scientific industries.

Law Program Implements Experiential Third Year
Calls for curricular change are quite common in higher education and can come from a variety of sources and for a variety of reasons such as accreditation changes, pedagogical innovations, changing student needs, and changes within a profession.

Dealing with Market Inequity in Faculty Salaries
By Jeffrey L. Buller, PhD
To paraphrase Tolstoy, all fair salary systems are alike; all inequitable systems are inequitable in their own ways. For instance, you might believe that salary compression or salary inversion exists at your institution, because you suspect that current salaries within your unit are artificially low compared to:

• other faculty members in the same discipline but at different institutions (i.e., market inequity);
• other faculty members in different but comparable disciplines at your own institution (i.e., institutional inequity); or
• other faculty members within the same discipline at the institution (i.e., departmental inequity).

Understanding College Costs
By Lucie Lapovsky, PhD
The growing tensions around the topics of cost and price affect us all differently, depending on whether we are parents, students, faculty members, administrators, public officials, campus chief executives, or board members—and whether our institutions are public or independent. But as the report of the National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education stated back in 1998: “Continued inattention to issues of cost and price threatens to create a gulf of ill will between institutions of higher education and the public they serve.

How to Get an Implementation Plan on Track
When John Pyle was vice president at St. Mary’s University of Minnesota, one of his goals was to focus the campus’s energy on implementing the operational plan. “There was a lot of energy once the strategic plan was developed, but we kind of lost steam in implementing the operational plan,” he says.