Friday Focus: Heroic leadership
July 18, 2019
— by Keith Champagne, vice chancellor for student affairs
In my previous Friday Focus columns, I have written about leadership. My views on leadership and organizational change are influenced and informed by my New Orleans Jesuit Catholic education and my years in higher education leadership and administration over the past 25 years.
A principle of leadership is “do the right thing” in spite of the opposition — leaders have to face the reality of the facts that they are presented with. They must have the wisdom to consider and weigh the options before them and they must be decisive. Thus, we need to be heroic leaders; we must envision the impossible and do it.
It is time for all of us who are leaders at whatever level of the system or university to become heroic leaders and to confidently innovate, adapt to and embrace a changing landscape. We must all come together to create a new 21st-century modern university to survive financially with our academic reputation intact. Academic excellence must always be the sine qua non to public higher education. We are going to have to cut our budget dramatically while maintaining the strength of our academic core, and present our plan to all of our stakeholders. We will have to create reconfigured, repositioned and innovative schools, colleges and academic programs.
In addition, in the new modern 21st-century university, we still need to educate the “whole person” intellectually, professionally, psychologically, culturally and morally. Tomorrow’s “whole person” cannot be whole without an educated awareness of Alaska Native and Indigenous ways of knowing and doing, diversity, inclusion, caring, and social equity and social justice.
In order to accomplish this task, we will need a highly functioning, innovative, problem-solving, results-oriented student affairs team that, day in and day out, facilitates students’ development and learning throughout the university community. Student affairs and enrollment management will be the essential drivers that keep this new modern university budget afloat through new-student recruitment, retention and academic success — all of which will continue to be critical to fulfilling the core institutional and educational mission of the university.
I had a parent in my office last week asking how will I — as the vice chancellor for student affairs at UAF — ensure a positive return on her investment by having her two children enroll at the university. I shared with her that we in Student Affairs were experts in facilitating students’ development outside of classrooms by offering student learning and experiential learning initiatives, programs, activities and events, all of which contribute to skill development and career readiness after graduation. In essence, in the modern new 21st-century university, all of our co-curricular and extracurricular programs and experiences throughout the Division of Student Affairs will have to continue to offer and strengthen the return on investment. In fact, many of our co-curricular programs and experiences continuously and consistently function as living-learning laboratories for our students — including intercollegiate athletics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks — which holistically support students by developing, nurturing and encouraging physical, intellectual, academic and athletic excellence.
Modernizing the student experience will also be sine qua non. A modern student experience actively hones cutting-edge interdisciplinary and integrative education programming, offers curricular and co-curricular activities for undergraduate and graduate students, and provides many opportunities for professional development tied to impactful leadership and community engagement.
As we continue to go forward, we must be “magis-driven leaders” — heroic leaders who encourage others around us to aim high and to keep them restlessly and resiliently focused on and pointed toward something more, something greater and for the greatest good.
Friday Focus is a column written by a different member of UAF’s leadership team every week.