Leadership in Place: How Academic Professionals Can Find Their Leadership Voice

In this stimulating collection of stories, ten academic leaders reflect from personal experience on leadership in place―an emergent mode of leadership that brings people together in order to effect organizational change. Originating from diverse sectors of the academy, each of the book's contributors brings a fresh and deeply human perspective on academic leadership theories and their effective applications.

Leadership in Place calls for a shift in attitude about leaders and leadership. It departs from the hierarchical view that academic leadership flows from a leadership position, and instead embraces a more lateral view where leadership roles are available to everyone. It calls for a rethinking of how our colleges and universities are led and organized by discussing the following:

• Importance of strong academic communities in preserving the integrity of academic programs
• Empowerment of part-time faculty by combining adaptive and transformative learning models
• Opportunities for, benefits of, and challenges in collaborative leadership
• Problems that can emerge in times of leadership transitions and possible solutions
• Concept of leadership as an attribute of the many rather than the few

Advocating for academics to reengage and recommit to their institutions, the book creates an agenda for what higher education must do to create conditions under which leadership in place is the norm rather than the exception.

Jon F. Wergin is professor of educational studies in the Ph.D. Program in Leadership and Change at Antioch University. He received his Ph.D. in educational psychology in 1973 from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. For nearly 30 years he held faculty positions at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), serving in both administrative and faculty roles, and won awards for both teaching (1996) and scholarship (1998). As a faculty member in the School of Education he taught courses in adult and higher education and coordinated the Preparing Future Faculty for the Professions program through VCU's Graduate School. In 1992, he took a leave from VCU to be the founding director of the Forum on Faculty Roles and Rewards within the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), and continued an active association with AAH until its demise in 2004, focusing his scholarship on evaluation and change in academic departments. His monograph The Collaborative Department (1994) was the first published by AAHE under the auspices of the Forum. His other books and monographs include Educating Professionals (1993, with L. Curry), which won the best Scholarly Publication award from Division I of the American Educational Research Association; Analyzing Faculty Workload (1994): Analyzing and Evaluating Educational Research (1996, 2001, and 2005, with J. McMillan): and Departmental Assessment: How Some Campuses are Effectively Evaluating the Collective Work of Faculty (AAHE, 2000, with J. N. Swingen), Which reports the results of a national survey of departmental assessment practices of the Pew Charitable Trusts. He has also published numerous journal articles on such topics as professional education, assessment, and the restructuring of faculty work, including two articles in Change magazine on accreditation and student learning (2005). His most recent book is Departments That Work: Creating and Sustaining Cultures of Excellence in Academic Departments (Anker, 2003).
Dr. Wergin is past Divisional vice president of the American Educational Research Association (Division I, Education in the Professions), and has served as chief evaluator of two national centers for research in higher education. In 2003, he completed work on a project funded by the Pew Chartable Trusts aimed at integrating efforts to assess student learning by the eight regional accrediting associations. He is a member of the National Academy for Higher Education Leadership, and has consulted with scores of national associations, accrediting bodies, and colleges and universities on issues related to evaluation and change in higher education.