Tournaround Leadership for Higher Education, by Michael Fullan and Geoff Scott, starts tartly with a barb: “it has been observed that elementary school teachers love their children, high school teachers love their subjects, and university professors love themselves.” Powerful words. If only the authors had maintained that critical distance the book would warrant an in-depth review. Instead, the authors’…
Category: Deanspeak
Posts about the wide realm of higher education from a deanly perspective
Hacking Through Policy Thickets – Higher Education, Accreditation and Financial Aid
What’s the best way to support higher education? It’s a very tricky question to answer and in many ways, it’s almost as hard to figure out who to ask. The United States is without a national system for higher education. The government most certainly sets policy, but it does so without the clear agency one…
Organizational Culture and Higher Education
Edgar H. Schein’s Organizational Culture and Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2010), now its fourth edition, is one of the most important works in explaining organizational culture as well as defining the field. The title is today much more than a course in an MBA; it rates a wikipedia site and can be its own degree program at…
Innovation and Differentiation
Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring’s The Innovative University is an important book. Christensen is the Cizik Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Eyring is a long-time administrator at Brigham Young University-Idaho. Bringing them together are shared ties with Harvard and BYU-Idaho, two very different institutions who have charted different paths towards success. Despite a baffling…
Metaphors and Institutional Understanding
Change is a constant if an academic unit is going to stay active and engaged in the professional world, both within and outside of academia. Change does not come easy to higher education, however, as its benefits are rarely clear while its costs are all too apparent. As a dean, I do much of my…
2011 Convocation
August 30, 2011 Welcome, faculty, staff, colleagues, alumni, friends and above all, new students to Convocation. On behalf of everyone at Curry College, we are absolutely thrilled you are here – and I am honored to speaking before you this morning. Now you may be wondering – why am I here? And what, exactly, is…
Academia’s Dilemma
Important and interesting questions are often difficult for higher education to digest. Michael Pollan raises just such a vital question in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. The book has reached into America’s public intellectual consciousness in a thoughtful and profound way. It is related, perhaps, to a similarly provocative…