The ACM co-organized a three-day professional development gathering in New York City focused on leadership on campuses.
Eight academic leadership fellows from six member institutions of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) took part in a professional development gathering in New York City designed to develop the next generation of higher education leaders. The three-day event, co-organized by the ACM and partners with two other consortia of liberal arts colleges—the Associated Colleges of the South and the New York Six—focused on its title theme, Moving Forward: Navigating the Moment, Leading Through Crisis, and Continuing Your Professional Leadership Journey.
The July 23-25 institute served as the midpoint for the ACM participants’ two-year terms as ACM-Mellon Academic Leadership Fellows. Funded through a generous $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, the fellowship program enables humanities faculty members to support strategic and operational goals on their respective campuses while also gaining new skills, knowledge, and mentorship that offers them a better understanding of the complex realities of academic leadership.
One of the ACM-Mellon fellows, Andrea Kaston Tange, a professor of English at Macalester College who serves as the special assistant to the provost for strategic initiatives, said the immersive discussions and presentations at the summer institute in New York gave her a whole new perspective on what is possible in academic leadership.
“I thought I knew positions that I could imagine myself having,” said Kaston Tange. “What I have figured out really, truly, this week is that I have to stop thinking about it in terms of positions and start thinking about it in terms of goals.”
Kaston Tange noted how Moving Forward: Navigating the Moment, Leading Through Crisis, and Continuing Your Professional Leadership Journey left her considering ways to advocate for the value of the humanities in higher education. She lamented what she sees as a decline in the public’s awareness of the value of the humanities as vital academic pursuits, but said the gathering inspired her to forge new professional relationships to help her work toward changing the dialogue around the importance of the arts, humanities, and humanistic social sciences.
“The trajectory to leadership is often through spreadsheets and budgets,” Kaston Tange observed, explaining why she would like to see more people with humanities backgrounds serve as campus leaders. “You can learn spreadsheets and budgets as a humanities person. You cannot learn humanities ways of thinking if you have always been only a ‘spreadsheets and budgets person.’ So we need people in the humanities learning budgets as opposed to budgets people being like, ‘The bottom line says no, so we’re going to cut all the foreign languages.’”
In 2022, the ACM board of directors ratified a strategic plan to guide the organization’s programming for three years. One pillar of the plan is to develop and cultivate the next generation of campus leaders. ACM’s programming, including this academic leadership fellowship, seeks to address a well-identified need facing colleges and universities. The 2023 edition of the American College President Study from the American Council on Education revealed that more than half the nation’s college or university presidents expect to step down within five years. ACE’s data also suggests institutions are experiencing more rapid presidential turnover than ever before.
The Mellon Foundation, which made July’s leadership institute possible, is one of the nation’s most prominent supporters of the arts and humanities. For more than a half-century, the foundation has viewed these disciplines as having the power to sharpen imagination and critical thinking, ultimately leading to more just communities with a deeper understanding of their complexities. By funding initiatives such as ACM’s Academic Leadership Fellowship program, Mellon strengthens the pipeline of faculty members who bring this disciplinary expertise to the work of campus leadership.
Ryan Raul Bañagale, an associate professor and chair of the music department at Colorado College, praised the ACM-Mellon Academic Leadership Fellows Program. He is one of ten faculty nominated to participant in the program by ACM member colleges and selected for the fellowship through a competitive application process.
“It’s not directive. It’s not saying, ‘You now need to go do this,’” Bañagale said of the ACM-Mellon Academic Leadership Fellows Program. “It’s, ‘Here’s what’s possible out there.’”
Bañagale, who leads CC’s Crown Center for Teaching, said he works in higher education today in large part because of an ACM program he joined as an undergraduate at CC. He said it highlighted career paths in higher education and demonstrated how humanities researchers can contribute to academia and remain highly creative. For that reason, he said the current professional development opportunity presented to him by ACM is layered with additional personal meaning.
“I’m not alone in this journey,” Bañagale said of how the summer institute strengthened relationships with colleagues at other ACM schools and from other consortia around the country. “Thinking about what we can bring individually and collectively to institutions and the larger goal of providing the best opportunities for our students as possible—this has been a really wonderful experience to think about the ways we do that on our campuses.”
During the gathering in New York City, the ACM-Mellon Academic Leadership Fellows took part in several in-depth sessions on topics including crisis management and how leaders can make their campuses more inclusive. Those sessions featured various experts in their fields, such as a crisis communications professional, academic hiring search executives, and several current and former college and university presidents, including Anne Harris of Grinnell College.
“Seeing our fellows dive so enthusiastically into the learning offered at the summer institute has me even more confident they have bright futures in academic leadership,” said Lisa Jasinski, the president of the ACM. “We are deeply grateful to the Mellon Foundation for supporting their development at a critical time in higher education for the arts and humanities.”
One of the ACM-Mellon Academic Leadership Fellows who took part in the institute was Constance Kassor, an associate professor of religious studies and special assistant to the president at Lawrence University. She said that prior to the leadership institute, most of her closest professional contacts were confined to her disciplinary field.
“The fact this opens up space to cultivate and create other networks, I think that’s huge, especially for those of us who are using this opportunity to move forward into leadership positions” Kassor said at the conclusion of the event. “Having these meetings where we have opportunities to engage with leaders at other institutions has really helped me understand more about how higher ed works.”
The current cohort of ACM-Mellon Academic Leadership Fellows conclude their two-year term in June 2025.
