There’s a line in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) that’s become shorthand for institutional decline. Bill asks Mike how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” Mike says. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

It’s a famous line because it captures a real pattern: a long stretch where deterioration looks manageable, followed by a point where the accumulated problems become impossible to ignore.

Higher education is living that pattern right now. Too many institutions postpone real changes to their business model until the situation is dire - by which point the resources needed to fund meaningful change have largely disappeared. The greatest threat facing many colleges isn’t that they’ll fail to recognize the need for change. It’s that they’ll recognize it too late.

Why the Usual Process Isn’t Built for This

Part of the problem is structural. When institutions face rapid external change, the traditional tools they reach for - ad hoc committees, task forces, advisory councils - that simply aren’t built to keep pace.

Take the typical curriculum committee. It’s charged with facilitating change, but it operates in a relaxed, collegial manner and rarely makes hurried decisions. Because committees form within the institution’s existing operational paradigm, they tend to recommend incremental tweaks rather than the structural shifts that systemic disruption requires.

The rhythm of committee work reinforces this: formed in early fall, three or four meetings, adjourn for the holidays, another leisurely round in spring, summer off. Most faculty understand that fast-moving change must be championed by senior leadership - president, provost, senior vice presidents - if it’s going to happen on any reasonable timeline. But leadership is often just as reluctant to confront questions of faculty governance and settle for incremental change too.

That deliberate pace served institutions well in calmer times. It’s becoming one of higher education’s biggest liabilities now because two converging trends are making Hemingway’s line more relevant by the year: bankruptcy gradually gains momentum, and then, suddenly, the options run out.

Two Trends Converging

Two interrelated demographic shifts are driving the change for which most institutions are unprepared: a shrinking pool of college-age students, and the migration of population toward regions with stronger job opportunities and wealth creation. Together, they’re already reshaping the landscape for small, tuition-dependent liberal arts colleges in states losing population and young families.

The Demographic Cliff Is a Slope, Not an Edge

The “demographic cliff” gets talked about like a single edge higher ed will fall off in one bad year. It isn’t. According to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE), U.S. high school graduates peaked in 2025 at roughly 3.9 million and are projected to fall steadily to about 3.4 million by 2041 - a 13% decline. The cause is demographic, not cyclical: total fertility rate fell from 2.12 in 2007 to 1.58 today, and the Congressional Budget Office doesn’t expect a rebound. It projects fertility will stay 25–30% below the replacement rate through 2040. Absent a significant rise in immigration, graduate numbers aren’t returning to pre-2007 levels.

The decline will not be felt evenly. WICHE projects steeper drops across the Northeast and Midwest, with modest growth in the South. Virginia is projected to see a 6% decline in high school graduates between 2023 and 2041; Maryland, a steeper 11%. The lesson isn’t just that enrollment will shrink - it’s that the shrinkage will hit unevenly over decades, and institutions in the wrong geography or the wrong tuition model will feel it years before their peers do.

An Institutional Problem, Not Just an Enrollment Problem

The real danger was never a single catastrophic drop in 2025. It’s a 15–20-year reshaping of the higher-education market, where shrinking student numbers, shifting migration, changing college-going behavior, and institutional financial fragility feed off each other. The demographic cliff has already arrived; the open question is whether institutions can move fast enough to survive a transition that’s well underway.

Coping with the Gradually Phase

Private colleges are showing the earliest effects. Fall 2025 enrollment data showed four-year private nonprofit enrollment declining about 1.6%, after years of relative stability. Four-year public institutions, by contrast, continued to grow - a meaningful gap given how much more private institutions depend on tuition revenue.

Discounting is becoming unsustainable. National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) preliminary 2025–26 data put the average tuition discount rate for first-time, full-time students at private colleges at 57.1% - a record high, up from 46.0% in 2012–13. Colleges are paying more to attract fewer students, and that math gets harder every year. Operational costs climb while net revenue keeps shrinking, with less money for faculty, maintenance, and the new programs that might respond to a changing job market.

Closures are becoming more visible. A 2024 Federal Reserve working paper by Robert Kelchen, Dubravka Ritter, and Douglas Webber models the demographic cliff’s impact on higher ed. Low enrollment and heavy tuition dependence are the strongest predictors of closure - a pattern that hits small, thin-endowment institutions hardest. Public institutions rarely close outright; when they’re under strain, the more common response is consolidation. Georgia’s public university system, for example, has merged from 35 institutions down to 26 since 2012.

Three Groups of Strategies

Small liberal arts colleges are responding to the demographic challenge in three broad ways.

Group I — Strategies That Buy Time

Defensive moves that attempt to preserve enrollment, cash flow, and stability.

• Aggressive recruitment

• Discounting

• Expense reductions

• Delaying capital expenditures

• Emergency fundraising

• Drawing down reserves or endowment

These strategies can keep a college alive for years - but they can also become a downward spiral. Deeper tuition discounts may prop up enrollment in the short term while simultaneously reducing net revenue and increasing dependence on even higher enrollment, which becomes harder to achieve with each passing year.

Group II — Strategies That Improve the Existing Model

Efforts to make the traditional university more competitive and efficient without changing its underlying business model.

• Improving retention and completion

• Online and hybrid programs

• Graduate and adult education

• New majors and academic programs

• Dual enrollment

• Geographic and international expansion

• Program consolidation

• Improved marketing and enrollment management

These strategies can make a college considerably stronger with new revenue, better outcomes, and wider reach, but most stay within the basic architecture: students → semesters → courses → credit hours → majors → degrees → graduation.

Group III — Strategies That Change the Business Model

Approaches that challenge the assumptions the traditional university is built on.

• Competency-based education and assessment

• Year-round learning

• Stackable credentials

• Employer-integrated and paid experiential learning

• Shared academic infrastructure and strategic institutional networks

• Partnerships with employers and government

• AI-integrated learning

• Decoupling learning from the credit-hour and semester model

• Treating the university as a learning platform rather than a collection of departments

Rather than adding programs to the existing model, these strategies change how the institution creates educational value, delivers learning, measures achievement, and connects education to employment. The model shifts from students → courses → credits → degrees toward learners → competencies → experiences → credentials → employment → lifelong learning.

The Choice is Ours

The demographic cliff is not going to destroy higher education.

But it will expose institutions that cannot adapt.

For years, colleges have responded to declining enrollment and financial pressure by doing what they know how to do: discount tuition, recruit more aggressively, cut expenses, add programs, improve retention, and search for new markets.

Those strategies have value. Some may buy years of additional life.

But buying time is not the same thing as changing direction.

The fundamental problem is that many institutions are trying to solve a twenty-first-century problem with a twentieth-century business model.

The traditional university was designed around a remarkably stable sequence:

Students → courses → credit hours → majors → degrees → graduation.

That sequence is no longer the only way people learn, demonstrate competence, or build careers in a modern technological world.

The Adaptive University starts with a different sequence:

Learners → competencies → experiences → credentials → employment → lifelong learning.

That is more than a change in curriculum. It is a change in the institution itself.

It means designing education around what learners need to know and do rather than around the courses an institution has historically offered. It means making experiential learning central rather than peripheral. It means using AI not simply to teach students about technology, but to fundamentally change how they think and learn. It means developing meaningful partnerships with employers and government agencies and allowing those partners to help shape what students learn and how they demonstrate competence.

And it means being willing to question some of higher education’s most deeply embedded assumptions:

Why four years?

Why semesters?

Why seat time?

Why should every student follow the same path?

Why should a degree be the final product of education rather than one milestone in a lifelong learning relationship?

These are uncomfortable questions.

But institutions that avoid uncomfortable questions today may face impossible choices tomorrow.

That is the real lesson of the demographic cliff.

The danger is not the cliff itself. The danger is waiting until we reach the edge before deciding where to go.

Hemingway’s phrase - gradually and then suddenly - captures the danger perfectly. Institutional decline rarely begins with a dramatic event. It begins with small enrollment losses, rising discount rates, deferred maintenance, shrinking reserves, program cuts, and increasingly difficult financial decisions.

Each year, the institution adjusts.

Until one year, it can’t. It fails and quietly closes.

The Adaptive University offers a different path.

It is an invitation to begin the transformation while there is still time, talent, and capital to do it - not because the traditional university has failed, but because the world for which it was designed has changed.

The question for college presidents, trustees, and faculty is therefore no longer simply:

How do we save the university we have?

It is:

What kind of university will the next generation actually need?

The institutions willing to answer that question now may discover that the demographic cliff is not simply a threat.

It may be the catalyst for creating a better university.

Personal note: this will be my last post for a few weeks. I have scheduled time for travel and visiting with family. I am also working on an eBook that I hope to publish early next year on Leadership by Design. I will miss the opportunity to post, but I feel I need to devote time and attention to other matters.

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Universities operate on a calendar whose roots reach back to the nineteenth century and whose modern September to May was largely established by the early twentieth century.

The calendar may be one of higher education’s least questioned, and most consequential, constraints. Built around semesters, fixed course schedules, credit hours, and synchronized start and stop dates, it was designed for institutional efficiency, not individual learning. But the world our students are entering doesn’t run on a September-to-May timetable. Employers need people who can learn continuously, apply knowledge in authentic settings, pick up new competencies, and move fluidly between learning and work. The question isn’t whether the semester is convenient. It clearly is for the institution. The question is whether convenience is still the best framework for organizing learning.

If universities are serious about building a flexible, experience-rich learning environment, the calendar can’t just be adjusted around the edges - it needs to be reimagined as part of the educational model itself.

This post looks at the origins of the static, semester-based model, and proposes an alternative: the Adaptive University Model.

The origins of the academic calendar

The two-semester system is a relatively recent addition to university history. In the United States, it emerged largely during the mid-1800s, slowly replacing the three- and four-term structures that had come before. Several forces drove this shift: fewer students were leaving school partway through the year to teach during the winter, institutions began favoring terms of more even length, and German models of higher education left their mark on American practice.

The cohort model

The academic calendar has become such an unquestioned fixture that it has its own rhythms, traditions, and defenders. What may be replacing the traditional calendar is the cohort model. The cohort isn’t simply an alternative to the semester; it provides an alternative operating system for the university. Perhaps personal experience will clarify this observation.

Shortly after we opened the school of pharmacy, it became obvious that we would need sites for our students to complete experiential education. With no alumni yet, recruiting these sites was difficult. We surveyed regional pharmacists about their educational needs and quickly decided that offering them the opportunity to earn the same degree we were providing our pharmacy students would both deepen their understanding of our educational approach and give them a path to that degree through two years of online study. We developed a part-time program built around a cohort structure, with three start dates spread evenly across the year. We chose the cohort model to better serve practicing pharmacists who could not return to the physical campus due to family and work-related constraints.

Cohorts were recruited at four-month intervals. Some chose September, when their children were back in school, and their own schedule eased up. Some chose January when fewer colleagues were on vacation, and it was easier to get their employer’s blessing to return to school. Others chose May, planning to use personal leave time for online meetings and study.

We had no trouble enrolling students year-round. If someone hit an unexpected interruption - a family emergency, pregnancy leave, an illness - they could drop out of their cohort and pick back up with the one starting four months later. In practice, very few did because they’d already become virtual friends with the rest of their cohort and with the online facilitators. It was an efficient use of both their time and ours.

The real advantage of a cohort-based model isn’t just a different calendar - it’s that it lets the university align its human and physical resources with the actual learning process. Faculty workloads were staged so there were manageable groups three times a year for labs, hands-on training, and competency evaluation (an Objective Structured Clinical Examination, for instance).

Instead of hiring faculty to teach courses that appear on a semester grid, instructional teams were built around cohorts, and faculty were deployed when their expertise was actually needed. Content that had recently lived in a traditional classroom got repackaged for online delivery by a team in the Technology Division - obtaining copyright releases for research articles, setting up student access to clinical databases. Each cohort had an online facilitator, often an adjunct from another accredited pharmacy school who wanted to teach online or supplement their income.

This matters most for adjunct and practitioner faculty. An experienced project manager, engineer, accountant, or pharmacist may not be able to commit to a semester-long teaching obligation - but many will gladly engage with a cohort for a defined stretch when their expertise is most relevant. There were no difficulties in attracting talented, enthusiastic faculty who wanted to be part of one of the first truly online programs.

In this learning model, the cohort - not the semester - becomes the organizing unit. Faculty expertise, classroom space, experiential placements, technology, assessment, and industry engagement all get scheduled around the cohort’s progression rather than the other way around. It’s a more efficient use of scarce instructional resources, and it brings practitioners into the process exactly when their expertise has the greatest value. None of this came without resistance - from the business office, the registrar, and even other pharmacy schools that pushed back hard against deviating from the traditional calendar. One of the most interesting issues was how the university handled non-traditional students who finished up at a time other than the traditional graduation dates (December and May). The students would finish when they had completed the degree requirements and wanted some documentation that they could present to their employer for either reimbursement or advancement. The Registrar’s Office -supported by the Business Office - stated unequivocally that students could only be certified for graduation on those two traditional dates. We disagreed and eventually settled on the School of Pharmacy, issuing a signed letter from the dean congratulating them on completing the program.

Higher education still runs on its traditional calendar, but online instruction and the cost of campuses sitting empty much of the year are forcing change - leaving universities carrying what economists call slack resources. Slack resources refer to the surplus or unused capacity within an organization - resources like time, money, staff, equipment, or capabilities - that exceed what’s strictly needed to maintain current operations. The issue of slack resources has grown as universities embrace and expand online learning, where the student’s need for physical facilities is diminished.

Growth in online instruction

According to the latest NCES/IPEDS data (Fall 2024), roughly 53.4% of U.S. undergraduates took at least one distance-education or online course.

This trend was already building thanks to wider access to technology - classroom computers, wireless networks, the spread of learning management systems - but it went into overdrive during the pandemic. Hybrid learning nearly doubled, from 13.6% in 2013 to 27.8% in 2024, while purely face-to-face enrollment fell from 73.6% to 46.2%.

The real issue isn’t online versus face-to-face. It’s how an institution integrates multiple learning environments - classroom, online, experiential, workplace - into one coherent model. The 53.4% figure shows the traditional campus/semester model is already being supplemented by a substantially more flexible delivery system, one better suited to a world where time-on-task matters more than time-in-seat. That number will almost certainly keep growing as AI fosters even more creative ways to learn outside the classroom.

The roughly 46% face-to-face figure is telling in its own right. It suggests the future of higher ed isn’t simply replacing the campus. What we’re seeing instead is a more complicated shift toward choice, flexibility, and different environments for different purposes.

The old model - everyone on physical campus, same place, same time, same educational experience - is no longer the dominant pattern. AI doesn’t make the campus obsolete. It makes the traditional reasons for requiring students to be on campus obsolete.

So, the question is not

“Why are almost half of students still coming to campus?”

It is

What is the unique value of bringing students together physically - and why are we using the same calendar and classroom structure for learning that doesn’t require physical presence?

That question sits alongside a related one: college and university presidents have been on a building binge for the past decade. Some of that is replacing aging facilities with ones built for modern technology or collaborative learning, which is admirable - but it doesn’t fully explain campus growth at a moment when learning itself is moving off campus. The question many parents and employers are asking is blunt: do we need to keep investing in buildings, or should the investment go into redesigning the academic business model instead? Which points to a related problem - slack resources.

Slack resources

Most traditional universities leave enormous amounts of physical capacity idle for much of the year. The physical campus is designed for year-round use, but the traditional instructional calendar concentrates much of its scheduled instructional activity into roughly 30 weeks.

• Summer break: ~84–98 days

• Winter break: ~21–28 days

• Spring/fall breaks: ~10–14 days

• Remaining weekends: ~65–70 days

• Stand-alone holidays: ~5–7 days

Weekends and holiday breaks are legitimate downtime for students, faculty, and staff - no one disputes that. The conventional undergraduate instructional infrastructure is significantly underutilized outside the academic terms. But universities may need to re-evaluate how much of the rest of that idle time is truly necessary.

From administrative convenience to educational model

The semester is so deeply embedded in higher education that it’s easy to mistake administrative convenience for a fundamental principle of learning. But learning doesn’t happen in semesters - it happens continuously: in classrooms, labs, workplaces, communities, internships, simulations, conversations, and, increasingly, through technologies that let students learn whenever and wherever they need to. It happens at different rates for different students. It doesn’t conveniently begin in August, pause for Thanksgiving, resume in January, and wrap up in May.

Yet the semester remains the organizing mechanism for most of American higher education. That’s a fundamental mismatch: we’ve built a system around the needs of the institution rather than the needs of the learner. Faculty assignments, classroom utilization, financial aid, registration, transcripts, institutional budgeting - all of it fits neatly into the semester model. The world our graduates enter does not. Employers need people to demonstrate competencies when those competencies are needed, not simply because a student finished a 15-week course.

The Adaptive University Model

Start with a different assumption: the university operates year-round, with only short breaks for vacation and assessment. Staff shifts from nine-month contracts to year-round employment - and fewer of them are needed overall, because the delivery mechanism shifts from seat time to competency acquisition, where much of the mentorship and practical instruction occurs in the field that the student anticipates joining after graduation.

The instructional staff changes shape too. Instead of all instruction coming from faculty, the work splits across a mix of:

· AI for scheduling, managing assessment metrics, and grade management.

· Technology staff who convert instructional content into the institution’s learning management system, and

· A blended faculty model - campus-based faculty who serve as facilitators and mentors, online adjuncts who run learning and interaction, and professional-practice faculty who serve as both facilitators and career counselors.

That last group connects students to their professional networks, guides their entry into the field, and helps them build the competencies the job actually requires. Grades should no longer be the primary proxy for professional readiness. Whether a student is workplace-ready - on day one, or before - becomes the measure instead.

This model also demands a different posture toward students who arrive with real-world experience. Military veterans, career-changers, and other adult learners shouldn’t be treated like freshmen fresh out of high school. They already have experience, knowledge, and the ability to demonstrate those skills in the right assessment environment.

I saw this firsthand. Before pharmacy school, I spent four years as a Navy hospital corpsman managing health issues for active-duty sailors and Marines. When my professors learned about that background - and realized I could contribute meaningfully to both the classroom and the lab - I was drafted to help overworked faculty with setup, pre-lab instruction, and grading. They excused me from some labs and classes outright. One of them put it plainly: “You are probably better prepared to teach this than I am.”

That comment has stayed with me because it’s exactly the kind of judgment a rigid semester system has no mechanism for making. A calendar built around fixed terms and seat time can’t tell the difference between a first-year student encountering material for the first time and a veteran who has already done the job. A model built around cohorts and competencies can.

The real question for university leaders

None of these models argue that the semester should disappear overnight, or that every program needs a cohort structure. It argues that the calendar should be treated as a design choice, not a constraint handed down from 1900 - because right now, it’s an unexamined default quietly shaping everything from faculty contracts to how ready our graduates are for the work waiting for them.

The Adaptive University Model - organized around cohorts, competencies, and continuous operation rather than terms and seat time - is one answer to what that redesign could look like. It won’t be the only one, but the question every institution should be asking is the one this post opened with

The semester was designed to organize the university. It was never designed to organize learning. Perhaps it’s time to build the university around how people actually learn.

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About an hour later, I noticed the landscape had turned arid and empty. We were driving into the desert when we should have been climbing toward Glacier’s western entrance. We were heading south, not north. We pulled over to figure out where our trusty Garmin had led us. We hadn’t seen a house, a cow, or a telephone pole in nearly an hour. Then we spotted a faint, overgrown dirt road branching off to the right. I slowed, turned onto it, and stopped. Facing us on a lonely fence post was a hand-lettered sign: Feeling Lost? We burst out laughing—it was the perfect caption for exactly where we were.

Recently, I came across another sign that captures a very different feeling—one that speaks to the dilemma facing students entering their freshman year of college.

Students are stepping into a rapidly changing environment, and many sense that the skills and knowledge they built before college no longer match the challenges ahead, in the classroom or the workplace. That uneasiness is showing up as skepticism toward artificial intelligence itself and fear that hard work and accumulated knowledge won’t be enough to find, or keep, a job.

Faculty and future employers see something similar, though from a different angle. They are investing in AI at a striking pace, hoping that investment pays off through new markets and a more efficient workforce.

Both students and employers stand at the same crossroads; each must quickly build the skills and judgment to use AI well. There’s no simple fix, but I’d like to share a few observations drawn from my own experience as a longtime academic, and, more recently, as someone who has learned to write with AI rather than around it.

I’ve worked in some academic capacity for more than forty years. I learned to do research and write academic papers in the early days of the computer revolution. It was slow, tedious, and full of uncertainty.

Later in that same era, I began writing grant proposals and papers on microcomputers, using statistical software that finally lived on my own desk instead of a terminal tied to a data center.

Eventually I could reach databases and digital archives from my home workstation and prepare proposals and reports without a trip to the data center, or even the library. Everything I found was saved to my computer or printed for review. I once wrote a paper on the future of higher education that left me with a stack of highlighted articles over a foot high—all read, and reread, highlighted and abstracted, a process that took months.

I mention this because of how remarkable the shift has been. Now, when I research a topic, draft a paper, write a report, or, these days, a Substack post—it all happens electronically. I rarely print anything except to keep an archive copy. AI lets me develop a theme, raise questions, answer them, and shape a draft through an iterative back-and-forth: my chatbots and I trade ideas, track down published research, and pull out what’s relevant to the piece I’m writing. Here are a few personal observations about how AI has impacted my workflow, and probably that of a lot of other scholars who are adopting it as the latest technological aid.

What Is Competency?

I was trained in an era when competency—for an academic or any professional—was measured by the sheer weight of what you knew, retained, and could put to use, whether in a presentation or at a patient’s bedside. My dissertation committee required the final draft to be comprehensive and exhaustive. In practice, that meant no loose ends, however small, could go unaddressed, or a committee member might point to it as evidence that the candidate wasn’t quite up to the standard. My dissertation’s introduction alone carried 127 citations. I can testify that it was exhaustive.

Times have changed. The standard now is a representative sample of pertinent literature. There is simply too much published, peer-reviewed research for a PhD candidate to master an entire field, unless that field is genuinely narrow.

The same shift is playing out more broadly across professional education. Researchers and educators are now expected to manage their knowledge of a field rather than memorize it. A widely cited review found that general physicians trying to stay current with their specialty would need to read 19 articles a day, 365 days a year. That figure is from 1998, before the explosion of digital publishing, let alone AI-generated content. The author’s conclusion still holds, only more so: physicians can’t maintain competency by trying to read everything relevant to their field. What they need instead is a systematic way of finding, evaluating, and applying information, rather than trying to master literature wholesale.

Artificial intelligence has made that problem worse in some ways, yet offers a real solution in others.

I can only speak about my own experience, but I’ve learned to work alongside AI in ways that make my writing better and considerably more efficient. A few things have made the difference.

First, accept that artificial intelligence isn’t a passing trend, and it isn’t something that only affects large corporations. It is already a growing presence in every corner of life, and it will keep growing. My own research moved from an old Royal upright typewriter to a computer terminal, then to a personal computer, and now lives in the cloud—and each time, I adopted the parts of the new technology that made my work better. AI is not the enemy of creativity. Used well, it is a tool that makes a higher level of creativity possible.

Never cede your creative thoughts, ideas, and stories to artificial intelligence.

That’s what makes your work yours. It’s the fabric of your life, and nothing can take that from you. Treat it accordingly.

Let AI read your work, but don’t let it write your work.

