This is a follow up post to "The Unspoken Contract: How Academic Departments Run on Invisible Labor" I want to acknowledge the very real risk that critiquing departmental dysfunction could sound like I'm blaming faculty writ large. I'm not. Faculty didn't design the soft money model, the incentive s...

I have been thinking for a long time about whether, and how to say this out loud. Not because the problems are subtle, but because naming them plainly is uncomfortable in systems that depend on people silently absorbing strain. What follows is an attempt to explain why I am choosing to name them any...

In Parts 1 and 2, we explored why traditional strategic planning often fails: long lists of objectives, abstract values-based pillars, and a tendency to overemphasize prestige metrics or unit-level plans. We also discussed the power of trade-offs and strategic bets as a way to surface priorities, ma...

In Part 1, I distinguished between strategy, planning, and strategic planning. Not because those distinctions are academic, but because collapsing them into a single exercise often leads to a substantial misinvestment of time and attention. In practice, strategic planning in higher education often p...