In Tuesday’s post, we talked about a survey conducted by Brenda Coppard, chair of occupational therapy at Creighton University, on the transition from faculty to chair, and what experiences they found most helpful in making the move.

Despite all that has been written about leadership, the question still remains: What does it take to be an effective academic leader?

How do you come across to the people you work with? Does what you say and how you say it send mixed messages? Are your actions consistent with your words? Do you listen intently? Do you acknowledge others’ ideas? All these questions are important for any leader, and answering them honestly can help you become a better leader, says Florence Richman, special assistant to the president for academic growth at Northern Virginia Community College.

In the early 1990s, higher education researcher James Fairweather used data from the National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty to explore relationships between teaching, research, and faculty pay. Five years after this first analysis, Fairweather repeated the study to see if a growing emphasis on teaching was being reflected in faculty salaries.

Faculty careers are often divided into three phases: beginning, middle, and end. New faculty have been studied in some detail—probably because of the great influx of them. So have senior faculty, although less than new faculty. But what about that expanse in the middle? Researchers Baldwin, Lunceford, and Vanderlinden (reference below) quote sources describing mid-career faculty as “perhaps the least studied and most ill-defined period in life.”

Becoming a department chair does not always follow a smooth or particularly well-thought-out process. Most faculty, who have no academic leadership training, need real support to make this career transition a successful one.

Reflecting on my career as a teaching psychologist, I realized I was missing something. Trained as an experimentalist and employed academically to teach courses in the experimental areas of psychology, I would occasionally teach introduction to psychology. However, I would always feel much more comfortable teaching the part of the course that tended to be experimental in content in contrast to the portion that was more applied with topics such as counseling and clinical, abnormal, and therapeutic psychology. Also, as an academic adviser, I would often find that I wasn't able to offer a thorough depiction of what students could expect when employed after graduation in areas of psychology dealing with humans in therapeutic scenarios.

Faculty roles are defined by a combination of institutional culture and discipline standards, and achieving the right balance among teaching, scholarship, and service should be an important consideration for individual faculty members and their chairs and deans.

Early advocates of online learning focused their efforts on demonstrating online learning's legitimacy to the broader community. Now, as an increasing body of literature supports the notion that there are no significant differences in learning outcomes between online and face-to-face courses, these advocates have expanded their efforts to address issues of student and faculty support and resource allocation.