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2 weeks ago | 
chronicle.com | Denise Magner
How to help your department through the hectic weeks before graduationT.S. Eliot had it right when he called April “the cruellest month,” at least in academe. Especially if you’re a department chair on a semester system (as most institutions are), April and the first half of May are a race toward the finish. At this point, spring break has passed and you have roughly six weeks of instruction left. That’s not much time, and there’s so much to do before those mortar boards go sailing skyward.
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Apr 14, 2024 | 
chronicle.com | Denise Magner
What to expect in a “serving at the pleasure of” administrative positionHigher education is rife with organizational structures that seem inscrutable. One such source of mystery is captured by the phrase, “I serve at the pleasure of,” which characterizes a distinct relationship between a major power holder (e.g., a dean, a provost, a president) and an appointed underling.
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Mar 10, 2024 | 
chroniclevitae.com | Len Gutkin |Karin Fischer |Denise Magner
The Public-Perception Puzzle Featured Newsletters The Review Are some kinds of vitriol too much? March 11, 2024 Latitudes A Fulbright chapter and a special training program both seek to expand international opportunities at two-year institutions. March 6, 2024 Your Career Ways to make higher education’s environment of scarcity work for you instead of against you.
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Feb 19, 2024 | 
chronicle.com | Denise Magner
What to consider as you draft the most important element of your faculty-job applicationDrafting a curriculum vitae can be a bit of a reckoning. The CV is essentially a running list of your accomplishments, and as you edit it, you see clearly what you’ve done — and what you haven’t. Your goal is to organize the document such that your accomplishments leap off the page and need no interpretation.
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Nov 26, 2023 | 
chronicle.com | Denise Magner
What a chair should consider in helping the faculty cope with a colleague’s unexpected deathDealing with the death of faculty members is the common lot of departments and their leaders, and the odds are good that someone who has chaired for a long time will have experienced the loss of a retired or emeritus colleague. In the best of cases, their passing is an opportunity for the campus community to honor the colleague’s contributions to the institution and to celebrate a successful career.
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Oct 22, 2023 | 
chronicle.com | Denise Magner
How to cope if you and your grad-school buddy are competing for the same openingsIf you are on the tenure-track market this fall, you may have already received a plethora of tips on organizing your CV and writing cover letters, but rarely do you get much advice on how to manage your relationships during a job search. And when you do, it tends to focus on dual-career couples. But what about friendships — especially when you are both on the job market in the same field?
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Sep 17, 2023 | 
chronicle.com | Denise Magner
How to manage your way out of a stagnant careerWhen you hit a wall, careerwise, your immediate instinct is to blame the position — or the institution that created it — as the source of the problem. And sometimes that’s the case. Certainly higher education can be a daunting place to work, especially for people who are untenured, who work in staff roles, or who come from underrepresented or less-privileged backgrounds.
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Sep 10, 2023 | 
chronicle.com | Denise Magner
More colleges are realizing that “trial and error” isn’t actually a professional-development strategyHigher education is experiencing a sea-change when it comes to preparing faculty members to be department chair. Colleges have long treated the position as simply a minor cog in the administrative chain of command, providing little to no training. But more and more institutions are now investing in their chairs, because they see it as a retention issue.
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Sep 4, 2023 | 
chronicle.com | Denise Magner
So many meetings are dull, fruitless, or contentious. It doesn’t have to be that way. When it comes to using meetings to get work done, the optimal group size is no more than seven. Productivity is not the only reason to keep meetings as small as possible. Research reveals that participant behavior deteriorates as group size increases. Larger groups are more likely to demonstrate counterproductive behaviors such as boastfulness, parasitism, interpersonal aggression, and misuse of resources.
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Aug 27, 2023 | 
chronicle.com | Denise Magner
If you’re wondering whether you need to write a syllabus policy on ChatGPT, the answer for most instructors is yesChances are, faculty members on your campus have been collectively stressed out over the easy availability of AI tools and the implications of that for college teaching and learning. And it’s similarly probable that you’re worried about how you should deal with this on your fall syllabi. Many institutions have yet to adopt formal policies on generative-AI tools.
