Pareena Lawrence, dean and chief academic officer of Augustana College, says that faculty need to take on a different and more active leadership role in order to meet the demands of the 21st-century higher education landscape. “There is limited space in the traditional system of shared governance to share with faculty leadership the rapid changes in higher education. It seems like sometimes I have a lot of information, but they have to make some of the decisions as part of shared governance without access to much of this information. And there’s no committee on campus that’s looking at long-term trends or threats that should concern us,” she says.
Connections Are Everything: Putting Relationships at the Heart of Higher Ed
As academic leaders, we are under so much pressure to deliver—enrollment targets, strategic plans, graduation rates, AI policies, and on and on—that we can lose sight of what our students