There is no shortage of theories about what leadership is and what good leaders do. After two decades of academic administration — department chairs, an interim graduate deanship, a directorship of civic engagement, an acting chairship taken on mid-year, and an ongoing investment in formal leadership development — I have stopped finding those theories very interesting on their own terms. What interests me is the evidence. Not what someone says about leadership, but what they have actually done with it.
My own understanding of leadership was sharpened early by training with the Kansas Leadership Center, whose curriculum is built around a deceptively simple premise: leadership is an act, not a position. It is not something conferred by a title or an org chart. It is something demonstrated through choices — the choice to act when action is needed, to speak when silence would be easier, to build when it would be simpler to maintain. The KLC framework asks leaders to examine their orientations, the values and assumptions that shape their decisions before they are consciously aware of making them. That kind of self-examination is uncomfortable. It is also indispensable.
What that training gave me, practically, was a vocabulary for something I had already been doing intuitively: treating leadership development as an organizational responsibility rather than an individual achievement. In every department I have led, I have worked to create conditions in which faculty and staff develop the confidence, the information, and the perspective to act as leaders from wherever they sit — not waiting for a title to authorize them, not deferring automatically to whoever holds formal authority. That is what shared governance is supposed to mean, and it only works when the people at the table have been genuinely prepared to participate in it.
The Kansas Leadership Center taught me the foundation. The work of the last decade has tested and expanded it. Leading four departments across four institutions, navigating budget cuts, managing accreditation cycles, building programs from scratch, inheriting departments in transition, and doing all of this while maintaining a productive scholarly agenda has required a kind of leadership that goes well beyond any single framework.
At Radford University, I grew a department from 81 declared majors to 409 — a 405 percent increase — while improving retention to 87 percent, building five new minor programs, launching two 3+2 graduate partnerships with Virginia Tech and George Mason University, and co-founding a statewide civic education program conducted on the floor of the Virginia General Assembly. Those outcomes did not happen because I had the right philosophy. They happened because I made hundreds of concrete decisions — about curriculum, about hiring, about budget allocation, about how to talk to prospective students and their families, about which initiatives were worth fighting for and which were not — and because I built a team of colleagues who trusted the process and contributed to it.
At Fort Hays State University, I served as interim graduate dean, interim assistant provost for quality management, director of liberal education, and department chair — sometimes in overlapping combinations — while leading the institution through an AQIP reaccreditation cycle, chairing the Faculty Senate, and serving on the AAUP bargaining team. That breadth of simultaneous administrative responsibility at a single institution gave me a systems-level understanding of how universities actually function — how budget decisions in one unit ripple into staffing decisions in another, how accreditation requirements shape curriculum in ways that aren't always visible from inside a single department, how shared governance works when it works well and what breaks it when it doesn't.
Academic leadership requires five things that I have spent my career deliberately developing.
The first is vision with evidence — the ability to articulate a compelling direction and back it with data. Every enrollment goal I have set has been grounded in demographic analysis and peer benchmarking. Every program I have built has had an assessment plan from the start.
The second is fiscal discipline and creativity — managing existing resources strategically while building the external funding relationships and internal reallocation capacity that create room to invest in priorities. I have secured external funding at every institution I have led and made consequential budget decisions that paid off over time.
The third is faculty trust — earned through consistency, transparency, and genuine investment in colleagues' success. I have chaired or served on university-wide tenure committees, mentored pre-tenure faculty at multiple institutions, advocated for faculty lines and travel support even in constrained budget environments, and built cultures in which faculty participation in shared governance is valued rather than performative.
The fourth is external presence — representing the institution credibly and actively in the wider world. My media engagement record, national civic engagement network, accreditation peer review service, and AASCU Emerging Leaders cohort membership all reflect a commitment to visibility that extends well beyond any single campus.
The fifth is institutional courage — the willingness to make difficult decisions, initiate necessary change, and hold a course when it is the right one even when it is not the comfortable one. The record on this page and the subpages below documents what that has looked like in practice across twenty years.
What This Section Documents
The subpages in this section provide evidence for each dimension of my leadership record:
Highlights — enrollment and retention data documenting growth at Radford and UWG
Faculty Success — mentoring, hiring, and faculty development across four institutions
Fiscal Leadership — budget stewardship, external funding, and resource strategy
Accreditation — HLC, SACS-COC, and NASPAA engagement as reviewer and institutional leader
Service — committee leadership and shared governance contributions
Community — engagement beyond the campus