Option A
Talk with me
We’ll have a short conversation, and I’ll guide us through the prompts and capture your responses. There is nothing to prepare and nothing to write in advance.
Schedule My ConversationDepartment chairs occupy a uniquely embedded vantage point inside the institution.
You sit in the midst of institutional life, close to faculty, students, curriculum, operations, and the day-to-day consequences of decisions made across the institution. It is often at the department level where competing priorities, emerging pressures, and efforts at change become visible first.
That is why The Chair’s Perspective centers the voices of department chairs: you see not only what institutions intend, but how those intentions are actually experienced, negotiated, and carried forward in practice.
01
Share your perspective
Use the eight conversation prompts below as the foundation for your contribution. Choose the format that feels most natural: talk with me, respond in writing, or speak your responses.
How to Participate
Upload your headshot
Send the professional headshot you would like used with your feature. Use the same email address throughout so I can match it to your response.
The Conversation Prompts
Use these eight prompts to reflect on what you are seeing, questioning, protecting, and reimagining from where you lead. You do not need to give each one equal time.
01
What has higher education taught you that you could not have understood from outside the institution?
02
When you look at the pressures facing higher education today, what appears to be a problem on the surface but is actually a symptom of something deeper?
03
Where do you see the greatest mismatch between how higher education institutions were designed to operate and what students, faculty, communities, or society now require of them?
04
What is one area of higher education that you find yourself thinking differently about now than you did earlier in your leadership journey?
05
As institutions attempt meaningful change, where do you think leaders most often underestimate what it actually takes to move from intention to implementation?
06
As you look at your own leadership agenda, what questions or possibilities are occupying your thinking about what needs to come next?
07
What should higher education be careful not to lose as we reimagine its future?
08
If we were truly willing to reimagine higher education rather than simply improve the institutions we inherited, what question would we need to be brave enough to ask?
02
Review
I’ll shape what you share into the first draft of your feature and send it directly to you. Once you’ve had a chance to read it, schedule a time for us to reconnect, clarify anything that needs attention, and make any final refinements.
03
Approve + publish
I’ll make any final revisions and send the completed feature to you for one last review. Nothing is published until you approve it.
Why This Matters
Higher education is being asked to become something different in this moment, and those closest to the work must help shape what comes next.
The hope for The Chair’s Perspective is that these conversations will help us not only name what is changing, but begin to reimagine what higher education can and should become.
About Nicole
Nicole Robinson, Ph.D.
Founder, Reimagine Higher Ed
Nicole Robinson has experienced higher education from multiple vantage points inside the institution. Her career began as music education faculty before moving into academic and institutional leadership. She served as a department chair at the University of Memphis, Syracuse University, and Virginia Commonwealth University; held a Presidential Endowed Chair at the University of Utah; and later served as Vice President of Equity and Diversity at the University of Utah.
Today, through Reimagine Higher Ed and the 4P Culture Framework™, she works with colleges, universities, and senior leaders to understand what is happening beneath presenting challenges and reimagine what comes next.
Explore Reimagine Higher Ed on LinkedIn →