October, 2005

Academic Leader - October, 2005 - Full Issue
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The First 1,000 Steps: Walking the Road from Academic to Administrator
By Andy Curtis, Ph.D.
Last year, in an article in the Academic Leader (August 2004), Cheryl Achterberg wrote, “The leap from a faculty position to one in administration is full of risk,” echoing C. Kristina Gunsalus on “surviving the jump from faculty to administrator,” in an earlier Academic Leader (January 2004). Having recently completed my first 1,000 days and nights as the executive director of a Canadian university English-language school, I can see what Achterberg and Gunsalus meant.

Systems Thinking Not Just for Business Anymore
Marianne Sullivan, associate professor at Medaille College and executive officer in the University at Buffalo’s Computer Science and Engineering Department, believes that systems thinking—a popular business approach to leadership that considers the interrelationships of various units—can help higher education institutions meet students’ changing needs, provide quality education, and ensure financial sustainability. “Every single entity of a higher education institution is part of the entire system, and it’s very important for that system to continually work together. Everybody needs to be involved, but it’s very difficult changing someone who’s been accustomed to managing his or her position one way,” Sullivan says.

E-Management: A Survival Guide
By Charlotte Brasic Royeen, Ph.D.
Those of us serving as deans, directors, or chairs are experiencing a major change in one of the processes of management. Yet few of us are cognizant of the phenomenon. We all live by, supervise others through, and are supervised by e-management—the process of giving and receiving feedback, approval, directions, or any form of information exchange with faculty or higher administration using e-mail. How many of you as deans use e-mail to manage issues? How many of you as chairs or directors use e-mail to inform, direct, or otherwise engage faculty members? Most of us would answer that we use e-mail, and thus conduct e-management, on a daily basis. Yet, as pervasive as e-management is, scant attention has been given to the process as a management technique or issue.

Managing Entrepreneurial Faculty Members
Some of the best faculty members engage in entrepreneurial activities such as consulting, creating intellectual property, founding companies, and serving on corporate boards. These activities have the potential to bring recognition and funding to a department, but they also create administrative challenges for department chairs, including enforcing conflict-of-commitment and conflict-of-interest policies, determining which activities count toward tenure and promotion, and managing the time and resource demands of these entrepreneurial faculty members.

Recent Case Brings Stricter Conflict of Interest Rules
Since the case Gelsinger v. Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, there has been a tightening of conflict-of-interest policies at many institutions that have biochemical departments, medical schools, and genomics departments—the kinds of departments that have potentially strong ties to the pharmaceutical industry, says Russ Lea, vice president for research and sponsored programs at the University of North Carolina.

Curriculum Review: Ideas from a Nontraditional Institution
Cardinal Stritch University, which offers accelerated business degree programs at 25 locations in Wisconsin and Minnesota, has a centralized curriculum that is created, reviewed, and revised through a single department: the Department of Academic Quality Assurance. Although this model is not very common, the university’s approach to program review has elements that could be adapted to more traditional institutions.