Most writers rely on an editor or proofreader to sharpen a final draft; I use several chatbots for research, tracking down sources, and locating the information a piece needs. These are the tedious tasks that used to make writing slow, and I’m grateful for a tool that turns weeks of that work into minutes.

Treat everything AI presents with a healthy amount of skepticism.

I’ve caught fabrications, misreadings, and simple factual errors—all presented with complete confidence. Verify before you trust.

Delegate the mechanical work to AI without apology, but be specific, and don’t hesitate to send work back when it misses the mark.

I use AI to produce polished final products—visuals, headings, well-formatted tables and graphs—work that used to take hours in PowerPoint or a graphics program. Copilot, Microsoft’s chatbot built into Microsoft 365, makes powerful slides in minutes.

Write from your own perspective, not the one AI offers you.

During revision, AI often suggests phrasing or a direction that drifts from what you set up in your opening. Resist the pull to adopt its voice just because it sounds polished. When I work with AI on a Substack draft, it frequently nudges me toward something punchier for social media. There’s some value in that, but not enough to trade away my own voice just to chase followers.

Redefining Competency

Competency has traditionally meant the combination of knowledge, skills, experience, and judgment that lets someone perform well in a field. In the age of artificial intelligence, that definition needs to be reconsidered. AI can increasingly supply information, analyze problems, generate alternatives, and propose solutions on its own. What’s shifting is the distinctly human contribution—from simply knowing the answer to knowing how to inquire, evaluate, judge, and act.

Competency shouldn’t be defined as the ability to solve problems without AI, or as the ability to extract answers from it. Competency is increasingly the ability to engage AI in an iterative process of inquiry and collaborative problem-solving.

That process starts with observation. Before asking AI for a solution, you have to recognize what’s actually happening, separate what’s relevant from what isn’t, and identify the real problem to be solved. This matters because AI can process enormous amounts of information but can’t always tell you which part of a situation matters most.

From there comes questioning. The quality of your questions becomes a real measure of competency. Rather than asking AI for a single answer, you use it to explore possibilities, surface assumptions, expose alternatives, and figure out what information is still missing. In writing, this has replaced what used to be called the literature review—not built by reading everything and hoping to find the few nuggets that matter, but by asking a sequence of pointed questions, in the form of prompts, that surface usable information quickly and let you get on with shaping the final piece.

The critical step is evaluation. AI-generated responses need to be challenged, tested against evidence, and judged for accuracy, relevance, and consequence. From there, you refine the question, bring in new evidence, or ask AI to reconsider its answer. Learning becomes an iterative dialogue, not a one-time handoff of information.

For a writer, or any professional working through a problem, the real evidence of skill shows up in observation, problem framing, domain knowledge, AI literacy, critical evaluation, judgment, decision-making, communication, adaptability, and reflection.

This changes the purpose of education. AI may ultimately make competency more observable—not less—because when access to information and answers becomes nearly universal, the differentiator becomes what a person does with them.

The goal is no longer to prepare students to out-produce AI at generating answers. It is to develop people who can determine which questions matter, evaluate the answers they get, recognize what AI does not know, exercise sound judgment, and turn knowledge into effective action.

In that sense, AI does not diminish competency. It makes genuine competency more visible and more important than ever. John Dewey, writing decades before anyone could have imagined artificial intelligence, put it well.

We do not learn from experience; we learn from reflecting on experience.

— John Dewey, 1933

Maybe that is the real answer to both roadside signs. Feeling lost is just the beginning of the road. What matters, for a student, a physician, or an aging academic learning to write alongside a chatbot, is what you do with the reflection that follows. Past, present, future: competency was never about knowing everything. It was always about knowing what to do next.

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It’s the wrong question. The right one is simpler - and much harder to answer: What can this student reliably do?

If competence, not accumulated credit hours, is the true goal of higher education, then experiential learning can’t remain an activity reserved for seniors. It must become an organizing principle of the curriculum from the first semester onward.

Every element of the curriculum - not just a handful of courses or a capstone internship — should contribute to developing competent professionals. The purpose of education isn’t simply to transfer knowledge. It’s to transform students into people who can apply knowledge effectively, exercise sound judgment, communicate clearly, solve complex problems, and serve others responsibly.

Knowledge remains essential - it’s the foundation on which expertise is built. But knowledge without application is incomplete education. Students don’t become professionals when they can recall information. They become professionals when they can use that knowledge wisely in complex, uncertain, human situations.

Two Models for Building Competency from Day One

Institutions rethinking the first year of college - without abandoning the liberal arts - are increasingly moving toward two approaches.

Model One: Developing the Person Before Developing the Professional

The first approach emerged during the development of our new school of pharmacy: exposing students to human need before introducing them fully to professional responsibility.

Students were partnered with local service and volunteer organizations serving vulnerable and underserved communities - groups addressing nutrition, education, mental health, and other pressing needs. The objective wasn’t to teach clinical skills. It was to teach students to recognize human needs.

Through reflective journals, students wrote about discovering how much suffering goes unnoticed, how many needs go unmet, and how much work remains despite the dedication of the volunteers already on the ground.

The goal wasn’t simply to produce a temporary emotional response — it was to develop professional responsibility. The foundational competency we hoped to cultivate was compassion expressed through professional behavior. Knowledge could be taught later; technical skills can be developed through coursework and clinical experience. But compassion, empathy, observation, and commitment to service needed to become part of the student’s professional identity from the beginning.

In competency-based education, these qualities aren’t assumed - they’re developed, observed, coached, and reinforced throughout the educational experience.

Health professions routinely present themselves, through mission statements and professional codes, as compassionate practitioners dedicated to bettering the lives of others. These values shouldn’t surface for the first time during clinical rotations, once students are already on the cusp of entering practice. Instead, they should serve as the framework through which all subsequent coursework is filtered and understood. What separates a profession from a mere job is a set of core values that define its purpose. Professional identity, then, is competency in its own right - one that demands deliberate cultivation rather than being left to chance.

Model Two: Developing the Professional Through Guided Participation

The second approach emerged as accreditation standards evolved to emphasize early experiential learning with members of the profession students were preparing to enter. Rather than waiting until the final years of a program, students began interacting earlier with practicing professionals - through observation, mentoring, community engagement, and structured workplace experiences.

This represents a fundamental shift in how higher education views internships and professional practice. The internship is no longer the final reward students receive after formal instruction ends. It becomes one of the primary environments where education occurs.

The question is no longer whether students should have experiential learning. The question is how early it should begin, and how to intentionally design those experiences to develop measurable competencies.

The progression becomes:

• First year: Who am I serving?

• Second year: What does this profession require?

• Later years: Can I perform competently?

Career Readiness Without Killing the Liberal Arts

The concern driving this transformation is a familiar one: graduates often leave college without understanding what employers expect of them, entering a workplace that’s changing faster than traditional curricula can adapt.

The answer isn’t to eliminate general education and abandon the liberal arts. It’s to make the liberal arts more focused on the application of knowledge. Students still need to learn how to communicate, analyze, reason ethically, evaluate evidence, and understand the human dimensions of complex problems. The difference is that these abilities should be developed in meaningful contexts, not in isolation.

Students should enter their second year with a clearer understanding of both their profession and themselves, before beginning longer internships, clinical experiences, or cooperative education.

The Old Pathway vs. The New Pathway

The traditional university model often follows this sequence:

Faculty expertise → classroom instruction → student knowledge → degree → employment

The Adaptive University reverses it:

Real-world problems → guided experience → reflection → competency development → demonstrated performance → employment

The destination is the same. The road is different - and the relationship between students and knowledge changes completely.

Students no longer ask, Why do I need to learn this?

They begin by asking, How does this help me solve the problems I will face?

What This Looks Like in Practice

The Adaptive University model incorporates several changes.

1. First-year seminars connected to professional identity From the beginning of their education, students explore career paths, ethics, emerging trends, and professional expectations alongside alumni, employers, and faculty.

2. Major-linked general education Rather than separating communication instruction from professional preparation, students practice communication within their discipline. In our pharmacy model, every student delivered a formal ten-minute presentation to the class. The goal wasn’t simply public speaking — it was learning to communicate clearly as a future health professional. The Adaptive University should expose students to more effective ways of reaching an audience, drawing on formats like TED talks (Technology, Entertainment, Design - founded in 1984): an engaging story, minimal slides, a single central idea conveyed with passion in under twenty minutes.

3. Project-based learning: Authentic problems shouldn’t be reserved for senior capstone courses. Students should encounter meaningful challenges from the beginning and learn to develop creative solutions even under uncertainty. Employers are no longer willing to devote scarce resources to showing recent graduates what to do. They expect new hires to become contributors on day one, bringing knowledge, skills, and insight into the workplace.

4. Earlier experiential learning: Clinical observation, research experience, service learning, and employer-sponsored projects should begin in the first year, not appear only near graduation.

5. Integrated advising: Academic advising focused on career development, paired with faculty mentoring, should function as a coordinated system from day one - not a scramble to build a resume senior year, but active guidance in making critical decisions about careers, entry-level expectations, and how best to meet them.

We Have a Structural Problem

I once chaired a pharmacy practice department filled with experienced clinicians responsible for preparing students to become capable practitioners. One faculty member made a comment I’ve never forgotten:

I’m glad when students progress into the last two years, because then we can finally teach them what the profession of pharmacy is really about.

The comment revealed a structural problem: we had separated knowledge from application.

The early years built the scientific knowledge base necessary for professional judgment. Later years taught students how to apply that knowledge under pressure, often in situations with real consequences. Both were necessary - but the order and balance mattered more than we had admitted.

Students shouldn’t spend years acquiring knowledge before discovering why that knowledge matters. When I began working as a pharmacist, I used to carry all my notebooks, reference guides, and textbooks in the trunk of my car. They were there because, along the way, professors had admonished me to learn arcane facts because one day you will need this. In practice, I was never forced to run to my car for an answer. I had learned instead to evaluate the situation and develop a recommendation without searching for it in my trunk.

Competency-Based Learning as the New Framework

This is where competency-based learning becomes essential.

The most important abilities required in today’s workforce - observation, critical thinking, communication, teamwork, leadership, ethical judgment, adaptability, and effective use of artificial intelligence - can’t be mastered through classroom instruction alone. They’re developed through guided participation in meaningful work under the mentorship of experienced professionals.

Competency-based education shifts the question from What courses did the student complete? to What can the student demonstrate? Authentic assessment becomes central. Simulations, portfolios, workplace projects, Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs), observations, and performance demonstrations become the evidence of learning.

Education isn’t merely the accumulation of information. It’s the development of perception - the ability to recognize what matters, understand context, interpret situations accurately, and apply knowledge appropriately. That ability is developed through observation and experience.

Literature Is Catching Up to Reality

Recent higher education literature increasingly reflects these same themes:

• Mastery over seat time: Institutions are emphasizing demonstrated competence rather than accumulated credit hours.

• Employer alignment: Competency frameworks are becoming more closely connected to workforce expectations.

• Authentic assessment: Performance demonstrations, portfolios, simulations, and workplace projects are supplementing traditional examinations.

• Experiential learning: Structured workplace experiences are increasingly viewed as essential components of professional preparation.

• AI integration: Artificial intelligence is reshaping learning, feedback, assessment, and the skills graduates need.

• Institutional transformation: Meaningful change requires redesigning curriculum, assessment, faculty roles, and institutional structures.

The future of higher education won’t be defined by whether institutions offer internships. It will be defined by whether they recognize that meaningful experience isn’t something that happens after education. It’s where education happens.

The Adaptive University Model

The question is no longer whether higher education should change - of course it should. The question is whether we’re willing to redesign it around the way students actually learn, employers actually hire, and society actually evolves.

The Adaptive University Model begins with a simple premise: education should be organized around the development and demonstration of competence rather than the accumulation of credit hours. Instead of separating classroom learning from authentic work, it integrates experiential learning, competency-based assessment, industry-recognized micro-certifications, artificial intelligence, and continuous workplace engagement into a single, coherent educational system. Students’ progress by demonstrating what they can do - not simply by accumulating knowledge and hours spent in class.

This is not a proposal to modernize the traditional university. It is a proposal to rethink its underlying architecture. In future Substack posts, I’ll examine each component of the Adaptive University Model in greater detail and explore how these elements combine to create a university designed not for the twentieth century, but for the rapidly changing demands of the twenty-first.

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Do you have a large garbage bag?

That was the first thing a man said to me on the opening night of the Winchester Area Temporary Thermal Shelter (WATTS), where I was volunteering as a night aide.

WATTS exists because of a tragedy. During the winter of 2008–2009, a man experiencing homelessness froze to death on the streets of Winchester, Virginia. In the aftermath, local faith leaders realized something uncomfortable: dozens of churches sat empty every night - heated, with kitchens and restrooms - while people slept outside in life-threatening cold. They built a rotating shelter program so that no one in the community would ever again die from exposure.

Our congregation agreed to host the pilot night. I signed up to help, alongside another volunteer and the shelter supervisor.

After dinner, about thirty guests - mostly men - settled onto cots across the fellowship hall. As I stood talking with the supervisor, one man motioned for me to come over. He was large, thick-bearded, and wearing a worn snowmobile suit that had clearly survived many winters.

Do you have a large garbage bag? he asked quietly.

I do.

Could you get it for me? I need help getting out of these coveralls.

I came back with a thirty-gallon bag. Together we peeled away the insulated suit - filthy, threadbare, unmistakably a garment that hadn’t been washed in a very long time. Once it was off, we stuffed it into the bag, and I carried it to the trash. When I returned, he was pulling on a second set of clothes from his backpack.

Anything else I can do? I asked.

He gave a weary smile. No. That was great.

We talked for a few minutes. I asked where he spent his days when the shelter wasn’t open.

I walk, he said.

All day?

He nodded. If I stop, I might get arrested for loitering. I’ve seen enough jails.

That sentence has stayed with me for years.

Walking back to the supervisor’s table, two thoughts hit me at once. First, I had only begun to understand how exhausting life can be on the margins of society. Second, I realized that on a night when the temperature outside would fall to nine degrees, this fellowship hall was the difference between life and death for the people sleeping in it.

No lecture could have taught me what those ten minutes taught me. No dataset could have either - some things you only learn by being in the room.

Why We Built Service Learning Into Year One

When we designed the first-year curriculum for our School of Pharmacy, we made service learning a required experience - not so students could log volunteer hours, but so they could learn to observe. The community, we decided, is the best laboratory in the world.

Service learning is a structured educational approach that combines meaningful community service with intentional reflection and faculty guidance, helping students apply academic concepts while building professional competence, civic responsibility, and lifelong learning skills.

But in the Adaptive University Model, service learning isn’t primarily about community service at all. It’s a deliberate strategy for teaching first-year students how to see. Students are embedded in volunteer organizations where they watch, closely and repeatedly, how people, teams, and organizations function in real-world settings. Instead of rushing to solve problems, they practice noticing: patterns, workflows, communication, leadership behavior, decision-making, unmet needs.

At each site, volunteers work with a Service-Learning Coordinator to guide student teams through structured observation exercises, reflective discussions, and evidence-based analysis. Students learn to separate fact from assumption and to ask sharper questions. These are the same muscles that later underpin critical thinking, sound judgment, and the ability to use any tool - including AI - well rather than carelessly.

By turning volunteer organizations into authentic learning laboratories, the model develops students who don’t just know things: they’ve learned to see before they solve. That’s a competency that underlies successful professional practice in every field.

What the Journals Revealed

Our student teams worked alongside organizations serving people with mental illness, answered crisis hotline calls under supervision, assisted in domestic violence shelters, tutored adults in literacy programs, and volunteered in soup kitchens serving the homeless. Afterward, each student reflected on their experiences in a journal shared with their site mentor and the Service-Learning Coordinator.

Our Service-Learning Coordinator recently told me she’d been rereading those journals, and that the reflections still move her, even after all these years. What she described echoed the lesson I learned that frosty winter night: observation is not a passive act. It is the beginning of understanding.

It builds empathy before judgment, curiosity before certainty, insight before action. It teaches students to notice the lives, struggles, and strengths that stay invisible to anyone who never leaves the classroom. And it reminds future professionals of something easy to forget: every decision they make ultimately lands on another human being.

The Skill AI Can’t Replace

We spend enormous energy teaching students what to think and remarkably little teaching them how to observe. But without careful observation, there is no meaningful critical thinking. The best physicians, pharmacists, nurses, engineers, teachers, and business leaders share one trait: they notice what others miss.

That trait matters more, not less, in an age of artificial intelligence. AI can analyze data, summarize a transcript, even flag a pattern buried in a spreadsheet. What it cannot do is sit across from a man in a snowmobile suit and understand, in a single quiet sentence, what it costs to survive outside all day rather than risk arrest for standing still. That kind of understanding still has to be learned the old way - in person, in the room, paying attention.

If higher education is serious about preparing graduates for a future built alongside AI, observation needs to become a deliberate learning outcome, not an accidental by-product.

Sometimes that journey begins with nothing more than a quiet request for a garbage bag.

In my next post: how service learning evolved into one of the foundational pillars of the Adaptive University - and why volunteer organizations and businesses may be the best classrooms ever created.

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When supermarket executive Stew Leonard sent members of his leadership team to visit competing grocery stores, he gave them one simple assignment:

Don’t come back and tell me what we do better. Come back with one thing they do better than we do.

The observations they brought back were rarely dramatic - a faster checkout process, friendlier greetings, clearer aisle signage, better product displays- but those small insights led to meaningful improvements throughout the company.

The lesson was simple: you cannot improve what you never learn to notice.

Higher education has largely overlooked that lesson.

Critical Thinking Begins with Observation

We talk a lot about critical thinking, data analytics, evaluation, and decision-making, but none of those cognitive skills comes first. Critical thinking begins with observation.

Across disciplines - from science and medicine to law enforcement and business - the evidence points the same direction: long before interpretation, analysis, or judgment enter the picture, effective critical thinking starts with disciplined observation.

There’s something almost magical about looking closely. The more carefully we observe, the more the world reveals what was there all along. As Yogi Berra famously quipped, you can observe a lot just by watching. And yet observation has become one of education’s most neglected skills.

The Gap Between What We Say and What We Do

Social media offers a perfect illustration of that neglect.

Ask people whether they approach online information skeptically, and most will say they do. But research keeps finding a gap between what people believe about their own critical thinking and how they actually evaluate what they see online. Emotionally charged messages spread faster than neutral ones. Familiarity boosts perceived credibility. Information that confirms existing beliefs sails through with barely a second look.

The pattern shows up again and again in the research: many young people judge information by how familiar or trustworthy it feels, not by whether they’ve actually verified it. The rapid growth of Artificial Intelligence makes this gap even more critical. They aren’t carefully observing the evidence before reaching conclusions - they’re accepting what already feels credible.

This isn’t just a social media problem; it’s an educational one. Unfortunately, students often learn to form opinions before they learn to observe - and that habit follows them everywhere, screens included.

Reversing the Thought Process

Throughout their education, students are taught to analyze, argue, critique, and recommend. Far less attention goes to a more fundamental question:

What do I actually observe?

Observation and interpretation are not the same thing. Observation identifies what is present. Interpretation assigns meaning. Skip straight to interpretation, and assumptions quietly replace evidence - bias slips in before anyone notices.

The proper sequence is straightforward:

Observation → Questions → Analysis → Judgment

Reverse it, and every step downstream gets less reliable.

Observation, critical thinking, and intuition don’t operate in silos - they feed each other. Sharper observation leads to better questions. Better questions sharpen your analysis. Sharper analysis leads to smarter decisions. And those decisions become the experiences that make your next round of observation even better.

It’s a loop, not a checklist. Weaken the first link - stop really seeing what’s in front of you - and every link after it inherits that weakness.

Observation, Critical Thinking, and Intuition Form a Continuous Loop

• Observational skills - the foundation. This is the ability to notice details, patterns, anomalies, and context in the real world. It supplies the raw material - what’s actually happening - without which the other two have little to work with. Strong observers pick up subtle cues that others miss.

• Critical thinking - the analytical engine. Deliberate reasoning, questioning assumptions, evaluating evidence, spotting logical flaws, weighing alternatives. It turns raw observations into coherent understanding and guards against errors and bias.

• Intuition - the rapid synthesizer. Often called gut feeling or subconscious pattern recognition, intuition draws on accumulated experience, observation, and prior analysis to generate quick insights and hypotheses. It moves faster than deliberate reasoning, but it’s only as good as the observing and thinking that shaped it.

Observation Is a Skill - Not a Talent

No one becomes a better observer by listening to a lecture. You can’t lecture someone into becoming a sharp observer any more than you can lecture someone into becoming a better musician.

Observation is a skill you build through deliberate practice, not one you’re simply born with. Students get better at it the same way you’d get better at anything: by repeatedly noticing, describing, comparing, verifying, and reflecting - before jumping to conclusions. It barely matters where that practice happens: lab experiments, case studies, simulations, fieldwork, internships, classroom discussions - the setting is almost interchangeable. What matters is the discipline underneath it: observe first, interpret second.

That discipline takes real intent and effort. Sustained attention to detail is tiring, and, for some people, it’s energy they’d rather spend elsewhere.

Many Professions Already Understand This

High-performing professions grasp this instinctively - which is why they deliberately teach observation as the foundation of sound judgment.

Physicians observe symptoms before diagnosing a patient. Pharmacists verify details before dispensing medications. Pilots run systematic preflight inspections before takeoff. Investigators gather evidence before concluding. Higher education, by contrast, often assumes students already know how to observe. That’s a costly assumption.

Medical education offers compelling proof that building better observational skills is a better approach. Programs like the University of Virginia’s The Clinician’s Eye - inspired by Amy Herman’s Visual Intelligence (2016) - use museum-based observation exercises to sharpen clinical reasoning. Their success shows that observation is a teachable competency, not an innate gift.

Faculty Face Their Own Challenge

If observation is teachable, why isn’t it taught more widely? Part of the answer is simple: many faculty members were never taught how to observe, either, but it has to start somewhere.

Graduate education trains disciplinary expertise and research methodology - not the pedagogy of noticing. Professors often become exceptional observers over years of practice, but that expertise gets internalized, not articulated. They can do it. They often can’t explain it. And so students are asked to think critically without ever being taught the skill critical thinking actually depends on.

This mirrors how professionals actually work. Physicians, pharmacists, nurses, crime scene investigators, consultants, and engineers all gather and validate observations before forming conclusions. Think of Patrick Jane from The Mentalist - he always worked a crime scene as a patient observer, collecting information before ever moving into analysis.

Teaching Observation Doesn’t Require New Courses

The good news: observation can be woven into virtually any curriculum without adding a single course to the catalog. Students can

• Describe photographs before interpreting them

• Compare nearly identical images

• Observe customer behavior in retail settings

• Analyze workflows without proposing solutions

• Keep service-learning journals that separate observation from assumption, using three simple columns:

  • What did I observe?

  • What do I think it means?

  • What evidence do I still need?

Five minutes of structured observation at the start of every class may accomplish more than an entire lecture on critical thinking.

A Simple Example of Observation Skill Development

One of the best observational exercises I ever witnessed came from my graduate mentor, Mickey Smith. He gave students in his marketing seminar a simple task: observe student behavior in the university’s student union cafeteria.

Students spent two-hour sessions there - counting visitors, mapping seating patterns, timing visits, recording activities, documenting how the space was actually being used. Only after everyone compared notes did the class move into analyzing the data and developing recommendations for the university.

The resulting changes improved use of the facility without adding a dime to the operating budget - and the exercise worked for one reason: students had to observe before they interpreted.

