In This Issue Current Issue Archives

November, 2006

Academic Leader - November, 2006 - Full issue PDF
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Leadership and Management: Complementary Skill Sets
Management is a big part of what academic leaders do on a daily basis—managing budgets, dealing with personnel matters, scheduling courses, etc.—but being a true leader demands a more visionary perspective than the day-to-day management tasks. To better understand this relationship between management and leadership, Academic Leader recently spoke with Donna Goss and Don Robertson, co-directors of the Leadership Development Institute at Northampton Community College.

Best Practices in Civic Engagement
In 2002, Campus Compact, with help from a Carnegie Corporation of New York grant, began investigating best practices in civic engagement. The three-year project looked at community colleges in the first year, which produced a set of resources that community-college leaders can use to help improve engagement with the community.

Apply the Measures of Engagement
Clea Andreadis, dean of social sciences and human resources at Middlesex Community College in Massachusetts, is using The Community's College: Indicators of Engagement at Two-Year Institutions—a monograph that resulted from the Indicators of Engagement Project—to increase involvement in civic engagement at the college.

JCC Faculty and Administrators Collaborate on Personnel Decisions
Jamestown (New York) Community College uses a joint faculty-administration committee to make all decisions related to faculty hiring, retention, promotion, salary, and tenure. The idea is that the variety of perspectives will help the college make better decisions in these critical areas.

Department Grapples with Merit-based Compensation Policy
Change is inevitable when a new administration comes on board, but the implementation of change is largely up to the faculty and leaders at the department level. At Missouri State University, one change being championed by the new president is a performance-based faculty salary system, and Karl Kunkel, head of sociology, anthropology, and criminology, is working within his department to devise a department-specific compensation system within the guidelines developed by the president (with input from faculty leaders).

The Positive and Negative Effects of First-Year Learning Communities
Even successful student programs have drawbacks. The sense of community students get in a residential freshman interest group, for example, can help them adjust to college life, but it can also create cliques and peer pressure, says David Jaffee, assistant vice president of undergraduate studies in the office of academic affairs at the University of North Florida.

Parting Shot: In Praise of Accreditations
By Thomas R. McDaniel, PhD
Readers of Academic Leader will know from recent essays of mine that I have some reservations about the efficacy of the accreditation process. The myriad accreditation agencies—both regional and subject specialties—create a ton of paperwork for institutions of higher learning, and their emphasis on standards-evidence-quantitative assessment can be both costly and burdensome while undermining creative learning and “the joy of teaching.” But I promised an essay in praise of accreditations.