Leslie:
Today, I am happy to welcome Dr. Kevin McClure onto your Words Unleashed podcast!
Here’s a bit about him. He is the Murphy Distinguished Scholar of Education and Associate Professor of Higher Education at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. He also serves as co-director of the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges.
Dr. McClure is an expert on college leadership, management, and workplace culture, especially at broad-access institutions. He’s the co-editor of the book, Regional Public Universities: Addressing Misconceptions and Analyzing Contributions and Unlocking Opportunity through Broadly Accessible Institutions.
His public scholarship covers a range of topics, and throughout the pandemic, he wrote viral articles on morale, burnout, disengagement, staffing, and leadership in higher education. And he now writes the Chronicle of Higher Education’s workplace column, Working Better. Finally, his book, The Caring University: Reimagining the Higher Education Workplace After the Great Resignation, will be released with Johns Hopkins University Press in 2025.
Congrats to you on all of that, Kevin.
Kevin:
Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me, Leslie. I’m really excited.
Leslie:
Yeah, this is great. So Kevin and I know each other from LinkedIn, where I eagerly read his posts on all kinds of important topics. But the thing that really caught my attention was a several part series in which he talked about how to do public scholarship, including how to write op-eds. So that is what we’re going to talk about today.
So obviously public scholarship is near and dear to my heart, so I can’t wait to hear your advice for academics who want to do more public facing work. But first, would you mind telling listeners a bit about your journey through academia, and then also your decision to do more writing for the general public?
Kevin:
Yeah, sure. So I actually began as a staff member in higher education. I went to graduate school to be a student affairs educator and began working first in housing as a resident director and then became the program coordinator for an international studies living learning program. As part of that program, it was a really unique partnership between housing and an academic college and international programs.
And as a young, recently-degreed with a master’s degree professional in higher education, I got to teach. And so I was teaching undergraduate students courses in cross-cultural communication, international relations, and also doing programming with them near Washington, DC. And so we were going to embassies and museums and designing study-abroad programs.
It was a dream job as a new professional entry level position. I absolutely loved every part of it. And a couple of years into that role, there was some restructuring at the university where they said, we want all of our living learning programs to be housed in an academic college and to have a faculty director.
And so I was not a faculty member and we made that move as a program. And I realized pretty quickly that there were going to be opportunities available to me if I were to pursue my doctorate. And so I decided to go back and work on my doctorate and continue to work full time in the first couple of years as I did that, which is very difficult.
Ultimately stepped back into a graduate assistant role and started working in the office of the provost in faculty affairs. So despite working in faculty affairs and having done a little bit of teaching in the program that I coordinated. It was not really on my radar to become a faculty member. My plan had been to continue to work in student affairs or work in higher education administration, or I had done some coursework in policy and I was near DC.
I thought maybe there could be an opportunity to do some type of work in higher education policy. As I was finishing my doctorate, I started job searching and there were some jobs in administration that I applied for, but I decided, I’m going to try to cast a wider net. I didn’t have any immediate job prospects on the horizon.
And so I applied for two faculty jobs. This is the part of the story that I always get a little bit uncomfortable telling, because for people that have pursued faculty roles and have gone through an incredibly arduous search process, this seems insane. And it is insane. I applied for two faculty jobs.
One of them was at UNCW and I got offered that interview. I had to reach out to my mentor immediately and say, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I have not prepared for this. I’ve never done a faculty interview before. Help me!” So she was able to coach me through that initial interview. And I ended up receiving that job offer.
And it was a relatively new program. And so I think my logic is that they were willing to take a chance on someone like me, who maybe had not done all of the traditional preparatory things for a faculty role. But we moved to Wilmington and it’s been 10 years now that I have been in that faculty role.
I am now an associate professor. I’m in this three-year rotating distinguished position, which is what has enabled me to pursue this book project because it provides some resources, and reduces my teaching load a little bit so that I can focus a little bit more on writing. My step into public scholarship actually happened at a relatively early point.
