Higher education institutions rely on staff working in a variety of roles to perform their core functions, including custodians, librarians, food service workers, career counselors, and residence hall directors. Research within and beyond the field of higher education offers multiple approaches leaders can consider to improve their workplace…

Equity-centered trauma-informed practice can benefit not just individuals who have experienced trauma but all members of a campus community. Recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic have provided space for many students, staff, and faculty to articulate their exhaustion, burnout, discrimination, and/or lack of being valued. These are clear…

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…

The paper suggests that today's world is a VUCA (volatile-uncertain-complex-ambiguous) world, based on the Fourth Industrial Revolution in which machine intelligence and technology are transforming almost every field of human endeavor--all against a backdrop of climate change, social and political turmoil, and enormous and growing wealth inequity.…

The circulation of head football coaches is a well-established practice, and with it, salary costs are significantly outpacing other spending as institutions compete in the pursuit of prestige. This movement of college football coaches is known in the popular press as the "coaching carousel." The carousel is a fitting metaphor for a…

It has been almost ten years since the American Council on Education (ACE) began to raise awareness of the importance of workplace flexibility in faculty careers and to encourage colleges and universities to support faculty in better integrating their professional and personal lives. With the generous support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, ACE…

In academia, there are two different worlds, one inhabited by tenure-track and the other by non-tenure-track faculty. In the first, people encourage faculty to become involved in a series of important reforms that increase student success, completion, and learning. In this first world, people envision faculty simultaneously increasing their…

Non-tenure-track (NTT) research faculty are perhaps the most under-recognized group of academic professionals on the campuses today, despite their increasingly important role within the expanding academic research enterprise. The American Association for the Advancement of Science reports that the amount of federal spending on R&D has more than…

College and university presidents are viewed by their various constituencies as responsible for everything, good and ill. Upon assuming the role of president, one takes on a double existence--the symbol of the presidency overlays one's identity as a private individual. And the line between the two can at times become dangerously blurred. In this…

Strategies to address the problem of work and family balance have begun emerging in recent years. Many American college and universities have begun to adopt this "family-friendly policies," such as tenure-clock extensions. Each of the policies to enable work and family balance, however, is situated within the broader academic culture.…