Chief Academic Officers Research Articles

Practice these recommendations to get promoted

I’m a ponderer, so I’ve had plenty of time to contemplate my career since I retired five years ago. I’ve identified many mistakes I made throughout the years, and many things I did right. My higher education career started out with a job in college recruitment and ended with a job as a chief academic officer. I fulfilled my career goal. It was very satisfying. I had the opportunity to be promoted from within, and to be promoted by changing institutions.

The three most important words in faculty workload: transparency, transparency, transparency

Among the most contentious topics between faculty and administration in higher education is defining what constitutes fair and equitable faculty workload. The provost, as chief academic officer, oversees the faculty workload policy, yet implementation is typically carried out at the department level. Specific teaching assignments for each faculty member are determined by the department chair, who must address the needs of the faculty and the department, with oversight from the dean. Like the real estate adage about location, location, location, we suggest that transparency is a critical factor for chairs in assigning faculty workload. Individual faculty sometimes feel that they are doing more work than their colleagues, and a lack of transparency regarding teaching assignments can cause suspicions of favoritism and inequity. Transparency leads to increased trust and a sense of accountability between faculty and academic leaders (O’Meara et al. 2019). Here we discuss three strategies for increasing transparency and, thus, faculty satisfaction in workload matters.

Administrator perceptions of the purpose and function of academic advising in the United States

ABSTRACT Scholars have long debated an idealised conceptualisation of academic advising practice, while higher education administrators have shaped their own vision for its practice on college campuses, resulting in widespread ambiguity regarding its purpose and function. This study investigated how 181 chief academic officers at two year and four year public and private institutions in the U.S. viewed academic advising roles. The findings indicate consistent agreement amongst those surveyed regarding their views about the role of the academic advisor. However, this consistency of agreement on role possibly represents an oversimplified understanding of the purpose and function of academic advising, contributing to the continuation of role misunderstanding.

The American Council of Education Fellowship: A Pathway to Higher Education Leadership

When considering the opportunities for service in higher education's most visible leadership roles, such as the presidency, multiple pathways internal to higher education exist, including academic affairs, advancement, business administration, student affairs, government relations, and less often, leadership roles originating outside academia. While most institutional leaders do not answer to shareholders, according to the American Council on Education (2023), they are “among the most important leaders in the country.” No matter which pathway to a senior leadership role, opportunities for serving higher education's diverse stakeholders, including but not limited to students, faculty, staff, families, and communities, abound. At the center of academic leadership, 86% of provosts, according to the 2022 Inside Higher Education Survey of College and University Chief Academic Officers (CAOs), agree that “healthy undergraduate education requires healthy departments.”

Is it time for a new job or career?

By the time I was 20, I knew I wanted a career in higher education. I met with a dean at my junior college and thought that his job was something I'd like to do. And much later, I became a dean and then chief academic officer. I changed jobs and colleges several times during my career but couldn't imagine leaving higher education. I told people often, “It's the only thing I know how to do.”

Is it time for a new job or career?

By the time I was 20, I knew I wanted a career in higher education. I met with a dean at my junior college and thought that his job was something I'd like to do. And much later, I became a dean and then a chief academic officer. I changed jobs and colleges several times during my career but couldn't imagine leaving higher education. I told people often, “It's the only thing I know how to do.”

Promoting Civic and Community-Based Teaching Practices: An Exploratory Study of Collaborations Between Faculty Development

The study discussed in this article explored collaborative efforts between faculty development centers and civic and community engagement centers related to the promotion of civic and community-based teaching practices. The authors surveyed chief academic officers of public institutions supportive of civic and community engagement and found initial evidence that such collaborations do exist and can be effective. However, the partnerships may often be episodic and informal. The authors also discuss implications for practice and future research.

Advancing a Framework for STEM Caring Intelligence for Academic Administrative Leadership to Broaden Participation: Perspectives of HBCU Provosts

Concerns over student retention and development within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) higher education present a need for research that examines educational caring in STEM leadership. This work purports that senior academic administrative leadership's positional influence and caring intelligence are necessary to cultivate and sustain caring STEM environments. Building on cross-disciplinary scholarship on academic caring, the STEM Caring Intelligence Framework for Academic Administrative Leadership is proposed as five interrelated dimensions of caring intelligence: STEM caring, academic caring, administrative caring, leadership caring, and champion-driven caring. The proposed conceptual framework and a thematic analysis were used to examine caring intelligence within the interview transcripts of seven provosts at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), who were identified as STEM supportive. Atlas TI software was used for management of the data, coding, and assistance with thematic analysis. Extending previous scholarship tested with HBCU deans, the findings substantiate the relevance of the framework for understanding characteristics of STEM caring intelligence of provosts serving as chief academic officers. All seven provosts’ reflections on STEM leadership promoted at least one of the five dimensions of caring intelligence that were proposed in the framework. STEM caring and champion-driven caring were found to be the most common dimensions present in the provosts’ reflections on their STEM leadership and efforts to broaden participation. Thus, the reflections of the participating HBCU provosts provided a narrative for the practice and study of caring in STEM leadership. Implications for future research are discussed.