I have always loved writing. My background was in history and Spanish literature. I was always immersed in texts as an undergraduate student and I’ve just loved writing. And so as I got into my doctoral studies, I was constantly pushing against the conventions of academic writing and wanting to do other things.
And so I actually wrote my first Op-ed as a doctoral student for the Chronicle because I had been working on my dissertation. I had some creative energy. It just felt like I was boxed in, around the dissertation. And so I wanted to let some of those ideas out. And that was a venue. And so I tried it. I literally put together the Word document.
I sent it as an email to the Chronicle without any prior relationships. And they decided to publish it. And that was my first step into this. And It suggested to me that there was a possibility there. There was engagement with that article, people were reading it. And it proved to be a really, I think, pivotal moment for me as an academic to be able to say, there are lots of different ways that you can do this.
It doesn’t all have to be in traditional academic research, and that there are ways to share ideas and communicate and connect with a community of people using some of these other venues and platforms. And so that kind of started the process, and then it grew from there.
And we could talk about some of the steps that I took to grow it from there, but I think it’s fair to say that I caught the bug early, and now, being post-tenure, I have really tried to think about impact, the impact of my work in a different way, and that has produced a whole other justification for wanting to do public scholarship.
Leslie:
Yeah, I think that’s fantastic. And I think so often academics do want their research to have impact. But I think one thing we don’t often do is define what the term impact means to us personally. Right? So for some folks, it’s about really impacting their field, and that’s going to be more limited, but that’s what they’re doing, right, versus impact on a broader level, impact on policy.
So I think it’s really important for people to think about, like, “if impact is important to me, how do I define it? And maybe I define it a little differently now further along in my career than I would have at the beginning.” So I think that’s a great point to start with.
Kevin:
Yeah, and I love that. And actually, one of the things that I have grown to appreciate so much about my own institution and where I’m at is it has enabled and created this space for exactly that. So many different pathways that faculty can follow based on where they can make the most impact. And I’m glad that you brought this up because I think there is a tendency to sometimes put this pressure on faculty like public scholarship is the way that you create impact through your work. And that’s not the case, right?
There is impact through really good, rigorous, high quality academic research. There is impact through community engagements. There is impact through doing really policy-relevant work where you’re interacting with policy-makers and policy organizations. And then there can be some of the stuff that I have been doing, which might touch on a few of those, but is maybe a little more squarely in this public scholarship space. And all of those are ways of creating impact that are valid, but maybe pausing to consider which one is right for you is an important first step.
Leslie:
Yeah. And absolutely, like defining your audience.
And so your book, The Caring University, is going to be published soon. And I’m so curious what it’s about and what inspired you to write it.
Kevin:
Sure, yeah. The Caring University grew out of some public writing that I did about problems in the higher education workplace. Many of these were problems that were amplified as a consequence of the pandemic. And through that writing and additional research, it became clear to me that there are many problems that we experience as staff and faculty as we go about our working lives that can be located at an organizational level.
So they have to do with the cultures and the structures of our colleges and universities. And a lot of our solutions when it comes to workplace challenges have been individualized. So we are trying to encourage people to develop a self care routine or to set better boundaries. We might be giving them access to individual mental health resources. And all of those things can be really important, but they may not really do a great job of getting at some of those organizational problems.
So the Caring University is about the importance of pursuing cultural and structural change to address those root problems. And in the book, I propose a set of six organizational changes, each of which has a number of concrete approaches associated with it. And the whole point is to better foreground the well-being of staff and faculty in higher education as a way of making our organizations better. Making our institutions more sustainable and allowing us to do our best work for students.
Leslie:
That sounds so necessary, and I think the words caring and university, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard them put together before, so I really appreciate that!
And I actually remember you posting on LinkedIn about like, “I’m writing the introduction of this book. I’m writing this chapter of this book.” It didn’t seem like it took you that long in the grand scheme of things. I mean, compared to a lot of the clients that I work with where it’s like five, six, seven, eight years.
