February, 2010

Academic Leader - February, 2010 - Full Issue PDF
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Financial Sustainability Analysis
By Rob Kelly
How financially healthy is your department? If you use the traditional methods of student credit hour analysis or budget variance analysis, you may not be able to accurately answer this question, says Clint Ewell, executive director of planning, budget, and institutional research at Central New Mexico Community College.

Sophomore Living-Learning Communities
By Rob Kelly
Every October, Steve Bisese, vice president for student development at the University of Richmond, surveys all the university’s first-year students about their concerns as their sophomore year approaches and invites them to discuss these concerns with him. The majority—83 percent of 160 respondents in 2009—ask to discuss academic issues, which is why he has spearheaded efforts to develop programs that blend academics and student development.

Serving under Commander Queeg
By Jeffrey L. Buller, PhD
Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny proved to be a best seller during the 1950s and received several awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In the novel, Lieutenant Commander Philip Francis Queeg is assigned to a minesweeper, the USS Caine, in the Pacific theater during World War II, and quickly becomes a textbook example of an incompetent leader entrusted with responsibilities too great for him to handle.

New Deanship Recognizes the Importance of Student Engagement
By Therese Kattner
Institutions are beginning to create jobs that recognize by name the importance of student engagement in and out of the classroom. These positions are based on the idea that students who contribute actively to their learning environments—through experiences such as learning communities, service-learning, first-year seminars, and undergraduate research—are more likely to succeed in college.

Keys to Effective Decision Making
In a recent survey of nearly 3,000 department chairs, conducted by R. Kent Crookston, professor of plant and wildlife sciences at Brigham Young University, respondents ranked the most important decisions they make.