Stew Leonard’s grocery store assignment followed the same principle. Neither exercise relied on sophisticated technology. Both depended on disciplined observation.

Why Observation Matters Even More in the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence can already retrieve information, summarize documents, generate reports, and increasingly perform sophisticated analysis. As it does, the human advantage is shifting elsewhere. Our value increasingly lies in recognizing meaningful patterns, noticing what others overlook, asking better questions, and exercising sound judgment. Those abilities all begin with observation. Which means that as AI gets more capable, careful observation becomes more valuable - not less.

The First Learning Outcome

Universities devote enormous effort to measuring learning outcomes, yet they often neglect the very first one: learning to pay attention.

Observation is the disciplined practice of noticing meaningful details, recognizing patterns, spotting anomalies, and delaying judgment long enough to ask better questions. It’s neither mysterious nor hard to teach. It just requires consistent practice.

If higher education truly wants graduates who think critically, solve complex problems, and make sound decisions, it should start where every strong professional program starts: teaching students to see before asking them to decide what they think.

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In my two previous posts - The Vanishing First Rung of the Career Ladder and It’s About Time We Had an Academic Who Understands - I argued that universities are struggling to prepare graduates for this new reality. This post proposes a framework for doing so.

These ideas are offered for discussion, not as a finalized institutional plan. I’d welcome feedback from educators, administrators, employers, and accreditation experts as I refine the model into a fuller white paper.

Three Assumptions

Every transformational idea rests on a set of assumptions. This model rests on three that are becoming harder to ignore.

1. Employers need competencies, not just knowledge. Employers consistently report that graduates lack the capabilities needed to succeed today: observation, critical thinking, communication, problem-solving, teamwork, and effective use of artificial intelligence. These aren’t isolated skills — they’re interconnected competencies that let people recognize problems, interpret complex situations, and respond effectively.

2. Competencies require deliberate practice. Higher education excels at transmitting disciplinary knowledge but assumes workplace capability will emerge naturally through coursework. It won’t. Competencies develop through deliberate practice, coaching, assessment, and authentic experience — and as the workplace evolves faster than universities can adapt, the gap widens.

3. Universities already have the resources to change. For much of the summer and during extended breaks, classrooms, labs, residence halls, and student services run well below capacity. A year-round calendar could turn that idle time into learning periods focused on competency development, experiential learning, internships, and industry partnerships — without lengthening the degree. Faculty appointments would evolve accordingly, with portions of the year devoted to supervising workplace learning rather than classroom instruction.

Together, these assumptions point to a redesign not of what students learn, but of how universities organize learning. The model I propose places competencies alongside disciplinary knowledge, integrates AI as a foundational learning tool, and turns the campus into a year-round environment where students build the capabilities employers demand. The goal is simple: graduates who contribute meaningfully from day one.

Knowledge remains essential. But in an economy shaped by automation and AI, knowledge alone is no longer enough. The institutions that thrive will be the ones that cultivate capability alongside understanding - while also making fuller use of campus resources that too often sit idle.

Four Pillars of the Adaptive University Model

Dynamic Skill Set

Students progress by demonstrating observational skill as the foundation for critical thinking — producing graduates who can think clearly in a rapidly changing environment.

Integrated Experiential Learning

Roughly one-third of every student’s education occurs in authentic workplaces under trained mentors.

Continuous Academic Calendar

Three rotating academic periods replace the traditional semester, creating multiple annual entry points and year-round campus use.

Competency-Based Learning

Competency replaces seat time as the measure of success.

Each pillar reinforces the others. Together, they produce graduates who possess both knowledge and the professional judgment employers demand. The model is designed to operate within existing accreditation frameworks through explicit competency mapping and assessment.

Pillar 1: The Dynamic Skill Set

For decades, employers hired graduates expecting them to develop workplace competencies over time - observing experienced colleagues, taking on gradually greater responsibility, learning to analyze situations and decide independently. That apprenticeship model has largely disappeared. Today’s employers expect graduates to arrive with those competencies already in hand.

Students feel this gap too. Inside Higher Ed’s most recent Student Voice Survey found near-universal interest in work-integrated learning, with students citing technical skill development and professional networking as primary motivations.

Higher education, however, still organizes its curriculum around transferring disciplinary knowledge. I described in an earlier post the reaction of psychology faculty when I suggested they teach business students to communicate like a great presenter. Their response — that universities teach theory while the workplace teaches application — reflects a philosophy that no longer matches employer expectations. If universities don’t take responsibility for teaching students to observe, communicate persuasively, solve problems, collaborate, and use AI, they are preparing graduates for a workplace that no longer exists.

Competency develops through experience, not exposure. Observation is the foundation: students learn to recognize patterns, distinguish important from unimportant information, and anticipate consequences. Repeated cycles of observation, reflection, decision-making, and feedback sharpen critical thinking until many judgments become nearly automatic. What experts call intuition isn’t instinct - it’s thousands of observations organized into subconscious pattern recognition.

This progression – from observation to critical thinking to intuition – should become a central theme in higher education. Universities must build environments where students repeatedly practice these competencies, receive expert feedback, and refine their judgment.

Health professions education proves the approach works. Pharmacy, medicine, and nursing devote substantial portions of their curricula to structured clinical experience, where students observe practitioners, solve authentic problems, receive continual coaching, and gradually take on more responsibility - all while meeting rigorous accreditation standards. The same model can extend across the liberal arts and professional disciplines through extended internships, apprenticeships, service learning, consulting projects, and undergraduate research.

I was reminded of this on a visit to a regional university where the campus felt nearly empty during the day. The students hadn’t disappeared - they were embedded in local businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies, observing, solving problems, and developing judgment under experienced professionals. The classroom remained important. It was no longer the only place learning happened.

Most universities assume students already know how to observe effectively. High-performing professions - medicine, the military, aviation, intelligence, forensic science - teach observation explicitly, because they recognize it as a prerequisite for sound judgment. This should apply to every first-year student, regardless of major. A common course built around observation, critical thinking, and AI literacy - not an add-on prompting workshop run by the computer center - would be unusual in American higher education, and could become a distinguishing feature of any institution that adopts it.

Pillar 2: Experiential Learning as the New Laboratory

One-third of the curriculum should occur in authentic workplaces. This isn’t a new idea - medicine, pharmacy, nursing, engineering, and teacher education have relied on supervised experiential learning for decades, with a quarter to a third of the curriculum spent that way. The Adaptive University Model simply extends that proven strategy across every discipline.

In their first year, students take part in structured service-learning experiences built around observation, communication, documentation, and professional judgment. Later years build on that foundation through internships, consulting projects, research, and apprenticeships that grow progressively more sophisticated. Students are assessed against standardized competencies, not hours completed.

Regional coordinators, employed by the university, recruit mentors, support experiential sites, train supervisors, and ensure consistent evaluation. Employers get an extended window to evaluate future employees; students build authentic workplace competence. Each year includes a full 16-week experiential learning period, supervised by individuals trained in the expected competencies and given a rubric to grade against.

Pillar 3: A University That Never Sleeps

The traditional academic calendar was built for institutional convenience, not educational effectiveness. The Adaptive University Model replaces semesters with three continuous academic periods. A new cohort enters every four months as an earlier cohort graduates and (re)enters the workplace. Each cohort spends eight months in campus-based learning, followed by four months in supervised experiential education - creating a continuously operating university.

Campus population stays at roughly two-thirds capacity year-round, with a new cohort rotating out every four months. The model maximizes campus resource use, gives faculty year-round teaching, and gives experiential preceptors a steady flow of students. Non-traditional students could skip years one and two entirely through testing and credit for life experience.

Pillar 4: Competency-Based Learning

Competency-Based Learning (CBL) is central to this model, but it’s only one part of a broader redesign. Rather than simply replacing seat time with demonstrated competency, the model integrates CBL with organizational restructuring, continuous cohort progression, year-round scheduling, AI integration across the curriculum, and authentic workplace assessment.

When we designed the pharmacy school, we combined traditional examinations with competency-based assessment. Each course identified both its learning objectives and the competencies students were expected to demonstrate. Once students understood they’d be evaluated on both knowledge and its application, they approached learning differently.

Competency can’t be assessed through written examinations alone. It must be demonstrated through simulations, Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs), case analyses, workplace evaluations, reflective portfolios, AI-assisted assessment, and authentic performance in real-world settings. Business schools use case studies; medical schools use simulations and OSCEs; a growing number of programs are exploring adaptive AI for interactive competency assessment. Faculty who rely solely on a written exam are failing both students and employers.

Nor should competencies be defined by faculty in isolation. Where do they come from? Short answer: successful alumni. Every school tracks its graduates, usually to solicit donations — and there’s nothing wrong with that. But that same database and outreach could solicit something even more valuable: their wisdom. Ask your alumni relations staff for a short list of successful graduates, and they’ll come back with a talent pool loyal to the university and invested in its future graduates.

A common concern: does this satisfy accreditation? It’s designed to. Grounding curriculum in documented, industry-validated competencies, paired with rigorous assessment tied to those competencies, generates exactly the evidence base accrediting bodies expect — alignment between outcomes and curriculum, backed by assessment data. The real validation comes when graduates are hired; many states and accreditors now treat employment outcomes as a key indicator of programmatic effectiveness. The result is a curriculum that evolves with the workplace instead of lagging years behind it.

What Happens to Faculty?

Faculty concerns are understandable. Similar questions accompanied every major technological shift in higher education - I heard them when I encouraged colleagues to adopt personal computers and incorporate technology into their teaching. AI represents a comparable transition, on a much larger scale.

Rather than diminishing the faculty’s role, AI will transform it. Faculty will increasingly serve as mentors, coaches, assessors, and guides who help students develop judgment, critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and professional competence - while also teaching students how to use AI tools effectively and evaluate their outputs critically.

Faculty don’t have to make this transition alone. Colleges, professional associations, and technology companies now offer affordable certificate programs, workshops, and discipline-specific training that faculty can incorporate immediately - far more support than existed during the personal-computer revolution. I experienced that earlier learning curve firsthand; the effort required real investment, but it ultimately expanded my effectiveness as an educator. I believe AI offers the same opportunity, and one of the more exciting professional development challenges faculty have faced in decades.

Changing the Campus Culture

Perhaps the greatest obstacle isn’t curriculum or faculty - it’s culture. Universities remain organized around semesters, classrooms, and credit hours because their administrative systems evolved to support those structures.

I encountered this firsthand in 1998, launching one of the nation’s first Non-Traditional Doctor of Pharmacy programs for licensed pharmacists. The curriculum matched our traditional program but was delivered through recorded lectures, online instruction, team-based learning, and periodic on-campus skills workshops and OSCE assessments. New cohorts began every three months; most students finished in about two years. Instead of redesigning administration around continuous enrollment, institutions typically force innovative programs into traditional structures. The Adaptive University Model reverses that relationship: the institution adapts to learning, not the other way around.

This wasn’t new to me even then. As a Navy Corpsman, I trained in a competency-based system where advancement depended on demonstrated proficiency, not classroom hours. Progress ran on an individual timetable, but the standard never changed. Flexibility and rigor aren’t competing values — they’re complementary once learning is measured by competence instead of time.

The university’s central question changes too - from how long a student spends in class? to can this graduate demonstrate the knowledge, skills, and professional judgment required for success? That shift is one of the most significant cultural changes higher education must make in the age of AI.

Today’s universities increasingly serve veterans, working professionals, and adults returning for new skills. They shouldn’t be forced into a system built for recent high school graduates. The diploma should become just one indicator of achievement, alongside stackable, competency-based micro-credentials earned through authentic performance assessment.

Most first-time freshmen will need instruction across the majority of foundational competencies and will follow a largely comprehensive curriculum in the first half of their program. Adult learners and students with prior academic, military, or professional experience may demonstrate mastery of selected foundational competencies through assessment, letting them accelerate to advanced coursework. The university’s greatest value lies in the upper-division curriculum, where students build higher-order analytical skills, professional judgment, and workplace readiness through mentoring, simulation, internships, and applied learning. After graduation, the same competency framework supports lifelong learning through stackable micro-credentials and periodic skills updates - an ongoing relationship between university and alumni.

The Bottom Line

Institutions that stay organized around semesters, classrooms, and credit hours will grow increasingly disconnected from students and employers, and irrelevant to the new workplace. Institutions that organize around demonstrated competence, continuous learning, authentic workplace experience, and artificial intelligence will define the next generation of higher education.

The Adaptive University Model isn’t an argument for abandoning academic rigor or shortening degrees. It’s an argument for organizing higher education around the way people actually learn and the way employers now evaluate talent. The university of the future will be measured not by the number of credit hours it delivers, but by the capability of its graduates to solve problems, exercise sound judgment, adapt to change, and continue learning throughout their careers.

This is a framework for discussion, not a finished blueprint. I’d genuinely welcome pushback - from educators, administrators, employers, and accreditation experts - as I develop it into a fuller white paper. What am I missing?

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Almost immediately, I was appointed to campus committees charged with making critical decisions about technology investments - not just for the pharmacy school but for the entire medical center campus. Most faculty avoided these committees entirely. Their egos wouldn’t permit them to sit in a room and admit they knew less about computers than the staff from the computer center. I understood the instinct, even if I didn’t share it.

My first meeting was a revelation. The few faculty members present sat in near-total silence while the computer center staff held court, talking largely among themselves about how the budget should be allocated - with almost no discussion of how any of it would affect teaching or learning. The jargon flew fast and thick: terminology I recognized as technical shorthand, but which functioned, intentionally or not, as a kind of coded language designed to keep academics on the outside.

I decided to find my way in.

I joined national educational technology associations, including Educause. I attended conferences focused on technology in health care, particularly SCAMC. I read voraciously - everything I could find on computers, especially personal computers, which were just becoming widely available and seemed to hold the greatest promise for health care education.

Gradually, the investment paid off. I started contributing to committee discussions rather than simply observing them. I made a point of meeting one-on-one with key figures in the computing community, building relationships and credibility along the way. Slowly, I went from being a silent seat at the table to an active voice in the conversation - sometimes, I could tell, to the genuine surprise of the computer center staff.

I remember one meeting in particular. We were discussing how to better use computer center resources to train health professionals - students and staff alike - when one of the senior staff members paused, looked over at me, and said: It’s about time we had an academic who understands how we can use technology to do more than manage grades.

It was a small moment. But it meant everything.

I tell that story because it captures the position higher education finds itself in today with the advent of artificial intelligence - except this time, it isn’t one committee member playing catch-up. It’s an entire generation of institutions.

The Gap Is No Longer Speculative

Concerns are growing that graduates are not ready for an AI-driven workplace, and the data backs up that concern. According to a study reported by Inside Higher Ed, 85 percent of graduating seniors now use AI tools - up 31 points in two years - but only 28 percent received any formal instruction in how to use them. They’re teaching themselves, unevenly, while two-thirds of hiring leaders say they won’t hire someone without AI skills.

Students in that same report voiced growing frustration with their institutions’ ability to prepare them for an AI-driven workplace. One observation from the research stood out to me: students want AI woven into how they actually learn, while institutions have largely responded with policies and the occasional workshop - nowhere near what students are asking for. When students raise concerns about becoming dependent on AI, the institutional response has often been to say use it responsibly (whatever that means) and call it a day. Neither of these responses solves anything.

That gap doesn’t close with one elective offered periodically by the computer science department. AI isn’t discipline-specific - it touches psychology, ethics, medicine, business, and beyond. A nursing student, a historian, and a finance major all need real fluency, not a token module. You need faculty who can talk intelligently about AI to serve on committees and to provide discipline-specific examples of responsible use.

Timing matters, too. Research on undergraduate AI literacy has found that students with only foundational coursework show underdeveloped skills and recommends embedding AI across the entire learning cycle rather than confining it to advanced classes. This has to be a curriculum-wide commitment, not a senior-year add-on.

The impatience is showing up in the numbers on both sides. Over half of graduating seniors say they’re more AI-proficient than their professors; 82 percent say the same about their parents. Meanwhile, employers rated the outlook for this graduating class as the most pessimistic since the pandemic.

Separately, a survey of college graduates by the recruiting site Monster found that half report using AI tools in coursework, and one in five relied on it for professional skills development. Yet only 36 percent said college is preparing them to use AI in the workplace - more disagreed than agreed - and 58 percent said they feel anxious about applying AI in future roles.

Students are acutely aware that the labor market is shifting beneath them. Exposure to AI has not translated into confidence.

Reading this data, I keep returning to that committee room in the 1980s. There is a gap between what students need and what universities profess to be providing when it comes to workplace preparation. Parents, students, computer science staff, and now faculty themselves are waking up to the need for closer coordination between what colleges provide and what the rapidly changing workplace demands. For those who insist that higher education is doing what it can, I’d point to the students themselves, who increasingly say the institution is missing the mark.

The Dilemma

The evidence is becoming increasingly clear: AI is reshaping work fastest at the entry level, eliminating many of the routine tasks that traditionally help graduates gain experience. Employers now expect new hires to arrive with stronger critical thinking skills, AI fluency, and the ability to exercise judgment from day one.

For higher education, this means curriculum reform can’t be limited to simply adding an AI course. Every program should intentionally develop four capabilities:

1. Disciplinary expertise

2. AI fluency

3. Distinctly human skills — critical thinking, communication, ethical reasoning, and collaboration

4. Authentic workplace experience — internships, projects, and industry-recognized credentials

Graduates must be prepared not simply to perform work, but to direct, evaluate, and improve work accomplished in partnership with AI. Institutions that embrace this shift will be better positioned to prepare students for careers increasingly defined by adaptability and lifelong learning, rather than mastery of a fixed body of knowledge.

1. Disciplinary expertise. Numerous studies and surveys arrive at the same conclusion: you cannot simply add a course or two about AI in the abstract and hope the problem goes away. Every discipline, every department, every faculty member needs to make it their mission to incorporate artificial intelligence into what they teach - and to show students, through their own use of it, how it relates to the career they’re pursuing. Faculty often lack the training to do this, which leads to inconsistent adoption or outright resistance. Leaders must provide robust professional development, incentives, and resources for educators to integrate AI thoughtfully, while establishing clear, forward-looking policies on ethical use, academic integrity, data privacy, and assessment. This includes piloting AI tools institution-wide, addressing equity concerns such as access divides, and fostering shared governance. A balanced approach - neither knee-jerk bans nor uncritical adoption - builds credibility and prepares students for ethical, effective AI use.

These steps shift higher ed from playing defense against criticism to exercising proactive leadership. Success requires genuine cultural change: treating AI as both a tool to enhance teaching and learning and a core competency graduates must possess, while doubling down on the strengths that remain irreplaceably human - creativity, judgment, and ethical reasoning. Institutions that act decisively will serve students better and help counter the narrative of their own obsolescence.

2. AI fluency. What students have learned about AI so far has been largely self-taught, and that produces real gaps in their knowledge. When they enter their chosen profession, their skill set will be limited to whatever utility they happened to find in AI as a student - not what’s expected of an employee, at a moment when many entry-level tasks are disappearing as AI is adopted. Using a chatbot to find answers is not AI fluency. Criticism of graduates often centers on their lack of fluency in using AI tools effectively, understanding their limitations, and applying them in domain-specific contexts. Leaders should mandate foundational AI education for all students - covering prompt engineering, critical evaluation of AI outputs, ethics, bias detection, and human-AI collaboration - while integrating advanced applications into majors, whether that’s AI for business analysis, healthcare diagnostics, or creative workflows.

This has to go beyond optional workshops. Core courses need to be revised to include hands-on projects where students use AI as a lever for productivity and problem-solving, building AI literacy so graduates can adapt as the tools themselves evolve. Some business schools are already launching dedicated AI concentrations or redesigning classes around human-AI teams — a model worth watching closely.

3. Partnerships with employers and experiential learning. Traditional academic curricular models lag behind the pace of AI-driven change in the workplace. Leaders need to collaborate closely with industry to co-design curricula, offer AI-focused internships, apprenticeships, and capstones, and gather ongoing feedback on skill gaps. This includes updating career services to teach AI-enhanced job search skills and ensuring programs emphasize adaptability. The mantra I keep hearing in these discussions is a useful one: people won’t lose their jobs to AI, but to people who know how to use it. Experiential learning is what bridges that gap.

4. Human skills. This is where the combination of thin disciplinary expertise and self-taught AI skills becomes most visible. To meet employer expectations, students need to be shown how to integrate this new tool into their thinking - particularly in the areas where human skill still surpasses AI: problem-solving and critical thinking. We need AI users, in the workplace and in society, who understand how to use this remarkable technology to solve real problems and to do it ethically.

Critical Thinking and the Ability to Communicate

Whenever you read a warning about artificial intelligence and higher education, it almost always circles back to the same demand: graduates need to demonstrate critical thinking skills and communicate effectively within their organizations. Yet when you drill into the educational literature, you find the same admonition repeated again and again - with no easy solutions attached.

Higher education has long claimed critical thinking as a cornerstone of its value proposition. When pressed to demonstrate that graduates actually possess these skills, however, most institutions fall silent. Accreditation reports are filled with learning outcomes that mention critical thinking, but the assessments meant to back them up are rarely rigorous, rarely standardized, and rarely tied to any meaningful improvement cycle.

This is precisely the problem W. Edwards Deming identified in the context of quality management: you cannot improve what you cannot measure. If a university cannot define critical thinking in operational terms, cannot assess it reliably, and cannot show longitudinal growth in students from enrollment to graduation, then the claim that it teaches critical thinking is little more than institutional marketing. The workplace deserves better - and so do the students paying for the credential.

We faced this same dilemma when we established our school of pharmacy, and we designed the program specifically to solve the challenge of measuring critical thinking accurately. We built a suite of eight examination rooms, each equipped with audio and video feeds to a central control room, to conduct what’s known as an Objective Structured Clinical Evaluation, or OSCE.

An OSCE creates real-world situations in which students must demonstrate both critical thinking and communication skills within a brief time window - in our case, ten minutes per station - across eight stations covering skills such as prescription verification, patient counseling, drug information retrieval, physician communication, and identification of medication-related problems. The emphasis shifted from simply asking what the student knew to whether the student demonstrated the skill.

At the end of each professional year, students participated in an OSCE. The entire process lasted three hours and consumed a week of the final semester. Local actors, trained to present specific symptoms and commentary carefully developed by faculty, played standardized patients - welcoming both the income and the chance to hone their acting skills. Every performance was recorded and used in two ways: as a feedback loop for faculty to help students improve and as an evaluative tool against a standardized grading rubric. Each year, the difficulty increased.

I used to visit with students queued up in the hallway outside the OSCE suite and shake their hands before they went in. I can honestly say every hand I shook was damp, and some were shaking outright. I asked one student, right after he’d finished all eight stations, what he thought. He paused, then made two observations that have stuck with me ever since: it was harder than he expected to cover everything within the ten minutes allotted per case, and if he’d known in advance how I was going to be tested, he would have studied differently.

That single comment tells you everything you need to know about how students should be taught and how their performance should be measured … before they’re sent into the workplace.

The real value of an approach like an OSCE lies in forcing faculty to move beyond knowledge transfer and into the application of that knowledge under uncertainty. Students are test-wise; most can figure out the correct answer on a multiple-choice exam. Facing a real person, they must read the context, ask the right questions, and only then apply what they know. It isn’t recall. It’s knowledge coupled with observation and communication - exactly what employers are demanding, and exactly what too many colleges are still failing to provide.

