ELAF 786 Academic Leadership in H.E.
Summary 3 – Issues Facing Academic Leaders
By: Ronald M. Oler, Ph.D. – First Published on October 25, 2006

Academic Leaders face challenges from inside and outside the academy.

Forces within include:
 Financial Management – Budgeting
o Increased Costs
o Declining Revenues
o Finding More Funding Sources to fill-in the Gap
 Just to Maintain Quality, Access, and Efficiency
 Quality of Instruction
o Credentialed Faculty
o Equipped Labs and Classrooms
o Transfer Agreements
 Staffing Issues
o Employee Turnover
o Consistency

Forces from outside include:
 Increased Expectations by Stakeholders
o More and Better Courses
o More and Better Faculty
o More and Better Students
o More and Better Facilities
o Smaller Class Sizes
 Accrediting Bodies
 Peer Pressure among Similar Institutions
 Governments
o Federal Regulations
o State Regulations
o Local Regulations

These are just a few of the internal and external pressures academic leaders are feeling in twenty-first century America. Balancing these forces seems to be a never ending job that serves to reduce their tenure. Someone observed that the average term of an Academic Dean is only six years. It seems that leading an academic group may not be as rewarding as some would expect.
Variations in all aspects of academic leadership are endemic to their perspective institution. At Ivy Tech Community College we cannot afford to hire another full-time faculty member for academic areas of greatest recent growth, because state appropriations are tied to four-year rolling FTE averages. By the time we have funding to hire a new faculty member that particular area may have stabilized or even lost enrollment. By contrast, Harvard University’s endowment is so large that if they received a paltry 3.5% return on their investments, they could fund 100% of their total annual operating costs, including paying all student tuition, without affecting their principal balance.
Financial pressures seem to be the most burdensome for academic leaders and most all other issues appear to be tied to money. Hiring more faculty requires more money, improving labs takes more money, conforming with more governmental regulations takes more money, etc. Therefore, it seems prudent that the best academic leaders of the future will be proficient fund-raisers. They must know how to fill-in-the-gap between declining revenues and increasing costs through philanthropic activities (fund raising). I hope that my experiences working with our Foundation Office, creating a new project last spring, served to educate me in this regard.