Our Cherished Halls of Ivy: A Time for Tune-Up or Overhaul?

By Phillip L. Beukema

Higher education has both supporters and detractors, although not in equal numbers. Some would have us believe that our higher education enterprise is on the brink of disaster, that it’s falling apart at the seams. Some go so far as to call the system broken beyond repair, suggesting that it be rebuilt from the ground up. Can it be this bad?

Drawing on his long experience in higher ed administration, the author examines the sea change that’s affected nearly every corner of the higher learning landscape. These corners include the high-and-rising costs of tuition, the crushing levels of student debt, the shamefully low graduation rates in too many schools, the growing “million-dollar clubs” whose members include university presidents and football and basketball coaches, the inadequacies of accreditation, and the growing influence of partisan politics in the conduct of our public universities. That’s for starters.

With an insider’s perspective, the author paints a picture that is up-front and honest, laying bare the depth and extent of specific problems confronting that crucial engine of our economy – higher education. In each case, he spells out what needs a tune-up and what needs something closer to an overhaul. Of course, he offers specific proposals for ‘fixing’ those problems. They’re likely to be controversial, but the author hopes they spark a debate that ultimately leads to productive solutions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781663244345

Phillip L. Beukema

Teaching online was both a passion and an avocation of the author for close to ten years. He taught more than 50 undergraduate and graduate online courses over a ten-year span, in subjects ranging from entrepreneurship to organizational behavior, research methods, sustainability, and management. Prior to this, the author’s career took him from the University of Southern California, where he received his doctorate, to five private colleges and universities and two public universities where he served as a faculty member and, later, as Dean of a business school and Vice President of Academic Affairs.

Book preview

Copyright © 2022 Phillip L. Beukema.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

844-349-9409

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-6632-4435-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-4436-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-4434-5 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 10/07/2022

With appreciation to all who’ve given me support,

wise counsel, and a helping hand in my journey

through the halls of ivy – my wife and traveling

companion, mentors, colleagues and so many

others over the past half-century.

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: Becoming an Academician

Chapter 2: Higher Ed: A Bird’s-Eye View

Chapter 3: College Tuition and Student Debt – Two Unfortunate Companions

Chapter 4: High Finance in Higher Ed

Chapter 5: In Search of the Right College: Use and Abuse of College Rankings

Chapter 6: Rethinking the Bachelor’s Degree – Questions of Value, Time, and Design

Chapter 7: Distance Ed Comes to Higher Ed

Chapter 8: Who’s Earning a Fair Salary – Faculty, Deans or the Executive Suite?

Chapter 9: Joining the Million-Dollar Club: Presidents, Coaches and Assistants

Chapter 10: CEO and Coach Compensation: Calling Fair or Foul

Chapter 11: Adjunctification of Our Faculty: Who’s Minding the Store?

Chapter 12: The Right Faculty Mix: Assuring Institutional Integrity

Chapter 13: The State of Faculty Tenure: Under Threat, Not Under Water

Chapter 14: Boards, Legislatures and the Rise of Partisanship

Chapter 15: Accreditation and Quality Assurance: Is Public Confidence at Risk?

Chapter 16: Quo Vadis, Leaders of Our Higher Education Enterprise?

Notes

Preface

Just over 50 years ago I launched my academic career in higher education. It was an exciting time to begin my professional journey, and absent a crystal ball, I knew little of what lay ahead of me and even less of the forces that would influence the direction of higher education in the decades to come.

The past half-century frames the chapters of this book, examining the sea change that’s affected every corner of our higher education world. These corners include everything from high-and-rising tuition to crushing levels of student debt, million-dollar clubs of coaches and presidents, the college rankings business, growing dangers of something called adjunctification, and out-of-control trustees. That’s for starters.

Throughout the book I’ve referred to the higher education enterprise, mainly because our colleges and universities are not simply a collection of educational organizations, nor do they constitute an admixture of business firms. Some members of this great enterprise are private nonprofit, some private for-profit, and still others public – funded in whole or part by a state government. Some of these even have overseas outposts!