This kind of assessment produces results you can actually measure. Since 2000, pharmacy students from the Bernard J. Dunn School of Pharmacy have competed in the APhA-ASP National Patient Counseling Competition, a national event held annually at the American Pharmacists Association’s Annual Meeting & Exposition. Shenandoah University’s Bernard J. Dunn School of Pharmacy has won the national championship three times in that span - more than any other pharmacy school over the same period - along with a first runner-up finish, a third-place finish, and four additional top ten placements. That record isn’t incidental. It’s a direct result of building critical thinking and communication into the curriculum as something to be practiced and measured, not just claimed.

Implications

The implications of this story matter for every college and university struggling to prepare its graduates for a rapidly changing workplace. AI is a tool, a very powerful one, that can significantly increase productivity and enhance decision-making.

Successful universities are no longer preparing students simply to perform work. They are preparing graduates to direct, evaluate, and improve work increasingly performed in partnership with AI. That distinction changes curriculum design. Success will depend less on how much information students can memorize and more on whether they can ask insightful questions, exercise sound judgment, collaborate across disciplines, communicate effectively, and use AI as a force multiplier.

For higher education leaders, this means moving beyond the traditional model of knowledge transmission toward one centered on capability development - equipping graduates not only with expertise but with the adaptability and judgment needed to thrive in a workplace where AI is a constant collaborator.

I think often about that senior staff member’s comment in the computer committee room all those years ago: it’s about time we had an academic who understands. I’d like to think that’s what employers will eventually say about the institutions that get this right - not it’s about time, but here’s an institution that understands!

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Here are the top-line findings:

1. At AI-driven companies, the ability to use AI tools effectively has quietly become a minimum job requirement.

2. Companies that have embraced AI have seen productivity rise 40% since 2020.

3. AI-exposed entry-level jobs in the U.S. are seven times more likely than in 2019 to require traditionally senior skills - leadership, judgment, stakeholder management, and team building.

4. The new tasks being layered onto these roles are 2.5 times more likely to depend on empathy, judgment, and creativity - capabilities that grow more valuable, not less, as AI absorbs the routine work.

Among the once-senior skills now showing up in entry-level postings are: strategic decision-making, motivational leadership, team building, people management, stakeholder management, process management, mentorship, resourcefulness, and data-driven decision-making.

PwC’s explanation is simple. AI is automating the routine, apprenticeship-style work that used to give junior employees room to learn on the job. What’s left is harder, judgment-oriented work - the kind that depends on emotional intelligence and leadership rather than procedural knowledge.

The report’s recommendation follows naturally: companies need to reinvent early-career pathways, redesigning onboarding, mentorship, and training to accelerate skills that traditionally took years to build.

What’s conspicuously missing from this massive study is any mention of higher education’s role in this shift. For decades, employers trusted colleges and universities to supply graduates who already had these capabilities. That trust is looking shakier by the day, and it’s increasingly clear the old model wasn’t built for a world that changes this fast. If PwC is telling corporate leaders they need to overhaul their own training to meet the demands of an AI economy, doesn’t the same logic apply - maybe even more urgently - to the institutions that have long claimed to prepare students for the working world? Perhaps two experiences capture the challenge facing leaders in higher education in developing strategies that better prepare future graduates for these challenges.

Preparation for a Career

After retiring from pharmacy education, I served as Executive Dean of a business school. It proved to be an instructive experience. My charge was to evaluate the program and recommend strategic initiatives for the future. This was in 2017, just before the workforce disruptions that PwC and others now describe began accelerating. Two conversations from that period crystallized my concerns about how higher education prepares students for work.

The first was with the faculty member responsible for computer science instruction within the business curriculum. I asked her to describe her primary responsibilities. Her answer was straightforward: teaching students how to build Excel® spreadsheets and create pivot tables.

Why?” I asked.

She seemed surprised by the question, paused for a moment, and replied, Because they need it.

I agreed. Students absolutely need to understand spreadsheets and be proficient in Excel. But that led to a second question: Why are we spending valuable classroom time teaching students to construct spreadsheets when those skills can be acquired and validated before they ever arrive on campus?

When she could not offer a clear rationale, I suggested an alternative. Why not partner with the admissions office and require incoming business students to earn a Microsoft certification over the summer before enrollment? The Microsoft Office Specialist credential is inexpensive, well-designed, widely recognized by employers, and endorsed for college credit by the American Council on Education. The Microsoft Office Specialist program has survived multiple technology cycles - from desktop computing to cloud-based Microsoft 365 - making it one of the longest-running end-user software certification programs in workforce development.

It validates practical Excel competencies that employers routinely expect in business, healthcare, government, nonprofit, and administrative settings. Microsoft classifies it as an intermediate-level credential designed for individuals with approximately 150 hours of Excel experience and workplace readiness.

The key point is that a student can acquire and validate foundational Excel skills through an industry-recognized credential before entering a business school curriculum, allowing faculty to focus on higher-order competencies such as data analytics, business intelligence, decision-making, and problem-solving.

Students could acquire skills-based instruction from LinkedIn or by watching free YouTube videos. The certification will then verify mastery of foundational skills: creating and managing workbooks, working across multiple worksheets, organizing data, and using charts and graphics for budgets, reports, and financial analyses. If students arrive with those competencies already demonstrated, faculty can devote less time to teaching software mechanics and more time to helping students interpret data, solve problems, and make decisions. The widely recognized certification can be added to their portfolio for the benefit of future employers.

That shift matters. The competitive advantage of a college education should not be teaching students which buttons to click. It should be helping them understand what the data means, how to ask better questions, and how to apply analytical insights within a business context. Those are the higher-order skills that employers increasingly value and that artificial intelligence is making even more important.

As far as I know, neither recommendation was pursued. The business school continued teaching spreadsheet construction in the classroom rather than requiring students to arrive with those skills already certified. The opportunity to redirect faculty effort toward deeper instruction in data analytics and business decision-making was left unrealized.

For higher education leaders, the lesson is broader than Excel. Every course should be examined through the same lens: Which skills can be acquired efficiently outside the classroom and validated through recognized credentials, and which skills truly require the expertise, mentorship, and intellectual engagement that only a college education can provide? Institutions that answer that question honestly will be better positioned to prepare graduates for a rapidly changing workforce.

The second conversation, during that same brief appointment, was with the chair of the Psychology Department, which was housed within the Business School. I asked two of the senior faculty whether anyone had ever approached them about teaching soon-to-graduate students to deliver TED-style presentations. I’d just read Carmine Gallo’s Talk Like TED and was struck by how much the format depended on speaking with clarity and conviction in front of business leaders. My question was simple: had they ever considered building a course around the basics of persuading an audience in that style?

They looked at each other. Finally, the chair answered: we teach the theory of psychology and leave the application up to the graduates.

Redesigning what and how we teach

Both conversations point to the same uncomfortable conclusion, told two ways.

First, educators keep their distance from the technology world - sometimes because they don’t understand it, sometimes because it threatens what they already know how to teach. I’ve talked with plenty of seasoned faculty who’ll readily admit they don’t trust AI and have no plans to bring it into their classrooms. They’ve effectively ceded that ground to the same industries where their graduates will soon be competing for jobs - and if the PwC report is any indicator, those graduates will arrive unprepared.

Second, even where the need for collaboration is obvious - building communication skills, empathy, judgment, and creativity - the PwC study flags that higher education still treats that development as someone else’s job. We teach theory, not application. The business leaders behind today’s job postings would emphatically disagree.

I used to tell my mentees that transferring knowledge is the easy part; teaching graduates how to apply it in practice is the hard part. If educators see their role as bounded by the classroom - limited to whoever happens to be enrolled on campus this semester - we’re selling everyone short, our students and ourselves.

The Wage Premium

One important point coming from the PwC study is the premium employers now place on workers arriving for the first day of work with a working knowledge of artificial intelligence. Remember the faculty member who was teaching her students to prepare spreadsheets. Workers who have a working knowledge of AI can now use natural language and creative prompts to instruct their AI chatbot to do the same thing in a fraction of the time. This skill results in workers who can accomplish more in a shorter time than former graduates who are still creating spreadsheets by hand.

Perhaps the chart below will add weight to that perception. In the chart, PwC analysts (or their chatbot) compared the wage premium for two workers – one with AI skills and one without. Same job, same employer, but different skill set. The average differential for all professions, based upon their analysis, is 61.8%, which means that the AI advantage in salary alone is significant for most professions: greater for those with higher levels of AI penetration and lower for those that are still adapting. Health care and financial services are slowly adapting, but they lag significantly behind consumer markets. If you are contemplating entering one of the fields on the left of the chart, it is imperative that you are skilled at utilizing AI.

The Dilemma

Higher education is faced with two interrelated problems.

First, they can no longer avoid the responsibility of teaching future graduates of their institutions how to use Artificial Intelligence effectively. It is now a survival skill. Without it, they simply cannot compete for high-paying jobs in many professions. In fact, they may not even be invited to interview.

Second, and most importantly, even with AI skills, higher education must change its educational model. It is no longer sufficient to create a series of somewhat related courses that result in a degree without giving consideration to the skills that graduates will need when they enter a highly competitive field. The concept that we teach theory, but how they use it is up to them, is no longer acceptable.

The AI economy is redefining what it means to be career-ready. Employers increasingly expect new graduates to arrive with both technical fluency and the judgment, communication, creativity, and leadership skills once developed only through years of experience. Higher education can no longer assume that knowledge alone is enough. Institutions must rethink what belongs inside the curriculum, what can be learned and credentialed elsewhere, and how theory is connected to practice. Colleges that embrace AI prioritize applied learning and intentionally develop the human capabilities that technology cannot replace will be best positioned to prepare graduates not just for their first job, but for lifelong success in a rapidly changing workforce.

In my next Substack post, I will advance possible strategies that leaders in higher education may consider as they work to respond to the changing workforce.

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Before I could even greet him, he launched into a tirade that only ended when he ran out of breath. The source of his fury was a single student evaluation. One comment in particular had stung him deeply: the student had dismissed the course as ivory tower BS and questioned its relevance. My mentor’s voice rose again as he exclaimed, What does he know? He’s never even practiced pharmacy!

He paused to catch his breath. I responded, quite innocently, Well… you’ve never actually practiced pharmacy either. You went straight from pharmacy school to graduate school and then into academia.

The words landed like a quiet bomb. He stood there speechless for a moment, then turned and left my office without saying another word. I shrugged, returned to my lecture notes, and assumed the matter was behind us.

I was wrong.

A week later, he reappeared in my doorway, visibly calmer but no less determined. I’ve been thinking about that evaluation. he said. We need to open a pharmacy.

The word We hit me immediately. I was barely surviving my first year on the tenure track, still writing my dissertation, drowning in student debt, and expecting our fourth child with my wife. Starting a business was the last thing on my mind.

Faculty get bad evaluations all the time, I protested. They don’t go out and start a business just to prove a student wrong!

He wouldn’t be dissuaded. Within a few short months, I found myself working with three colleagues to finance, build, stock, and open an independent pharmacy in a small community on the outskirts of Atlanta. It was one of the most frightening - and ultimately rewarding - experiences of my life.

We poured our combined academic expertise and clinical knowledge into the venture. We created advertising campaigns, established clear policies, and forged strong relationships with the local hospital, a nearby nursing home, and community practitioners. The pharmacy thrived. Just over a year after opening, I was called into the Dean’s office.

He greeted me warmly and asked how the pharmacy was doing. I told him we were entering our second year and business was steadily improving. He leaned back in his chair and recounted a recent phone call from a college alumnus - the owner of the only other pharmacy in our town. The man had been furious, demanding that the Dean intervene and get them back into academia where they belong.

The Dean considered the request and then remarked, So they’re competing with you for business, and you want me to stop them? He paused, then added, They must be doing something right if you’re feeling threatened. Have a good day.

That story has stayed with me for years, and not just because it makes a good office anecdote. It’s a small, almost comic version of a much larger and more consequential tension: the one between a college and the place it calls home.

The Conflict

Town and gown describe the often-complicated relationship between a college or university (the gown, a reference to academic robes) and the surrounding community (the town).

The tension arises because the two groups frequently have different priorities. Colleges focus on education, research, student life, and institutional growth, while residents and businesses are concerned with housing, taxes, public services, employment, traffic, noise, and community character. Universities may bring jobs, cultural opportunities, and economic activity, yet they can also contribute to rising housing costs, congestion, and demands on local infrastructure. Communities may benefit from the institution’s presence while resenting its influence, its tax-exempt status, or its perceived separation from local concerns.

At its best, the town-and-gown relationship is a partnership in which both sides recognize their mutual dependence. At its worst, it becomes a source of conflict when either side views the other as an obstacle rather than a stakeholder in the community’s future.

For many small college towns, this relationship is especially significant because the institution often serves as both an economic engine and a cultural anchor. When a college thrives, the town often benefits; when a college struggles or closes, the effects can ripple through the community for years.

The Issue

There is no denying that many small, liberal arts colleges in small communities are struggling. As a rough heuristic - not a finding from any single study, but a useful proxy worth keeping in mind - the effects of closure tend to become especially noticeable once a college’s enrollment exceeds roughly 10% of the local population. Below are a few recent examples that illustrate the range:

• Green Mountain College had enrollment equal to nearly half the population of Poultney, Vermont.

• Cazenovia College had students equal to more than one-quarter of the village population.

• Marlboro College had students equal to roughly one-fifth of the town population.

The size of both the college and the town tends to shape the severity of the outcome when a closure happens. And if the closure-and-merger trend among colleges with fewer than 3,000 students continues, the effects will extend well beyond higher education itself.

By this same logic, the closures of Green Mountain, Cazenovia, and Marlboro would be expected to have major economic and cultural effects on their towns. By contrast, the closure of Burlington College - another small liberal arts college, located in the much larger and more diversified city of Burlington, Vermont - was comparatively muted. The town’s size and economic diversity absorbed the shock in a way a smaller, less diversified community couldn’t.

This is one reason small liberal arts colleges are often described as anchor institutions in rural communities. Even when they enroll only a few hundred students, they can play an outsized role in the economic and cultural life of the town around them.

Their closure can mean:

• Loss of local jobs

• Reduced educational access for students who wish to remain near home

• Declining downtown businesses

• Less cultural programming and community engagement

A longtime resident of Poultney, Vermont - home to Green Mountain College until its closure in 2019 - put the loss this way: It’s a love-hate relationship between a rural town and a college, especially a liberal arts college, but there is a culture and entertainment vibrancy that comes from a college or university. That’s a big hit. You’ll see these towns dry up, I think.

At the time of closure, Green Mountain College enrolled roughly 700 students, while Poultney’s population was approximately 3,000 - meaning the student body represented nearly a quarter of the town. It was, by any measure, one of the more college-dependent communities in New England.

Reading accounts like this, you come away with an often-unvoiced worry: that we’re losing something valuable in higher education. The small, unique, and sometimes quirky environment that may not be attractive to some students, but for others is exactly what they are seeking from higher education: small class sizes, mentorship from professors and staff, and a feeling of belonging.

I attended a large land-grant university myself: new buildings, polished dining halls, thousands of commuting students, among whom a lasting friendship felt almost accidental. My first-year general studies courses were taught by graduate students who were visibly anxious and clearly unprepared, in a lecture hall built for a thousand that was rarely even half full. Knowledge moved from professor to student, technically, but it arrived stripped of meaning and relevance. Too many students - including me - got lost in that kind of environment, not for lack of ability, but because nothing ever asked us to engage. Many leave without a degree.

Small colleges solve a problem that large institutions often can’t: they let students pursue knowledge while still feeling like a real part of a community. But the deeper question isn’t about classroom size. It’s about the relationship between the institution and the place it calls home. Does the university invest in the town, or does its sense of responsibility stop at the edge of campus? And does the town see the university as a genuine partner, or just as untaxed land that happens to come with a convenient workforce?

That mutual perception - how each side sees the other - is what determines whether the partnership thrives or merely persists.

The Town’s Dilemma

Small towns often become economically dependent on institutions they do not control. Enrollment declines, program cuts, or boardroom decisions can damage the local economy almost overnight, as many communities have learned in recent years. Yet towns usually have little leverage. They cannot easily zone, tax, or regulate a major employer without risking real economic harm to themselves. The politics are awkward, too: students rarely vote locally in large numbers, but their presence shapes everything from housing costs and noise complaints to the character of downtown.

What’s easy to forget, in the midst of those tensions, is what a thriving campus actually gives a town. I was on a road trip with a colleague once, and he asked if we could detour so we could drive down the main street where he’d spent four years of his life getting a degree. The street was lined with clothing shops, small coffee boutiques, and sports bars, all bustling with students clearly enjoying both the campus and the town around it. As we drove out, he said, almost to himself, I really miss that. It’s a small moment, but it captures something towns rarely get a vote on whether that vibrancy continues at all.

The Gown’s Dilemma

Colleges depend on the town being attractive enough to recruit faculty and students, yet they rarely invest in it systematically. A declining downtown, weak schools, limited amenities, and aging infrastructure make recruitment harder - but fixing those things isn’t typically part of a college’s stated mission. Institutions also face internal pressure to keep tuition dollars on campus (dining halls, recreation centers, bookstores), which directly undercuts the local businesses they need to thrive. And when enrollment pressures mount, the instinct is often to cut community outreach programs first - precisely when community goodwill could help save the college.

The Survival Question - and a Way Forward

For small colleges, the viability question has become acute. Declining birth rates, competition from online education, and growing skepticism about the value of a degree have hit smaller, tuition-dependent institutions hardest. When a small college closes, the town doesn’t just lose an employer - it often loses its identity, its reason for existing at its current scale. Antioch College in Ohio and Sweet Briar College in Virginia offer cautionary tales: the college and town were so intertwined that the struggles of one accelerated the decline of the other.

But not every small college has treated this as a fight to survive passively. Berea College, Grinnell College, and Berry College offer a more creative model: anchor identity as mission, not as PR. Berea’s founding commitments bind it to the Appalachian region, with outreach and nonprofit partnerships woven into its institutional purpose rather than treated as separate charity work. Grinnell has taken a parallel path. Since formalizing its community-partnerships office in 1999, the college has invested more than $10 million in joint community-development projects, including downtown facade restoration and the multi-year Zone of Confluence initiative, aimed at physically and economically connecting the campus to the downtown business district. Berry College created The Spires at Berry College, a University-based Retirement Community on part of Berry’s 27,000-acre campus in Rome, Georgia. The goal was to foster lifelong learning, cultural engagement, and deep intergenerational connection. Residents are given a unique opportunity to embrace the college lifestyle by sitting in university classes for free, attending campus lectures, plays, and concerts, and utilizing the college’s massive trail system.

There’s a name for the broader idea these colleges are circling, and it’s older than any of them. The term Academic Village traces back to Thomas Jefferson, who rejected the single-monolith university building in favor of small, connected structures - what he called a village rather than a house - and built that idea into his design for the University of Virginia, with separate buildings for housing, teaching, and communal life.

In a letter to Littleton Waller Tazewell on January 5, 1805, Jefferson laid out his reasoning for rejecting the single-building model:

...the greatest danger will be their overbuilding themselves by attempting a large house in the beginning, sufficient to contain the whole institution. Large houses are always ugly, inconvenient, exposed to accident of fire, and in bad cases of infection. A plain small house for the school & lodging of each professor is best. These connected by covered ways out of which the rooms of the students should open would be best. These may then be built as they shall be wanting. In fact an University should not be an house but a village.

That idea is now being revived, quite literally, as a survival strategy. Goucher College’s planned partnership with Edenwald Senior Living will fold a retirement community onto campus, with shared library access, performing-arts events, and the option for residents to audit Goucher classes. The effect is to turn the campus into a multigenerational civic and economic hub, rather than an enclave built only for eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-olds.

What Berea, Grinnell, Berry, and Goucher have in common - despite very different approaches - is that none of them is waiting for the town-and-gown divide to resolve itself. They’re designing around it. In an Academic Village, the college and its surrounding region stop functioning as two separate interests that occasionally collide, and start operating as a single, mutually reinforcing ecosystem.

For the college, that can mean greater financial stability through diversified revenue streams, deeper relevance to the region it serves, and an expanded network of supporters, learners, and partners. For the community, it can mean lifelong educational access, cultural programming, workforce development, and a stable economic anchor that strengthens quality of life. Rather than perpetuating the old divide, the model creates genuine interdependence: the institution becomes indispensable to regional life, and the community gives the college something rankings and amenity races never could - sustained, durable relevance.

Declining enrollments, rising costs, shifting demographics: the headwinds facing small colleges aren’t going away. But the Academic Village model offers something better than a defensive crouch. Instead of trying to simply outlast the storm, these institutions can become the kind of place a region can’t imagine losing - woven into its economic life, its civic identity, its sense of itself. That’s a different value proposition than U.S. News rankings or amenity races. It’s the value of being needed.

The colleges that figure this out first won’t just survive the demographic cliff. They’ll prove that a two-hundred-year-old institution can still write the next chapter of American higher education - not by shrinking to fit a smaller world, but by growing into a bigger idea of what a college can be.

In that sense, the successful small college of 2040 may look less like an isolated campus and more like a modern version of the village square: an institution that educates students while simultaneously serving as the intellectual and cultural heart of its region.

Does your town have a college like this - one woven into its civic and economic life, for better or worse? I’d be curious to hear what that relationship looks like where you live.

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That staggering statistic belongs to Michigan State University - and it perfectly captures a crisis quietly reshaping American higher education. The latest departure, Kevin Guskiewicz, left the MSU presidency after just two years to lead Clemson University. His exit wasn’t about money; the university offered to double his salary. He left anyway. The reasons ran deeper: clashes with his Board of Trustees, unmet strategic goals, and a corrosive environment of misinformation about his performance.

His story is not an outlier. It is a symptom.

Across the country, college and university leadership is churning at an alarming rate - and in the wake of each departure, institutions are turning to a familiar stopgap: the interim leader. These are the steady hands called in to hold things together while the search for permanent leadership drags on. I know this role intimately. After 21 years as a founding dean, I answered that call myself, asked by my university’s president to step in as interim dean of the business school during a leadership transition.

What I observed during that chapter of my career surprised me. And given the wave of interim appointments now sweeping higher education, I believe those observations are worth sharing.

The trend is real — and the data confirms it.

This isn’t a matter of perception. The American Council on Education found that college presidents in 2022 had been in their roles an average of 5.9 years - down 2.6 years from 2006. Deloitte’s 2025 Higher Education Trends report confirms that leadership churn has accelerated, with chief academic officers among the most affected. At the University of Minnesota, seven of the seventeen colleges have been led by interim deans since 2021. That is not an anomaly. It is a pattern - and one that is even more pronounced at smaller private institutions, where recruitment is constrained by program size and limited resources.

When a leader departs, the instinct is to buy time. The interim is named. A search is launched. Months pass. Sometimes the search fails. Another interim follows. The cycle repeats - and with each rotation, the institution signals to the outside world, and to its own academic community, that something is wrong.

Three forces are driving this crisis.

The first is complexity. The modern deanship or presidency bears little resemblance to the role it had a generation ago. Today’s academic leader is simultaneously a fundraiser, a crisis manager, a political navigator, a budget strategist, and a faculty diplomat - often with inadequate institutional support for any of it. A recent interim dean at Georgia Tech described the experience as an unrelenting succession of political and budgetary emergencies, particularly since early 2025. That observation resonates widely. The job has become a target, and qualified people are increasingly unwilling to step into the crosshairs.

