Seeking Nominations for the 2020 Faculty-Administrator Leadership Program

Dear Colleagues,

The Faculty-Administrator Leadership Program (FALP), sponsored by my office, provides faculty the opportunity to learn about administration in higher education. The goal of the program is to help faculty broaden their understanding of university administrative work and increase their knowledge of leadership issues pertinent to career advancement. It provides a structure for faculty and administrators to interact and share ideas. This kind of ongoing interaction is good for general governance and communication, and as professional development for faculty.

The Faculty-Administrator Leadership Program is designed for tenured professors, with preference given to full professors and underrepresented faculty, interested in learning about higher education administration, or those who are considering or recently having taken on roles as a director, department head/chair, associate dean, dean, or vice provost. It is also intended as a way to grow the diversity of the pool of potential administrators at UIC. We are excited to be offering this program for the fourth year in a row, and encourage you to consider participating.

The program consists of the following four components:

1) Individual Mentoring Relationship – Each FALP participant will be matched with a mentor currently serving UIC in a senior leadership capacity. Mentors typically are vice chancellors, deans and vice provosts. The participant will work with the mentor to establish personal goals for the program, and to come up with a program project. Mentoring relationships involve a monthly meeting that includes discussion of leadership issues as well as updates on the progress of the project that the participant will work on during the participant’s time in the leadership program.

2) Program Project Workshop – All participants will attend an introductory workshop during which they will discuss their ideas for a project. The project must involve researching and proposing a solution to an administrative issue at UIC or an institutional need within a department, college, or administrative unit. Most of the work on the project will be done in the summer. The FALP participants present their completed projects to the other members of the FALP cohort and their mentors at a meeting in October.

3) Interviews and Job Shadowing – FALP participants will be required to interview and/or shadow at least two UIC administrators in order to obtain a preliminary experience of the roles and duties of different types of administrators and how they approach their work.

4) Attendance at Internal and External Leadership Events – Participating faculty will be required to attend at least six sessions of the Faculty Affairs Faculty Engagement Series (occurring throughout the year), one FALP Book Club lunch discussion per semester, and the Provost’s Leadership Retreat (scheduled for the Tuesday before classes begin in August). FALP participants are also invited to attend the orientation for new deans, heads, and chairs, which occurs at the beginning of the academic year. Additionally, participants will be sponsored by the Provost’s office to attend one national conference geared toward university administrators (e.g., ACE, APLU).

Additional information about this program and the application may be found on the program webpage.

Applications are due by noon on Friday, December 6, 2019. If you have any questions about the program, please contact Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs Nancy Freitag (nfreitag@uic.edu).

Susan Poser
Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs