The University Is a Unique Organization | David J. Staley

By David J. Staley | An IngenioUs Leadership FeatureAre we teaching students to compete with artificial intelligence, or to become the creative minds who direct it?Universities are sending students mixed messages about AI. They're warned that using it to write assignments constitutes cheating, yet they're also told that AI fluency will be essential to their professional futures. How do we reconcile these contradictions?In this provocative installment of University Design, David J. Staley offers a different way of thinking about the relationship between human creativity and artificial intelligence.Drawing on his own experiments writing and producing radio plays in collaboration with large language models, Staley explores what it means to be an author when AI participates in the creative process. Is he the playwright, the director, the showrunner, or something else entirely?Inspired by filmmakers such as Werner Herzog and the collaborative artistry behind the classic film Network, Staley introduces the concept of "auteuring," the ability to bring a distinctly human vision, judgment, and creative direction to work produced in partnership with AI.His argument has important implications for higher education. Perhaps the challenge isn't simply to teach students how to use AI tools, but to help them become the auteurs of their own intellectual and creative work.A question worth considering:What would change about teaching and learning if we treated AI not simply as a tool for producing answers, but as a creative collaborator that students must learn to direct?University Design is an essay series by David J. Staley, published through IngenioUs Leadership, exploring bold ideas and new possibilities for the future of higher education.Explore more from IngenioUs Leadership:https://ingeniousleadership.org#UniversityDesign #DavidStaley #IngenioUsLeadership #ArtificialIntelligence #HigherEducation #AIFluency #FutureOfHigherEducation

Access, Not Applause: How Women Leaders Make Possibility RealShe Leads the Way | Episode 6 of 7What does it really mean to create possibility in higher education?It's not enough to inspire people to dream bigger. Transformative leadership means redesigning systems, removing barriers, and building pathways that make opportunity real.In this sixth installment of She Leads the Way, Melissa Morriss-Olson draws on conversations with four remarkable women leaders who are redefining what access and opportunity look like in higher education.Van Ton-Quinlivan built a healthcare education ecosystem spanning 41 education partners, 17 occupational programs, and nine states plus Washington, DC, achieving an impressive 83% credential completion rate. Her story demonstrates what becomes possible when leaders move beyond individual institutions to create collaborative solutions.Annette Parker, president of South Central College, shows how intentional partnerships and institutional redesign can advance equity. In a region that is only 9% diverse, her college serves a student population that is 24% students of color, demonstrating the power of sustained commitment to access and student success.Tracy Hartzler is simplifying the often complicated journey from education to employment through shared services, workforce partnerships, and innovative approaches to recognizing learners' skills and credentials. Her work challenges institutions to make education more navigable for the adults who need it most.Summer McGee helped reimagine Salem Academy and College in the face of an existential enrollment crisis. By introducing 11 new academic programs, nearly doubling enrollment, and increasing applications by 400%, she demonstrated how bold institutional reinvention can preserve and expand opportunity.Together, their stories reveal a powerful truth:Possibility isn't simply a vision. It's something leaders build.From collaborative ecosystems to redesigned institutions, these women show us that meaningful leadership is measured not by the applause it receives, but by the doors it opens for others.Explore the original interviews with the four women featured in this episode:Van Ton-Quinlivan: Behind the Starting Line: Purpose as a Leader's SuperpowerAnnette Parker: Listen to her IngenioUs interviewTracy Hartzler: Rooted, Responsive, and Relational: A Community College President's BlueprintSummer McGee: The Builder President: How Summer McGee Is Reimagining Higher Education with Vision, Data, and HeartShe Leads the Way: What Women Leaders Teach Us About the Leadership Higher Education Needs Now is a seven-part series exploring the leadership lessons emerging from conversations with more than 30 women presidents and senior leaders featured on the IngenioUs podcast.Each installment explores a defining dimension of leadership and what these women's experiences can teach us about building a stronger, more inclusive future for higher education.Read the companion essay: https://ingeniousleadership.org/ideas/#latestThese conversations are also the inspiration for She Leads the Way, a forthcoming book that brings together the experiences, insights, and leadership lessons of women who are reshaping higher education.Coming soon on Amazon.#SheLeadsTheWay #WomenInLeadership #HigherEducationLeadership #EducationalEquity #LeadershipDevelopment #IngenioUs