So maybe you can just share briefly, what was your approach to writing? How were you able to get this done relatively quickly with all the other responsibilities you have?
Kevin:
Yes, that’s a very good question. Nobody has asked me this question and I’ve been wanting to talk about it. So I want people to just ask me questions about writing a book because it is a whole other thing and a crazy process for someone like me who’s never done it before.
Leslie:
Yeah, always crazy, yes.
Kevin:
But I walked into this already having written some content by virtue of the public writing that I had already done. So that’s one aspect of it. There are pieces of this work that draw on organizational theory that I have already been using in my scholarship and teaching for years, and so being able to write on that was a pretty easy lift.
There is a certain dimension of this where I wrote in a flurry because I had this opportunity through the position I’m in that changed the structure of my workload to create an opportunity and it was time-limited. I was worried about this moment that we have right now or had a little bit more intensively in the last couple of years to improve the workplace, improve the well-being of staff and faculty. I was worried about that moment slipping and I felt this urgency to get the work out.
Other than that though, I cleared everything off my plate. So, early in the writing process, I was juggling other research and writing projects. And it meant that I was making progress, but it was very, very slow, incremental progress. And I said, “if I’m ever going to get this done, for me, I had to clear off those other things.” So I hit pause on the book. I cleared off the other things, not all of which, by the way, that clearing off was not always me finishing those other things. Some of it was “that’s not going to happen right now. I’m going to just put that away.” And then I had a more blank slate, at least from a writing standpoint, where this was it. This was the sole priority.
So I sat down every single day and said, at a minimum, I’m aiming for 500 words. And I did that for five days a week. Sometimes I went above that, sometimes beyond that. This is the only time in my entire life, writing wise, that I have used that type of word count strategy.
But it did become a habit, and I was able to, piece by piece, build this out over time. And I found for me, once I got into a chapter, and I got into the flow of that chapter, and what I was trying to say, It moved pretty quickly. It’s really the heavy lift of those first couple of chapters, getting your feet under you, figuring out what the kind of underlying architecture of the book is.
And then once you have some of those foundational pieces in, for me, it has a way of moving a little bit faster.
Leslie:
Yeah, I think that’s fantastic. And what I always tell my clients is the first chapter of your book is going to take the longest and it’s going to be the hardest because you don’t have a process yet.
And you’re going to learn some lessons from that that hopefully are going to be applicable to the next one, the next one, the next one. Not that it’s necessarily going to go that much faster, but you shouldn’t have to do such a heavy lift, right? So it sounds like that happened for you as well.
Kevin:
And for me, that first chapter was incredibly hard. I put so much pressure on myself around the introduction because introductions are really important. And for some people, this is the only part of the book they’re going to engage with as they think about whether they’re going to read the rest of it.
And I wanted it to try to say something really important about this concept right out of the gate. And so, you’re right. I mean, it took me a long time to try to finesse what I was doing in that intro part. And then that pressure was dialed back a little bit with subsequent chapters where I didn’t quite feel like it had to deliver in the same way.
And so that probably enabled me to move through it a little bit at a faster pace.
Leslie:
Right, right, right. Yeah, that’s super helpful. So let’s talk about op-eds. You mentioned them before. It was sort of your first foray into getting into public scholarship. And You actually have a bunch of strategies and I would love for you to talk to listeners about how should they approach writing and publishing op-eds.
It’s like a totally foreign thing for a lot of folks and they really want to do it. What steps actually need to be taken?
Kevin:
Sure. I think a really important first step really does center on the content and the topic itself. And for me, some of the topics that I select, I do so on the basis of how much it fires me up.
This is a type of writing where there is some expectation that the topic is topical. It maybe intersects with important conversations that we’re having. maybe within a community of practice, or even as a society. And there is some expectation that the writing is compelling. There’s varying degrees of that.
