On-Line Ed: Believers and Non-Believers

Useful forum in Inside Higher Ed today on faculty “resistance” to teaching online.  Simply phrasing it that way drives me kind of bonkers.  Why don’t we ever read about the problem of administrators being seduced by online education or students being duped by online education?  Some will say, “No! Those are really biased ways of phrasing it!” So is “faculty resistance.”

The unfortunate thing about online education is, almost no one is really focusing on using digital tools to really solve problems instructors actually have – give me the tools that let me teach more, better, and easier. The driving force is almost exclusively institutional revenue and the cloaking rhetoric is student access.

It’s really difficult to have a reasoned conversation when it’s believers and non-believers. Disingenuousness and self-serving arguments abound in this space. I’ve especially found the rhetoric of the believers problematic – that ultimate put down: “some faculty just don’t want to try modern pedagogical methods” is among the most intellectually dishonest tropes being bandied about our campuses these days.

Overcoming Faculty Resistance — or Not

Some instructors refuse to teach online. Experts weigh in on whether that’s OK and how institutions might respond.

By Mark Lieberman
March 14, 2018

American Talent Initiative aims to recruit 50,000 highly qualified students from modest backgrounds

Well, this is good news. Unless, perhaps, you are already an institution that does this – sure the pool is a deep one, but what’s the net effect when top schools skim the top of it? Still, attaching the research resources to the effort is a good thing – way too much seat-of-the-pants policy and practice in this area.


Looking for Low Income Students

A group of 30 top colleges and universities wants to enroll more low-income students, but critics question whether the focus should be elsewhere.

By Rick Seltzer Inside Higher Ed December 13, 2016

A new effort to enroll low- and moderate-income undergraduates at colleges and universities with high graduation rates is being announced today in an attempt to have more students from modest backgrounds graduate from prestigious campuses seen as opening doors to top careers.
 

The effort, called the American Talent Initiative, aims to add 50,000 highly qualified students from modest backgrounds to campuses with high graduation rates by the year 2025. A group of 30 colleges and universities have signed on to the initiative, which is being coordinated by the nonprofit Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program and Ithaka S+R. Bloomberg Philanthropies is providing $1.7 million over two years to start the project, money that won’t go directly to colleges and universities but will be used to fund research on their efforts and related activities.

Read more at Inside Higher Ed

The "Core" COULD actually be a core

In the Chronicle of Higher Education Nicholas Lemann argues for an alternative approach to a core curriculum that is explicitly focused on intellectual skills and METHODS. The core courses he proposes would all be interesting to teach:

  • Information Acquisition: kinds, acquiring, evaluating
  • Cause and Effect: science as style of thought
  • Interpretation: close reading of texts
  • Numeracy: quantity in everyday life
  • Perspective: the limits of one’s own viewpoint
  • Language of Form: intelligently seeing/producing visual information
  • Thinking in Time: thinking historically
  • Argument: how to make a compelling and analytically sound argument

One element of what Lemann is responding to should sound familiar: “Quite a few colleges … devising a new undergraduate liberal-arts curriculum … these new curricula often identify a suite of intellectual skills … [but] permit a wide array of existing courses to fulfill the requirements … [thus] declaring victory simply by pasting on a new label.”

Or, he continues:

Or they define the new requirements in terms of “learning outcomes” rather than course content, which puts the emphasis on devising an end-of-course assessment rather than on designing the course itself. Or they offer courses on broad interdisciplinary subjects, with words like “ethics,” “values,” or “justice” in their titles, rather than on the inescapably different project of identifying fundamental methods of understanding and analysis.

And the result of that is something my own school has: a core curriculum that is neither core nor curriculum.

More to the point, many schools (my own included) allow even a “core” which is called skills or competency based to be captured by colleagues who want the content – especially values and worldviews – that they champion to be required for all and who use core requirements to drive enrollments in their departmental courses. The “core” becomes a symbolic expression of whose intellectual and ideological commitments are on top at the moment and then a whole bunch of organizational ritual and hoohah emerges to regularly remind all of whose game it is and to channel resources in their direction. Until the next reimagining of the core elevates some other group.

My colleagues can read the article here.  If you have premium access to the Chronicle, you can read the whole article there.

The Case for a New Kind of Core

NOVEMBER 27, 2016 

 

When I was a professional-school dean (at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism), we had no choice but to try to define the specific content of an education in our field. The premise was that if you want to practice a profession, there is a body of material you must master, at least in the early part of your education. That perspective led me to urge, this year in The Chronicle Reviewthat undergraduate colleges move in a similar direction: a core curriculum.