Small or large, private or public, each of these thousands of colleges and universities has warts and shortcomings – some more than others. To be fair, they also have their unique strengths and bragging rights. All of them, without exception, are faced with challenges. Some are confronting a challenge of survival; some are dealing with serious leadership issues; many have strayed from their historical mission; and most of them continue to employ the same model of proud independence, working within their comfortable silos, just as they did a half-century or more ago.

I’ve outlined the character of these challenges, chapter by chapter, and then proposed steps our institutions of higher learning should take to address them. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, and I fully anticipate that some of my recommendations will be controversial. Beyond controversy, however, I hope they spark a debate that will ultimately lead to productive solutions.

The topical coverage in selected chapters required the analysis and presentation of data – lots of data in certain areas – from trends in student tuition to graduation rates, faculty and administrative salaries, online degree enrollments and the like. To the extent possible I’ve incorporated the most recently available data, and in some instances the most recent data series were released two or three years ago (2019 or 2020). My sense, on balance, is that the trends and comparisons I’ve shown are sufficiently stable to support the conclusions I’ve drawn and stand the test of time - for at least a reasonable period.

For reasons that will become clear to the reader, Chapter 1 highlights the course I charted from the start of my career in higher ed to the time I officially retired from that arena. Think of it as a highly abbreviated professional autobiography. In subsequent chapters, I ‘ve drawn briefly on some aspect of my experience as a point of departure in developing the topic at hand.

Given the nature of my administrative experience, many details regarding the size and shape of the academic landscape over the past half-century were already familiar to me in the course of my writing. A great deal of information also surfaced in my research, both quantitative and qualitative, that was essential to developing each of the themes examined throughout the book. At times, it was difficult to sort out those details and perspectives that were part of my accumulated academic worldview versus those that had surfaced in my literature study. In the end, I settled on including a reference citation when in doubt. For simplicity, each chapter contains its own citation sequence, and all reference citations are shown in the Notes section at the end of the text.

One would like to think that careful attention to detail will assure an error-free product when undertaking a writing project of this kind. Wishful thinking, of course! Considering the range of subject matter and the extensive analytical and quantitative detail contained throughout, it’s highly probable that inaccuracies and oversights occurred. My apologies for having borrowed or otherwise appropriated an idea from some distant-but-unknown writer or colleague who I inadvertently failed to reference. However unintentional, the error is entirely mine.

Finally, my hunch is that most of us who’ve spent much time on a college campus probably sense that it has a way of growing on you. It not only grew on me, but I decided to stick around the college scene for a good while and make higher education a career. After grad school one thing led to another, and I wandered from my first teaching role into a junior administrative post. I was hooked. Pursuing the administrative life isn’t everyone’s cup ‘o tea, but I found the opportunity to work with faculty colleagues in creating and building strong academic programs a fascinating and rewarding experience. Fifty years later and having served with ten private and public colleges and universities, my walks through the many halls of ivy turned into an extraordinary career. Even with all its challenges today, I’d take it on again in a heartbeat!

Phillip L. Beukema

Elkhart Lake, WI

August 30, 2022

47088.png

CHAPTER 1

47170.png

Becoming an Academician

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

– Robert Frost [from The Road Not Taken]

P oetry hasn’t always captured my interest, but there’s one poem I stumbled across long ago that spoke to me, The Road Not Taken . I’ve read and thought about the lines of Robert Frost’s poem more times than I can remember, finding new meaning in it each time. I first encountered it as a young and admittedly disinterested high school junior, but eventually I grew to enjoy poetry, especially that of Frost. His multiple Pulitzer Prizes are well deserved, as is his status as Vermont’s Poet Laureate.

By some combination of good fortune, the advice from wise mentors, and the support of some exceptional people in my life I’ve had the opportunity to travel down that road not taken for an extended and rewarding journey. I must add that I’ve also detoured onto the road I had decided against earlier, and that detour turned out to create new opportunities I’d never dreamed of. How this came about is part of the life journey I’ve described in Making a Difference: Roads Traveled and Dreams Pursued. [1]

Much of my professional work is rooted in the higher education enterprise, or what some would call our higher learning academy, aka academia. Whatever the case, the path I settled on in my earlier twenties took me into the realms of both private and public university work and into the halls and offices of a dozen colleges and universities across the country. The roles I assumed ran from faculty member [assistant, associate and full professor] to department head, dean, vice president for academic affairs and assistant to the president. To say I pursued an academic career would be more than obvious.

