Regardless of how long you served as an instructional faculty member, as the institution’s Chief Academic Officer, you are no longer part of that club. You still work with and among faculty but make no mistake: You don’t have the same relationships that you previously did. You may have served as a department head or dean and think you are used to changing interactions with faculty, but the CAO role holds a specific set of foibles.

This doesn’t mean you can’t have a collegial association with your faculty; that mutual respect and commitment is more important than ever. But your interactions, communications and overall association is different and more delicate. Keep these three things in mind as you consider your own connections with faculty.

Sharing our professional experiences, especially the novel challenges faced by chief academic officers is an invaluable resource as we lead in academia. As the single national organization of and for Chief Academic Officers, ACAO endeavored in 2020 to develop and deploy a series of Town Hall Meetings. Sharing their expertise, CAO’s from a diversity of institutions participated in a series of live Town Hall meetings available at no cost.

With topics ranging from COVID-19 to The Great Resignation, seasoned professionals not only shared their expertise but welcomed questions and feedback from a community of practitioners. Recordings of the 16 discussions can be found at 

It is both expensive and time-consuming on many levels to launch a national search for every academic leadership position on campus.  Sometimes, of course, a national search is warranted for a Dean or for a Provost, but for other positions, such as department chairs, program directors, assistant and associate deans and associate/provosts, having a trained and ready “back bench” may be the best solution to maintain desired progress and efficiencies.  Admittedly, there are reasons to desire external candidates when changes and fresh perspectives are desired, but that is not always the case.  More often than not, leadership laments that there are no internal candidates ready to move up.

When colleges and universities want to retain their best, most creative, ambitious, and competent faculty and academic administrators, it is important for these people to sense a career path if they stay at the institution, and it is important to invest in their professional development so that they feel valued. With these two complementary goals in mind, the Touro College Academy of Leadership and Management (TCALM) was implemented five years ago in 2018.

The challenges we currently face getting back to a “normal” (thanks to vaccines and other immunity enhancers), are working with student impacts (including the challenges of new students whose instruction while in high school or community college was negatively impacted) and finding the technology mix that is appropriate.  We seem to be in a continuous transition state.  While in 2020, we were mainly responding without much time for reflection, we now need to perform assessments of the changes we made.  We need to assure that modifications that were improvements are not.  It is only through this assessment that our picture of the academy of the future will be realized.

Therefore, we will need to look at changes that were made in:

In June 2022, ACAO partnered with the American Conference of Academic Deans (ACAD), the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) to study the longevity of Provosts in their positions. The resulting study led to a research paper.

Factors Chief Academic Officers Consider in Deciding Whether to Remain in Their Positions

ACAO Provosts presenting at the ACE Annual Conference April 13-15, 2023 in Washington, DC. 

Many CAOs attend the ACE Annual Conference and ACAO will host a session during the meeting.  If you’re a CAO in attendance you won’t want to miss the CAO meetings ACAO has planned in addition to the sessions. 

By Patricia E. Salkin, Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost of the Graduate and Professional Divisions, Touro University

A little studied trend revealed in a new book, shows the exponential increase in the number of lawyers being appointed as college and university presidents.  Serving as a provost is often a pathway to the presidency for those interested, yet the data shows that most lawyer presidents did not previously serve as provosts or chief academic officers.  Although there is little published research about the backgrounds of provosts, it is fair to state that the typical provost does not possess a JD degree.  A 2010 Study of Chief Academic Officers of Independent Colleges and Universities published by the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) indicated that among provosts (of chief academic officers) at four-year colleges and universities, at least 90% indicated that they held a terminal degree.  The study reported that 86% of chief academic officers at independent institutions had earned a PhD and 10% had earned an EdD. Of the remaining 4%, the survey reported the provosts possessed theology degrees, JDs (less than 1%) and MDs.

            “…As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It’s not as wide as you may think.”  Campbell

Greetings!

ACAO is delighted to re-introduce our blog series. The goal of the series is to address the on-going challenges and opportunities that face our members in their Chief Academic Officer roles. The series will be penned by our members for our members, drawing on the wealth of experience that all of us have accumulated over our academic lives. We will also draw on the expertise of our Advisory Board, comprising CAO emeriti who support the work of ACAO.

Welcome to "The Chief Academic Officer" blog by ACAO

If you would like to post a blog, please send it to [email protected]