In today's financially strained higher education landscape, the student services infrastructure is often supported by fewer staff, less money, less experience, and less knowledge. Gone are the days when higher education staff professionals acquired the necessary education pieces, apprenticed in positions, and waited patiently for promotions. Most…

The United States is undergoing a transformation from a national, analog, industrial economy to a global, digital, information economy. The result is profound, accelerating, and unremitting change--demographic, economic, technological and global--which is disrupting the lives of many Americans. The result is that Americans will need upskilling and…

Dartmouth College did not need the round of controversial headlines that were about to come its way nor the cascade that was surely to follow. Only weeks in office as president, Philip Hanlon found his back to the wall. What had happened and so early on his watch? While Hanlon confronted presidential challenges at the very outset of his tenure,…

The purpose of this statement is to help beginning faculty members, particularly at the assistant professor rank and in non-tenure-track positions, to succeed in their new institutions. These recommendations are intended for early-career faculty members themselves as well as administrators and other faculty in the hiring departments, to ensure…

To build postsecondary institutions that educate responsible citizens as well as competent employees and consumers, it is important that people must teach and learn themselves about the context--domestic and global--in which work is to be done, and the purposes which economic and technological development serve. One aspect of that context is the…

In this theoretical essay, I argue that the current incidences of backlash to diversity are best understood as a dynamic of complicated, historic and intertwined desires for racial diversity and white entitlement to property. I frame this argument in the theories of critical race theory and settler colonialism, each of which provide necessary but…

In this cartoon essay, the author shares his experience from a travel to Paris to see the French higher education system. From his travel, he learned that in France, "degree" inflation may be an issue, but not grade inflation. On the flight home, the author reflects how French and American academics answer one question about the state of…

After finishing her undergraduate degree in English, the author's first employment was in an academic department at her alma mater. At a large public state institution, the salary scale for non-academic appointees was--and remains--woefully low. Knowing that monetary compensation wasn't the source of staff satisfaction, her chairman made a…

The stone age of college and university admissions was characterized by paper, snail mail, large file rooms, and cumbersome admission processes. Even more frightening to recall is that only fourteen short years ago, approximately 36,000 applications for admission to Michigan State University arrived hand printed on paper in sealed envelopes. Mere…

This author asserts that faculty should publicly and tenaciously support graduate student organizing campaigns. She states this not only from her perspective as a staff member of the largest higher education local in Illinois, University Professionals of Illinois Local 4100, which represents faculty and staff at seven of the state's public…

Much has been written about the glass ceiling and pay differentials in higher and further education (HE, FE) for women academics (McTavish and Miller 2009, Rees 2007) but very little about discrepancies for women "professional managers" within UK higher education. Professional managers as a term needs to be defined as universities call…

The decision to leave a successful career and great earning potential to start over as a novice with new surroundings and expectations is not made without consideration of a wide array of variables. Making the transition to higher education was not an easy one and the transition itself has presented various other challenges and joys that I have…

In this essay, the author explains how teaching assistant (TA) unions work to the benefit not only of the graduate students who are their members but also of the writing programs that employ them. While university administrations understand unions to be bothersome at best and forces of evil at their worst, unions are essential to the maintenance…

The president of the City University of New York College of Staten Island reflects on her path to the presidency. She admits that even with help and advice, the climb to the top is rigorous, but that it leads to a richly rewarding view. (EV)

Discusses the need for students to learn to recognize and cope with difficult co-workers. Describes a few types of personalities that exhibit difficult or disturbed behavior and offers suggestions for coping with these personalities. (JOW)