READ MORE at CHE
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"Free College" and the System of Higher Education

Finally, someone is writing about the consequences of “free” college for the system of higher education in the US.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education 1 August 2016

How Clinton’s ‘Free College’ Could Cause a Host of Problems

By SCOTT CARLSON
AND BECKIE SUPIANO

The policy proposals of presidential campaigns aren’t often burdened by details or even realism. A candidate’s ideas are supposed to represent vision, ambitions, principles — all while taking on the latest American anxiety.

These days, some of that anxiety concerns the cost of college and the notion that student debt burdens young people as they head out to get jobs, buy homes, and start families. Hillary Clinton’s answer is her “New College Compact,” which includes a plan — adapted from her tenacious primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders — that would cover tuition for students from families earning up to $125,000 a year.

“College used to be pretty affordable,” says a fact sheet on Mrs. Clinton’s compact. “For millions of Americans, that’s not the case anymore.” Colleges’ systems of grants and other financial assistance are complicated, and “free tuition” is a lot easier to pitch than a plan to tweak the existing patchwork of aid. Simple messages tend to resonate best.

And this message is a particularly resonant one. Higher education is widely seen as a necessary step on the road to a middle-class lifestyle, and most policy makers agree that the country needs a more educated work force. But as more of the burden of paying for college shifts to students and their families, proposals like Mrs. Clinton’s make a powerful suggestion: that higher education is a public good, which deserves to be treated as such.

The plan is grand — and very likely dead on arrival in Washington. Although the notion of free college is popular among progressives and young people, conservatives — who will probably retain control of the House of Representatives and many state governments after November — have balked at the cost of various free-college plans. Even some left-leaning policy wonks have questioned whether the plan would drive up tuition, put new burdens on the tax system, or even undermine college access.

Let’s set aside for a moment the question of whether the plan could ever become reality and treat it as a thought experiment: If Mrs. Clinton’s plan passed, what would happen to the higher-ed landscape? Many of the specifics aren’t known yet. But one thing is clear: Policy makers could write a free-college plan that does significant harm and questionable good.

PRIVATE COLLEGES IN PERIL

First in line for harm, most experts agree, would be private colleges. Although many people (and some policy makers) picture elite, wealthy institutions at the mention of “private colleges,” the category also includes hundreds of small, remote institutions, with tiny endowments.
“These colleges are concentrated in rural areas in the Midwest and Northeast, where high-school populations have been fairly stagnant,” says Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor of higher education at Seton Hall University. What’s more, he says, high-school graduates are increasingly minority or first-generation college students with lower incomes. “Because of that, these students might be more price-sensitive and may be interested in going to a public college rather than a private college.”

There’s a big variable here: Mrs. Clinton’s free-college plan does not make clear whether students at private colleges could still get grants and loans from the federal government. And while free tuition would surely appeal to many families, students don’t choose colleges on price alone. They also care about finding a strong academic program and a good fit. Geography, too, is key: Most students go to college relatively close to home.

But if public colleges became free for those lower-income students, says Kent John Chabotar, a former president of Guilford College, “small private colleges without endowments in states with highly regarded public universities — particularly the flagship universities — would be in trouble.”

The private colleges would have to compete to attract students who would be less prepared for college and have lower expected family contributions. “You’re going to see a combination of dropping enrollments and skyrocketing tuition discounting, killing off the weaker, private, unendowed colleges,” Mr. Chabotar says.

PUBLIC COLLEGES PRESSURED

So let’s say that the migration happens, and a new crop of students chooses public institutions over the private ones. It’s unclear that regional public and community colleges have enough capacity to meet that demand.

Public two- and four-year colleges already enroll more than three-quarters of the nation’s undergraduates. Even if a college had been planning to grow when Mrs. Clinton’s policy took effect, government funding probably would not keep pace with its needs over time, says Donald Hossler, a senior scholar at the Center for Enrollment, Research, Policy & Practice at the University of Southern California.

Colleges, he says, would be expected to educate more people with fewer resources per student. The quality of public education could erode. When enrollment is high and funding is tight, it can be hard for students to get all the classes they need to graduate on time.

At flagships and other selective public colleges, the picture would be more complicated. Flagships already tend to enroll more relatively affluent students, whose socioeconomic advantages give them an edge in admissions. Unless the government were to give the flagships some incentive to grow, they’d have little reason to take on more students. That would mean even more competition for a fixed number of seats.

