Telling Our Story, Making Our Case: from Classrooms to Constituencies
As the 2017-18 academic year comes to a close, you’ll soon have the chance to reflect on the successes of the past year for students, faculty, and staff, and the ways that your leadership was instrumental to advancing your institution. ACAD is proud to be a supportive partner for you, providing smart and thoughtful sessions at our annual meeting, alerting you of opportunities in higher education, and maintaining our ever popular—and incredibly helpful—email discussion list where 800 colleagues can share their practices.
In January 2018, our 73rd Annual Meeting (held in conjunction with the AAC&U Annual Meeting) invited members to consider how we, as academic leaders, can better articulate what our colleges and universities do well to focus multiple constituencies on the value of our institutions and our graduates. Our sessions focused on the exciting partnerships at colleges and universities between academic affairs and areas such as student development, career services, and external relations, including communications, advancement, and development. These partnerships are crucial—I often say to colleagues across my campus that we’re all working with the same student, it’s just that some of us see them in classrooms and some of us in residence halls or résumé workshops. Given that all of us are focused on articulating to multiple constituencies a strong case for our academic programs and institutions, our Annual Meeting sessions offered key advice, metrics, and examples of how we can best frame our institutions’ successes in this competitive environment.
This coming year, ACAD is focused in several key areas that have been identified by our members—thank you for your good ideas of how we can continue to grow in service to you. Our popular Dean’s Institute, held the day before the Annual Meeting, will expand to now include a track for new academic leaders, and one for more experienced academic leaders focused on a particular topic, such as budgeting. Our Career Center continues to be a valuable online site to search for your next career advance, or at least to see where opportunities are. We’ve been exploring programming partnerships with other national organizations, such as the POD Network, and CCAS, since both of these organizations have missions complementary to ACAD.
And we find ourselves in the enviable position of having accomplished many items in our strategic plan—we’ve launched The Academic Leader, upgraded and updated our online presence, and achieved 100% of Board giving to the organization, to name only a few. This year, we’ll roll-out an updated ACAD logo, make a push to grow from 800 to 1,000 members, and continue to maintain and assess our programs to make sure they are effectively serving your needs. And at our Spring 2018 Board Meeting, the Board will engage in further discussion of what comes next for ACAD, as we roll our strategic plan forward a year in order to add new goals and benefits for our members. We welcome your ideas.
For now, best wishes for an enjoyable, relaxing, and rejuvenating summer, and thank you for all that you do at your institutions to help your students, and the faculty and staff who work so well with them, realize their potential.
Related topics: reflection
