Engaged Partnership
Partnerships are critical to the success of any modern organization. Partners may provide certain services better and less expensively than you can manage within your own organization. Partners may also provide critical collaboration on important projects, blending their expertise with your own, to support more nimble and higher quality development. Branch campuses absolutely need reliable partners. Internally, campuses can partner in all sorts of interesting ways, but the most critical partners probably are main campus academic units. These often-difficult relationships can work much better if the campus and the academic unit think of each other as partners. I was fortunate to carry the title of vice president for over eight years, and I realize that position provided access and encouraged cooperation in a way that titles like campus dean or executive director may not. Regardless, I maintained that our branches would partner with any academic program, assuming we had an audience ...