Principled Academic Leadership 2025

Greetings and welcome to the Principled Academic Leadership (PAL) program presented by the National Center for Principled Leadership & Research Ethics (NCPRE). Our goal is to support your growth as an academic leader. The program will be offered through online group Zoom sessions augmented by outside readings and your reflections and analyses.

NCPRE creates and shares resources to support better ethical and leadership practices in academic and other professional contexts. Leadership—and particularly ethical leadership—is central to creating a culture that establishes healthy and productive professional interactions. We equip you with evidence-based tools to support intentional leadership development and institutional integrity.

Your cohort’s presenter are Dr. Kimberly Foster and Dr. Robert Stacey. Sarah Mustered is your Cohort Coordinator and will be your main point of contact for scheduling and logistics.

Please feel free to contact Sarah Mustered, the Cohort Coordinator for this program, if you have any questions: mustered@illinois.edu

General Reference Materials:

PAL Recommended Further Reading List

Program Schedule

Fridays and Thursdays 2-4pm CST (Fridays in the fall, Thursdays in the spring)

Session 1: September 12
Session 2: October 3
Session 3: October 24
Session 4: November 21
Session 5: December 12
Session 6: January 22
Session 7: February 19
Session 8: March 12
Session 9: April 9
Session 10: April 30

Session Two: Critical Friends & Group Problem Solving

Session Date: October 3 at 2-4:00pm CST

For this session, we would like you to watch, in advance, the video provided below. This one is a bit longer than last time, around 9-10 minutes. It depicts a staged meeting discussing the Thomas Santo case study we addressed in the first cohort meeting, using a protocol created by the Annenberg Institute known as Critical Friends. We have provided a description of the protocol along with the full background from the Annenberg Institute for reference. We also have included a quick reference summary sheet of the Decision Making Framework (DMF) discussed in our last meeting that many find useful during a Critical Friends session. We will discuss the protocol, its uses, and do an abbreviated Critical Friends session during our upcoming online meeting.

We will be opening with your reviews of items in the Leadership Collection and the Testing Yourself prompts provided as homework after our last meeting, and discussing the AUDiT assessments you started.

Pre-Session Materials:

Session One: Leadership in the Academic Environment

Session Date: September 12, 2-4:00 PM CST

Prior to our meeting, we ask that you watch this short vignette that was filmed as part of our larger Leadership Collection. This particular clip features a faculty member named “Professor Major” having a conversation with a new Department Head on his first day.

As you watch the scene unfold and the behavior of the characters within it, we invite you to think about what is really happening in this interaction. Please consider the questions posed within the video and write some thoughts down in the Journal we have asked you to maintain as part of the program.

We will begin the session by discussing this scenario, after which we will take some time to explore the unique challenges our environment presents.

Pre-Session Materials:

Slide Deck Reference (for Personal Use Only):

Session 1 Slides

Homework Assigned:

We invite you all to take a look through NCPRE’s Leadership Collection. This library of resources has been developed over several years, built on the experiences and wisdom of our experts. The collection includes Quick Tips, Executive Briefings and Annotated Bibliographies, as well as many video interviews with our experts themselves sharing their thoughts on a variety of subjects. Please take some time to browse the collection – during our second session we will ask each of you to share a couple of the assets you found most interesting or useful.

Find attached the Testing Yourself exercise and take a few minutes to respond to the prompts within. We will discuss these prompts and share responses in our next session when we dive deeper into handling contentious situations like these.
Also attached is a copy of the AUDiT Dashboard developed by NCPRE to help systematically assess the health of your department. Our observation has been that many leaders tend to focus on areas that they think are problematic. The AUDiT approach helps ensure that your assessment is comprehensive. Use the AUDiT table to score your unit. Start by putting a number in each cell – the more the cell describes your unit, the higher the number should be. In the green and red columns, scores run from 0 to 5; in the yellow column, it is 0 to 3. When you are finished, add up your green scores and subtract the totals from your yellow and red scores. We will be revisiting this tool throughout the course so please keep the original with your journal.