In 2006 the Great Lakes Colleges Association, with initial funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, developed the GLCA Academic Leadership Institute (GALI), a program designed to engage faculty in understanding the complex factors in decision making and problem solving in a liberal arts college. Chief academic officers invite teams of two or three people identified as rising faculty leaders to the three-day event.

The workshop includes sessions on stakeholder analysis (both internal and external to a college); “inventing” a college that embodies values of a liberal arts mission and programs, then making that college “work” as a viable budgetary model; and a session on constructive negotiation at the level of faculty governance committees and departments.

Each team brings an institutional challenge, typically of the team’s own definition. In their time together, the team’s members seek to apply what they have learned to develop a solution to that challenge, and to share their insights – both with their counterparts from other GLCA colleges, and later with their own chief academic officer.

The Academic Leadership Institute fosters the development of academic leadership and constructive problem solving that will allow faculty of liberal arts colleges to engage more effectively as members of a deliberative campus community that values academic shared governance.

For more information on the GLCA Academic Leadership Institute contact Mickey McDonald: [email protected].