The second force is political volatility. A researcher at George Mason who studies presidential searches noted that 2025 saw unusually high turnover at the presidential level and among other senior academic leaders. Some institutions, she observed, are deliberately using interim appointments to buy time — hedging against political exposure and avoiding the commitment of a permanent hire in an unstable environment. When even boards of trustees are reluctant to put a permanent leader into an uncertain situation, the reluctance filters down. It tells candidates before they’ve submitted a single application that the institution itself isn’t sure it’s ready.

The third force - and perhaps the most quietly devastating - is the erosion of the candidate pipeline. A recent Chronicle of Higher Education headline put it plainly: You Could Not Pay Me Enough to Be a College President. The vacancy crisis in higher education isn’t primarily a qualifications problem. It is a willingness problem. Qualified people are walking away from the table before the conversation even begins.

I hear it constantly from colleagues still inside higher education leadership. The comments vary in tone but converge on the same uncomfortable truth. Things are changing at such a bewildering pace that I can’t keep up. The pool is very shallow. And most telling of all - I can’t wait until I can retire. When the people best positioned to lead are counting down the days to their exit, the institution has a problem that no search committee can solve.

Cost savings, often cited as a motive, are largely a myth.

Interim appointments are not, as is sometimes assumed, a budget strategy. Interims are typically internal faculty given a stipend on top of their existing salary - not dramatically cheaper than a permanent hire. The real cost avoided is the search itself, which for a presidential position typically runs thirty percent of total compensation, often translating to $90,000–$180,000 or more. Executive dean searches run $50,000–$100,000. Those are real numbers, but they are not the reason institutions reach for interim appointments. The evidence points elsewhere: institutions use interims primarily because they cannot fill the role quickly, not because they are choosing not to. The academic calendar is unforgiving. Beginning a new year without a permanent leader in place projects uncertainty - to faculty, to students, and most critically, to prospective recruits. Saving money is a side effect, not a strategy.

What I learned from the inside.

When a colleague dean departed with little advance notice at the start of a new academic year, the president asked me to step into an interim role until a permanent replacement could be found. Before accepting, I asked for clarity. The president indicated that student affairs would remain under the purview of the Associate Dean and that my focus should be on external relations, operational matters, and strategic planning. They also asked me to produce a transition report - a candid assessment of the school’s strengths and weaknesses, with actionable recommendations and proposed strategic initiatives that could be launched with existing resources.

I accepted and set to work differently than most might expect. Rather than convening large meetings, I chose a more personal approach: visiting every faculty and staff member individually, in their own offices, to hear their perspectives. I extended the same listening-tour approach to student leaders and advisory board members. Their voices collectively shaped the final report I delivered to the president - and shared directly with the incoming dean.

Two things I encountered stayed with me. The first was the strategic plan. When I obtained the plan developed by the previous dean, I shared it with the faculty during individual meetings. The responses fell almost entirely into two categories: I’ve never seen this - or - This is completely unrealistic. The plan had been crafted to satisfy an accreditation review, not developed collaboratively with the people responsible for carrying it out. Among my recommendations was that the incoming dean be formally charged with building a new strategic plan from scratch, with genuine faculty and staff input, before the next accreditation visit. They agreed.

The second was budget transparency. I requested a private meeting with the comptroller to review previous expenditures, current income projections, and budgetary controls that could reasonably be shared with the incoming dean. Some institutions treat this information as confidential, but a candidate cannot make an informed commitment to a program whose financial reality has been kept from them. Transparency here is not a courtesy. It is a prerequisite for any honest search.

The interim appointment, used well, is a bridge. Used carelessly, it becomes a trap.

There is a meaningful difference between a position description and a recruitment blueprint. A position description is a public-facing document - necessary, but insufficient. A blueprint is something deeper: an internal document that captures what the board and president genuinely want in the next leader and serves as a shared guide for everyone who touches the search. It brings coherence to the process. It ensures that every interviewer and every search firm partner is operating from the same set of expectations, not improvising independently. Developing that blueprint should be among the priorities of any serious search - not an afterthought.

The best candidates, in my experience, are rarely the ones actively looking. They are often already inside the institution, serving in different roles, understanding the culture and the major players. They can work collaboratively, resolve existing tensions without triggering resource competition, and stabilize a program during the transition. The secret to naming an effective interim - or recruiting a strong permanent leader - lies in setting honest expectations from the beginning, about scope, about resources, and about what the institution is genuinely prepared to offer.

The age of the interim leader is, at its core, a symptom of a deeper institutional reckoning.

Higher education has always prided itself on long-term thinking - on building legacies measured in decades, not quarters. Yet the very conditions it has created are driving away the people best positioned to carry that mission forward. The revolving door will not slow on its own. It slows when institutions commit to honest self-assessment, invest in succession planning before a crisis forces their hand, and offer incoming leaders not just a title but a genuine foundation: a clear mandate, transparent finances, and a strategic plan built with the people who will live it.

The interim appointment, used well, can be a bridge to something better. Used carelessly, it becomes a holding pattern - one that signals to the world, and to the next generation of potential leaders, that the institution itself has lost confidence in its own future.

That is a message no college or university can afford to send.

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Higher education is entering an era in which visibility is increasingly mistaken for leadership. University administrators are now encouraged not only to lead institutions, but to cultivate audiences, build personal brands, and keep a constant social media presence. Yet, I would argue, influence and leadership are not the same thing.

Carefully crafted social media images

The most visible individuals are those who cultivate carefully crafted online personas while presenting themselves as sources of insight and expertise. They carefully cultivate visibility, engagement, and audience growth. The architecture of social media rewards visibility, immediacy, and affirmation ...often encouraging performance over reflection - the triumph of style over substance.

In the most literal sense, a true Influencer is an individual who has the power to affect the decisions or opinions of others because of their authority, knowledge, position, or relationship with their audience.

When Influence Masquerades as Leadership

A second type of influencer within professional and academic circles is one that masquerades as thought leaders.

These individuals have also proliferated on social media, but with a different audience. They present themselves as thought leaders while contributing little original insight of their own. Instead, they repost the work of others with a brief endorsement or superficial observation that creates the appearance of ability. I once read a pointed comment from a thoughtful content creator who spent hours researching and crafting a substantive analysis, only to watch someone else gain attention by summarizing it in a sentence for their growing audience. In academic circles, this is known as plagiarism, but in social media, it is simply recognized as the person who traffics in the ideas of others.

Where this distinction between influencer and thought leader is most crucial, however, is in the upper ranks of higher education, where leaders must combine a measure of personal charisma with authentic leadership.

We are living in a moment when visibility and leadership are increasingly conflated. The administrator with the largest following, the most downloaded podcast, or the most retweeted take on higher education policy can appear - at least from the outside - to be the most influential voice in the room. And perhaps they are. But influence and leadership, it turns out, are not always the same thing.

This is not an argument against communication, presence, or even personal branding. Administrators who can articulate a compelling vision for their institutions, who can build coalitions and tell stories that matter. That is genuinely valuable work. The real question is not whether leaders should be visible, but what purpose their visibility serves.

Authentic leadership offers a useful compass here, not as a buzzword and not as a performance checklist, but as a genuine framework for asking the harder questions.

There are two types of personal visibility that often share the same space.

· Influencer — someone with reach, whose power comes from audience size and attention.

· Authentic leader — specifically, someone whose values, actions, and relationships are consistent regardless of who’s watching.

Each type of visibility has a place in academic administration, and the challenge is deciding which form of leadership you are cultivating.

Higher education is at a fascinating inflection point where the lines between influencer and leader are increasingly blurred. Traditional academic leadership built credibility through scholarship, mentorship, and institutional trust - work that was often invisible to the broader public. Now, some of the most visible voices in higher education are edupreneurs, LinkedIn^© thought leaders, and academic-adjacent creators who build audiences largely by amplifying the ideas of others.

The influencer administrator chases rankings, press mentions, social media clicks, and conference keynotes. The authentic leader is often the one quietly fighting for a struggling department, protecting a vulnerable faculty member, or telling the board something it doesn’t want to hear. In a field literally built on credentialing others, who gets to be seen as a leader? Which voice carries more authority today: the president shaped by decades of institutional experience, or the administrator with the larger digital audience?

If higher education is going to resist confusing influence with leadership, it needs a more durable standard for evaluating leaders.

One useful framework comes from Bill George in his book Discover Your True North^[1].

• Self-awareness - Do you know why you got into this work? What brought you into a leadership position may have shifted imperceptibly over time and now needs to be re-examined. Periodically reflect on the reasons you entered into leadership and affirm that those reasons are still important.

• Internalized values - Do your decisions hold when no one is watching? Much of the work of authentic leaders is invisible to those around them. It is the reports they write, the budget they closely examine late into the night, and the disciplinary letters written to an old friend.

• Balanced processing - Do you seek dissenting voices, or surround yourself with agreement? A president who only hears good news from her cabinet isn’t well-informed - she’s insulated.

• Relational transparency - Are you honest with faculty, staff, and students even when it’s costly? Do you take the risk of sharing concerns and disturbing trends with those within your organization? Many higher education leaders conceal financial information until it becomes necessary to fire or lay off faculty and staff. Far better, in my estimate, to share candidly with those affected by your decisions so they can become part of the solution.

• Moral perspective — Does your leadership serve the institution or your career? No elaboration is needed, but some soul-searching is in order.

When the visibility ends and the real work begins, what decisions are you making that no one will ever applaud you for? And are those decisions consistent with the leader you say you are?

Bill George’s most famous observation, which deeply resonates with me, is simple: Your life story defines your leadership. We are the sum of our experiences, both good and bad, that characterize our moral compass.

Authentic leadership in higher education is rooted not in visibility or popularity, but in integrity, difficult decision-making, and service to the institution and its people. The bottom line is, to be an authentic leader, you must remind yourself frequently who and what you serve. If you find the answers increasingly hard to find, it is time for self-reflection and perhaps a course correction.

Institutions do not ultimately rise or fall on the strength of personal brands. They endure because of leaders willing to make difficult decisions, accept unglamorous responsibilities, and remain faithful to the mission of the institution even when no audience is watching. Authentic leadership begins there.

[1] George, B. (2015). Discover Your True North: Expanded and Updated Edition. Wiley. [1, 2, 3].

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That difference isn’t accidental. It’s rooted in agriculture.

While much of the country has shifted toward finance and technology, the Valley still carries the imprint of its agrarian past. Family farms - some recognized through the Virginia Century Farms Program - have endured for more than a hundred years. You pass them without ceremony: weathered barns, long fence lines, fields in various stages of cultivation. Each one feels less like a business and more like a living inheritance.

What makes these farms remarkable isn’t just their longevity. It’s what they have endured.

In 1864, during the final phase of the Civil War, the Valley was subjected to a campaign so destructive it became known as the Burning of the Shenandoah Valley. Under the command of Philip Sheridan, Union forces systematically dismantled the region’s agricultural capacity—burning barns, destroying mills, and driving off livestock. The goal was simple: deny the Confederacy its breadbasket.

The destruction was total. Communities across the Valley were left with little more than ruins, ash, and memories.

And yet, when the war ended, they rebuilt - patiently.

That’s the part that lingers. The land you see today is not just productive; it is recovered. The families who work it are not just operators; they are stewards of a long, uninterrupted history. Somewhere in their lineage are people who lost everything and chose, deliberately, to begin again.

That choice required patience - not as a feeling, but as discipline.

The Farmer and the Field

A farmer doesn’t walk into a field and demand that seeds grow faster. They don’t pull on stems to make them taller or rage at the sky when the harvest isn’t ready. Growth has its own timeline - one that cannot be hurried.

Instead, they do the quiet work.

They prepare the soil before anything is visible. They plant with no immediate return. They tend consistently - through good conditions and bad - and then they wait. Not passively, but attentively. Patiently.

There are setbacks. A late frost. Weeks without rain. A crop that doesn’t take. The inexperienced farmer panics. The seasoned one absorbs the loss, adjusts, and plants again next season. Just as their ancestors did after the Civil War, they sometimes have to rebuild.

Patience, in this context, is not inaction. It is a sustained, disciplined effort without immediate reward.

The Leader’s Parallel

Leadership operates under the same constraints, even if we pretend otherwise.

Patience doesn’t arrive the day you step into a leadership role. It’s cultivated - slowly, often invisibly. Every time you resist the urge to rush a decision, you’re preparing the soil. Every time you give someone space to develop instead of stepping in, you’re planting a seed. Every time you respond to a setback with curiosity instead of blame, you’re learning to read the weather.

And like farming, patience compounds.

Leaders who have endured difficult seasons develop a kind of steadiness that cannot be shortcut. It is often recognized as wisdom. They understand that not everything improves with speed - and that forcing outcomes too early often creates more problems than it solves.

Why Patience Matters Now

We operate in a culture that rewards immediacy. Speed is celebrated. Decisiveness is often praised - even when it’s just impulsiveness in disguise.

But the leaders who build things that last tell a different story.

They learn to distinguish between what requires action now and what requires time. They resist the reflex to respond to every signal. They create space for clarity to emerge rather than forcing premature conclusions.

Patience, in this sense, is not passive. It is strategic.

Three Practices That Cultivate Patience

1. Set Realistic Expectations and Timelines

Meaningful change - whether in people, organizations, or strategy - takes longer than we want it to. Patient leaders align expectations with reality. They focus on steady progress rather than quick wins and resist the pressure to manufacture urgency where it doesn’t belong. I once compared observations with a colleague about a dean who often acted impulsively. The colleague observed wryly, I learned through repeated encounters that if he said we were going in a particular direction or wanted a certain result, I waited. If he didn’t follow up in two weeks, I knew it wasn’t important.

2. Focus on What You Can Control

Leaders are exposed to a constant stream of variables - market shifts, personnel dynamics, unexpected disruptions - many of which are beyond their control.

The discipline lies in knowing where to focus.

When leaders fixate on what they cannot influence, they drain energy from what actually matters: setting direction, building teams, and making thoughtful decisions. Letting go of the uncontrollable isn’t passivity - it’s precision.

Teams mirror this behavior. Composure at the top reduces noise everywhere else.

3. Develop Situational Awareness

Not all information arrives clearly labeled.

Often, it comes in fragments: a shift in tone during a meeting, an unusual silence, a number that doesn’t quite align. The leader’s job is to notice, hold, and interpret these signals - often without complete certainty.

This requires a different kind of attention. Less rigid. More expansive.

Leaders who wait for perfect information will always be late. Leaders who act without awareness create unnecessary risk. Patience lives in the tension between the two.

The Discipline Beneath the Surface

A mentor once told me:
Knowledge changes quickly. Attitudes take longer. Behavior—you may not live to see it.

That observation captures something essential about patience. The most meaningful changes unfold on timelines we don’t control - and often won’t fully witness, which is why patience ultimately becomes an internal discipline.

Leaders who cultivate it tend to share a few habits.

• They create space to think—through reflection, journaling, or quiet time.

• They examine their reactions, especially in moments of frustration.

• They learn to sit with ambiguity without rushing to resolve it.

These are not dramatic practices, but they are cumulative.

A Final Thought

In the Shenandoah Valley, no one confuses motion with progress.

The work is done early, quietly, and often without recognition. The harvest comes later - sometimes much later.

That’s the lesson.

Patience is not about waiting. It’s about how you work while you wait.

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It was a practical way to direct seating - bride’s side or groom’s side, but the phrasing stuck with me. In that moment, it highlighted something we rarely pause to consider: the real difference between a friend and an acquaintance. We throw the word friend around loosely these days - on social media, in casual conversation, even at work. Yet the distinction matters far more than most people realize, especially for those in leadership roles.

True friends are the small circle who have your back when the stakes are high, who will tell you hard truths without an agenda, and with whom trust runs deep and unspoken. Acquaintances, by contrast, are the far larger group of pleasant, useful, or enjoyable connections - colleagues, network contacts, social peers - who show up for the good times or when it’s mutually beneficial, but whose loyalty often has limits. To me, the distinction is important, not because I favor one over the other but because I draw emotional support and guidance from those few friends I have made over my life. Some are no longer with me, and a day doesn’t go by that I don’t miss their wisdom and guidance.

Treating acquaintances as friends risks favoritism, clouded judgment, eroded authority, or painful disillusionment when expectations don’t align. Conversely, failing to nurture genuine friendships outside (or carefully within) the professional sphere can leave leaders isolated, without the candid counsel or personal support that sustains long-term resilience.

In this post, I explore why the ability to clearly distinguish between friends and acquaintances is a quiet superpower for effective leadership. We’ll look at the risks of getting it wrong, the benefits of getting it right, practical ways to maintain healthy boundaries while still being approachable and human, and how this clarity strengthens decision-making, team dynamics, and personal well-being.

First, the realities of leadership

It’s lonely at the top - 50% of CEOs report experiencing loneliness at some point in their career. This is particularly acute among new CEOs, with 70% reporting feelings of loneliness early in their tenure. In one academic sample of senior leaders, about 36% met measurable loneliness criteria. A 2018 study published in the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies concluded that senior managers are lonelier inside and outside of work because of the demands of their roles - especially true for executives like CEOs, who have no true peers at work.

The loneliness that leaders experience is not a function of their personality; it is a result of the structural limitations of the role that they have chosen to fulfill. It is caused, typically, by three interrelated factors:

• Information asymmetry

• Role-based distance

• Lack of true peers

Depending on the study, between one-third and two-thirds of senior leaders report that it is not simply the absence of people - it is the absence of unfiltered relationships. People with whom you can share your deepest concerns.

Despite spending significant time with employees, leaders often find workplace relationships unfulfilling and experience non-reciprocal support dynamics, which can heighten loneliness. In other words, they’re surrounded by people, but the relationships are fundamentally asymmetrical - people relate to the president as a president, not as a person. Leaders are bound by norms -self-sufficiency, rationality, and independence. These expectations limit their ability to express emotional needs or share doubts without risking professional credibility.

As leaders rise, they do not lose proximity to others. If anything, they are surrounded by colleagues, teams, stakeholders, and expectations. They become the center of a lot of, sometimes unwanted, attention. What they lose is something more specific: the ability to be fully known without consequence. The role comes with expectations that they are predisposed to meet.

Information asymmetry – Being a leader of any organization is a lot like being a small parish priest hearing confessions on a Saturday afternoon.

By evening, he walks back out into the same town - past the neighbor, the teacher, the couple arguing quietly on the corner. He has just been entrusted with the most personal truths of their lives: failures, betrayals, fears no one else sees.

And then he does something that looks, from the outside, almost unnatural.

He greets them as if he knows nothing.

Not because he’s indifferent.
Not because he’s forgotten.
But because the role requires a kind of disciplined acknowledgement without sharing what you know.

Leadership has a similar demand.

The higher you go, the more you are entrusted with information that would change how others see themselves, their colleagues, or the future of the organization.

And then you walk into a meeting, or a hallway, or a casual conversation -and you act as if you don’t know.

You don’t hint.
You don’t signal.
You don’t accidentally reveal.

You don’t use the information to control the behavior of others.

Because the moment you do, you’ve broken something that can’t easily be repaired, trust.

Leadership, at times, requires the discipline of the parish priest - carrying what you know while refusing to let it alter how you treat the person in front of you.

Role-based distance – Most leaders learn, much to their chagrin, that fewer of their former relationships can carry the full weight of their new role as a leader.

Leadership doesn’t require you to be distant. But it does require you to be deliberate - about what you share, what you hold, and which relationships can truly bear the difference. There are times when you are forced by the role to withhold information or even engage in the luxury of commenting on something a colleague says. The line between friends and acquaintances isn’t drawn by loyalty or history. It’s drawn by what the relationship can withstand.

This is where loneliness at the top quietly exerts pressure. Leaders, being human, often want connection. And in the absence of true peers, they may lean into relationships with subordinates to fill that gap, but doing so creates a hidden instability:

• The leader may begin to treat the relationship as a friendship.

• The subordinate may rely on that perception for psychological safety.

• The organization still requires objective judgment.

Leaders don’t lose the ability to have friends. What they lose is the ability to be ambiguous about who those friends are. The literature in organizational psychology is filled with anecdotes of leaders who, in responding to loneliness, blur boundaries with subordinates - often with consequences that are as predictable as they are avoidable.

Lack of True Peers - The higher an individual rises within any organization, the fewer people truly understand the weight of decisions. The leader’s circle narrows - not by choice, but by design. The moment you are promoted above your friends, the lunchroom dynamic changes. Your jokes are funnier, your critiques are heavier, and the candid, unfiltered feedback you once relied on disappears. You are often totally alone with your thoughts and the ramifications of your decisions.

The research points to a hard truth: this tension cannot be eliminated. It can only be managed.

Leaders who navigate it well tend to do three things intentionally:

• Cultivate true peers outside their chain of command

• Create structured spaces for candor (coaches, advisors, boards)

• Accept that not every relationship can carry the weight of friendship.

This last point is the most difficult - and the most clarifying. Because once a leader understands that not every connection is meant to be a friendship, they can begin to see relationships for what they are, not diminished, but differently bound.

Leadership requires warmth without partiality, approachability without entanglement. The ability to distinguish friends from acquaintances is not about distancing yourself from people; it’s about protecting the integrity of both the relationship and the role you’ve been entrusted to carry. You must recognize and accept the new realities of your role as a leader if you are to be successful.

At the top of an organization, the line between friend and acquaintance doesn’t just blur - it becomes a leadership decision with real consequences.

A leader may feel genuine warmth toward people on their team. Shared effort, long hours, and even moments of vulnerability can create something that feels like friendship. But structurally, the relationship is still governed by power, evaluation, and consequence. That distinction matters most not when things are going well - but when they aren’t.

A helpful way to frame it is this:

• A friend is someone with whom the relationship can survive asymmetry - disagreement, distance, even harm - without formal consequence.

• An acquaintance in a professional hierarchy is someone the leader may like, respect, and enjoy - but ultimately must judge.

So how does a leader create a resilient organization without burning out? Leaders who navigate this well do a few things consistently:

They name the boundary early - They don’t wait for tension to explain it. Make clear to subordinates (both friends and acquaintances) that you will not be able to fully discuss everything that you are privileged to know as a function of your new role.

There are parts of my role I won’t be able to talk about - even with people I trust.

They share perspective instead of information - They offer how they think, not what they know. One important concept that most leaders learn with time is the ambiguity of information. Much of what leaders know isn’t cleanly classified as confidential or shareable. It exists in a gray zone - a rumored restructuring, a tentative budget decision, an executive’s uncertain future. Sharing it risks spreading something that may prove false or half-true. Staying silent feels like withholding. Neither choice is comfortable.

Organizations have informal networks that move information in unpredictable ways. A casual comment to one trusted friend can surface three departments away in a distorted form. The leader may not be punished for sharing, but they can be burned by it. Leaders are expected to somehow absorb these norms intuitively - and when they’re uncertain, the safest default is silence.

They stay consistent
No inner circles based on convenience. No selective transparency. Instead of asking, Who are my friends at work? Ask

• Who can handle limited transparency without taking it personally?

• Who understands that access is not a measure of trust?

• Who won’t mistake a casual comment for a signal or a promise?

Those people may still be friends - but they are rare.

Everyone else - people you respect, enjoy, and rely on - becomes something closer to a trusted acquaintance.

They find one place to be unfiltered
A peer, a mentor, a coach, a colleague - somewhere the pressure can be set down without consequence. In my case, I invited a senior dean at a different (non-competing) school to become my advisor. I reciprocated by taking on the same role for new deans at other schools.

