| | | Academic Leadership |
A small minority of faculty devote significant time to leadership activities in the department, school, and university. Academic leadership can be divided into the three primary types of research, educational, and administrative, with some positions combining two or all three types. Leadership in research is extremely important and should be on everyone's radar. Three important attributes come to mind: the ability to do good research work; having a vision of what could be accomplished through a strong team effort; and having good interpersonal skills to motivate and bring colleagues together. Inviting colleagues to work on a proposal can be a good way of stimulating collaboration. Leadership in education generally receives less attention in our community than it should and in some universities is not strongly valued in the reward system. Nonetheless, we as faculty have a responsibility to quality education, and there is opportunity for innovation. The use of high tech classrooms, distance learning, PC simulations and courseware are just a few examples of non-traditional approaches to learning that are currently being explored. Educational symposiums run by professional societies like the ASEE and IEEE provide excellent venues for disseminating new learning innovations.
Administrative leadership includes a variety of positions that involve managing groups of various sizes and compositions such as department chairs and associate chairs, academic deans and associate deans, deans of undergraduate and graduate schools, the chair of the faculty senate, directors of research centers, the vice president for research, and the provost and associate provosts.
This group is critically important in spite of its small size because of the impact it has on academic program, faculty, staff, and student body. Two obvious aspects of assuming a leadership role leap to mind when considering following a career path that includes administration and leadership. The negative side is the enormous amount of time required, time that must be taken from other professional responsibilities including research and teaching, not to mention family time. Usually the higher the position, the greater the required commitment. Energtic deans sometimes brag how they are actually able to maintain a few students and teach an occasional course in spite of their workload, but presidents are rarely seen in the halls of a department. The positive side is precisely the potential for a major impact on many levels, including academic programs, student welfare and success, educational quality and inovation, community and national outreach programs, relations with industry and government, diversity, and quality of life issues.
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Often, but not always, participation in leadership begins quite early in a career with the modest responsibilities of leading a small group of peers within a department. A typical path is to move from such initial positions to junior departmental positions such as associate chairs, to chair, to associate dean or dean and so on. But not all paths are so linear. Some faculty find a level they like and stay there, others drop off the leadership path, others move sidewise to directing centers or major university responsibilities, and others get drafted later in their career without low level experience, which can make getting up to steam on budgeting and planning particularly tough. This multipath entry adds to the difficulty of mentoring for leadership, there is no standard route.
In this chapter we explore in more detail various views of leadership and mentoring specifically for (or against!) leadership.
| | | Academic Leadership |