Provocation 1: The Dire Need for Leadership in Higher Education

Abstract

One of my most recent activities as editor was to read back across all the articles in Change over the last 50 years to identify what Change readers are excited about. I wanted to share a couple of key trends. First, Change readers enjoy visionary and conceptual articles that describe a new way to think about higher education—real paradigm changing ideas. They also prefer articles on teaching and learning compared to most other topics and longer, featurelength articles compared to shorter columns. As a result, we will be continuing a trend started by previous editors to include a greater number of feature articles. This preference bucks current trends in other written media, where readers prefer ever-shorter articles. And Change readers enjoy editorials that engage in more perspectivetaking rather than summarizing and threading together the articles in that issue, especially as readers increasingly access Change online and not via the printed magazine, where all of the articles are physically bundled together. As a result, I will be moving towards more “editorialized” editorials, so that they respond to readers’ interests and mode of reading the magazine.