Weekly Intelligence
for Campus Leaders

Why a leadership team full of great hires still drops the ball.

For college presidents, superintendents, and their leadership teams: a 25-minute exercise for your next meeting.

Your cabinet is running on countdown math. The leaders who last the longest stopped counting. Sometime this week, in a cabinet meeting somewhere, a smart and decent leader said the most common sentence in American education:

Eight principles from superintendents and college presidents across eight states on leading through hard seasons, choosing the right seat, and staying grounded as pressure builds.

This fall, a student in your district or on your campus will get caught letting ChatGPT write an essay.

The most persuasive person in your cabinet meeting might be the reason nothing ever gets decided.

The most persuasive person in your cabinet meeting might be the reason nothing ever gets decided.

I want to say something that will get me uninvited from a few conferences this year: the calmest cabinet meeting in your building this month was probably the most dishonest one.

Fluent. Confident. Wrong. In that order.Every cabinet meeting I've sat in since the second week of June has opened with some version of the same sentence-

Three Convos Hiding Inside Every Hard One

Your graduates aren't struggling because they're not smart enough. Smart was never the whole test.

Here's a pattern nobody names out loud in the corner office: the leader who insists they've “got it handled” is usually one enrollment cycle away from finding out they didn't.