For eighty years, ACAD has created spaces for experienced academic leaders to provide guidance, support, and knowledge to fellow administrators looking to grow their skill sets and bring new ideas to their home institutions. Those settings include annual meetings, workshops, mentoring programs, and publications like The ACAD Leader. This issue contains four essays each offering innovative and practical recommendations to advance your institution, whether by improving faculty wellbeing, addressing the hidden costs of faculty overloads, adopting a more human-centered model of leadership, or integrating athletics into the curriculum. Collectively the essays suggest how we can help universities better support students, faculty, and ourselves as academic leaders.
Responding to the mounting pressures that have eroded faculty and staff wellbeing in recent years, Janee Both Gregg and Ariana Cervantes-Borges lay out specific strategies leaders can use to rebuild faculty’s mental and emotional health. Ensuring faculty have a sense of purpose, supporting their work-life balance, and offering growth opportunities are key solutions. The stakes are significant: without such moves, according to the authors, “the institution’s capacity for innovation, excellence, and trust” will disappear.
Greg Pillar exposes the hidden costs of assigning faculty overload teaching, labeling it an insidious and “invisible form of deferred maintenance on people” and a practice which has become more routine at many institutions. The author exposes the structural causes of overload and the dire consequences for faculty wellbeing, productivity, and the student experience. Pillar charts five steps to bring change and shift cultural attitudes about work and compensation. If leaders fail to act, they risk fostering an environment in which “overload erodes advising, weakens relationships with students, and reduces instructional quality.”
Tricia Giannone McFadden asks how administrators reshape their leadership away from the transactional activities of assessing, reporting, and complying to a more human-centered model focused on meaning and individual flourishing. Stepping back from our work in directed ways through perspective-taking can lead to insights that lend more agency to the work of university employees. The author asks us how we might reorient ourselves as to what it means to manage people and rediscover the joy of purpose-driven and compassionate leadership.
Bridget Trogden and Lou Matz see so many positive educational outcomes for student participation in competitive sports on campuses that they argue for the inclusion of athletics as an undergraduate major. Contextualizing their argument in the changing history of undergraduate curricula, the authors liken athletics as an academic discipline akin to performing arts. They cite student demand for such a field and tie athletics to positive career outcomes. The essay provides specific steps leaders can consider for their own campuses.
Finally, the editors of The ACAD Leader are pleased to re-introduce the “From the Archives” section. Drawing from the published proceedings of the annual meeting from the earliest years of ACAD’s existence we have found much that may resonate with today’s readers. The contribution in this issue, “Anti-intellectualism and the American College,” explores how the McCarthyism in the 1950s affected campus climate, and the author, Ivan Stone, makes a compelling case for the enduring value of academic freedom.
If you are inspired by the contents of this edition of The ACAD Leader, the editors hope you will consider sharing some of your own insights about academic leadership with the ACAD membership in the form of an essay submission. And if you have read a recent book on higher education leadership that is particularly powerful, please consider writing a review that will bring the title to the attention of your fellow leaders.