I once had a fellow dean reflect on the university dynamics when he said we (school deans) were a unique group - strong-willed, fiercely protective, but mutually supportive. That alone helped me cope with the challenges of my position! I agreed and remembered a small group meeting where he had become increasingly irritated by something that was being proposed. I was sitting next to him and had observed his behavior in similar situations. When he began jiggling his leg under the conference table, I quietly reached over and placed my hand gently on his leg. He turned to me with a surprised look, and I calmly looked down at his leg and then looked straight ahead. He got the message. He paused, took a deep breath, and then began a calm and coherent presentation of his concerns.

That mutual support began to diminish as the university added more layers to the administration until it virtually disappeared as a collection of young, fresh faces more interested in appearances than collegiality was added to the group.

The tradeoff

There’s no way around it. Leadership doesn’t eliminate relationships - but it does change their shape. Some friendships endure, but only because both people accept the constraints.
Many relationships remain strong, but more constrained than before. And a few… don’t survive the transition at all.

The truth that most leaders learn late.

Many leaders don’t lose friends as they rise. They realize, too late, that they had fewer of them than they thought.

Leadership doesn’t require you to be distant. But it does require you to be deliberate - about what you share, what you hold, and which relationships can truly bear the difference.

Effective leadership demands a clear-eyed distinction between true friends and acquaintances - a distinction that most leaders underestimate until it costs them. True friends are the rare few who offer candid counsel, deep trust, and loyalty without agenda; acquaintances, however warm or valued, are relationships ultimately bounded by power, mutual benefit, or professional hierarchy. As leaders rise, structural forces - information asymmetry, role-based distance, and the shrinking pool of genuine peers - create a quiet loneliness that can tempt them to blur these lines, often with damaging consequences for their judgment, their teams, and their own well-being. The leaders who navigate this well are deliberate: they cultivate real friendships outside their chain of command, create structured spaces for honest feedback, and resist the urge to treat professional warmth as personal intimacy. Knowing the difference isn’t about keeping people at arm’s length - it’s about protecting the integrity of both the role and the relationships that sustain it.

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I’ve heard this phrase - or some version of it - countless times throughout my personal life and professional career. It’s the go-to explanation when someone in a leadership role sees a shift early, acts on it, and creates an advantage while others scramble to catch up. What’s presented as modesty is often an excuse for inaction - an unwillingness to admit that they simply didn’t notice what was happening around them.

When a colleague once asked how I developed my model of pharmacy education, I gave what I thought was a straightforward answer: I had spent years in different educational environments, carefully noting what worked well and what didn’t. I deliberately kept the failures out of my design and incorporated as many proven successes as possible. From the look on their face, it was clear they preferred to label the outcome as luck or intuition rather than recognize the power of disciplined observation.

The Underappreciated Leadership Skill

Great leaders develop an almost uncanny ability to read the future in the everyday signals around them. Observation - truly seeing what is happening rather than just looking - is one of the most valuable yet overlooked traits in leadership today. In a fast-moving, highly interconnected world, the discipline of being deeply observant is essential.

Too many executives operate through the narrow lens of tasks and execution. They experience the world the way spectators watch a game through their phone screens - recording the moment instead of truly living it. Putting the phone down, so to speak, and choosing to be fully present, unfiltered, and unbiased takes conscious effort and skill. It means engaging with people and situations directly, without the usual assumptions or mental shortcuts.

In conversations with emerging leaders, we often discuss communication, strategic thinking, and team leadership - important skills, no doubt. But beneath all of them lies one foundational ability: the ability to see.

Observation is subtle. It rarely announces itself. It shows up in the quality of questions a leader asks, in their awareness of group dynamics, and in their capacity to connect patterns others miss.

Training the Eye: A Simple Exercise

One of the most effective exercises I used with leadership fellows was deceptively simple.

They would sit in on Executive Committee meetings - not to participate, but to observe.

Afterward, we’d stay in the empty room, and I’d ask:

• What did you notice about the dynamics?

• Who held influence?

• Where was there tension?

• What was not said?

They were often surprised by how much they had seen - but never consciously processed.

That’s the shift: from passive exposure to active awareness.

The goal wasn’t just to understand the meeting. It was to prepare them to one day lead it, with insight others wouldn’t have.

In my experience, there are two (2) general observational styles: Passive Observation (exception monitoring) and Active Observation (situational awareness).

Passive Observation (Exception Monitoring)

This is the background radar mode:

• Walking into a room, immediately sensing tension, low energy, or a subtle shift in team dynamics.

• Spotting that one metric in a report that represents a noticeable departure from earlier reports. One that is increasingly becoming clear in higher education is declining enrollment, either in selected programs or overall, as we approach the demographic cliff.

• Picking up cultural drifts: People aren’t volunteering ideas as they used to or before responding in a meeting, they quietly glance at one influence peddler to see how they should respond.

• Noticing changes in body language, tone, or participation levels during meetings.

It’s pattern recognition built from deep familiarity with the baseline. Great leaders develop this almost subconsciously through experience and presence. They notice the delta - the deviation - because they’ve internalized what normal looks like in their environment.

Active Surveillance (situational awareness)

This is intentional and proactive:

• Regularly scheduling listening tours or one-on-ones with no agenda other than gathering unfiltered input.

• Running structured audits: customer feedback loops, anonymous surveys, competitive intelligence, or market basket comparisons with competing entities.

• Asking probing questions like: What are we missing? What’s changing that we haven’t named yet? This is where developing regular state-of-the-union reports for your leadership team has an impact.

• Using tools and rituals: walking the floor. Management by Wandering Around, reviewing raw data dashboards daily, or keeping a system failure file.

Leaders who master both become exceptionally good at early detection - catching issues when they’re small, cheap, and fixable, rather than waiting for crises. They also spot opportunities others miss because they’re attuned to weak signals.

Developing the Skill

Observation isn’t a personality trait. It takes practice.

A few ways to strengthen it:

· Stay deliberately curious. The moment you assume you understand your environment is the moment you stop seeing it clearly. Seek input beyond your usual circles. Read broadly. Expose yourself to perspectives that challenge your assumptions. Agree to disagree with others but allow them to express their viewpoints.

· Listen more than you speak. Most leaders are evaluated on what they say. The best ones focus on what they hear - and what isn’t being said.

· Build situational awareness. Pay attention to context: physical spaces, interpersonal dynamics, organizational signals. Environments communicate constantly - you just must learn how to read them.

· Get out of your office. Some of the most important signals happen outside formal settings. Informal conversations often reveal what structured meetings are missing.

· Create space for dissent. If people only tell you what’s safe, your observational field is artificially narrow. Leaders who encourage honest input see more - and earlier.

· Develop the skill for evaluating non-verbal behavior – Observant leaders develop a keen understanding of non-verbal as well as verbal behaviors.

Let me share one simple but powerful example of non-verbal behavior - a handshake.

A handshake is one of the richest 3-second windows in another person’s psychology. Here’s what to watch for.

The Grip

A crushing grip often signals dominance anxiety - someone who needs to establish control immediately. A limp handshake can mean disengagement, low confidence, or simply that they were raised not to squeeze. The perfectly calibrated firm shake usually belongs to someone socially trained- salespeople, politicians, therapists, and college presidents.

Eye Contact During

I often tell my leadership fellows to always maintain eye contact when shaking hands. Your hand knows what to do; make sure your eyes are actively gathering information about the individual whose hand you are shaking. Breaking eye contact during the shake - glancing away - often reveals discomfort, distraction, or deception. Sustained eye contact signals confidence or deliberate impression management.

Timing of the Smile

A genuine smile reaches the eyes and appears with or just before the handshake. A social smile that arrives a beat late or fades the moment you look away is performative rather than sincere.

Spatial distancing

A slight forward lean with the shake signals genuine engagement. Staying planted or leaning back while extending the arm creates distance - they’re keeping you at arm’s length, literally. Individuals who stand too close when shaking your hand are establishing dominance.

Temperature & Moisture

Cold, damp hands almost always mean active anxiety - the body is diverting blood to muscles (fight or flight). Warm, dry hands suggest calm. Notably, nervous people often know their hands are sweaty, which makes them more anxious about the handshake itself.

Measuring Anxiety Through a Simple Handshake

I learned this technique from a friend who was a highly successful medical sales representative. He taught me how to discreetly read someone’s anxiety level by casually extending my index finger along their wrist while shaking hands. Under low anxiety, the pulse is subtle and often imperceptible. When someone is agitated or stressed, the pulse becomes noticeably stronger and easier to detect. It’s the same principle doctors and nurses use when checking vital signs—only far more subtle.

The Physiology Behind It

The radial artery runs along the inner side of the wrist, just below the base of the thumb. In a calm state, the pulse is gentle—typically 60–70 beats per minute with relatively low pressure. Under stress, the sympathetic nervous system kicks in, releasing adrenaline that increases both heart rate and the force of each heartbeat. This makes the pulse stronger and more distinct against your fingertip.

Why the “Innocent” Positioning Works

A natural handshake with your index finger gently extended along the radial artery looks completely normal and socially appropriate. The other person has no idea their pulse is being read. This element of surprise is crucial—if they knew what you were doing, their awareness alone would elevate their heart rate and ruin the reading.

One of his favorite tells was the moment just before the handshake. As soon as someone sees your extended hand, their body reacts instinctively - before their mind can override the response. Even if they force a smile and complete the handshake, their pulse often betrays the internal conflict. That half-second of raw reaction is often more revealing than anything that follows.

It’s a simple, socially invisible method that hides in plain sight - using basic human etiquette as the perfect cover.

Where Leaders Go Wrong

Many leaders believe they’re observant because they’re experienced.

But experience alone doesn’t guarantee awareness.

Without intentional effort:

• Familiarity turns into blind spots.

• Intuition becomes bias.

• Confidence replaces curiosity.

Observation without reflection is just exposure. And intuition without calibration can be dangerously misleading.

People characterize skilled observational skills - especially the dual practice of passive noticing (spotting deltas from the norm) and active surveillance (deliberate scanning) - as mere intuition or luck for several intertwined psychological, social, and cognitive reasons. This mislabeling is common because true ability often operates below conscious awareness, making the underlying process invisible to both the observer and onlookers.

What intuition is actually made of

Skilled observation doesn’t just support good judgment - it is the foundation that intuition draws from. Without the steady discipline of scanning an environment, reading signals, and registering deviations, what we call intuition would have nothing to work with. The process just happens to be invisible, which is why it looks like magic.

Expert leaders internalize baselines so thoroughly that anomalies register almost before they can be named - a hallway that’s slightly too quiet, an email thread with a different temperature, a metric that’s barely drifting but drifting the wrong way. The detection happens holistically and fast, bypassing the kind of conscious, articulate reasoning we could easily see from the outside. So, to the leader, it simply feels right. To everyone watching, it looks like luck, or a sixth sense, or some innate gift they don’t have.

Several forces contribute to this misconception. Leaders themselves often reach for modest explanations - crediting instinct or good fortune rather than describing years of deliberate habit, partly out of humility, partly because the habit is hard to see even from the inside. Observers, meanwhile, prefer the romantic version; natural genius is a more satisfying story than sustained effort and discipline, and it neatly sidesteps any obligation to develop the skill themselves. Then there’s hindsight: in a field as volatile as higher education - where demographic shifts, policy changes, and AI disruption reward whoever detects weak signals earliest - the leader who pivots before anyone else is labeled visionary rather than well-calibrated. The foresight gets repackaged as lucky timing.

But luck is random and doesn’t repeat. What does repeat, reliably, across different situations and different years, is the pattern-recognition that comes from disciplined scanning. Intuition without that foundation can be biased - skewed by recent events, shaped by what a leader wants to be true. Calibrated intuition, refined against reality through feedback and failure, is something else entirely: genuine expertise.

The simpler, more flattering label will always win in casual conversation. Calling someone instinctive is easier than acknowledging that they have cultivated a rare and effortful discipline - one of seeing what others miss, before it becomes a problem others must manage.

The good news is that discipline isn’t mystical. Environmental scans, anomaly logs, listening tours, a habit of seeking out evidence that contradicts your current view - these are learnable skills. What looks like effortless intuition is almost always the visible tip of a practiced iceberg.

Institutions that develop this capacity stay agile, mission-driven, and student-centered when conditions shift. Those who mistake the iceberg for the tip risk discovering the full problem only after it’s already a crisis.

What signals are you not seeing right now - not because they aren’t there, but because you’ve stopped looking?

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Curious, I asked why. He admitted, a bit sheepishly, that he’d been pulled over three separate times on the same stretch of interstate - each time for going twenty miles over the speed limit.

I paused. “Three times? Wasn’t once enough to learn the lesson?”

He shifted uncomfortably. “I never bothered to figure out where the state troopers hide.”

I couldn’t believe it. “You drive the same route almost every day, and you still haven’t noticed where they set up?”

He shrugged. “I guess I didn’t notice.”

That moment stuck with me. Here was an intelligent young man pursuing a demanding professional degree, yet he was repeatedly blindsided by something predictable. He saw the troopers - but only after the lights flashed in his rearview mirror.

I gave him three simple pieces of advice:

• Pay close attention to where you get the tickets. They almost always happen when the speed limit suddenly drops.

• Patrol cars need cover. Look for curves or just over the crest of a low hill.

• If all else fails, watch the long-haul truckers. When they suddenly slow down, ease in behind one. They’ve already done the seeing for you.

The lesson went far beyond speeding tickets. Most of us move through the world seeing just enough to get by. We register the obvious, but we miss the patterns, the signals, the subtle cues that could change everything.

I call this the observational blind spot.

The Quiet Superpower of Great Leaders

The best leaders I’ve known or studied share one understated trait: they notice.

They walk into a room and instantly read the emotional temperature. They scan a report and spot the single number that doesn’t fit. They listen to a team member and sense that something is off - even when the words sound perfectly reasonable.

Their attention isn’t passive. It’s a finely tuned instrument they’ve deliberately sharpened over the years. To everyone else, it can look almost psychic.

Popular culture has turned this trait into compelling drama for decades.

As a child, I was captivated by Sherlock Holmes, the ultimate master of deduction from tiny details. Later came Patrick Jane in The Mentalist, who used razor-sharp observation with charismatic flair. In the pilot episode, Jane casually makes himself at home in a grieving family’s house, offers comfort, and within minutes deduces intimate truths about the mother’s life from seemingly insignificant clues most people would overlook.

More recently, Criminal Minds highlighted this skill through the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU). In the Season 3 episode Tabula Rasa, Aaron Hotchner faces a smug defense attorney who mocks criminal profiling as “intellectual guesswork.” Hotch calmly turns the tables, profiling the lawyer on the spot—deducing his secret vice for horse racing from his buzzing BlackBerry, shifting moods, and perfectly timed race notifications. The scene was so powerful, fans dubbed it the “Hotchalanche.”

In reality, the FBI doesn’t hire behavioral analysts straight out of college. The professionals in the BAU are seasoned Supervisory Special Agents with years of elite investigative experience, followed by rigorous specialized training in behavioral analysis. However, what the aforementioned shows dramatize is real: the power of patience, psychological insight, meticulous detail-orientation, and highly developed observational skills.

What Truly Separates Exceptional Leaders

Exceptional leadership isn’t just about vision, strategy, or charisma. It’s about this deeper, quieter habit of truly seeing - noticing what others miss. Such leaders obsessively develop their observational acuity. They train themselves to pick up on subtle shifts in people, environments, dynamics, and situations. Over time, this cultivated awareness becomes one of their greatest competitive advantages.

In leadership - as in life - the difference between average and extraordinary often begins with four quiet words:

“Oh, I hadn’t noticed.”

And then choosing, deliberately, to notice next time.

Developing Observational Skills: The Learning Loop

The skill of observation has nothing to do with high IQ, natural charisma, or projecting confidence. It starts in the moment before any of that—the moment of genuine seeing.

What sets apart those leaders who make consistently better decisions, build deeper trust, and spot opportunities early isn’t access to superior information. It’s their superior ability to receive the information that the rest of us walk past.

Strangely, this skill is rarely formally taught. We coach executives on communication, strategy, and presence. We give them frameworks and questions. But we rarely ask: Are you actually seeing what’s right in front of you, or are you rushing through a world you’ve already decided you understand?

This post begins a deeper exploration of this crucial attribute. Here, we examine what exceptional observational skill really looks like. The next will focus on practical ways leaders consciously improve their ability to see and make sense of the world.

How Leaders Convert Observation into Accumulated Wisdom

Great leaders don’t just collect observations—they systematically turn them into reusable insight. Observation provides raw data (details about people, situations, dynamics, and outcomes). Reflection, pattern recognition, and deliberate application transform that data into principles, mental models, and judgments that compound over time.

This is neither passive nor accidental. It’s an active, repeatable process fueled by curiosity, presence, and humility.

Here’s the core learning loop effective leaders follow.

1. Cultivate Observational Acuity - They train themselves to notice what others overlook: subtle body language, team energy, unspoken tensions, customer reactions, or faint market signals. Many practice Management by Walking Around (popularized by Tom Peters) - staying immersed in real-time dynamics rather than hiding behind reports and dashboards. This is intentional, multi-sensory awareness that builds true situational insight: perceiving what’s happening, understanding its meaning, and projecting likely futures. It takes energy. The default that many use is to just relax and let life flow by.

2. Pause for Reflection - Raw observation alone doesn’t create wisdom - reflection does. Leaders deliberately carve out time to ask: What happened? Why? What patterns am I seeing? What assumptions did I bring? They journal, conduct after-action reviews, or simply sit with an experience. As Confucius noted, By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.

3. Identify Patterns and Build Mental Models - Repeated observations across contexts reveal recurring cause-and-effect relationships. Leaders synthesize these into broader principles and mental models - frameworks that let them interpret new situations quickly and accurately. This is exactly how behavioral analysis works in the FBI and military intelligence: decades of careful observation distilled into reliable patterns.

4. Test, Apply, and Iterate - Wisdom grows through experimentation. Leaders apply their insights in real decisions, see the outcomes, reflect again, and refine. Feedback from teams, mentors, and results closes the loop: observation → reflection → action → better observation.

5. Share and Mentor - Many leaders solidify their wisdom by teaching it - seeing others closely, giving precise feedback, and guiding development. Articulating the insight forces deeper refinement.

The Compound Effect

Each cycle adds another layer of insight. Simple pattern recognition evolves into a nuanced understanding of exceptions, interconnections, and human complexity. Over time, this doesn’t just build knowledge - it compounds into practical wisdom: the ability to read situations accurately, act with humility and foresight, and guide others through ambiguity.

Leaders who master this discipline become noticeably more adaptable, empathetic, and effective. They anticipate problems before they erupt, strengthen relationships, spark innovation, and build resilient cultures.

The gap between average and exceptional often comes down to this: most people look at the world. Great leaders learn to look into it - and then act on what they discover.

As Marilyn Vos Savant, an American writer best known for having one of the highest recorded IQ scores and for her long-running Ask Marilyn column in Parade magazine, put it: To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe which echoes the earlier observation by Confucius.

Yet many accomplished professionals - especially in academia and corporate life - invest heavily in study while ignoring the development of disciplined observation. The good news? This is a skill anyone can develop. It starts with the very next interaction you choose to truly see.

In the next post, we will examine strategies and techniques that accomplished leaders use to develop exceptional observational skills.

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If you’re like me, you probably dread them. For leaders, meetings aren’t an occasional inconvenience; they are the texture of professional life. Research from Harvard Business School’s CEO time study shows that senior executives spend the majority of their working hours in meetings, while data from Microsoft suggests that meetings consume roughly a third of the average professional’s workweek - and often far more in remote settings, where three or more hours per day in virtual meetings is not uncommon.

Yet the returns on this massive investment of time are often dismal. Studies synthesized by Harvard Business Review and workplace research from Atlassian consistently find that a majority of meetings fail to meet their objectives, with as many as 70% perceived as unproductive. The cumulative cost is staggering. Survey data from Salary.com estimates that employees lose dozens of hours each month to unnecessary meetings—adding up to an economic impact measured not in millions, but in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually.

A single one-hour meeting with eight average-salaried employees costs between $338 and $700, depending on how you account for indirect costs. That number often surprises people, but the math is straightforward:

· Direct cost: The salary expense of having people in a room (or on Zoom) instead of doing other work.

· Opportunity cost: The value of what those people would have produced had they not been at the meeting.

· Recovery cost: The time it takes to regain focus after a meeting ends.

While exact figures vary by study, the direction is unmistakable: meetings dominate modern work—and too often fail to deliver proportional value.

Here’s the paradox: leaders spend more time in meetings than almost anyone else in their organizations, yet, by their own admission, most of those meetings do not deliver tangible results. If meetings are the primary place where leadership is exercised, decisions are made, alignment is built, and culture is shaped, then running them well is not a soft skill or mere courtesy. It is a core executive competency - and one that is almost never formally taught.

Why Most Meetings Fail

A strong McKinsey Quarterly article, Want a Better Decision? Plan a Better Meeting by Aaron De Smet, Gregor Jost, and Leigh Weiss, argues that effective meetings start with a simple question: Should this meeting even happen? From there, it’s essential to clarify the purpose of the meeting and define roles and responsibilities with precision. Meetings, if they are to occur, need to be better managed.

Too often, meetings prioritize politeness over progress. This tendency is especially pronounced in academic administration, where there’s pressure to invite large numbers of people - even those only tangentially related to the issue - so no one feels excluded. As one author observed, some organizations pursue collaboration so aggressively that they become excessively polite and overly inclusive. True collaboration doesn’t always mean inviting everyone or keeping perfect decorum; sometimes it means being decisive and focused.

I once was tasked with assessing the strengths and weaknesses of an academic unit. In preparation for the report, I asked my assistant to schedule a meeting with the CFO to discuss budget priorities and ways to manage expenses within the unit. When another member of the unit found out I had scheduled a meeting with the CFO, he asked if he could attend. I considered his request and then responded, No. He was surprised, and after recovering some composure, he reiterated his request. I repeated my earlier response. He then tried to coerce me into extending an invitation to the meeting. I responded that I would be asking questions that may make him uncomfortable, and I would rather not have the distraction of him attempting to justify past expenditures and defending earlier management decisions. He left my office and returned to his office, slamming the door to emphasize his displeasure. The assistant who had witnessed the exchange quietly remarked, Smart move. Leaders have an obligation to ensure that only individuals who are essential to the task at hand are invited to meetings.

Researchers in another McKinsey piece, What is an Effective Meeting?, reinforced the point with a blunt subtitle: effective meetings are all about purpose, preparation, and presentation. Their research found that 61% of executives believe at least half the time they spend making decisions is ineffective, and only 37% say their organizations make decisions that are both timely and high-quality. As McKinsey alum Tom Peters memorably put it: The only thing on Earth that never lies to you is your calendar.

My Own Response to Meeting Fatigue

Years ago, frustrated by repeated systemic failures, I started collecting observations about bad meetings and filed them in my System Failure File. Whether in hospitals, pharmacy organizations, or higher education, the inability to run good meetings is almost always a leadership and systems problem.

When I became a dean and gained some control over the meetings I led, I created a set of guidelines that I expected everyone on my team- including myself - to follow. I shared them with my leadership team and with cohorts of AACP Leadership Fellows, hoping to spare them some of the daily drag of unproductive meetings and to protect their time and energy for actual work. I’ve refined these rules over the years, but the core principles are still the same. In the spirit of turning personal frustration into something useful, I’m sharing them here.

Meetings don’t have to be soul-crushing. With intention, discipline, and a willingness to break a few polite habits, they can become one of the highest-leverage tools in any leader’s arsenal. The question is whether we’re willing to treat them with the seriousness they deserve.