So while free in-state tuition might sound like a boon to low-income students, it doesn’t help them much if they can’t get into the public college they want to attend, says Donald E. Heller, provost and vice president for academic affairs at the University of San Francisco.

In fact, some experts worry that free tuition for most families could exacerbate existing inequalities and further stratify higher education. While poor students would attend crowded, lower-tier public colleges at no cost, affluent students could buy their way into elite colleges, public or private.

Flagships have long worked to bring in more revenue from sources beyond state appropriations, like tuition — by enrolling more out-ofstate students, for instance. That’s unlikely to change. One big question is how much flexibility the institutions would retain in those efforts. What would students whose families make $125,000 or more be asked to pay?

If the policy applies to out-ofstate students, that eliminates a source of additional revenue. But if it applies only to in-state students, enrolling out-of-staters with family incomes below $125,000 would get harder when those students could attend their in-state colleges free, says Robert K. Toutkoushian, a professor in the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia.

BETTER STUDENT OUTCOMES?

Free in-state tuition might also change when some students enroll. Mrs. Clinton has proposed that the program start out covering families making $85,000 or less, with the cap rising $10,000 annually for the next four years, until all families making less than $125,000 are covered. A family making $104,000 in the first year of the program might hold off on sending their children to college for a couple of years, Mr. McPherson says.

You might think that a plan that saves students money, possibly reducing how much they must work outside of class, ought to help them graduate, Mr. Hillman says. But graduation rates are higher at private four-year colleges than at public ones. That probably can’t be chalked up entirely to the colleges themselves — the students who enroll matter, too — but it makes it harder to think of the plan as a boon to college completion.
In the end, the free-college proposal is about one thing: mitigating debt. “Every student should have the option to graduate from a public college or university in their state without taking on any student debt,” says Mrs. Clinton’s website.

Sure, students from families making up to $125,000 wouldn’t have to borrow for tuition, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have to borrow. They would still have to pay their living expenses, which can be a bigger burden than tuition, especially for needy students. Studies have shown that students on a low hourly wage have a hard time covering those bills.

Barring sizable government investment, many students would still take out loans, a pattern already established in other countries that have tried “free college.” Even at the handful of wealthy American colleges that meet students’ full financial need — accounting for the full cost of attendance, without loans — some students still borrow.

Here’s one more unanswered question: Does “free” mean tuition alone, or does it include fees? That’s no small detail: If colleges can’t get more tuition out of most students, they might look to increase fees instead.

ECONOMIC ENGINES

Colleges are economic engines in their towns — machines that move money around, particularly in rural communities. In many parts of the Northeast, Rust Belt, Midwest, and beyond, small colleges are anchor institutions, helping to prop up communities that long ago lost the manufacturers and farmers that helped create them in the first place.

Let’s assume that students chase free tuition at the public colleges, abandoning fragile private colleges and leading to their closure. What would happen to a place like Rensselaer, Ind., home of Saint Joseph’s College?

Saint Joseph’s is a Roman Catholic institution with 2,000 students; 45 percent are first-generation students, most of whom would be covered by the Clinton plan. “If you take 45 percent of our population, and you allow them to go to Purdue or Indiana University or any of the state schools in Indiana for free, more than likely they are not going to be coming here,” says Robert A. Pastoor, the college’s president. “The viability of the institution is going to be seriously called into question.” Indiana has 31 private institutions, he adds, and many of them would find themselves in the same situation.

In a town of 6,000, the college employs about 250 people. and is a significant economic engine. Students, parents, and alumni shop at the grocery store, eat at the restaurants, sleep in the hotels. Locals go to sports games, celebrate Mass in the college’s Romanesque chapel, and hold wedding receptions and meetings in college facilities.

“All of that would go away,” says Mr. Pastoor, “and there is nothing to take its place.”

From the "Good Grief!" Department

U of California Criticized for Extending Transfer Deadline
December 14, 2015
The University of California announced early this month that transfer applicants to system campuses — who thought they had to finish applications by the end of November — could apply as late as Jan. 4. The university said it was acting because UC campuses recently committed to admitting more transfer applicants. For students who still want to apply, this is, of course, good news.
But the Los Angeles Times reported that many of those who met the standard deadline, and the counselors who helped them, are frustrated. Mihai Gherghina, who met the regular deadline, said, “They didn’t tell anyone about this extension until after the deadline. It’s unfair how some lazy people were given another chance.” Adding to the frustration: those who submitted their applications for the early deadline will receive no preference and will not be permitted to edit their applications between now and Jan. 4.