That career began in the early Seventies. There were, to be sure, a few twists and turns along the way [Frost would have understood completely], but the choices I made and the experiences I gained all combined to shape my interests in some very specific directions. Each of those directions, in turn, constituted a particular theme that I’ve selected for inclusion in this book.

It’s now been over fifty years since I started my higher education career with a doctorate from the University of Southern California. There is much about the world of higher education in the early Seventies that I recall distinctly, and it’s no exaggeration to state that our higher education enterprise has undergone a sea change in the half-century that’s passed since then.

Before getting ahead of the story, though, I believe some context is required. My decision to enter university life and the nature of my administrative responsibilities over the years led naturally to shaping my perspectives on the purpose of higher education, writ large, and what the character of higher education leadership ought to be. Those perspectives formed the foundation for the topics I’ve chosen for this book. In certain respects, they have helped shape the recommendations I’ve offered for strengthening, retooling, fixing, or otherwise reimagining one of our most vital American enterprises, higher education.

41355.png

I didn’t wander into our esteemed halls of ivy by accident, nor was my pursuit of an academic administrative career a carefully mapped out long-range plan. From the time I was ten years of age I knew, almost instinctively, that my future would have something to do with the realm of education. I just didn’t know precisely what or where.

Reading, writing, working out math problems, studying . . . I enjoyed it all. I also liked the classroom competition, trying my best to get a higher grade than the other good students who I had my eye on or being the first to raise my hand to answer whatever question the teacher popped. Sheer fun!

That was early on. By the time I finished high school, I still wasn’t sure of my career trajectory, but I figured I’d head for college and get a degree that would qualify me for teaching high school. Although much of my high school experience was a bore, I had a couple of great teachers who sparked my interest in history, world cultures and communications. I admired and learned from them, and it somehow felt right that I would chart my course in a direction that paralleled theirs.

A slight hiccup occurred in starting college, owing to my negligence in submitting a timely application for admission to San Diego State University. But, after spending a gap year working in my dad’s business, I began my studies, majoring in business education. All went smoothly, despite the usual complement of student challenges along the way – working part-time, all-night study sessions, and taking the occasional course that was never to be my cup ‘o tea.

Still thinking I was headed eventually for a high school classroom [somewhere in California, I figured], the master teacher at the high school class where I worked as a T.A. bent my ear one day. "Phil, do you really want to teach at the high school level? You’re only going to face the same rat race that I’m in . . . . large classes, discipline problems, admins who don’t always support you . . . etcetera. Why not go on for your master’s, then your doctorate. You’ve got the brains and you know how to apply yourself." I didn’t attempt to contradict him.

I had worked with my teacher-boss for over a year and we’d become friends by this time. More than friends, in fact. He’d become my mentor – the first of three I was privileged to have in life. I thought over everything he’d said to me, talked with my fiancé the next weekend, and decided to take his advice to heart.

The following year was a busy one, hectic at times. Getting married, graduating from San Diego State, submitting applications to master’s degree programs and also doing advanced research on possible doctoral programs. The University of Southern California, UCLA and Stanford were on my scouting list. I ended up going to USC, completing my master’s and doctorate – doing my dissertation in organizational behavior [a new field at the time, 1970]. Apart from all the standard coursework, exams, research and fieldwork, and dissertation writing, I was fortunate to be tapped by one of my doctoral profs to participate in a two-year consulting project for PepsiCo International. It was an unforgettable experience, one that in subtle ways helped prepare me for several roles later in my administrative career.

Between my master’s and doctoral studies, I was well-grounded in all the key business disciplines, including economics, management, marketing, statistics, quantitative analysis and more. I knew my way around the library – almost blindfolded! – and could handle practically any research assignment one might throw at me. Doing the research for my dissertation, while extensive and complex, was challenging but not difficult. As for writing the document, after a few stumbles at the starting line I managed to finish the project successfully and on time.