Drawing on McKinsey’s research and hard-won institutional experience, I developed a set of ground rules, On the Conduct of Meetings, that I now consider non-negotiable. What follows are the rules for conducting productive meetings.

On the Conduct of Meetings

Ground rules

1. Only hold meetings when all alternatives have been exhausted (informal meetings, memorandums, delegation, etc.).

2. Keep meetings brief (one hour or less) and on track (use an agenda).

3. Limit membership in the meeting to essential personnel.

Rules of Conduct

1. Keep the membership to seven, including the chairman.

2. Establish a beginning date, frequency, and time of subsequent meetings and (most importantly) a termination date.

3. Set an agenda; distribute it 2 –3 days before the meeting, and stick to it.

4. The chairperson’s job is to lead the discussion, not dominate.

5. Have task leaders who are responsible for individual items within the agenda. They should also be responsible for background, research, and, if draft documents are involved, distribution and revision of drafts.

6. Avoid the use of miscellaneous or odd-and-ends category, as it only invites endless discussion.

7. If a consensus cannot be reached at the meeting, defer the item to a working party or subcommittee to avoid unnecessary wrangling during the committee meeting.

8. Begin and end meetings on time. Note individuals who arrive late and depart early in minutes. Make sure that everyone brings their calendar to the meeting to facilitate planning of the next meeting or individual task meeting.

9. Have someone (other than the chairman) keep the minutes and ensure that they are circulated for corrections and additions as soon as possible following the meeting.

10. Draw out the silent. Everyone has a view; get them to express it.

11. Meetings consist of (1) questions, (2) answers, (3) positive reactions, and (4) negative reactions.

12. Close a meeting with the following:

a. summary of accomplishments/actions

b. an assignment list with names of responsible parties

c. thanks to the participating parties

d. establishment of the next meeting and general agenda.

13. Minutes should contain the following:

a. time, date and place of the meeting

b. who chaired the meeting

c. who attended, who was absent and why

d. all agenda items (and other items) discussed and decisions reached. If action was agreed upon, record and underline the name of the person responsible for the assignment.

e. time the meeting ended

f. date, time and place of next meeting.

14. Finally, most issues are decided by consensus. If you can’t convince three smart people that something makes sense or is at least worth trying, it’s probably not a good idea.

None of this is complicated. What it requires is intention - and the willingness to lead rather than accommodate.

Here is what I have come to believe after decades in academic medicine, administration, and executive leadership: meetings are not inherently wasteful. Run well, they are among the highest-leverage tools available to any organization. They build alignment that no memo can replicate. They reveal disagreement before it becomes dysfunction. They create the shared context that makes distributed teams coherent. They can, when the culture is right, be where an organization’s character is made visible.

But that version of meetings doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because someone in the room — usually the leader - decides it will. Leaders decide whether meetings become soul-crushing time sinks or high-leverage catalysts for decision-making, alignment, and culture. On the Conduct of Meetings establishes sensible guidelines for managing the biggest time sink in a leader’s life – meetings. That choice is made not once, in a policy document, but dozens of times each week, in how you open a meeting, whom you invite, whether you let it drift, and whether you have the discipline to end it when the work is done.

Your calendar is not neutral. It is a reflection of your values as a leader. What does yours say about you?

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As a mentor, I was expected to meet regularly with each fellow, involve them in leadership discussions, and assign projects designed to build their leadership capacity. In our first meeting, I always asked the same question: What is your most pressing challenge?

I expected answers about gaining insight into leadership behavior, building confidence in decision-making, or navigating organizational culture. Instead, every fellow gave the same response: managing time.

I would begin by sharing my own experience, trying to manage time as a founding dean in a complex and demanding environment. It is never easy—but it may be the most valuable skill a leader can develop. What follows are the observations I shared with those fellows, along with a few I have added since leaving academia.

Success is Dealing with Trivia

For leaders, the calendar isn’t just a schedule - it’s contested ground. Every hour gets claimed by strategy sessions, unexpected issues, routine updates, and the occasional email chain that refuses to die. Effective leaders don’t ignore these demands - they develop strategies for handling them. They put systems in place, prioritize with intention, delegate thoughtfully, and guard their time for deep thinking as if it were their most valuable resource - because it is. They recognize that time isn’t just something to spend; it’s the foundation of meaningful impact. Here’s the quiet truth most high performers eventually discover: Success is dealing with trivia.

It’s not the grand vision that usually derails leaders. It’s the small stuff. The microscopic decisions, the low-stakes emails, the quick meetings that multiply like rabbits, the trivia that quietly eats your focus, fragments your day, and leaves you wondering why you’re exhausted yet feel like you accomplished nothing meaningful.

In this post, we’ll unpack why trivia feels so urgent, how elite leaders reclaim their time without becoming bottlenecks, and practical frameworks to turn dealing with trivia from a drain into a deliberate strength.

Because at the end of the day, your legacy won’t be built in the spotlight moments. It will be forged in how skillfully you handled the thousands of small things that tried to steal your attention along the way.

Leadership trap – time mismanagement

Most large surveys and studies find that top CEOs see time as their scarcest resource, feel chronically stretched, and believe they still invest in true strategic work despite heavy efforts to manage their calendars.

A 2013 McKinsey survey found that only 9% of executives were highly satisfied with how they allocated their time. While McKinsey has not replicated this exact survey, subsequent research - most notably its CEO time-allocation study - confirms the underlying problem persists, with leaders spending the majority of their time in meetings that are often misaligned with strategic priorities. The endless meetings that I attended in higher education typically began late without an agenda, meandered through various topics, and ended without actionable items. I will share in a subsequent Substack post the rules that I developed for my leadership team titled, On the Conduct of Meetings.

A Harvard Business School study, conducted by Porter and Nohria in 2018, of 27 large‑company CEOs, shadowed the participants 24/7 for 3 months. They found that the CEOs worked about 62.5 hours per week, averaged 9.7 hours per weekday plus weekend work, and spent roughly 72% of work time in meetings. In that study, CEOs concluded that managing time was one of the greatest challenges that leaders faced and that their schedule visibly signaled their leadership priorities to the organization.

If everyone knows that they are struggling to make better use of their time, how do you restructure your daily activities to accomplish more and leave each day feeling positive about those accomplishments? What follows are nine (9) strategies that most leaders can easily adopt, either in part or in total, that will address chronic time mismanagement.

Step 1. Stillness and meditation

I used to wake before dawn to plan my day and review emails that had arrived after I retired. I was always fearful that I would begin the day without adequate preparation; as a result, I fulfilled my prediction. I was not composed and adequately prepared when the day began, and I struggled almost as soon as I entered my office to keep up. Lack of composure was the symptom that I decided to address, and the solution was to reserve the first two (2) hours for two important tasks: prayer and meditation. A recent McKinsey Quarterly article, The AI Antidote, explores the importance of meditation in our current high-stress environment. I recommend that you read it if you would like to develop a deeper insight into the importance of meditation.

The day doesn’t start with email; it starts with quiet attention to your emotional needs.

• Take 3–10 minutes to sit quietly and breathe.

• Notice the swirl of thoughts about today and let them pass without chasing them.

• Choose one intention for how you want to show up: calm, decisive, supportive, creative.

I learned that meditation isn’t a luxury; it’s how you reclaim your mind before the world starts making withdrawals from it. You’re preparing the instrument you use to decide how your time will be used. Prayer recognizes that you have a greater power than even you sometimes realize, and it comes from God, however you define him. How you relate to him will not occur without intentionally making space for prayer in your daily life.

Step 2.

The core insight: success is dealing with trivia

Next, step back and look at the whole terrain, the entirety of the day that is facing you.

• Scan your calendar: meetings, deadlines, commitments.

• Check your task list and the status of ongoing projects.

• Note any constraints or obstacles that will need to be addressed and who should handle the issue.

Ask yourself, after carefully reviewing the upcoming day, what do I, as the leader of this organization, need to accomplish that no one else can do? Leaders don’t do everything; they do the things only they can do.

Step 3.

Identify the vital three

Now identify three vital tasks that must be done today.

Phrase them as clear results, not vague intentions. Examples may include

• Finalize the annual budget for review with the Executive Committee

• Author a professionally written memorandum of a proposed collaborative opportunity for the President and their leadership team.

• Draft the introduction for the upcoming accreditation self-study.

Step 4.

Reclaim your mornings (or when you are most productive)

Most evidence suggests that for the majority of people (including most leaders), peak cognitive acuity is highest early in the day and then declines steadily over the rest of the day, especially late morning.

What the research shows

• Lab studies on reasoning and short‑term memory find people perform logic and memory tasks fastest and most accurately from about 8 a.m. to around 2 p.m., with performance dropping off afterward.

• A review of time‑of‑day and cognition concludes that cognitive performance typically peaks during a narrow window in the first half of the day and then declines as the day goes on.

• Order your daily blocks to allocate mornings to the three (3) key tasks that you listed earlier.

Step 5.

Estimate time, delegate, and block your day

I got into a habit of estimating the amount of time I would need for each key task and then deciding where that time would come from. Some would come from delegating research and first draft preparation to individuals on my leadership team with personal knowledge of the area and responsibility for advising me on the approach I should take. We would collaborate on the final draft.

• How long will this really take if I focus?

• What resources do I need (data, people, decisions, space, tools)?

• What would be a potential obstacle, and how can I overcome it early?

Step 6.

Focus

Now translate priorities into time.

• Reserve calendar blocks for your three key tasks, as if they were meetings with your future self. My graduate school mentor, Mickey Smith, would always reserve the first two hours he was in the office to write. He was a prolific writer and authored an amazing array of textbooks, peer-reviewed articles, and general interest books. He did it using the first two hours when he was most productive and when no one would disturb him.

• Notice that I have not mentioned reading emails. I instructed my administrative assistant to review my emails when she arrived in the morning and respond to those for which she had knowledge or responsibility. She would also seek clarification and schedule meetings without first asking for my permission. We had an understanding that she was to have access to my emails and calendar and, within acceptable limits, she was free to respond to them in a way that was proper. The ones that were a high priority for which she felt I needed input would be brought to my attention personally when we had our daily strategy sessions at 11:30 each morning.

Time blocking is how leaders protect their attention. The sad reality is that the more you are interrupted, the less you accomplish.

Research has shown that whenever a leader is interrupted, it takes twenty-three minutes for them to regain their focus and move forward with whatever they were doing before they were interrupted. This increases stress and forces them into hurried decision-making. The authors of the study concluded that the leaders in their study made up for the interruption, but the time came at the expense of quality work. Blocking time means no interruptions, if you want to accomplish the set priorities.

Up until this point, you have been working within the two-hour block you reserved for yourself. You have meditated, prayed, organized your day, and decided on priorities. Now is the time to begin implementing the plan.

Step 7.

Start the Day

• Begin with the first important block, even if just for 10–15 minutes.

• Resist the urge to warm up with email or low-value tasks. I used to find myself using my time and resources to properly label file folders until my assistant pointed out that whenever she saw me sorting and filing, it was avoidance behavior. She would step in and forcefully take away the task, so I was forced back to the priority I had been avoiding.

• Momentum beats perfection. A leader who consistently starts the day with meaningful work gets more of the right things done across weeks and months.

Step 8. Reserve the less productive time of the day for less demanding tasks

• Push lower‑stakes, routine, and administrative work into mid‑ to late‑afternoon, when attention and accuracy naturally decline. This includes responding to emails, returning phone calls, or conducting meetings.

• Try this approach for three weeks and let me know if it makes a difference in measurable ways, less stress, greater productivity, or an increased sense of control in an often-chaotic environment.

Step 9.

Evening reflection and self-acknowledgement

At the end of the day, take 5 minutes to reflect:

• Did I make progress on my three (3) priorities?

• What derailed me, and how can I protect my time better tomorrow?

• What’s one win I want to acknowledge? This is important. Leaders sometimes take for granted that their efforts are often unrecognized, and they often are. My observation for my leadership mentees is that if you do your job well, people will assume it was easy and take success for granted. Sometimes, the only reward you will receive is to pat yourself on the back at the end of a long and grueling day.

I am reminded of the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14–30). In this familiar passage, Jesus relates the story of a servant who made wise use of the resources that were provided to them. In response, the master who had shared the resources with the servant observed Well done, good and faithful servant. If you make wise use of the resources provided to you, in this case, time, you may confidently make that observation at the end of a hectic but productive day.

Once you’ve restructured your days with these habits, the next level is building support systems that prevent trivia from piling up in your head in the first place.

Power tools for dealing with trivia.

When I first began trying to manage my time more effectively, I kept a small stack of 3 x 5 ruled cards in my shirt pocket. When I thought of an idea, saw a trend that I wanted to explore more extensively, or was struck by something someone said or related in a story, I wrote the essential details down on the card and shoved it back into my pocket. Later in the day or sometimes at the end of the week, I would try to decipher my handwriting and remember why I made the notation. Sometimes I was successful, but many times the importance of the observation or snippet of a conversation was lost in time. I discarded the card, and the thought that went into it went into the waste basket. I am sure that many important ideas disappeared when the trash was emptied. We have all had the experience of covering every surface of our workstation or office wall with Post-it Notes.

Later, recognizing the limitations of index cards and Post-it Notes, I moved on to keeping a journal. The first one was leather-bound and contained 150 pages. I became obsessive about recording meetings, telephone conversations, and many of my projects had their origins within those pages. When I retired, I moved to a 300-page journal that often had additional pages inserted at the end of the year. Each journal started on July 1, and the last entry was recorded on June 30^th. I chose those dates because they aligned with the fiscal year of most organizations with which I was associated. Each was labeled, and when I left academia, I had accumulated 23 bound journals. I impressed on each of my mentees that taking notes, even in the midst of meetings, was a critical aspect of capturing both the content and the meaning expressed by the participants. They became the repository of all the ideas that were often recognized and then discarded because they did not take root.

I now use a combination of voice recognition for ease of interaction with several very capable artificial intelligence chatbots that not only remember the past ideas but can organize them in very enlightening ways that facilitate writing and development of new conceptual frameworks.

About the time I began using this powerful combination, I came across an article by Chris Bailey, the author of a general productivity podcast. The article, The Productivity Benefits of Capturing Ideas (9/15/22). made several important observations.

1. Our heads are for having ideas, not holding them. One of his podcast guests, David Allen, was talking about our limited mental bandwidth. Now, before you rush to conclusions about mental capacity, let me make an important distinction. Intelligent individuals have lots of ideas. Many are worthwhile, but only if they are recorded and remembered at a time and place where you can make sense of them through reflection and research.

2. Some of the things you try to keep in your head include.

· Stuff you are waiting on – reports, return phone calls, calendared events.

· Ideas you want to examine more deeply – the things you conjure up during your morning mediation for example.

· Distractions – these are the events that intrude into your conscious state and must be triaged as you move through the day.

· Important ideas and insights that also occur at odd moments throughout the day and for which you try to make a mental note. If you are engaged in the knowledge industry (e.g., higher education or health care) you are flooded with important insights that are worthy of exploration, if you can only retain a record of the concept until you have time and capacity to explore it in more detail. This is where technology can help.

3. Here are three (3) methods that I have used that greatly increase my capacity to offload useless information and capture important ideas.

· Always have a notepad close at hand. Jotting down brief notes to yourself can serve as a reminder after you complete the task at hand. Just don’t raise it to an artform. Post It notes are often ridiculed for their ubiquitous nature, but they too have a valuable place in our organizational environment. I keep my journal close at hand for more detailed observations or to sketch out an idea.

· Voice recognition is an important adjunct to the desktop environment. I prop up my iPhone next to my keyboard and interact with it often. I can ask Siri for the spelling of a technical term, and, if I need background on the correct usage of the term, she obligingly gives me more detail that I sometimes need, but I don’t have to take my eyes off my screen to capture the essence of what she provided. Voice recognition becomes even more powerful when it is used to dictate ideas, request literature searches or simply to take note of a passing idea. Voice recognition technology has become one of the most powerful tools for frictionless idea capture and cognitive offloading in our increasingly idea-driven world. Instead of pausing to type, hunt for a notepad, or risk losing a fleeting thought while fumbling with apps, you can simply speak your ideas aloud - raw, unfiltered, and in real time. This dramatically lowers the barrier to recording insights, whether you’re driving, walking the dog, or lying awake at 3 a.m. By outsourcing the mechanical act of writing to your voice, you free up mental bandwidth for deeper thinking, pattern recognition, and creativity. What once required deliberate effort now happens effortlessly, turning your brain from a leaky bucket of half-remembered ideas into a more reliable engine of thought. In a world drowning in information but starving for original thinking, voice recognition isn’t just convenient - it’s a genuine cognitive multiplier.

· When you have an idea or are sharing your thoughts with others via email, always send a copy to yourself. You can always check your sent mail, but I find it is easier to remember the context and even the individuals who you shared the idea with if you simply include yourself as one of the recipients.

It is also important when you are reading a technical paper or opinion paper to copy and paste key concepts into an email. Remember to include the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) so you can find the source material and permit accurate attribution.

For many leaders, time management is no longer about squeezing more into the day- it’s about making better decisions about where attention goes. Tools like Siri, ChatGPT, or Otter.ai allow ideas to be captured instantly, meetings to be summarized automatically, and priorities to be clarified in real time. The real advantage isn’t efficiency alone, but perspective: AI can identify patterns in how time is spent, helping leaders shift from reactive schedules to intentional focus. In an environment where demands are constant and interruptions inevitable, those who learn to delegate not just to people - but to intelligent systems - gain a decisive edge.

We are in a new information age where best intentions and a sharp mind are not sufficient to extract essential information from the deluge that we face daily. If you are to function effectively as a leader, you must develop new and effective strategies for managing your most valuable resource – time.

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You saw what higher education had become - bloated, bureaucratic, disconnected from the people it was supposed to serve - and you decided to do something about it. You designed the curriculum yourself. You recruited the first class personally. You knew every student’s name, every instructor’s quirk, every friction point in the student experience. You were, in the truest sense, the program.

And it worked.

The team you created mastered technology and created a curriculum free of many of the restraints that hindered growth and change; now the program is attracting a growing number of excited students. You have met the challenges of an accrediting body that quietly rooted for you but held you to outdated standards. The organization chart is no longer a single dot. What used to be accomplished over a cup of coffee now requires committee approval and endorsement by the university administration. Your organization has now reached a crucial threshold. You, as the founding dean and leader, must now trust others with making decisions that you used to make and then move on. You have reached the stage of growth that many leaders experience – delegation dread. The quiet crisis that visits every founder-educator at the exact moment their success demands that they begin to let go.

In traditional higher education, this tension is baked into the institution. Shared governance, faculty senates, and administrative layers - these are the established containers for distributed decision-making, however imperfect. But you didn’t build a traditional institution. You built something lean, intentional, and deeply personal. And now the very intimacy that made it exceptional is making it nearly impossible to scale.

This is not a failure of vision. It’s the inevitable collision between the founder you had to be and the leader you need to become.

Over my years in higher education administration, I have frequently witnessed leaders who could envision a successful future for their organization but could not figure out how to get it there. It reminds me of two quotations that are attributed to one of the most visionary leaders of our time, Thomas Alva Edison. Edison was a prolific inventor, with 1,093 U.S. Patents to his credit. What is most notable is that he created his famous Menlo Park laboratory in New Jersey (1876–1890), which created the phonograph (1877), Incandescent light bulb (1879), first commercial electrical power station (1882), and then followed with an entire electrical distribution system that led to The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) being created in 1935.

The two quotations that are attributed to him and that reflect his philosophy are

A vision without execution is hallucination.

and

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

These two philosophical statements should be on the mind of every leader who is attempting to move an organization forward today. It takes more than a passing thought to realize a vision, and then it takes work, lots of work, by a dedicated team that shares that vision. I lost count of people who came up to me at professional meetings or later in my life with a remark that you created a very innovative school of pharmacy without acknowledging the work and dedication that went into making that vision a reality. They would generally make some deliberately vague comment about how you made it look easy. The inference was that it was probably just luck.

Admittedly, timing is important. When you are a startup, you must seize opportunities that other, more well-funded programs cautiously ignore. They would prefer to let someone else take the risks, but then they are quick to adopt those successes and pour resources into scaling. The advantage that innovative leaders and business startups have is that they can make decisions more quickly and then round up the resources needed to pilot the idea. One of the most important resources that a leader can possess is the ability to attract the right individuals who share both the vision and the willingness to take the risk.

In the Anatomy of a Startup, I outlined the creation of a new innovative school of pharmacy and observed that

I have found that you will receive a significant amount of interest from three types of faculty and administrators:

• Those interested in a challenge

• Those who are unhappy

• Those who are respected as teachers and administrators and who want a chance to demonstrate what they can accomplish.

Your goal is to obtain as many individuals from category three as you can find. Those interested in a challenge will typically become bored or disruptive, neither of which is a desirable arrangement. Those who are unhappy will typically be unhappy in a new program for many of the same reasons they were unhappy where they were. The trick is locating and attracting individuals who are passionate about teaching and are capable of dealing with change.

The same is true for any new startup. Equally important is that once you have found the right team, you must allow them to succeed. That requires more than leadership; it requires a willingness on the part of the leader to delegate to the team as they demonstrate capability.

Extensive research has focused on startups and the path they follow either to success or oblivion.

The Five-Year Wall: When Founders Become the Ceiling

Delegation is often misunderstood as a luxury - something leaders earn the right to do once their organization reaches a certain size. In reality, it is a foundational discipline, especially for startups. Early-stage leaders are typically builders, problem-solvers, and decision-makers by instinct, which makes letting go of control both difficult and counterintuitive. Yet the very behaviors that fuel a startup’s launch can become constraints on its growth. Effective delegation is not about offloading tasks; it is about transferring ownership, building capability in others, and creating the conditions for scale. For startup leaders, the ability to delegate is less a management technique and more a turning point - one that separates ventures that stall from those that evolve into sustainable organizations.

There is a persistent and well-documented pattern in startup development that deserves far more attention than it typically receives: the founder who built a company from nothing often becomes the single greatest obstacle to its continued growth - usually around the five-year mark.

According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, roughly 48.4% of businesses fail within five years, making the five-year mark a recognized inflection point in startup survival. But the more interesting story isn’t about businesses that simply die - it’s about the ones that stall, plateau, or quietly decay while still technically alive, victims not of market failure but of leadership failure at the top. The most rigorous academic work on this subject comes from Harvard Business School professor Noam Wasserman, whose landmark 2008 Harvard Business Review article and subsequent book The Founder’s Dilemmas (Princeton University Press, 2012) drew on a decade of data from thousands of startups.

In Wasserman’s study of 6,000 startups, 65% of those that shuttered did so because of people problems, compared to 35% with product, functional, or market problems. This has led many to conclude that most, if not all, businesses reach a five-year ceiling where the entrepreneurial instincts that gave birth to the product or service are no longer sufficient to grow the enterprise.

For many founders, their startups are more than just businesses - they are deeply personal projects, often described as their baby. This emotional attachment fuels a sense of ownership that makes it difficult to entrust their vision to others. Founders tend to believe they are uniquely qualified to lead their companies, and in the early stages of development, this may have been true, but Wasserman’s research highlights that entrepreneurs consistently overestimate their chances of success compared to similar ventures. This overconfidence can blind founders to their own limitations, one of which is the inability to delegate effectively.

