1. Understand four key spheres of influence on leadership in academia.

2. Examine what each of these four spheres mean in your career and experience.

3. Consider how these spheres interact to guide your priorities, boundaries, and strategies.

4. Explore the embedded nature of leadership in academia.

5. Clarify the next steps on your leadership journey.

• You're at a choice point in your career and want an opportunity to reflect before going on to the next thing.

• You've just achieved tenure or promotion to full and want to reflect more deeply on this transition.

• You have noticed that sometimes the external demands drown out the internal pointers, and would like to change that dynamic.

• You're moving to a new position, and want to up your game.

• You're nearing the end of a career as a scholar and professor and wondering what leadership and legacy mean in this context.

When we talk about leadership, we aren’t just referring to the head of a department, school or university.  In academia, leadership encompasses the everyday skills associated with teaching, running a lab, mentoring students and peers, participating in meetings, applying for funds, etc. 

Leadership is so ubiquitous across every aspect of the faculty role that almost no one recognizes it as such.

In fact, assessment results from the hundreds of faculty who have taken the CPI 260 with us demonstrate that faculty at all ranks have a profile that is much more similar to business leaders than the general population.

There is a myth in academia that leadership=administration=the dark side. In truth, leadership is neither optional nor problematic for faculty. Leadership is the warp and weft of a career that is designed to move thought, knowledge, perspective, technology, policy, practice, product, governance, commerce, peers, society, and students in directions that matter.

I have been reflecting on my answers from the course. What is becoming clearer to me is that I am most aligned when leadership allows me to convene people around meaningful intellectual work and turn that energy into something concrete. I care deeply about systems, but I do not want my leadership path to be defined by maintaining systems that are reactive, under-imagined, or dependent on a few competent people absorbing everyone else’s lack of capacity. My anger has been useful because it shows me that I am not indifferent. I care about movement, vision, and shared responsibility. But I am also recognizing that I need to distinguish between service that builds the kind of intellectual community I value and service that simply drains me because no one has agreed on a direction. I want to build a leadership path around public intellectual life: speaking, convening, and creating meaningful spaces where scholarship, art, and community meet. 

Enrolled April 2026