And then there were …

From Inside Higher Ed

College of New Rochelle Goes Completely Coed
December 9, 2015
Another women’s college has decided to go completely coeducational.
The College of New Rochelle on Tuesday announced its plans to begin accepting men into its School of Arts & Sciences in fall 2016. The New York college has been accepting men in other programs for about four decades. Its School of Nursing, School of New Resources (for adult learners) and Graduate School are already coed — the college’s School of Arts & Sciences was the last holdout, and has been women only since the college was founded in 1904.
“This decision was made after very careful thought, evaluation of several key factors, and above all with a great reverence for the college’s mission,” Elizabeth LeVaca, chair of the college’s governing board, said in a statement, adding that the board received supportive feedback on the change.
Facebook page for New Rochelle alumni contained a mix of comments, many supportive and understanding but several quite critical.

Will Free Community College Put HBCUs Out of Business?

My colleague Sara Goldrick-Rab wrote a post saying “Short answer: No.” But notes it might be because “HBCUs (both public and private) are allocated $10Billion in support under America’s College Promise.”  I confess to ignorance about the details of ACP, but it seems like something we should be paying attention to at tuition-driven SLACs.

See also AACC on America’s College Promise Act and this brief from democrats on the Committee on Education and the Workforce. Are the potential grants to Hispanic Serving Institutions driving some colleges to try to redefine their mission?  Here are a few notes from the above document:

In order to be eligible, MSIs must have a student body that is at least 35 percent low-income, including Pell-eligible students. Additionally eligible MSIs must commit to maintain or adopt evidence-based institutional reforms designed to improve student outcomes, and to set performance goals for improving those outcomes. Eligible MSIs that enter into articulation agreements with community colleges can also receive grant funds for eligible students who transfer from those community colleges to complete their baccalaureate degrees.

This is intriguing, but one would expect a bit of careful analysis about the costs, benefits, and implications of chasing this not-yet-existing funding.

Can Free Tuition to Community Colleges Put Historically Black Colleges and Universities Out of Business? T. Ramon Stuart, Ph.D. Associate Provost and Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs, West Virginia State University December 4, 2015 I 10 am - 11:00 am Educational Sciences, Room 253, 1025 Wjohnson Street During the 2015 State of the Union Address, President Barack H. Obama announced his vision to provide American citizens free access to higher education through community colleges. While President O bama failed Lo outline the details of his plan, there is no doubt that his plan could drastically increase the number of Americans with a college degree; howeve1~ one very important detail that President Obama omitted from his statement was the cost of this initiative and the impact that fu nding it would have on other institutions of higher education - especially Historically Black Colleges and University. This study uses current IPEDS data to analyze the tuition cost of the 1890 land-grant institutions while also exploring the ave rage tuition cost of L11e community colleges in L11c respective states to see if L11ere is a substantial diffe rence in tuition cost. Please email lpittard@wisc.edu if you are interested in participating in an invitation-onlysu·ategy luncheon for graduate and professional scholars with Dr. Stuart immediately following the research presentation.

Wisconsin Center for Education Research

Can Free Tuition to Community Colleges Put Historically Black Colleges and Universities Out of Business?
T. Ramon Stuart, Ph.D.
Associate Provost and Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs,West Virginia State University
December 4, 2015 10 am – 11:00 am

During the 2015 State of the Union Address, President Barack H. Obama announced his vision to provide American citizens free access to higher education through community colleges. While President Obama failed to outline the details of his plan, there is no doubt that his plan could drastically increase the number of Americans with a college degree; however one very important detail that President Obama omitted from his statement was the cost of this initiative and the impact that funding it would have on other institutions of higher education – especially Historically Black Colleges and University. This study uses current IPEDS data to analyze the tuition cost of the 1890 land-grant institutions while also exploring the average tuition cost of the community colleges in the respective states to see if there is a substantial difference in tuition cost.

Taking Note of Taking Notes on a Laptop

From Harvard Business Review

BUSINESS WRITING

What You Miss When You Take Notes on Your Laptop

Maggy McGloin

JULY 31, 2015

Even in my relatively short foray into office life, I notice that few people bring a pen and notebook to meetings. I’ve been told that over the years, the spiral notebooks and pens once prevalent during weekly meetings have been replaced with laptops and slim, touch-screen tablets.

I suppose it makes sense. In a demanding new age of technology, we are expected to send links, access online materials, and conduct virtual chats while a meeting is taking place. We want instant gratification, and sending things after the meeting when you’re back at your desk feels like too long to wait. It seems that digital note-taking is just more convenient.

But is longhand dead? Should you be embarrassed bringing a pen and paper to your meetings? To answer these questions, I did a little digging and found that the answer is no, according to a study conducted by Princeton’s Pam A. Mueller and UCLA’s Daniel M. Oppenheimer. Their research shows that when you only use a laptop to take notes, you don’t absorb new materials as well, largely because typing notes encourages verbatim, mindless transcription.

Mueller and Oppenheimer conducted three different studies, each addressing the question: Is laptop note taking detrimental to overall conceptual understanding and retention of new information?

For the first study, the researchers presented a series of TED talk films to a room of Princeton University students. The participants “were instructed to use their usual classroom note-taking strategy,” whether digitally or longhand, during the lecture. Later on, the participants “responded to both factual-recall questions and conceptual-application questions” about the film.

The students’ scores differed immensely between longhand and laptop note takers. While participants using laptops were found to take lengthier “transcription-like” notes during the film, results showed that longhand note takers still scored significantly higher on conceptually-based questions. Mueller and Oppenheimer predicted that the decrease in retention appeared to be due to “verbatim transcription.”

Read rest of article at HBR

Sometimes Best Learning Bears No Credit Value

From the New York Times

EDUCATION LIFE

Imagine you are Dean for a Day. What is one actionable change you would implement to enhance the college experience on campus?

I have asked students this question for years. The answers can be eye-opening. A few years ago, the responses began to move away from “tweak the history course” or “change the ways labs are structured.” A different commentary, about learning to live wisely, has emerged.

What does it mean to live a good life? What about a productive life? How about a happy life? How might I think about these ideas if the answers conflict with one another? And how do I use my time here at college to build on the answers to these tough questions?

A number of campuses have recently started to offer an opportunity for students to grapple with these questions. On my campus, Harvard, a small group of faculty members and deans created a noncredit seminar called “Reflecting on Your Life.” The format is simple: three 90-minute discussion sessions for groups of 12 first-year students, led by faculty members, advisers or deans. Well over 100 students participate each year.

Here are five exercises that students find particularly engaging. Each is designed to help freshmen identify their goals and reflect systematically about various aspects of their personal lives, and to connect what they discover to what they actually do at college.

  • For the first exercise, we ask students to make a list of how they want to spend their time at college. What matters to you? This might be going to class, studying, spending time with close friends, perhaps volunteering in the off-campus community or reading books not on any course’s required reading list. Then students make a list of how they actually spent their time, on average, each day over the past week and match the two lists.

Finally, we pose the question: How well do your commitments actually match your goals?
A few students find a strong overlap between the lists. The majority don’t. They are stunned and dismayed to discover they are spending much of their precious time on activities they don’t value highly. The challenge is how to align your time commitments to reflect your personal convictions.

  • Deciding on a major can be amazingly difficult. One student in our group was having a hard time choosing between government and science. How was she spending her spare time? She described being active in the Institute of Politics, running the Model U.N. and writing regularly for The Political Review. The discussion leader noted that she hadn’t mentioned the word “lab” in her summary. “Labs?” replied the student, looking incredulous. “Why would I mention labs when talking about my spare time?” Half an hour after the session, the group leader got an email thanking him for posing the question.
  • I call this the Broad vs. Deep Exercise. If you could become extraordinarily good at one thing versus being pretty good at many things, which approach would you choose? We invite students to think about how to organize their college life to follow their chosen path in a purposeful way.
  • In the Core Values Exercise, students are presented with a sheet of paper with about 25 words on it. The words include “dignity,” “love,” “fame,” “family,” “excellence,” “wealth” and “wisdom.” They are told to circle the five words that best describe their core values. Now, we ask, how might you deal with a situation where your core values come into conflict with one another? Students find this question particularly difficult. One student brought up his own personal dilemma: He wants to be a surgeon, and he also wants to have a large family. So his core values included the words “useful” and “family.” He said he worries a lot whether he could be a successful surgeon while also being a devoted father. Students couldn’t stop talking about this example, as many saw themselves facing a similar challenge.
  • This exercise presents a parable of a happy fisherman living a simple life on a small island. The fellow goes fishing for a few hours every day. He catches a few fish, sells them to his friends, and enjoys spending the rest of the day with his wife and children, and napping. He couldn’t imagine changing a thing in his relaxed and easy life.
    A recent M.B.A. visits this island and quickly sees how this fisherman could become rich. He could catch more fish, start up a business, market the fish, open a cannery, maybe even issue an I.P.O. Ultimately he would become truly successful. He could donate some of his fish to hungry children worldwide and might even save lives. “And then what?” asks the fisherman. “Then you could spend lots of time with your family,” replies the visitor. “Yet you would have made a difference in the world. You would have used your talents, and fed some poor children, instead of just lying around all day.” We ask students to apply this parable to their own lives. Is it more important to you to have little, accomplish little, yet be relaxed and happy and spend time with family? Or is it more important to you to work hard, use your talents, perhaps start a business, maybe even make the world a better place along the way? Typically, this simple parable leads to substantial disagreement. These discussions encourage first-year undergraduates to think about what really matters to them, and what each of us feels we might owe, or not owe, to the broader community — ideas that our students can capitalize on throughout their time at college.

