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Previous "Heads Up" Columns
Advice for academic administrators
Heads Up
Spousal hires are no longer unusual yet some colleges still let fears about the risks blind them to the obvious benefits.
Heads Up
In assigning pay raises, a department head can't avoid making judgments about each professor's productivity.
Heads Up
Don't underestimate the benefits of a well-managed advisory panel, especially in times of economic stress.
Heads Up
As an administrator, it's all too easy to leap to conclusions when the issue at hand is one of your hot-button concerns.
Heads Up
Which should take precedence in a virtual-reality campus: corporate terms of service or public-disclosure laws?
Heads Up
Too many academics ignore the rules that come with their campus-provided computer and e-mail accounts.
Heads Up
The ability to communicate negative information without alienating your audience has become an essential administrative skill.
Heads Up
Will you be held accountable for requiring students to participate in a virtual world if they become the target of online harassers?
Heads Up
If you are employed by a university, why should you be charged to park your car or connect a computer to the campus network?
Heads Up
When we take on administrative responsibilities, we face choices as to what kind of manager we will become.
Heads Up
A department chairman becomes a dean and finds that his view of the academic universe really has changed.
Heads Up
Taking an aggressive approach in hiring is the only way to avoid a mediocre pool of candidates.
Heads Up
The new faculty member is just as wonderful as everyone predicted -- there's just the small matter of her degree.
Heads Up
Just because the trustees pass on a search committee's favorite candidate doesn't mean the process was corrupt or undemocratic.
Heads Up
The pretenure years need not be a time of high anxiety, but for that to be so, institutions must make structural changes.
Heads Up
Those of us in administration should take the lead in demonstrating that all viewpoints are decidedly not equal.
Heads Up
What's a dean to do when an alumnus' accomplishments are better placed in Facebook than the viewbook?
Heads Up
The fact that some administrators act in arbitrary, less-than-altruistic ways does not mean that administration in general operates that way.
Heads Up
A new dean finds a source of cheer in the dreaded process of conducting faculty reviews.
Heads Up
A department head with egg on her face describes the hiring dilemma confronting liberal-arts colleges.
Heads Up
Too many students and professors confuse academe's increased openness with an invitation to take their complaints straight to the top.
Heads Up
The key to faculty recruitment is making candidates feel the college is genuinely interested in them at every step. Maybe that's the key to retaining them, too.
Heads Up
Professors often give up tenure in order to move up the administrative career ladder. Is it worth the risk?
Heads Up
Choosing the "safe" candidate who will stick around instead of the "ambitious" one is the wrong choice.
Heads Up
For the many academics who wind up corralled into administration, we offer this handy survival guide.
Heads Up
In the absence of sufficient real capital, the cultural capital of the academic world -- recognition -- is especially important.
Heads Up
A department head chronicles how the hiring committee narrowed its pool from 300 applicants to one.
Heads Up
Administrators may think they're preserving harmony, but they're really just fomenting paranoia by keeping professors in the dark.
Heads Up
Faculty members are all too willing to adopt an "us versus them" attitude toward administrators but it's never that simple.
Heads Up
Unless we reassess our high-tech priorities, issues of student insensitivity, indiscretion, bias, and fabrication will consume us.
Heads Up
An outside candidate for a department chairmanship finds himself asked to pick a side before he's even joined the battle.
Heads Up
An assistant professor who used to wonder what his department chairman did all day finds out the hard way.
Heads Up
"Midlevel Administrators Collaborate!" doesn't have quite the zing of most inspiring slogans. But it works.
Heads Up
A chairman explains why departments often shy away from hiring too many Ph.D.'s from local universities.
Heads Up
A department chairwoman battles it out with a combative staff member and loses -- not her tenured job, just her reputation.
Heads Up
Research, teaching, and service are the big three, but there's one more criterion that interviewers need to evaluate -- attitude.
Heads Up
When academics move into administration or association work, at some point they have to set aside their scholarship.
Heads Up
Savvy chairmen know that the days when certain faculty "lines" belonged to a department are over.
Heads Up
Managing affirmative-action procedures is easy, says a former department chairman. Actually hiring minority scholars is not.
Heads Up
For an associate professor, taking her turn as department head has meant seriously derailing her research career.
Heads Up
An English professor learned a key lesson about being a chairman, not from any formal orientation, but from two academic novels.
Heads Up
Setting faculty salaries is one of the trickiest tasks you'll face as a department head.
Heads Up
It gets to the point where there's nothing left to cut -- and then they ask for more.
Heads Up
For department heads, revising the curriculum is a lesson in human psychology.
Heads Up
As a department head, you'll have to deal with complaints from students about mean teachers and complaints from teachers about rude students.
Heads Up
When should department heads keep faculty members in the dark, and when should they talk?
Heads Up
Chaperoning job candidates, catering to donors, and other joys of a department chairmanship.
Heads Up
As a department head, you can rely on 98 percent of your faculty members to do their jobs and need minimal tending. Here's what to expect from the other 2 percent.
Resources:
Library:
Landing your first job
On the tenure track
Mid-career and on
Administrative careers
Nonacademic careers for
Ph.D.'s
Talk about your career
Elsewhere Online:
Perspectives
Wall Street Journal