What happens to the university if students stop reading?In this installment of University Design, David Staley considers a possibility that would have seemed almost unthinkable not long ago: that we may be entering a post-literate age—not because people cannot read, but because fewer are choosing to engage deeply with long and complex texts.David traces what declining reading stamina could mean for higher education, particularly for the humanities and for one of the university’s most enduring forms of learning: the seminar. But rather than simply lamenting what may be disappearing, he asks a more provocative question: What might come next?Could listening become as important as reading? Could the seminar evolve into a place where students develop not only literacy but oracy—the ability to listen carefully, think critically, and communicate ideas through the spoken word? Could podcasts, oral dialogue, and even disputation become increasingly legitimate forms of learning and scholarship? And there is an intriguing irony in encountering this essay as audio. David asks whether listening to a book “counts” as reading—and whether the distinction may eventually cease to matter. Listen as David explores what a post-literate university might look like—and whether the future of higher education could, in some unexpected ways, bring us back to Socrates. University Design is a regular series from the Center for Higher Education Leadership and Innovative Practice (CHELIP) exploring provocative ideas about how colleges and universities might be reimagined for the future.Read the full essay: https://ingeniousleadership.org/Learn more about CHELIP: https://www.baypath.edu/academics/centers-of-excellence/center-for-higher-education-leadership-and-innovative-practice/TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read): Does Reading Matter Anymore?

What does courage look like when there is no guarantee that a decision will work?In this fifth video essay from She Leads the Way: What Women Leaders Teach Us About the Leadership Higher Education Needs Now, Melissa Morriss-Olson draws from conversations with five women leaders who made consequential choices without the comfort of certainty.Kate Smith recalls the night she stood alone after speaking up at a campus forum. Carol Christ describes moving forward with plans to build student housing on People’s Park at Berkeley despite intense opposition. Pat McGuire reflects on opening Trinity Washington University to students from the city’spublic schools, even as critics accused her of abandoning the institution’s mission.Lisa Vollendorf shares what she learned while leading through devastating wildfires at Sonoma State University. Lori Carrell remembers leaving a safe and familiar teaching position, buying a truck, and driving the Alcan Highway alone toward an uncertain future.Their decisions were different, but they shared the same leadership discipline: moving before certainty arrived and accepting responsibility for what followed.At a time when higher education’s old playbooks no longer provide reliable answers, waiting can feel prudent. But delay is also a decision, and sometimes it is the more dangerous one.Read the full essay, “Decide, Not Delay”:https://ingeniousleadership.org/Hear the full conversations:Kate SmithCarol ChristPatricia McGuireLisa VollendorfLori CarrellAs Melissa concludes:“Courage in higher education right now rarely looks like certainty. The old maps for a lot of these calls don’t exist anymore, and waiting for one to appear is its own kind of choice, usually the wrong one.”Decide, not delay.She Leads the Way: What Women Leaders Teach Us About the Leadership Higher Education Needs Now is coming soon from IngenioUs Leadership Press and will be available on Amazon.About the seriesShe Leads the Way brings together ideas and voices from Melissa’s conversations with more than thirty women presidents and senior leaders featured on the IngenioUs podcast. Each essay asks what their experiences can teach us about the leadership higher education needs now. 

What if some of the most consequential work of leadership happens before the leader decides?In this fourth video essay from She Leads the Way: What Women Leaders Teach Us About the Leadership Higher Education Needs Now, Melissa Morriss-Olson explores a pattern that emerged repeatedly in her conversationswith women presidents and senior leaders: leadership practiced not over people, but with them.Through the voices of Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, Carol Christ,Tuajuanda Jordan, Mary-Beth Cooper, Georgia Nugent, and Elizabeth Meade, this essay examines what relational leadership looks like in practice—from resisting the pressure to arrive with all the answers and listening before declaring a vision, to speaking last, putting the institution ahead ofindividual divisions, giving away credit, taking responsibility, and making inclusive decisions without confusing inclusion with consensus. Their approaches are different, but together they point toward the same leadership discipline: build the relationships and trust that allow people to do hard things together.In a moment when higher education is navigating extraordinary fracture and change, that work cannot wait until a crisis arrives. Trust has to be built beforehand. As Melissa concludes:Leadership isn’t something you do to people. It is something you build with them, slowly and deliberately, long before you discover how much you are going to need it.With, not over. She Leads the Way: What Women Leaders Teach Us About the Leadership Higher Education Needs Now is coming soon from IngenioUs Leadership Press and will be availableon Amazon.Aboutthe series: Essays on Leadership from the IngenioUsPodcast brings together ideas and voices from conversations with highereducation’s most thoughtful leaders—and asks what their experiences can teachus about leading through the challenges ahead.

The University Is a Unique Organization | David J. StaleyCan a university really be run like a business?In this installment of University Design, David J. Staley explores why the university is unlike almost any other organization—and why that matters for the people who lead it.Drawing on research examining how universities have survived for nearly a millennium, Staley considers the university as a distinctive hybrid: a community of autonomous faculty operating alongside administrative and governing structures. Rather than viewing the tensions between these groups simply as dysfunction, he suggests that they may actually help explain the university’s remarkable adaptability and resilience.The implications for leadership are significant. If universities are not conventional hierarchical organizations, they cannot be led effectively through conventional command-and-control approaches. Instead, Staley makes the case for leadership grounded in influence, negotiation, relationship-building, shared purpose, and what he calls “cultivation-and-care.”What might change if we stopped trying to make universities behave like other organizations—and started designing leadership around what makes them unique?Read David Staley’s full essay: University Design is a continuing series from the Center for Higher Education Leadership and Innovative Practice (CHELIP), exploring new possibilities for the future of higher education.

