About Chapman

My mission is to create an ever-growing cadre of citizen-leaders. I define a citizen-leader as an individual who, regardless of title or position, seeks to think and act in ways that improve the communities in which they live and work. Political citizen-leadership is manifested in acts as small as local residents speaking at city commission meetings, communicating with elected officials, engaging in volunteer and civic work, and encouraging others to take up the same leadership roles. Academic citizen-leadership is the embodiment of that same commitment within the shared governance environment of a higher education institution. Rank-and-file faculty helming strategic and tactical initiatives for their university, offering ideas and critique to university administration, and working for the collective purpose of creating a welcoming, challenging, and supportive environment for students are all manifestations of the citizen-leader concept in action at the college level.

Central to the idea of citizen-leadership is that of engagement. As an academic, my core vision has always been building engagement among those around me. I am significantly influenced by the work of political scientists Robert Putnam and Samuel Popkin. Both scholars examine the depth and breadth of citizen engagement in governance, a concept near and dear to my values as a former political activist. In my teaching, I have stressed student civic engagement as the primary 21st Century skill I believe my students will have tasked in their post-collegiate world. I created a Bachelor's and Master's concentration in the FHSU Political Science Department to specifically train students for careers as activists, political professionals, and candidates for public office.

As I have transitioned into administrative roles, I have retained my focus on engagement but have shifted from mentoring students to mentoring my fellow faculty with the same principles of engagement and citizen-leadership. In higher education, where shared governance is the default method of decision-making, citizen-leadership is as important as it is in republican democracy. Faculty must be engaged in the process of keeping themselves informed of the larger issues affecting higher education and their institution, be willing to speak with articulate clarity about those issues, and make decisions on the appropriate strategies to continually improve their university. Faculty have so many things they must already do, between teaching, scholarship and the technical acts of leadership they perform daily, that as administrators one of our core functions must be subsidizing their information search process by providing them regular communication and insight into the larger world in which higher education is embedded along with encouragement for those faculty to confidently act within the shared governance environment.

Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) is a corollary need for citizen-leadership. Emerging originally from the world of private industry, CQI has a place in higher education's strategic pantheon now as well. Higher education is a competitive environment, facing myriad challenges from within and without. The world in which higher education operates is changing rapidly, and CQI principles best equip an organization to respond to and anticipate change to ensure continued success. Deploying CQI at a university means a commitment to understanding all of the interrelated elements of a higher education institution and measuring their effectiveness. After all, what cannot be measured cannot be improved.

Ethics and integrity undergird all of the elements above. Leadership is an act of faith in others as much as it is an individual act of courage. If my colleagues do not trust me, they will not let me guide them along their own leadership path. I have developed my own system of self-tracking, so that I can say with confidence that when I say I will do something, I will do it. Only by guaranteeing that our actions are consistent with our words can we build trust. Trust is, after all, difficult to earn and easy to lose. Every decision, every action, every interaction with others, is an opportunity to build or lose trust. My vision is very collaborative, so if others will not trust me I cannot accomplish my goals.

Higher education finds itself in a challenging place today. Declining public trust, paired with an active debate over the value of a university education, have put higher education as an industry in a position of having to better justify our worth. I believe strongly in the transformative power of higher education, not only because I am the product of a transformative undergraduate experience, but because of the differences in students' lives I have been able to connect with over twenty years as a faculty member. We must never ignore or forget the core product of a university education, which is intellectual growth and transformation among studens. As Fischman and Gardner note in The Real World of College, one of the keys to student success is instilling within them a mindset that is less transactional (the degree is a product, instrumental to career entry but perfunctory and requiring minimal engagement) and more transformational (exploring intellectual curiosity and instilling a lifelong desire to learn and grow). As a faculty member and administrative leader, I am mindful that everything I do should align back to supporting the transformational mindset with which we want all students to leave their college experience.