But for me, I then have to think about, okay, “is this topic, this idea that I have, does it intersect with something that folks care about, that there’s an audience for? And then secondly, am I fired up about this enough? Am I passionate enough about it? Am I angry or frustrated enough about it for my voice and my perspective to come through?”
Unfortunately, as academics, we’re sometimes taught to write in a somewhat detached way. We’re writing about these topics and concepts as if we are removed from them. And the challenge of an op-ed is a lot of readers don’t like that. They want you to be brought in. Not necessarily as like the subject of it, but you to be brought in in the sense that they have an understanding of who’s writing this and what’s their vantage point on this.
So that’s one thing is before you decide, am I going to do it? Or after you’ve decided that you’re interested in it, a next step might be to stop and say, “okay, what is this topic going to be and am I able to construct a hook around it?” So the hook is for me usually in the first couple of paragraphs. I try to stop and say what is going to grab a reader’s interest and give them reason to continue reading, and many editors are looking for that as well. They want that argument to be brought in fairly early, so that folks don’t have to go digging for it.
And if it is the case that your topic is connected to something topical, or a debate, or a current event, they want that hook, that thing that it’s hanging on, to be presented fairly early in the article as well. So that’s something that I’ve had to work on over time. And it is not unusual for me or for lots of writers that I have worked with my own students, for example, that their most compelling argument comes in as the conclusion. Because by that point, we’ve kind of figured out what we’re talking about and what it is that we’re trying to say. And it’s not uncommon for me to, by that point, say, “Oh, there it is. I’m going to bring that up to the top because that’s the clearest, most forceful articulation of what it is I’m trying to say.”
Beyond that, there is a not insignificant barrier to your work getting accepted or published by various outlets. All of these places are looking for content all the time, and so they are very happy to accept submissions. It’s not always clear to me 100 percent what their criteria is that they’re operating from or what they’re looking for, and so I don’t want to make it seem like this is just a matter of writing it up, sending it off, and someone is going to accept it.
But similar to academic publishing, there is a certain dimension of this where you might write something and one outlet is not interested at all and you send it somewhere else and they love it. And so you might have to sometimes send it to more than one place. The trick with that is similar to like different academic journals, some places have slightly different types of articles they tend to publish.
It may be the case that some really tend to publish things that are much more advice-oriented, so they’re going to want to see some really practical advice for an audience that you have specifically named. Others are willing to publish something that might be more of an essay about a topic that we’re all having conversations around, like, student engagement, for example.
So, there is a little bit of homework that can be helpful where you’re reading what’s getting published in different places, what are the types of articles that they tend to publish. And that might increase the odds that they’re willing to take a look at what you submit.
Leslie:
Yeah, yeah. I think those are all really, really great points.
And to your first point about having your own perspective, right? Being fired up, being able to like, basically take ownership of ideas and really take a stance in a way that readers can see that it’s coming from you. I think that is actually a very foreign way of writing for academics. Not only do you have to say, I argue this, or I believe this, or I’m against this, I want to challenge this thing, you have to then deal with potential backlash.
There could be a contingent of folks that are really, really offended by what you have to say. And so how do you overcome or just manage knowing that what you have to say may not be everyone’s cup of tea?
Kevin:
That’s a great point. So, first of all, that idea of finding your voice, finding your perspective, it is a process.
That’s not something that, first of all, I feel like I have mastered, or to the extent that I have mastered it, it has not come overnight. And one of the strategies that I have used to help me with that is social media. I often, before I write something, will write about it on social media as a way of floating the idea. Seeing what kind of responses there might be to it. Starting to make sense myself of what it is I’m trying to argue, or what it is I’m concerned about. And social media allows me to do it in a way that, as you said, I really do own it. It’s coming from me. I’m articulating it as not something that’s just this thing that’s floating out there, but it’s something I’m thinking about.
And here’s how I’ve been thinking about it. Here’s how it connects to my work. That’s been a very helpful exercise in that development of a voice. The other upside to it is it allows you to get a little more comfortable with putting yourself out there. A big piece of this that I hear from colleagues and others is they say, “I can’t imagine just putting myself out there! How do you do that?”
