In this new academic year now fully underway, ACAD is proud to be a supportive partner for you and the important work that you accomplish on your campuses. And the ACAD Board of Directors and Laura Matthias, Executive Director, are grateful for your continued suggestions about how ACAD can effectively serve its members.
In our continuing commitment to serve the organization’s members, ACAD is pleased to announce several new initiatives that are responsive to the professional needs of academic leaders, and that also signal the increasing energy around the organization.
First, I am pleased to announce that we’ve added a special session to the ACAD Annual Meeting, to be held January 23-26, 2019, in Atlanta, in conjunction with the AAC&U Annual Meeting. In addition to our regular sessions focused on the topic “Thriving beyond the Narrative: Academic Leadership for the Future,” ACAD is sponsoring a special session hosted by national search consultants, who will share with interested ACAD members their perspectives about the search process for senior leadership positions. This session will occur immediately after the ever-popular Dean’s Institute on January 23 and will be free of charge for ACAD members. The number of attendees will be limited due to the size of the meeting room. If this is of interest to you, please watch your email to register (the registration for this session will be separate from the Annual Meeting registration).
The pre-conference workshops for the 2019 Annual Meeting will focus on two key areas: “Learning to Thrive ‘In-Between’”—developed specifically for assistant and associate deans or provosts—and “Navigating the University Budget.” We welcome your participation in those workshops, as well as at the ACAD Keynote Luncheon, “Thriving in the Dysfunction: Building a Culture of Collaboration,” with Rick Castallo, Professor of Educational Administration, California State University, Northridge.
To guide our work, ACAD has developed a strategic plan and has recently rolled it forward to span from 2018 to 2022. We will soon post the plan on our website and I invite you to read through the organization’s goals and strategies. For an all-volunteer Board of Directors, we’re proud of the initiatives that we’re accomplishing, such as The ACAD Leader, our annual award for excellence in academic leadership, and an enhanced social media presence. We look forward to hearing from and working with you as the plan unfolds.
Finally, I’m happy to draw your attention to the new logo for ACAD that we think represents us as a contemporary, energetic, and forward-moving—and forward-thinking—organization. Over the next few months, you’ll start to see the new logo on all of our ACAD-branded sites, especially as we approach ACAD’s 75th anniversary year in 2019-2020.
For now, best wishes for a successful fall academic term, 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 | thriving