41361.png

With a doctorate in hand and a tenure-track assistant professor appointment, my first five years were devoted to a mix of undergraduate and graduate teaching. It had its ups and downs, and I often wished I’d had at least a six-month teacher-training course as part of my doctoral studies. None was offered at the time. Nevertheless, I stumbled along, doing my best but still falling short, in my own estimation. A gratifying part of that first five years was teaching on the branch campuses of Sussex, England, and Nairobi, Kenya – affiliated at the time with U.S. International University of San Diego. I spent nearly two and a half years on these two campuses, enjoying the opportunity to work with international students from various parts of Europe and Africa.

My dean and boss during the early part of my time with USIU also became a valued mentor. He had retired at Commander rank from the U.S. Navy a few years before securing his deanship. Despite my never having served in the military, he and I hit it off early on, and our working relationship was close and respectful. We had known each other for less than a year when he called me over to his office one day and asked if I’d serve as his assistant dean, responsible for heading the undergraduate Department of Business and Economics, located on another campus across San Diego [Point Loma]. The work sounded interesting, and even though I’d still be teaching half-time, it would give me a taste of academic administration. As things happened, I found the role much to my liking.

Near the end of my third year as department head, the university president called and invited me over to this office for a chat. The upshot of our conversation was that I was offered the opportunity to travel to Kenya for two years, develop the undergraduate business program at the university’s branch campus in Nairobi, hire the necessary faculty, and teach some of the required business classes. In only a month or so my family settled into our new digs on the school’s Nairobi campus. It took us a few months to adjust to living in this strange new world, but it quickly became home for us. Between my work and our family’s frequent safaris, it seemed as though every day brought a new adventure.

I had been back in the States several months when I received a call from my former dean – who had since taken on an interim role as Department Head of Business and Economics at Whittier College. He was planning to retire and move back to San Diego and asked if he could put my name in the hat for the department headship at Whitter. It took me no more than a few seconds to agree. After a short chat I thanked him, and we signed off.

That evening my wife and I talked it over, and we agreed this could be a good move for us. Whittier had a solid academic reputation as a small liberal arts college that also included strong professional programs in teacher education and business. In short order I submitted my application to the college’s Academic Dean. Over the next two months, I went through the customary interviews and was selected as a finalist for the position. After visiting with the college president I was tapped as the business and economics department head. What a feeling. I would now be my own boss, as it were, heading up a department of 15 faculty and representing it on assorted faculty and college committees. Five years had passed since receiving my doctorate from USC, and I was now an Associate Prof with tenure, heading one of the two largest departments at a respected private college.

From long-standing Quaker tradition, Whittier’s modus operandi was one of consensus-building in nearly all group settings, no matter what committee or forum. I caught onto this quickly and became comfortable working with colleagues in this environment. The campus was a pleasant and attractive one, and in no time I got to know most of the faculty and fellow department heads.

Early on I looked for ways to strengthen the department’s programs and build enrollment. From talking with members of my Business Advisory Council and studying the demographics, I concluded that Whittier was well-positioned to offer a Master of Business Administration {MBA] program. The program would increase enrollment, build our prestige as a department and college, and increase net revenue for the college since we already had most of the needed resources within the department. After several months of departmental and cross-college committee work, including the customary consensus-building, I gained approval for establishing a new MBA degree program. Soon I became a one-man marketing specialist and put all the operational pieces in play that would allow us to launch the program the following fall. This we did, and over the next two years the program reached our initial goal of nearly 50 enrolled students [roughly half full-time, half part-time].

Through my work with our Business Advisory Council, I had become acquainted with a council member who also served as one of the college’s trustees. In time we became close, and it was my good fortune that he became the third mentor I was privileged to have in my professional life. One day he dropped by my office and presented me with a gift, a recently published book by Robert K. Greenleaf titled Servant Leadership. [2] As time passed, Greenleaf’s book became one of the most influential, helpful books I’d ever read. Many years later I gave a copy to each of two young men who served as my administrative interns.

I was happy at Whittier and felt very much at home, but by the start of my fifth year I had started getting itchy feet, ready to take on new challenges. While perusing the personnel classifieds in the Chronicle of Higher Education one day, I noticed an announcement for a deanship opening in the School of Business at Eastern Washington University. From the position description, the job sounded like just the sort of challenge I was keen to take on – four academic departments, 50 faculty, the usual assortment of undergraduate business programs, a successful MBA program, plus a Small Business Innovation Center. There were a couple of other deanship openings on the west coast [now lost to memory], and in a matter of weeks I had updated my resume, prepared a formal application letter, and sent it off to the various search committees. I was both surprised and pleased to get a call from the committee chair at EWU – inviting me to fly up to Spokane for interviews.