What if becoming a stronger leader isn’t always about becoming someone new?In this special IngenioUs episode, we bring together voices from five remarkable women leaders featured in Essay Three of the She Leads the Way series: Pam Eddinger, Elsa Núñez, Marcheta Evans, Hilary Link, and Beverly Daniel TatumAcross their stories, a powerful theme emerges: identity matters.Leadership is often described as a process of growth and transformation. But these conversations suggest something different. Sometimes the work is not to reinvent ourselves, but to become more fully at home in who we already are—to recognize how our culture, experiences, communities, and even the places where we have not quite fit have shaped the way we lead.Pam Eddinger gives us the word at the heart of this essay: reclaim.Reclaim the experiences.Reclaim the perspectives.Reclaim the parts of ourselves we may once have thought we needed to leave behind in order to lead.Listen as Pam Eddinger, Elsa Núñez, Marcheta Evans, Hilary Link, and Beverly Daniel Tatum reflect on identity, belonging, representation, and what it means to lead authentically.Then read the full essay, “Identity: Reclaim, Not Reinvent,” at:https://ingeniousleadership.org/This is Essay Three in She Leads the Way, a series inspired by conversations with more than thirty women presidents and senior leaders featured on the IngenioUs Podcast.The complete collection will appear in the forthcoming book, She Leads the Way: What Women Leaders Teach Us About the Leadership Higher Education Needs Now, coming this fall from IngenioUs Leadership Press.

Over the past several weeks, we've been delighted toshare the beginning of She Leads the Way—a series of short essays inspired by Dr. Melissa Morriss-Olson's conversations with more than thirty women presidents and senior leaders featured on the IngenioUs Podcast.Each essay explores a leadership lesson that surfacedrepeatedly across these remarkable conversations.Today, we're pleased to share the second essay in theseries. Leadership journeys rarely unfold according to plan.In this essay, Melissa reflects on the stories of Isabelle Cherney,Krista Newkirk, Barbara Mistick, and Barbara Farley—fourwomen whose careers remind us that meaningful leadership is seldom the result of following a perfectly mapped path. Instead, their journeys were shaped by unexpected turns, personal challenges, courageous decisions, and a willingnessto grow through experiences they never could have anticipated.Rather than climbing a predetermined ladder, theycomposed their lives one experience at a time.The companion video brings their voices together, highlighting the wisdom behind these extraordinary journeys and inviting each of us to think differently about our own leadership path.

What does it mean to lead an institution forward without feeling compelled to reinvent it?In this latest episode, Dr. Melissa Morriss-Olson sitsdown with Dr. Laurel Bongiorno, the newly appointed president of Hartwick College, to explore a leadership journey shaped by mentorship, appreciative inquiry, collaboration, and a deep commitment to institutional stewardship.Laurel's path to the presidency began in early childhood education and evolved through roles as faculty member, dean, provost, and now president. Along the way, she developed a leadership philosophy grounded in the beliefthat "words make worlds" and that the strongest solutions emerge when people are invited into meaningful conversations about the future.In this thoughtful conversation, Laurel discusses:• The mentor who helped shape her career path at age seventeen• How her background in education and business prepared her for leadership• The influence of appreciative inquiry on her decision-making and leadership style• Why relationships, trust, and collaboration are at the center of effective leadership• Lessons learned from working with nine different college presidents• The opportunities and challenges facing small liberal arts colleges today• Why Hartwick chose continuity and forward momentum rather than disruption in its presidential transition• The role of mentorship, sponsorship, and community in developing women leaders• Her vision for ensuring a vibrant and sustainable future for Hartwick CollegeThroughout the conversation, Laurel offers a refreshing perspective on leadership—one that values steadiness over spectacle, partnership over hierarchy, and long-term institutional health over short-term change.Whether you are an aspiring leader, a seasoned higher education professional, or someone interested in how institutions navigate change, this episode offers valuable insights into leading with purpose, humility, andconviction.Guest: Dr. Laurel Bongiorno, President, Hartwick CollegeHost: Dr. Melissa Morriss-Olson#HigherEducation #Leadership #WomenInLeadership #CollegePresidents#AppreciativeInquiry #HigherEdLeadership #HartwickCollege #IngenioUsYouPodcast#AcademicLeadership #WomenWhoLead

One of the most important leadership lessons I've learned recently didn't come from a boardroom, strategic planning retreat, or leadership conference—it came from a pottery wheel.In this short video reflection, I share how learning ceramics has reminded me of the value of humility, patience, experimentation, and lifelong learning.📖 Read the full article: https://ingeniousu.wpcomstaging.com/What unexpected experience has become a teacher in your own life?