I suppose there is a certain element of this where you just have to try and see how it feels. And I want to acknowledge that there may be some people who try this and they say, “This is excruciating. This is not for me.” And that’s okay. But the upside to at least giving it a try on social media is that social media is very ephemeral. You know, you put something out there and people’s attention spans are very brief and they move on very quickly. That by itself can be a nice reminder that all of the writing that we do, all of this public writing, it kind of has a moment and people don’t really latch onto it that long before they might move on to something else.
And that might allow there to be a little bit of that pressure to be dialed back. So it doesn’t feel like there’s such intense scrutiny. I also want to just own, by the way, that there’s a significant amount of writing that I do that is not that controversial. There is a different calculus at play here.
If you are writing about politically charged topics, if you are writing about racism, if you are a marginalized scholar who is writing about social issues, the type of attention that you get is different than I receive as a white man talking about less controversial things. And so, as we’re thinking about public scholarship, as people are deciding how they want to engage, what they want to step into, that’s an important factor that should be weighed.
People who do this work can be singled out. They can be targeted. They can be harassed. I have not experienced that, and I think my identity is a big piece of that. So, that process of putting yourself out there plays out differently for different people. And institutions’ ability and willingness to support scholars in that can be very uneven.
And so I think that’s something that we need to think about, anyone needs to think about as they’re considering what their, what the type of public scholarship that they might want to do, how that looks for them.
Leslie:
Yeah, I think that is a really, really important point that you make, like our own positions, our own backgrounds, how we are going to be perceived by the general public is obviously going to differ depending on how we are perceived in society.
And so people really do have to think a lot, I think, to be very intentional about how they engage publicly AND not have that stop them from saying what they need to say or what they want to say.
Kevin:
To your point, regardless of whether it’s controversial or not or who you are, there are going to be people who disagree with you.
I have had people who write in letters to the editor after I’ve published something making it clear that they disagree with it. After I share things on social media, I get different levels of agreement, disagreement with it. The upside to all of this is the engagement that you get is so different compared to academic writing.
I cannot tell you how many conversations that I have had with practitioners in my field that are using work that I have done because it’s publicly available and it is more accessible. It’s getting circulated amongst leadership teams, they are discussing it, they are debating it. Unfortunately, that just did not really happen with my academic work.
It doesn’t mean that I have abandoned academic work altogether or don’t believe in its importance, but for me, the advantage to doing some of this is the ability to influence conversations in spaces where, unfortunately, some of our academic work is just not brought in.
Leslie:
Yeah. And I think part of the reason it’s not brought in, well, there’s a lot of different factors to it.
Part of it is that a lot of it is held behind paywalls, right? A lot of it is because it’s written for specialists and experts, it might not be legible to a wider audience, right? So if the main point of an article is to challenge a different article, it’s not so much like widening the conversation for everybody, right, or welcoming everybody into the conversation. There’s just a different purpose for it.
And I think that there does need to be people like yourself who are like bridges between the two, where you can bring in academic scholarship, you can refer to really important studies, but you do it in a way that is basically inclusive to the general public so that they can utilize it too. And again, getting back to that personalized definition of impact, right?
Kevin:
And the nice thing is, once you begin doing some of this work, you have the benefit of working for the first time, at least for the first time for me, with an editor. So they will help you with translating a little bit, helping to make your work a little more legible, helping you think about even the minutiae of sentence structure and paragraphs and how you articulate an argument.
And with practice over time and interacting with editors enough, you begin to develop an editor in your brain and you start to say, “Oh, I can anticipate what this person is going to say. I’m going to start at the beginning, structuring my article and writing in a particular way so that now I’ve done this enough.”
I have enough editors in my brain where they don’t have to do nearly as much rearranging and cutting as they once did. And so it enables you to develop a form and a tone as a writer that a general audience can pick up on. And so my point in all of that is to say there are some folks that help you with this as well.