My wife Charla was a southern California girl, and except for a study abroad session in western Europe, she’d never been out of California. But, she agreed I should fly up to Washington and check things out. That I did, and within a month Eastern’s Academic Vice President called me with an offer I couldn’t refuse.

By mid-summer of 1982, my family and I settled into a lovely two-story ranch-style home in the countryside a few miles southeast of Spokane in the town of Cheney, where Eastern’s main campus was located. By the start of the fall term I had settled into my Office of the Dean, a short stroll down the main sidewalk from the campus admin building. It wasn’t long before I met my fellow deans, most of the 30-odd department heads, and nearly all of my B-school faculty.

I had a rough checklist of critical things I needed to do early on. From my initial meeting with the Business Advisory Council, I concluded that the group of eight men and one woman (1) needed enlargement, (2) needed a much larger complement of businesswomen, and (3) needed something to do. They had become an easygoing, comfortable group, wined and dined every three months, and were happy to sit back and let the dean ‘do the talking,’ giving positive reports about the business school and then dismissing the group.

It didn’t take long and the comfortable group of eight doubled in size, with nearly as many female as male members. This changed the group dynamic, to be sure, and I engaged the group in a strategic planning exercise to seek their input on advancing the programs, reputation and quality of our business school. The outcome was a five-year development plan which included a one-million-dollar fundraising campaign. With the help of several members of the Council, I met with key business leaders across the Spokane community and, over the next few years, obtained the ongoing support of more than fifty business, industrial and public utility firms.

My limited experience in fundraising at Whittier paid dividends, to be sure, and I was delighted that my efforts at Eastern [approved by the president] caught the attention of several other deans who saw possibilities for doing similar things in their own divisions.

Fundraising work consumed nearly half my time. The other half was devoted to everything from faculty recruitment to departmental and university-wide meetings, evaluation of faculty tenure and promotion materials, and engaging with two of the principal business groups in the Spokane community [the Spokane-Area Economic Development Council [EDC] and the Small Business Innovation Center, co-operated by our business school, the City of Spokane and the EDC]. At the time, one of my university compatriots commented that I seemed to be as much of an external as an internal dean. I hadn’t thought about it much, but I acknowledged his point, adding that I also believed it appropriate for a business dean to play this dual role.

Late in my fourth year of the deanship, the president phoned me and suggested we meet on the main walkway in a few minutes – if that was convenient. Upon meeting him, we exchanged a few pleasantries, and in only a minute or two, he announced that he’d just fired my boss [the AVP] and – would I take over for him? Being clued into the administrative grapevine, I wasn’t too surprised my boss had been given notice. What surprised me was that the president looked to me as the interim replacement.

Within the month I arranged for my own internal, interim replacement and moved over to the main admin building to take up residence in the vice president’s office. In another few months, I had settled in, found my way around, and begun working with the deans and department heads on plans for the upcoming academic year. Within a month or so, I fell into the routine of meetings with the Academic Senate, Faculty Executive Committee, individual deans – my former fellows – and so on. Some days were filled with back-to-back meetings the entire day, or so it seemed.

As one thing led to another, my one-year interim appointment stretched into two, owing to our president being fired by the Board of Trustees. Following a national search, the newly hired president came on board and, in no time at all, we V.P.s helped him learn the lay of the land.

Throughout my first and second year as interim vice president, I worked hard to build trust between the faculty and the administration – something that had frayed badly under the former president. I also focused on strengthening several faculty departments by adding needed resources, including new faculty. Over time, I found the work of managing an array of schools and departments much to my liking. It whetted my appetite for continuing to take on the challenges of broader administrative responsibility. Given this, I informed my boss [the new prexy] that I did not wish to return to my deanship at the end of the academic year.