At the end of our sessions, I say to my group: “Tell me one thing you have changed your mind about this year,” and many responses reflect a remarkable level of introspection. Three years later, when we check in with participants, nearly all report that the discussions had been valuable, a step toward turning college into the transformational experience it is meant to be.

Two from IHE on Mistakes Deans Make

Abridgements of two from Insider Higher Education.  Full articles here and here.

5 Mistakes of Rookie Deans

July 24, 2015
Welcome to the world of being a dean — one of the most daunting and rewarding jobs in academe. …
In my journey, I have talked with many deans and identified the top five mistakes rookie deans make, along with some helpful advice on how to avoid them.
1. Underestimating the knowledge, skills and abilities it takes to do the job well.

 

    • Develop the mental capacity to know a little about a lot versus being narrow and deep.

 

  • Envision what you want success to look like so that you lead your team in a positive direction.
  • Understand how to delegate.

 

 

2. Overestimating the power and influence one has in the role.

  • Take seriously responsibility “power,” but don’t let it go to your head. 
  • Always share the credit.
  • Focus on how to engage people enough that they want to follow your lead.
3. Lacking sufficient knowledge about managing oneself.
Take charge of your schedule and priorities.

 

    • Manage your time.

 

  • Control your ego and develop a thick skin.
  • Managing stress.  Sort and prioritize and delegate. Talk out tough issues, be honest, reflect and work for clarity, take breaks and stay active.

 

 

4. Lacking sufficient knowledge of how to generate and allocate resources across the enterprise.

5. Underappreciating the art and science of relationship building.
Pursue each relationship within our college and our university and relationships with alumni, donors and friends of the institution as opportunity to build a lifelong, mutually beneficial relationship. These can be pursued through listening tours, outreach to other deans, strategic planning committees, faculty/staff town hall meetings and road trips.

A Few More Rookie Dean Mistakes

July 27, 2015 – 9:26pm
The five mistakes it highlights, it gets right, but I’d add a few.
Applying the standards of proof for an academic publication to daily decision making.  
I remember being struck by how quickly a few facts or anecdotes became conclusive. If you start picking those apart, though, you quickly discover why: if you wait for anything decisive, you will wait years.  So you have to learn when the call for more analysis is actually helpful, as opposed to when it comes across simply as a delaying tactic. 
Taking the first answer as the last answer. 
Many people will respond to any suggestion with a knee-jerk “no” that sounds definitive, but is really a version of “I’m not used to that yet.”
Acceptance of new ideas isn’t automatic. It’s a process. That means building some of that time into your process, and accepting that some initial reactions may be discouraging.
Being the smartest person in the room.
When teaching, it’s easy to fall into the trap of being the smartest person in the room. But in administration, if you feel the need to prove yourself all the time, you’ll burn bridges and look ridiculous.
The best administrators I’ve known make a point of surrounding themselves with very smart people, and listening to them. That can mean allowing someone lower on the food chain to win, simply by having the better argument. When you defer to the better argument — when you allow truth to trump rank — you create an environment in which all that intelligence becomes an asset.  [emphases, Ryan] If the chief has to win every time, then the organization is limited to the vision of the chief.
Neglecting Culture
Every college has quirky arrangements that make no sense on paper, but that work. Or they’re the least-bad compromises among warring factions. It can be tempting to regard those as low-hanging fruit, but be careful. Ask questions first, and listen for the pauses.  The part of the sentence that tails off is often the most important. “We would have changed that, but, well, you know…”
Remembering Too Much
Finally, accept that you’ll make mistakes, and sometimes have best-available moves seen as mistakes. Learn from them, but don’t dwell on them. Forgive yourself the honest goofs, own them, and move on.