Leslie:
Right, right, right. Yeah. And the one and only time I published an op-ed, I basically took it on as a personal challenge. I wanted to have a public-facing piece for when I published my second book. And it was interesting because I read all the advice online. I wrote something. I had two of my friends who are academics look at it. They were like, “it’s so great!” It was like 1300 words or something. And then I sent it somewhere and he cut it in half and he was like, “I still don’t know if this is going to go anywhere, but let me send it on to other people.”
Sent it on to someone else who then cut it even more. And by the end, it was so short, but it was so snappy and to the point. And it was like, “wow, that’s not exactly what I said.” I mean, it was, but reduced to this very clear set of points. But I can see how over time it’s like you develop that sense. It’s a skill set like any other.
Kevin:
Yeah, and that experience that you’ve had, I’ve had, I think every academic who’s ever written an op-ed has had that experience where we’re just accustomed to elaborating on things in a very different way.
And yeah, the editor is very likely going to have you cut it down, but it pushes you to really stop and say, “what is the most important thing that I’m trying to say here? What is really the throughline that I’m going to try to carry out from start to finish?” And every person who’s interacting with an editor has a choice, which is to say, you can fight this. And there may be moments where that makes sense, where you do want to fight for something because it’s really important. And I’ve done that. I’ve gone to bat for particular things. But, by and large, I say, “this person knows something that I don’t. They have experience with this that I don’t have. I’m going to listen to them.”
And it is almost 100 percent of the time that my writing is better by virtue of following their guidance. And so now I’m to the point now after I send something where they’re like, we think you should change this. I say, you’re right. Let’s do it. Let’s go with it. Because I just know, I know that I’ve learned to trust their expertise.
And that they are partners in this. So, that can be a really valuable resource.
Leslie:
Yeah, absolutely. And so we’ve talked a lot about doing public scholarship and the importance of it, and yet it doesn’t count that much when it comes to things like tenure and promotion. So, what are your thoughts on getting public-facing work to be more valued?
Kevin:
Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s a struggle that I continue to have. The, as I said, beauty of where I am is I have a lot of space to do this work because I’m not at an institution that rigorously polices the types of publications we should be aiming for, or the types of conferences we’re attending, and I’m not heavily pushed to be pursuing grants, and so there’s freedom for me to pursue this work.
But that freedom does not mean that this scholarship is counted in the exact same way as some of those other contributions. And I’m not suggesting that all of it should, either. The amount of time that I spend on an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education, for example, is not the amount of time that I spend conducting a study, writing an article, doing a grant application.
So these are not equivalent things, and I’m comfortable with that. So I’m not suggesting that these are pieces of scholarship that should be counted exactly the same, but I’d like to imagine scenarios where it counts more than it does at the moment. And I think some of that starts with leaders who themselves have relied upon public scholarship in their own work and begin to see there is a place for this. We need to think about how do we recognize it, how do we celebrate people who are willing to step into it.
And not just celebrate it in the sense of institutional publicity, because that’s sometimes what happens. Institutions are happy to jump on something that you’ve done publicly and to claim it in certain ways as an institutional success.
When I’m thinking about recognition, I think that we need to be truly recognizing individuals who are putting themselves out there and taking some risks and trying new things as faculty and rewarding that in our promotions, in our sense of what is meritorious in our sense of what should be awarded or officially recognized campus-wide.
You know, it’s not the case that everybody who’s doing this is looking for a gold star, but there is a disincentive to engage in this if it does not count towards our criteria for promotion, for example. The other thing I’ll say is this is labor that does not always fit neatly in our constructions of faculty workload, which are still often revolving around how many courses you teach or how many advisees you have, and then more traditionally understood scholarship and service.