As it happened, my hope for continuing the academic vice presidency at EWU was not realized. Following a national search, one of the finalists for the position was an accomplished academician with whom our president had previously worked, and he decided to extend her the offer. What happened next turned out for the best, however. The president asked me to serve as his Special Assistant for the next year. This position afforded administrative legitimacy for a different role I had assumed a few months earlier, and equally important, it offered me a one-year safety net during which time I would figure out my next career step. Based on the working relationship I’d developed with my fellow chief academic officers across the state while serving as interim vice president, I was asked to serve as the administrative co-chair of a statewide steering committee. This committee was tasked with designing and conducting a pilot study to determine whether and how a system of outcomes assessment might be instituted throughout Washington state [all community colleges would be included along with the public four-year and graduate universities].

This work occupied only part of my available time, however. When the fall term started I regularly scanned the administrative position listings in each week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, and over the next few months I submitted applications to a dozen or so universities, becoming a semi-finalist with three of them. One of these was Northern Michigan University, located in Marquette, Michigan. Late in the fall, the search committee chairman invited me to the campus for a full round of interviews [four other candidates were invited as well, out of a total applicant pool of about 75, as I was to learn later]. All went well, and I had a strong sense that both the university and the vice president’s role would be an excellent fit for me.

Early in 1989 Northern’s president, accompanied by the chair and co-chair of the search committee, came for a one-day visit to my [EWU] campus to meet a cross-section of EWU’s faculty, department heads, and administrative team. Their purpose, of course, was to learn more about how my colleagues regarded my leadership capabilities and performance record. My memory of this day is vivid, to be sure! By day’s end, Northern’s president extended an offer for me to serve as NMU’s next Vice President for Academic Affairs.

Meanwhile, our statewide pilot study came to a timely end, and my co-chair and I oversaw the completion of a formal report for submittal to the Washington state legislature. At the appointed time, I presented an oral report to the legislative education committee, supported by some stunning graphics, and the co-chair explained the statistical results in a way our audience could understand. The upshot of this report was that (1) our pilot study did not support the legislature’s view that a statewide approach should be taken to installing a system of outcomes assessment, and (2) assessment of student outcomes is both valuable and needed, but it will be implemented far more effectively if done at the individual campus level. Happily, our committee’s work was validated by the legislature’s agreement to accept our recommendations.

I devoted the remainder of the academic year to wrapping up my work with graduate students completing their MBA research projects and tying up a few other loose ends in the business school. On the home front, I began putting our house in order, arranging matters with a real estate agent, starting the packing process and seeing to a few hundred other details that go into preparing for a cross-country family move. Thankfully, my wife took charge of much of the activity involving the sale and/or packing of household goods!

My time at Eastern was a rewarding one, on balance, affording me more opportunities for professional growth than I could have imagined. I made mistakes along the way, but I was also able to help both the business school and the university strengthen ties with the area business community, build a special-focus fundraising arm for ongoing support of scholarships, grants and technology improvements, and build a measure of trust between the university’s faculty and administration.

The time came to say goodbye to EWU, travel 2,000 miles across the country, and say hello to my new colleagues at NMU. I found my new home a welcoming one, with its 300-plus faculty members and an administrative team that I quickly grew to respect. Every campus has its own culture, and the one at Northern reflected – if only in part – the history and tempo of Michigan’s upper peninsula. I had much to absorb and was on a steep learning curve for the first six months. The more I saw and heard, the more I liked and the more I enjoyed my role as Northern’s chief academic officer.

As time passed, I looked for opportunities to strengthen further the university’s academic programs – and there were many ways to accomplish this. Sometimes it takes new or additional resources [money, material, personnel], and sometimes it simply takes the encouragement of those involved in a particular department or school division to pick up on an idea and find ways to move it ahead. There are also times when strengthing a program or making improvements operationally may require a change in leadership. Over a few years, I found it necessary to make a change in several deanships and department head positions. Changes of this kind require careful handling, and these were no exception.

After serving at Northern for about three years, I concluded that the processes by which faculty evaluation for tenure and promotion needed strengthening. All faculty applications for tenure and promotion and accompanying evaluations by peers and the applicable administrative persons would eventually reach me – for one further and final assessment. I continued to find instances of (1) departments not adhering to their own bylaws [each of which specified the criteria for tenure and promotion in their particular department], and (2) department heads, faculty personnel committees and deans all too frequently rubber-stamping their approval of the