Academic Leader helps academic deans, department chairs, program directors, and other decision-makers provide effective leadership within their departments, schools, or colleges. As such, we’re always looking for concise and insightful articles on the ever-evolving role of academic administration.

Submissions can take a range of forms—for example, pragmatic, advice-driven articles; opinion pieces; thoughtful personal narratives; book reviews; and essays that explore controversial issues or raise questions about current practices. Topics may include program assessment, accreditation, faculty support, faculty development, conflict management, budgets and finance, personnel issues, leadership styles, communication, strategic planning, leadership development, curriculum, student support, legal issues, and institutional culture.

Submission tips:

• Write directly to the audience, remembering that this is an online publication read by your peers. The tone should be conversational and prose free of jargon.
• Keep the article short—generally between 800 and 1,200 words (excluding references). Please reference only key sources. Fewer is better; comprehensive literature reviews are unnecessary. Focus on sources that interested readers might want to review. Provide links when applicable.
• Provide practical, actionable advice to help academic leaders do their jobs more effectively. Case studies and first-person accounts are welcome, but we prefer articles with a “what you can do” rather than “what I did” bent. 

Be encouraged to write for Academic Leader even if you aren’t a widely published author. Don’t downplay the relevance and usefulness of strategies and approaches that you’ve developed and that would be of interest to others with similar leadership responsibilities. Academic Leader prides itself on being a place where administrators can learn from and with each other.

While Academic Leader doesn’t have strict formatting guidelines, we ask that you either embed links to sources in text or use author-date citations and references—preferably following APA 7 or The Chicago Manual of Style (18th ed.). If your article includes figures, please provide alt text for these.

Once you’ve written your article, please upload it as a Word doc through our submission portal below. We do not review submissions under consideration elsewhere. Review typically takes four to five weeks. Note that Academic Leader is not a peer-reviewed publication.

AI policy: We discourage the use of generative AI except for basic copyediting. For other uses, we ask that authors include at the end of each submission a statement disclosing both how they used AI (brainstorming, drafting, rewriting, etc.) and which program(s) they used. Disclosures of AI use will appear in published articles.

If you are not a subscriber, click here to download a collection of sample articles.

If you have questions about submissions or submission status, please write to Academic Leader’s managing editor, Jon Crylen (jon.crylen@magnapubs.com).