Unfortunately, it’s the case that many people have to do this as an extra. They have to figure out how to squeeze it in. And it is labor. Very often, an op-ed is not purely opinion. We are academics. We very rarely operate purely from a space of opinion. We are often writing this from a place of research, our own research and others’ research. And so, that’s labor. The writing of it is labor. There’s editing that goes into it. There is dissemination and promotion of it. So this is something that takes time and can require training before you even venture into it. I’d love it if there is an opportunity for us to think about, for people who want to do this, who have a knack for it, who have a passion for it, how do we somehow build this into their workload?
So that we say, if this is something that we value as an institution, then we should do that. And I do think that departments and colleges and institutions can benefit from faculty who do this. There are ways in which faculty who are engaged in public scholarship bring positive attention to their institutions.
They are almost a way of marketing the institution itself or the program itself, just by virtue of them doing high-quality, well-regarded work publicly.
Leslie:
Absolutely. Imagine one of your faculty placing an op-ed piece in the New York Times. It definitely brings good publicity to your institution.
So lots of great points and just the final question for you is really about this new column that you’ve started for the Chronicle of Higher Ed called Working Better. I’m so curious, what do you hope to achieve through these essays? What’s the purpose of your column?
Kevin:
In writing the book, there were certain approaches that were included, certain interviews and examples that were included, but I was aware as I was writing it that I was not going to be able to cover everything. The interesting thing about writing about the higher education workplace is that it’s about everything in the world of higher education. So there is almost no end to the number of things that one could explore or talk about. But I was very cognizant that there was a limit in terms of what I was covering as part of the book, and there were other topics that I didn’t get to.
So I started playing around with kind of a list of things that I just didn’t get to, but I knew I was interested in and were important and I wrote those out. There is a dimension of public scholarship that I find really fun, which is the creative piece of it. And there is a part of doing this and a part of some of the success that I’ve had doing it that comes down to me pausing and saying, let’s give this a try. Why not?
So I had reached out to the Chronicle where I had done some public writing already and had a relationship with an editor there. That’s where those relationships with editors can be very helpful. And I said, “I have an idea, but not just one idea, I actually have a bunch of ideas. And so, what would it look like for us to basically combine these together as part of a series?”
And I expected them to say no, to be honest with you, because I think I had floated this idea with them at another time and they said no. But for whatever reason, this time around, they said yes, they ran with it. So the purpose of this column is, as I said, to pick up on some of those topics I didn’t get to, but in a way that is very much grounded in how can we try to move forward with some good ideas, practical advice for leaders to improve the workplace and improve the well being of staff and faculty.
So, there are some essays, all of the essays that I’ve written in the past, I always try to bring in dimensions of, here are some things that we could do differently, here are some recommendations. I’m pushing myself to even more so think about, okay, how do we lift up good practices? How do I exemplify this with real on-the-ground programs or initiatives at campuses?
How can I really help us turn these ideas into action? So that’s the hope. We’ll see if we get there with it or not, but it is exciting and new territory for me because generally I’ve written on a very ad hoc basis, and this is more of a challenge for me to think about writing them with a little bit more regularity.
And so we’ll see how that goes. But yes, I’m very excited.
Leslie:
Yeah, I’m super excited for this too. I mean, clearly you’ve hit something in the zeitgeist that these conversations are just really necessary right now. And so I’m glad that you are taking the helm of this new column. And I hope listeners will all look out for the Working Better column at the Chronicle of Higher Ed.
So, last thing, how can listeners connect with you?
Kevin:
The best way is probably on LinkedIn. So I tend to be fairly active on LinkedIn and I’m also on Blue Sky for those that have maybe ventured away from X and are looking for something similar. There is a pretty nice community, academic community on Blue Sky and so they can find me there as well.
My website is drkevinrmclure.com and so you can find the articles that I’ve written, a little bit of more information about the book that’s coming out, as well as information about talks, keynotes, and workshops that I facilitate as well.
Leslie:
Fantastic! Kevin, thank you so much for your time. And listeners, please connect with him on LinkedIn, follow his always useful posts.
You can find him @kevinrmcclure. Make sure to read his new column and check out his new book, The Caring University. Thanks so much again, Kevin.