21st Century Leadership & Credentialing

Meredith Woo reflects on the demands of academic leadership, urging aspiring leaders to stay grounded in mission, act with courage, and embrace collaboration. She highlights the challenge of balancing diverse stakeholder needs while avoiding reactive, prestige-driven decisions. Woo emphasizes the importance of retraining faculty to adapt to workforce demands and technological change—without compromising academic values. She also addresses the rise of alternative credentials, noting that if universities fail to meet evolving learner needs, others will fill the gap.

Let me start with something mundane, but I think it's important... is to always remember why you're doing what you're doing, right? And I always thought, when I saw an academic leader who's timid and who treated his or her job as being a trained conductor or a greeter, right? And as a person who doesn't disagree, or that doesn't stir up the water, right? I always wondered, why? Because a lot of these folks are tenured faculty anyway, right? And so I'm thinking, it's important to always remember why you're doing what you're doing. And if why you're doing it is for your pecuniary reward or because you don't know what else to do and you're holding on to your job for your dear life, well then probably you're not going to be a great leader and that's probably fine too, right? But if you feel that you are committed for whatever reasons because you care about teaching, you care about students, you care about this and you care about that, and if you are in a position where you feel like you can walk away because being a you know being an academic leader is to be caught in crosscurrents, right? Especially today, right? So I think you always want to ask yourself, "Can I walk away from this so that I can actually do my job with some truthfulness, with some pride and with some courage, then I think it's it's good?"

Well, I mean [the] board is not the only entity that you ought to have a good relationship with. But if you don't have good relationship with the board, you're done, right? But I mean, academic leadership is uniquely difficult unless you're determined to be a trained conductor. It's uniquely difficult because you have too many constituencies, right? And so, I mean, you got the parents, you got the students, you got the board, you got the state, you got know the town, right? You got the faculty, you got the graduates, you name it. But I think you just have to figure out which is really important to you because at some point you have to make a choice right. I think that in terms of the demands, universities can always create new majors, new degrees, new credentials to satisfy and teach the students, if what students needs are particular kind of things in the changing labor market in terms of changing the mindset and the skills of the professorate to adopt to new ways of teaching and new ways of thinking. I think that's this is something that's very interesting that I think ASU does really well and with discernment that is, you can't force the faculty to do something they don't want to do, right? Corralling faculty is a little bit like hurling cats, right and we don't live in Stalin's dictatorship so you can't force people to do something, and if say don't do it you you go to [the] gulag or something, right? But, I think that ASU, by being so progressive in terms of ways of doing things. And so for instance, being heavily technology reliant compared to other universities. Actually being a university that retrains, on a relatively large scale, faculty, so that they know what it means to have adaptive learning, adaptive teaching. I think it's very good. And to do so without without being dictatorial I think it's very good and having training people like that so that the impact of training will eventually spread and the culture will change and there will be [a] different kind of enthusiasm. I think it's very wise.

Well the world is changing. The labor market is changing. Technology is [a] different thing. Every morning you're waking up and so there will be a need and frenzy in terms of getting the needed training and skills and learning. And if the universities can provide them, great. If they can't, the public will find it in whatever way that they can find it. They'll buy it from Google. They'll buy it from Coursera. they'll buy it from whoever is willing to sell the certificates because there's no regulation involved about those things. And I think that's inevitable and I don't know that there [are] good or bad ways. I know that when universities get in the business of those things it's usually for profit reasons, right? And who is to say what should be done and what not?