Psychology: Why Founders Can’t Let Go

The reluctance to delegate is not simply stubbornness. It is deeply wired into the founder’s identity and psychology.

Many founders are driven by a fear that if they hand off responsibilities, things will fall apart. This fear manifests in micromanagement or an inability to delegate, which suffocates the company’s ability to grow. Employees feel micromanaged, lose autonomy, and the company becomes reliant on the founder for every major decision, limiting the development of a capable leadership team. Psychological research on delegation avoidance in leadership reveals that the hesitation to delegate isn’t usually about quality; it’s rooted in a lack of trust. Founders often wrap their reluctance to delegate in narratives of perfection, but this quality protection hoax is more damaging than productive. Perceived perfectionism often masks a fear of losing control rather than an actual commitment to high standards.

The Inflection Point: When the Bottleneck Has a Name

In the early days, the founder and a small team could sit around a table and hash out decisions in real time - no complex layers of communication, no conflicting priorities. As the company grows, the inbox overflows, email messages pile up, and key decisions stall waiting for the founder’s input. This is the first major growth ceiling most startups hit: the point where founder involvement in every decision becomes the bottleneck.

Research from CREO Consulting maps this trajectory in terms of headcount rather than years, but the timing often aligns: the first inflection point occurs once headcount reaches approximately 50 people - the point at which the founder has typically hired everyone and has been responsible for most critical decisions. A second inflection point occurs around 125–150 employees, when founders often find there are employees they did not hire and do not interact with regularly. This is when defined business functions and formal organizational structures must emerge. It’s about identity, not incompetence. Many founders are extraordinarily capable people - but they are capable of founding, not necessarily of managing on a scale. These are genuinely different skills. The tragedy isn’t that founders are bad leaders; it’s that they are often excellent leaders for one phase of a company and not the next.

Anatomy of a Pharmacy School Startup

This research is not restricted to profit ventures; it also applies to higher education innovation and startups. The picture below is of the Bernard J. Dunn School of Pharmacy Leadership team. From a school of just three full-time individuals in the first year (Dean, Assistant Dean, and Administrative Assistant), we grew into a team of nine hardworking individuals who could meet in my living room. Communication was quick and reliable, and everyone assumed both responsibility and workload that most individuals would have avoided.

They shepherded the school of pharmacy through the first four critical years of the startup, culminating in the receipt of full accreditation. It was personally satisfying when our inaugural graduating class matched the first-time pharmacy licensing passage rates of other, more established schools. Ironically, it occurred at the five-year mark that most researchers predict represents a challenge for new startups. We were acutely aware that to continue growing, we would need a more formal decision-making process that involved delegation. The initial leadership team was not just employees - they were cultural co-founders. They set the tone, imprinted behaviors and values, and drew others to the school of pharmacy.

What Healthy Delegation Actually Looks Like

Effective delegation is not about offloading work - it’s about transferring ownership and accountability. Most founders don’t struggle to delegate tasks; they struggle to delegate decisions. Handing off a task is easy. But handing off a decision - like how to approach the creation of a totally online traditional and non-traditional curriculum and then, in a few years, a totally new curricular focus (e.g., Pharmacogenomics) as part of a joint venture with George Washington University, feels much riskier.

All of this happened over the next five years, when many leadership teams would relax and savor their accomplishment. We revamped our strategy to reflect the challenges of a growing and evolving organizational framework. We quickly realized that the inflection point isn’t strictly calendar-driven - it’s triggered by organizational complexity, typically arriving around 15–50 employees for many startups, which in a normally growing business lands right around the five-year window.

We moved from a relatively static strategic plan that was discussed once or twice a year to a dynamic strategic plan that was featured at every Executive Committee Meeting and served as the basis for the twice annual State of the School Report. We also added the formation of Task Forces to the original academic committees where a cross-committee focus was needed.

The image below is an abstraction from a Memo distributed to the faculty and staff (8/8/2014).

Along the way, I formed personal impressions of how and when effective delegation occurs. In the remaining space, I would like to explore some of those impressions.

Delegation Dread

Relinquishing control - Some leaders intellectually want to delegate but feel a visceral discomfort with uncertainty. This is particularly acute with a newly formed leadership team. Delegation means accepting outcomes you can’t fully predict or control. For anxiety-prone or high-stakes-oriented leaders, this ambiguity is genuinely distressing. The trade-off is more important. When people recognize that the founder is sharing the responsibility for the outcome, they become even more diligent in assuring success. The cruel paradox of delegation dread is that hoarding responsibility - whether from inadequacy fears or authority protection - actually produces the outcome the leader fears most. Teams become dependent and underdeveloped; the leader becomes a bottleneck; their reputation suffers, and their authority erodes organically. Delegation, done well, is what builds a leader’s stature, not diminishes it.

The leaders who delegate most confidently tend to have a secure sense that their value lies in judgment, vision, and development of others - not in being the one who executes every task. I used to remark to my leadership mentees that if I received five years of dedication and personal growth before they moved on, we would both be winners.

Resisting the Urge to Make the Startup Your Identity - Many leaders - especially founders, technical experts promoted into management, or lifelong high achievers - tie their sense of self to getting things done personally. Being seen as someone who works hard and delivers becomes their defining trait. As a result, delegating feels less like a practical handoff and more like giving away part of who they are. Their self-worth is wrapped up in execution.

Hard work and high output are admirable in a startup environment, but they must never become a substitute for effectiveness. Delegation is more than a time-saving tool - at its best, it is an act of development. When you delegate, you are not offloading work; you are transferring growth. A leader who holds onto every challenging task, believing it is their obligation to handle it personally, inadvertently denies their team the experiences that build real capability and confidence.

Match Tasks to People - When assigning work, think beyond who is most qualified. Consider who will grow the most from the experience. Align tasks with each person’s strengths, skills, and development goals. Delegation is both a productivity strategy and a coaching opportunity.

This requires two things from a leader: an honest understanding of each team member’s current capabilities and the willingness to stretch people beyond their comfort zone. When someone falls short, that is not the end - it is information. Reassess, adjust, and try again.

I once asked a faculty member with a strong oncology background to explore the emerging intersection of oncology and pharmacogenomics. The use of biomarkers to guide treatment choice was still a developing concept, and I needed someone to lead that area of our curriculum. When I raised it with him, he was candid - he knew very little about the subject. I appreciated his honesty, and I gave a simple task: find a conference where the topic would be featured.

A few weeks later, he returned with a lead - a conference in San Francisco that was relevant but expensive. He assumed I would say no. Instead, I told him to register and report back on what he found.

When he returned from the conference, he came straight to my office. His first words were, I had no idea. That experience changed him. He shed his hesitation about a fast-moving field and became one of the most vocal advocates among the faculty for integrating pharmacogenomics into the curriculum.

Be Clear on Outcomes, Not Methods - When you delegate, define what success looks like - the deadline, the quality standard, the expected result. What you should not define is exactly how the work gets done. Giving people ownership over their approach fosters creativity and personal investment. Prescribing every step does the opposite. In the early stages of the pharmacy school, we would agree on strategic initiatives at our annual retreat. It would be codified in the strategic plan and then would not be visited until the next retreat a year later, when the results would typically be a mixed bag. Some goals had been carried out, but they were typically limited to aggressive committee chairpersons who poured time and effort into their charge. There was also limited crosspollination with initiatives that needed coordination across several committees. In 2011, we shifted from retreat-driven plans to formal committee charges. They would begin with open discussions at the retreat, typically in May, but would be codified into a formal charge to all committees, both standing and task forces. The formal charges became part of the strategic plan, and more importantly, they would be shared with the faculty and staff at the first regular faculty/staff meeting in the fall.

Set Checkpoints, Not Micromanagement - Agree on check-ins at the outset so that progress stays visible without requiring constant oversight. This helps both sides: the team member feels supported, and the leader stays informed without hovering.

In practice, we addressed this through regularly scheduled Executive Committee meetings. Each member - and occasionally outside guests - was expected to formally report on progress toward the components of the strategic plan they owned. This eliminated a common leadership pitfall: assigning a critical task and then quietly assuming it will get done. You have to build in the expectation that the person responsible will either complete the task within a reasonable timeframe or proactively account for any delay.

Resist the Rescue Reflex - When someone struggles with a delegated task, the natural instinct is to take it back. Resist that impulse. Step into coach, not to reclaim. If people learn that struggling leads to being relieved of responsibility, they will never develop the resilience they need. Helping someone work through difficulty teaches them far more than removing the difficulty ever could.

Accept Good Enough as Sufficient - An 80% solution delivered by someone who truly owns it is often more valuable than a perfect solution reclaimed and finished by the leader. Perfectionism is the most common reason delegation fails.

The Real Shift: From Doing to Leading

Delegation anxiety is something nearly every leader struggles with. But the essential mental shift is this: moving from I am responsible for doing this to I am responsible for this getting done well. That distinction - simple as it sounds - is what separates a manager from a true leader.

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He made his observation in the late-1990s when things were relatively uncomplicated and university presidents, much like their counterparts in healthcare, were largely traditional leaders of their respective organizations. Things have changed dramatically since then.

The average tenure of a university president at the time I spoke with my mentor was approximately 9 years. Today, the average tenure has dropped precipitously to 5.9 years, and the trend is accelerating. The average dropped to 4.9 years in 2025. What’s more, a majority of those currently serving don’t think they will be in their current role in five years. And those presidents, according to the survey, which ACE conducts every five years, aren’t leaving for some other college’s top job. Instead, they are looking at possible consultant roles, returning to the faculty, or working in a nonprofit outside of higher education. The American Council on Education Pulse Survey found higher education leaders grappling with intense federal policy shifts, financial pressures, and the rapid integration of new technologies.

The chart below illustrates a major source of pressure on both CEOs and university presidents. Costs of their products and services have been rising faster than the cost of living for years and show no signs of abating.

One author, commenting on the turbulence in 2025, noted that College presidents faced an extraordinarily challenging year in 2025, marked by high-profile resignations, forced departures, and a wave of leadership instability across U.S. higher education institutions. What began as simmering tensions from previous years erupted into a full-blown crisis, driven by a perfect storm of political pressures, financial strains, and campus controversies.

Common drivers in early resignation by university presidents are.

• Board–president conflicts.

• Political pressure and public scrutiny

• Financial stress and enrollment declines

• Campus crises (activism, scandals, budget cuts)

• Personal burnout from the role’s fundraising and political demands

• Rapidly advancing technology and the inability of many institutions to adapt.

A striking illustration of how various factors - free speech principles, campus politics, donor influence, public scrutiny, and crisis management - can collide explosively in the public eye occurred during the December 2023 congressional hearing on antisemitism at elite universities.

On December 5, 2023, the presidents of Harvard (Claudine Gay), the University of Pennsylvania (Elizabeth “Liz” Magill), and MIT (Sally Kornbluth) appeared before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce to address rising antisemitism on college campuses following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

A pivotal exchange came when Rep. Elise Stefanik repeatedly asked each president whether a student calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their university’s code of conduct on bullying or harassment. All three initially avoided a straightforward yes-or-no answer, emphasizing context and free expression policies.

• Harvard’s Claudine Gay responded: It can be, depending on the context.

• UPenn’s Liz Magill said something to the effect that it depends on whether the speech crossed into conduct amounting to harassment (often summarized as context-dependent).

• MIT’s Sally Kornbluth gave a similar qualified response.

The clipped video of these exchanges quickly went viral, drawing widespread criticism for appearing deliberately evasive or insufficiently condemnatory of calls for genocide.

The fallout was swift and severe:

• Magill resigned as UPenn president on December 9, 2023—just four days later—amid pressure from alumni, donors (including the withdrawal of a major gift), and the board of trustees’ Wharton School.

• Gay resigned from Harvard on January 2, 2024, marking the shortest presidency in the university’s history (though additional plagiarism allegations also contributed to the pressure).

• Kornbluth remained in her role at MIT despite some calls for her resignation.

The episode sparked intense debate about university leadership, free speech boundaries, and how presidents handle public crises. At the time, observers and critics quipped that future Ivy League presidents might benefit from mandatory training in crisis communications before facing congressional scrutiny.

Facing Forward

Universities and health systems share common institutional DNA. Both are professional bureaucracies built around highly autonomous experts, complex funding systems, and deep public trust. As those foundations are disrupted by demographic, financial, and political forces, leaders in both sectors are discovering that managing uncertainty - not preserving stability - has become the central challenge of institutional leadership. They also suffer from another common trait that makes rapid response to change and chaos difficult, if not impossible. I examined this trait in the last post on The Pragmatic Leader. Because of the complex environments in which they exist, leaders in both health care and higher education surround themselves with support staff that specializes in managing the complexities of their respective areas. Unfortunately, as I noted in the post, this phenomenon has led to the inability of organizations to adjust and alter course quickly.

Management scholars often classify universities and hospitals as professional bureaucracies.

This concept comes from the work by Henry Mintzberg, titled The Structuring of Organizations.[1] He described professional bureaucracies as organizations where

• Highly trained professionals hold significant autonomy

• Authority is distributed rather than centralized

• Cultural norms can outweigh formal hierarchy.

The work of these institutions is highly structured, regulated from within, and subject to added scrutiny from accrediting bodies, licensing organizations, and - in the case of public institutions - legislative oversight. The combined weight of these interacting forces nearly guarantees that change will be glacial at best and nonexistent in many critical areas.

Corporate CEOs and university presidents both navigate rapid, multifaceted change—driven by technology (e.g., AI), economic pressures, shifting societal expectations, and disruption—but their strategies differ significantly due to organizational structures, accountability, and stakeholder dynamics. CEOs operate in hierarchical, profit-oriented environments with clearer lines of authority, enabling faster execution. University presidents lead in decentralized, mission-driven institutions governed by shared faculty input, tenure protections, and diverse constituencies (students, alumni, donors, regulators), which demand consensus and cultural sensitivity. These differences shape how each group approaches change management, though there is some convergence as universities face corporate-like financial and operational pressures.

Corporate CEOs: Emphasis on Agility, Speed, and Execution

CEOs prioritize nimbleness in an era of perpetual organizational upheaval. Their strategies focus on rapid adaptation to maintain competitiveness, with tools like restructuring, technology adoption, and talent optimization. Key elements include.

• Decisive, top-down action with supporting collaboration: They break down silos, position C-suite leaders as enterprise-wide thinkers (not just functional heads), and reduce bureaucracy for quicker decisions.

• Frequent, transparent communication and motivation: CEOs stress winning hearts and minds, providing regular updates to align employees on outcomes amid uncertainty, and balancing support with performance demands to avoid burnout.

• Board partnerships and external networks: They engage boards for strategy and risk input and tap outside networks for diverse insights on emerging disruptions like AI or geopolitics.

• Focus on measurable outcomes and superpowers: Strategies target speed, technology integration, talent retention, and resilience. Change is often disruptive - restructuring, layoffs, or innovation - to drive efficiency, revenue growth, and shareholder value.

CEO turnover remained elevated in 2025, with a notable number of departures prompted by activist investor campaigns - and boards have responded by emphasizing a measured, long-term focus on resilience over reactive leadership changes. This signals that boards are done gambling on symbolic figureheads who can’t hold the organization together under pressure. There has been a noticeable shift in boards’ approach to CEO succession planning.

Boards - especially in the current environment- prefer programmatic presidents with symbolic capability, not the reverse. The ideal candidate can execute first and inspire second. What boards are specifically penalizing is the purely symbolic leader who lacks operational credibility, because.

• Activist investors and institutional shareholders are scrutinizing management competence more aggressively.

• Post-pandemic complexity (AI disruption, geopolitical risk, workforce volatility) demands leaders who understand their organizations deeply.

• Succession crises caused by over-reliance on a single charismatic figure have made boards more risk-averse.

The safest hire for most boards today is someone who can run the machine and walk into a room and make a case of why it matters. The purely symbolic president is a luxury - or a risk - most boards can no longer justify.

University Presidents: Emphasis on Consensus, Trust-Building, and Mission Alignment

Presidents operate in environments of distributed authority and deeply rooted traditions, where top-down mandates alone often fail (roughly 80% of higher ed change initiatives collapse due to poor stakeholder buy-in or misaligned priorities). Strategies are coalition-driven, incremental, or transformative, only with broad support and guided by models that prioritize culture and people. Key elements include:

• Coalition-building and early stakeholder engagement: Presidents form guiding coalitions, co-design solutions with faculty, students, staff, and boards through retreats and listening sessions, and address resistance upfront. People support what they help create.

• Trust-focused cultural transformation: They unfreeze mindsets through dialogue and debate, reinforce individual adoption, and use Academic Communities for grassroots scaling. Visible leadership builds trust over time rather than imposing change.

• Storytelling, listening, and unifying diverse audiences: As communicators and storytellers, presidents balance analytical planning with emotional intelligence to inspire across opposing groups - tenured faculty, students, donors, and communities - while having opposites, sometimes to the detriment of the institution.

• Long-term, mission-driven, holistic focus: Change aligns with societal needs and institutional identity (“Who are we?”), avoiding fads. They expect ecosystem ripple effects (e.g., how a new system impacts pedagogy and workload) and emphasize sustainability over speed. This yields slower but often more enduring change, suited to shared governance, though it can hinder institutional response to crises (e.g., budget shortfalls or enrollment drops).

The future is redefining the present.

Whether you are in the corporate world with a health-system CEO who is trying to manage almost unmanageable change or a university president managing declining enrollment and faced with a public that no longer trusts them with their children, the messages are clear. The era of the Symbolic Leader is fading. What is replacing it is an evolved form of the programmatic leader - one less concerned with embodying institutional tradition than with rebuilding institutional architecture. The next generation of health-system CEOs and university presidents will look less like figureheads and more like enterprise architects. Their mandate will not simply be to manage these institutions, but to redesign them - balancing financial survival, political legitimacy, and professional culture in environments defined by persistent uncertainty.

This model has taken hold as boards increasingly prioritize financial sustainability and operational discipline over prestige and symbolic visibility. The emerging leader tends to arrive from a recognizable set of backgrounds: a former provost with a strong administrative reputation, the head of a large academic medical center, or occasionally a nontraditional executive drawn from outside higher education or healthcare entirely. Regardless of origin, the focus is consistent - financial restructuring, operational efficiency, enrollment management, technological change, and cost control. These presidents and CEOs behave far more like corporate system executives than traditional academic leaders, emphasizing measurable performance and structural transformation over culture and continuity.

The institutions they inherit are themselves in motion. Ivy-covered buildings and fixed lecture halls are giving way to modern, flexible spaces designed for collaboration and adaptability. Courses increasingly blend face-to-face small-group sessions with online knowledge transfer, dissolving the old boundaries between physical and digital learning. In time, place may become largely irrelevant - what will distinguish institutions from one another is not their campuses but their content: the difference between static, outdated instruction and dynamic learning experiences shaped by artificial intelligence and virtual simulation. The leaders of tomorrow will not simply be stewards of this transition. They will be expected to drive it.

You don’t have to look far to begin to see the outline of the future in new prototype institutions that marry the knowledge of higher education with dynamic opportunities for collaboration that help the faculty, students, and organizations with whom they partner.

Rising along the banks of the Potomac River, not far from where I write, stands the new Amazon headquarters - the company’s much-anticipated HQ2. Its arrival coincided with an ambitious initiative by Virginia Tech to establish an Innovation Campus at Potomac Yard designed to complement its main campus in Blacksburg. Rather than a simple expansion, this represents a bold joint venture with one of the most innovative commercial enterprises in the country. Virginia Tech’s vision is a $1 billion, one-million-square-foot, technology-focused campus in Alexandria, Virginia, drawing heavily on the Cornell Tech campus in New York City as its model and inspiration.

Virginia Tech was not alone for long. George Mason University soon announced its own plans to develop an advanced computing degree program in Arlington, extending the reach of its existing Fairfax campus into the heart of the region’s growing tech corridor. Binding these efforts together is the Northern Virginia Technology Council, whose active encouragement of public-private partnerships has helped turn what might have been isolated institutional ambitions into something far greater. Taken together, what is emerging along this stretch of Northern Virginia is something many observers are already calling a glimpse into the future of higher education.

Timothy Sands, President of Virginia Tech, speaking at the ribbon cutting for the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus (2/28/26), noted the obvious: Virginia Tech is now embedded in the growing concentration of talent, businesses, and opportunities located near Amazon HQ2 and National Landing, a place where we could build lasting relationships with partners across government and industry. Sands stressed that this campus, at this premier location, would alter the face of what he called the innovation economy in the Washington, DC region, a place with an incredible concentration of talent.

It shows that higher education is moving toward a networked, public‑private, regionally embedded model, closely integrated with major employers and tech economies rather than running as isolated, campus‑bound institutions. The Virginia Tech Innovation Campus is a bold joint venture with Amazon, signaling a shift toward co-designed programs and infrastructure with large corporations. It also shows that coordinated partnerships, not solo campuses, are the future of higher education. This may serve as a glimpse into the future of higher education, but it will take a new type of university president to make it work.

A useful guide for the way we pick and support future leaders is the CEO Genome Project - a 10-year study drawing on assessments of over 17,000 C-suite executives. It is the most compelling empirical resource for structuring leadership development in the future. They found that high-performing CEOs do not stand out for making great decisions all the time; they stand out for being more decisive, making decisions earlier, faster, and with greater conviction, even amid ambiguity and incomplete information. In their data, people described as decisive were 12 times more likely to be high-performing CEOs.

The CEO Genome finding that the highest-IQ executives struggle most with decisiveness maps almost perfectly onto the university president profile - highly educated, intellectually complex, trained to consider all perspectives. Some executives with the highest IQs were the ones who often struggled most with decisiveness - they looked at almost too much complexity and ended up bottlenecking organizations. One author characterized the most successful leaders as having the ability to

· Decide with conviction and speed

· Practice relentless reliability

· Master relationships

· Adapting proactively to changing circumstances.

Redefining the University Leader

The American Council on Education (ACE) has long served as a touchstone for leadership development in American higher education. Its flagship offerings - the ACE Fellows Program and the Harvard Seminar for New Presidents - represent two distinct but complementary approaches to preparing the leaders who run our colleges, universities, and academic health systems.

The Fellows Program is a long-horizon investment: a pipeline for aspiring senior executives who shadow presidents, engage with institutional strategy, and develop the budgetary and political fluency that executive leadership demands. The Harvard Seminar takes a different approach — an intensive immersion for newly appointed presidents who need rapid orientation to the realities of the role. Alumni consistently point to the peer networks forged there as among the program’s most enduring returns.

Both programs have traditionally emphasized decision-making, strategic thinking, and the stewardship of institutional culture. These remain essential. But the landscape has shifted. Recent ACE surveys and briefings reveal a sharp rise in attention to policy volatility, regulatory pressure, and the kind of real-time judgment calls that arise when precedent offers no reliable guidance. Premature presidential departures are climbing, and the reasons are instructive: leaders are being tested not by the known challenges of the role, but by an environment of compounding uncertainty that no succession plan fully anticipates.

This is the defining condition of contemporary institutional leadership. The old model - the symbolic president as embodiment of institutional continuity - is giving way to something more complex and consequential. The next generation of university presidents and academic health system CEOs will need to function less as stewards of tradition and more as architects of organizational resilience. Their charge will not simply be to manage institutions, but to reimagine them - threading together financial sustainability, political legitimacy, and professional culture under conditions where the rules are changing faster than the playbooks.

That is a different kind of leader, and it requires a different kind of preparation.

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[1] Mintzberg, H. (1979). The structuring of organizations: A synthesis of the research. Prentice Hall.