How Sex and Gender Impact Clinical Practice: An Evidence-Based Guide to Patient Care

The editors of this book are the Dean and Chief Academic Officer of a US medical school based in Greenville South Carolina and an Adjunct Professor in Medicine at New York University and so are well placed to provide a critical view of this important area. Over 3 sections and 16 chapters they bring together over 30 authors to provide a comprehensive overview of the impact that sex and gender play in the presentation and management of common conditions. The first section is short and covers less than 20 pages yet within it is a challenge to a lot of what many of us have taken for granted for years: an example is in investigations. We know that haemoglobin levels have different values for male and female patients but I had not really appreciated that the same applies to other tests such as the ECG where there are different QT...

Administrator Perceptions of Academic Advisor Tasks

As higher education leaders, chief academic officers are capable of affecting the ways advising is structured and performed on college campuses, but little is known about how they regard advising. This study investigated the perceptions of 181 chief academic officers at two- and four-year public and private institutions in the U.S. regarding advising tasks. Using a Likert-scale instrument built using the NACADA core competencies, we explored how chief academic officers' perceptions of advisor tasks represent the informational, relational, and conceptual areas of the core competencies. Results revealed small significant differences between institutional type in perceptions of advising roles and functions. This study lays the foundation for future inquiry into perceptions of chief academic officers and other key stakeholders of advising.

Reporting and Appraising Research Studies

In today's fast-paced health care delivery system, new evidence for practice emerges on a daily basis, and research results are quickly disseminated. Nurse practitioners are challenged to evaluate the relevance of the evidence to their patient populations and whether clinical practice should be changed on the basis of the presenting evidence. Nurse researchers also need to report study findings in a relevant, organized, and scholarly manner using reporting guidelines. This paper discusses both critical appraisal checklists and reporting guidelines providing exemplars for using each of the available tools.

Florida State University College of Medicine.

Florida State University College of Medicine.

University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine.

Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine.

TCU and UNTHSC School of Medicine.

TCU and UNTHSC School of Medicine.

Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine at Florida Atlantic University.

Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine at Florida Atlantic University.

Develop hard skills for successful deanship

Before I was a chief academic officer, I was a dean for 12 years. At different times, and at various colleges, I was dean of arts and sciences, academic support, an evening and weekend college, and the main campus of a multi‐campus college. One thing is for certain: There is an important skill set necessary for a successful deanship.

William James Stirling CBE. 4 February 1953—9 November 2018

James Stirling's wide-ranging contributions to the development and application of quantum chromodynamics were central in verifying QCD as the correct theory of strong interactions, and in computing precise predictions for all types of collider processes. He published more than 300 papers on a vast range of phenomenological topics, including some of the most highly cited of all time in particle physics. His research, always full of insight, focused on the confrontation of theoretical predictions with experimental results. Amongst many key contributions, he developed the helicity amplitude method and used it to show that the CERN ‘monojet’ events, thought to be a possible signal of new physics, were due to vector boson plus jet production. The method has since facilitated the calculation of many other important processes. At Durham he formed a famous long-standing collaboration that set the standard for determining the quark and gluon distributions in the proton. Besides his intellectual brilliance, his personal qualities of humility, modesty, diligence and fairness made him an outstanding scientific leader and administrator. He played a major role in the foundation of the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology in Durham and served as its first Director. In 2005 he was appointed Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research at Durham. He moved to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in 2008, becoming Head of the Department of Physics in 2011. Then in 2013 he was appointed to the newly created position of Provost, the chief academic officer, at Imperial College, London, from which he retired in August 2018.

Supporting principal supervisors: what really matters?

PurposeDistricts across the country are calling on their principal supervisors to shift from mainly focusing on operations and compliance to dedicating their time to help principals grow as instructional leaders. Learning theory elaborates that such support for principals demands that supervisors take a teaching-and-learning approach – which the authors define as consistently using particular strategies that are characteristic of high quality teachers and mentors across various apprenticeship settings – to their work with principals on their instructional leadership. Prior research on leadership supports these shifts but does not examine the conditions under which principal supervisors are able to persist and grow in taking a teaching-and-learning approach specifically. What are those conditions? The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approachThis paper addresses that question through a re-examination of data from two studies with socio-cultural learning theory as the conceptual framework. The authors primarily use observation data (approximately 760 hours), supplemented by 344 interviews and reviews of hundreds of documents.FindingsContrary to extant research the authors did not associate high quality outside coaching with the positive cases of principal supervision. Nor did hiring principal supervisors with requisite prior knowledge explain why some principal supervisors regressed and grew. Findings underscore the importance of supervisors of principal supervisors (SPSs) being principal supervisors’ main mentors and principal supervisors not over-relying on others for assistance but actively leading their own learning, especially through work with colleagues and protecting their time themselves.Originality/valueThis analysis distinguishes conditions that support principal supervisors in taking a teaching-and-learning approach to their work with principals. The authors elaborate key roles for chief academic officers and others who supervise principal supervisors typically overlooked in policy and research on district leadership. Findings reinforce the importance of mentoring to learning and also district leaders serving as main mentors for each other, rather than relying on outside coaching.

The academic health center (AHC) chief academic officer (CAO) role in fostering interprofessional learning experiences

Abstract Define and describe the roles and responsibilities of the Chief Academic Officer (CAO) in the creation of sustainable interprofessional learning experiences (ILE) sponsored or co-sponsored through Academic Health Centers (AHCs).