bodner089

A few years ago, the dean of one of our professional colleges approached me about arranging a conversation with several community colleges, to explore creating articulation agreements. I was pleased, but also surprised, because the college had always before been a reluctant partner. Enrollments had declined in the college, however, and reduced state support had forced the university leadership to tie budgets more closely to student credit hour production. The dean knew that my staff had built strong relationships with community colleges, so it made sense to ask us to initiate a conversation. We arranged the meetings, and the assistant dean of the college accompanied my staff to the community college. As soon as everyone was introduced and took their seats, the assistant dean spoke up, saying, “We would like to create an articulation agreement between our programs and your institution. I reviewed your curriculum and prepared curriculum sheets to show how your program articulates wit...

Let us sing the praises of outreach centers! When I started this blog, I wrote about the difference between branch campuses and centers. Briefly, a campus (according to me, among others) offers complete or nearly complete programs and has a permanent facility. There is a local administration, providing a reasonably wide range of student services and support programs, although not the range one would see at the main campus. It has a resident faculty, but curriculum control and the establishment of minimum faculty credentials come primarily from the main campus. Not all branch campuses meet all of these criteria, but the description is typical. Outreach centers have a more restricted range of programs and services, probably do not have a resident faculty, and have a relatively small support staff to handle local operations. A center does have some sort of facility, so it is more than what we might call a “site,” but it probably is quite limited in the total space available. Centers, ...

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 ...

I haven’t posted on Branch Campus Life in awhile. Instead, I’ve been developing a new blog, Creating the Future , which addresses topics that could be of interest to branch campuses, but reflect my personal focus on innovation in higher education, including programs for adult learners and distance learning. You can find the new blog at www.drcharlesbird.com/creatingthefuture . You also can link to my personal web site from the blog or by clicking on this link: www.drcharlesbird.com . I will continue to post on Branch Campus Life, from time to time, to address specific branch campus topics. I know how important it is for people on branch campuses to find others with similar experiences, as a way to identify best practices, test their own ideas, or assure themselves that they are not alone. To that end, I want to mention the two annual conferences that support branch administrators. The first, NABCA, is coming up April 20-23, in Seattle. You can...

Over the years, libraries have been an important part of my life. I worked in the library, as an undergraduate, spent nearly countless hours doing research in libraries, and had library directors reporting directly to me for at least a dozen years. I’ve even published in the Journal of Academic Librarianship. I’m also genuinely impressed by the way libraries and librarians have transformed over the years. I’m confident that libraries will continue to evolve and to serve a critical function at colleges and universities. Against all that sits my belief that a disruptive environment has emerged in higher education. One prediction I’ve made is that newly emerging options will offer high quality online and hybrid programs at prices that are sharply lower than we see currently. However, even if that doesn’t happen, institutional leaders will be forced to take a hard look at programs and services, to make sure that spending is tied closely to recruitment and retention. All services and ...

I’ve taken a couple of months off from posting on this blog, as part of the transition to my “encore” career. One of the things I did over the summer was to attend a week long coach training program. I’m interested in executive coaching, in several respects, including working with individuals in transition to new jobs or to their own new career. All this led me to think about the challenges that many people face, when they accept a position as the chief administrator (CAO) of a branch campus. Some people, like me, have a regional or branch campus background, so they come into the CAO role with an understanding of the issues, politics, and so on. However, I’ve met many people whose first branch campus role is as a CAO. For example, he or she may have been a department chair or dean in a more traditional environment, although I’ve also known individuals who became CAO of a university branch, after years of service at a community college. All of these transitions bring challenges, an...

Well, the time has come: I am in my third week of “retirement.” I view it as a transition to my encore career, as a consultant, writer and (I hope) speaker. Like so many Boomers, I feel neither burned out nor worn out, and I’m excited about future possibilities. From reading and conversation, I suspect that I am relatively typical of someone in my position. I’m accustomed to working hard, then fitting in some exercise, and spending time with family and friends, as time permits. Now, I want something a little different. I intend to stay professionally active, but I also plan to take more time for the people I care about, to travel, and to explore various interests that I’ve tended to put on the back burner. On the professional side, this blog chronicles some of my emerging interests. I would like to take a positive, coaching approach toward helping organizations and individual leaders develop strategies for serving adult learners, for encouraging growth of branch campuses, and fo...