Faculty Focus Special Report Academic Leadership Development: How to Make a Smooth Transition from Faculty to Administrator

An Essential Toolkit for New Academic Administrators

Inadequate preparation, unrealistic expectations, and increased workload can create undue stress on faculty members making the transition to department chair or other levels of administration. All too often new administrators are left to fend for themselves when it comes to discovering and developing the skills they need to succeed in their new position.


Making the leap from faculty to administration will never be easy, but this report will help new administrators navigate the potential minefields and find their voice when it comes to leading effectively.

Remember how you felt during your first semester of teaching? Excited? Nervous? A little over-whelmed? At times you even might have wondered how the school could give you a job with so much responsibility and so little training.


Now you’re a seasoned educator making the move from faculty to administration. And guess what? You’re excited, nervous, and a little overwhelmed. And, once again, you wonder how the school could give you a job with so much responsibility and so little training.

Academic Leadership Development: How to Make a Smooth Transition from Faculty to Administrator will get you on the right track for long-term success.

Here are some of the articles you will find in Academic Leadership Development: How to Make a Smooth Transition from Faculty to Administrator:


Look Before You Leap: Transitions from Faculty to Administration
It Seems Like Only Yesterday … The Challenges Face by Recently Appointed Administrators
Translating Teaching Skills to Leadership Roles
The First 1,000 Steps: Walking the Road from Academic to Administrator
Why New Department Chairs Need Coaching
10 Recommendations toward Effective Leadership
A Practitioner Model for Ethical Leadership
Look Before You Leap: Transitions from Faculty to Administration

This report will help new administrators find their way, while shedding new light on leadership styles, myths and responsibilities. It also may remind experienced leaders what it was like that first year in hopes that they might reach out to help make someone else’s transition a little easier.

Faculty Focus is packed with innovative ideas, best practices, and other information you can use right away on the topics that impact your students, your school and your work, including:


Teaching and Learning
Instructional Design
Faculty Development
Distance Learning
Classroom Management
Educational Assessment
Teaching Strategies
Faculty Evaluation
Learning Styles
Curriculum Development
Community College Issues
Trends in Higher Education
And much, much more.

Academic Leadership Development: How to Make a Smooth Transition from Faculty to Administrator is the perfect example of the free, high-value we offer on Faculty Focus.

Faculty Focus Special Report Academic Leadership Development: How to Make a Smooth Transition from Faculty to Administrator

Diverse Issues in Higher Education: Advocate Hopes to Use International Experience to Build HBCU Capacity

February 24, 2011

Advocate Hopes to Use International Experience to Build HBCU Capacity by Michelle J. Nealy

Dr. Boyce C. Williams had already secured her legacy as an advocate for Black colleges and African-American teachers when she accepted a new position last month at the National Association for Equal Opportunity and Higher Education.

The former vice president for institutional relations at the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), Williams helped develop a strategy that doubled by 2001 the number of education programs at historically Black colleges and universities that pursued or earned accreditation, up from 40 percent of those programs in 1991.

After nearly two decades of providing quality teacher instruction to departments and colleges seeking accreditation, Williams has a new task: helping HBCUs secure a place in the 21st century.

As the newly appointed senior vice president and chief of staff for NAFEO, Williams is forging stronger relationships between HBCUs and colleges and universities in the Middle East while improving accreditation inadequacies for both groups.
DI: What prompted your departure from NCATE after nearly 16 years of service?

BW: I spent almost 15 months in 11 different countries. When I returned to Washington, I knew that I couldn’t go back [to NCATE]. Outside of Egypt and Jordan, the whole concept of education and literacy is new. These people have been desert people for generations. The oil and the money are only about 30 years old. In order to compete on the world stage, they have to be educated. That, to me, hearkens back to what it must have been like when HBCUs were founded. At some point we began to build capacity and infrastructure for ourselves. That’s what they are doing. I’m a product of an HBCU, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. I feel like I have been blessed to have come full circle.

DI: You traveled throughout the Middle East studying the readiness of those nations to pursue NCATE accreditation. Has that work been concluded?

BW: The work had been commissioned for another two years. The Saudis were ready to fund it, as were the Kuwaitis. But I wasn’t sure if NCATE was in a position to really carry out what needed to be done with the limited staff and resources. We [didn’t] have the personnel to devote to this. I can’t half step. I cannot be over there, by myself, traveling from one country to the next, in the name of NCATE, knowing that NCATE is in the U.S., and they don’t know exactly what I’m doing. That’s not fair to them.

DI: Now that you’re at NAFEO, what role will you play? Do you see yourself as liaison between HBCUs and universities in the Middle East?

BW: In our mission statement, we talk about being that international voice. I’m hoping that I’ve built some alliances abroad. I’ve been invited next November to be the international keynote speaker for an education conference in Jordan. They know I’m not at NCATE anymore. It doesn’t matter. I asked them to think about a day where [we] could invite presidents from the Middle East to come and hear from the chairman of NAFEO’s board and [NAFEO’s executive director] Lezli Baskerville. They are entertaining that. I see a distinct role for our presidents in terms of networking and mentoring presidents in the Middle East. When we study abroad and when there are Fulbrights they should be choosing to go over there. Their students should be choosing HBCUs.

DI: Give me an example of an area where HBCUs need to be making a larger investment?

BW: Data. How we collect data, how we use the data to make decisions about teaching and learning and running our institutions. This is a data-driven [industry]. We have institutions that have done an exceptional job [with data]. We use them in our presentations. Hampton University is one. Tennessee State University is one. So we have asked them to share with us their best practices. If you don’t have the capacity and the infrastructure [to collect data], it begs the question by lawmakers, why do you need to be there?

DI: What’s on the horizon for NAFEO?

BW: We can’t lose sight of the advocacy piece that we play for our institutions because they are struggling. We have a partnership with Wal-Mart, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium and the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities to improve student retention and graduation rates. We just finished reviewing applications from about 20 institutions that want to be mentor institutions. They have programs in place to mentor other institutions toward retention of their students. We’ll do a [request for proposal] among the three organizations for institutions to be protégés.
The agenda of NAFEO can remain the same; however, the pathways to actualizing the goals and objectives embedded in the constitution have to be open and welcoming.

Diverse Issues in Higher Education: Advocate Hopes to Use International Experience to Build HBCU Capacity