My friend Kathy Humphrey, the talented and experienced president of Carlow University, offered wise advice to new college presidents at a recent CIC convening. Among her many good suggestions, one hit me right in the gut: “Make sure your calendar reflects the kind of president you want to be.” Wow. This is the kind of deceptively simple counsel learned through experience that counts as wisdom. It hit me hard because time management is something with which I continue to struggle. As with all leaders, my time and attention are among my institution’s most valuable resources. It’s essential that I use both in the best possible way. And yet it is so easy to let the urgent overwhelm the important, to do things myself that should be delegated, and to cram so much into a single week that I miss the forest among the trees. 

Leaders are often better at budgeting money than time. We easily recognize money as a finite resource and ensure our use of it reflects institutional values and priorities. We regularly review our financial budget—making sure we end up with a balance between revenue and expenses. We even start from scratch annually with a zero base to ensure we aren’t spending out of habit or outdated priorities.

But budgeting our time? Not so much. We treat it as though it were infinitely available. We spend it generously but without sufficient care for replenishment. We pack our schedules without leaving anything in the “contingency fund.” And we let others—well-meaning assistants, impatient campus folks, and demanding outsiders—blow up our time budget on “spending” sprees that may not align with our deepest priorities.

So, consider this a back-to-school practice. Imagine a completely clear calendar. Fill in the most important things first. Following President Humphrey’s advice, those blocks should reflect your leadership aims. If you want to be the kind of leader who listens widely, schedule in regular listening blocks. If you want to be a strategic leader, you will need dedicated time for quiet reflection, big picture creative thinking, and targeted consultation. If you want to lead with an eye on the broader context, mark off time to learn and stay up to date. Consider as well how you will make time to love and be loved. Set aside time for moving your body, feeding your mind, and touching your spirit. These are the keys to sustaining your leadership, yet they are often the first to get shunted aside. Do everything you can to follow President Humphrey’s sage advice. Let your calendar be in harmony with the way you want to lead. If your schedule isn’t explicitly on your side, it’s undermining you.

Questions for reflection: What kind of leader do I want to be? Is my calendar a reflection of those goals and values? What am I spending too much time on? What is not getting enough of my attention? Who can I rely on to keep me disciplined in my expenditure of time? How do I replenish myself so that there is more energetic time available for my priorities?

CIC is delighted to announce that we are now hosting the Campus Free Expression Project led by Jacquie Pfeffer Merrill. We are grateful to the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations for making it possible to bring Jacquie to CIC. Many of you have used the project’s Roadmap to address free expression policy and practice on campus. New editions are now available—with special versions focused specifically on information, policy advice, and case studies for faculty, trustees, and student life professionals, as well as others.

Jacquie will lead webinars and workshops throughout the year, focusing on key issues such as the lead-up to (and aftermath of) the presidential election and campus activism around the crisis in Gaza. She is also available for consultation with CIC member presidents and provosts.

In addition to CIC resources, I also recommend Better Discourse: A Guide for Bridging Campus Divides in Challenging Times, a new guide from Campus Compact that offers practical tools to create a better discursive climate on campus. Another great resource is the material produced by Nancy Thomas (formerly of Tufts and now at AAC&U) on redesigning democracy.

Finally, for those leaders struggling to communicate about complex issues in ways that speak to diverse audiences, I am happy to share my short essay on The Presidential Voice (PDF) and refer you to this piece by my former colleague and communication expert, J. Dylan Sandifer.

A Spark of Inspiration

Last week we observed the holy day of tisha b’av, a traditional day of mourning for a host of Jewish tragedies that have occurred on the same date over a span of several thousand years. It is a day of sadness and fasting. And a time to read the dark poetry of the Book of Lamentations.

Lamentations responds to the destruction of Jerusalem at the hand of the Babylonian empire in 586 BCE after a lengthy siege of the Kingdom of Judah. Its tone is unremittingly bleak, describing the pain and violence of exile. Hope for redemption is faint. The author contemplates a people abandoned by G-d. And yet …

The book is written as an acrostic in which the lines of the text follow the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet in order from Aleph to Tav. Rarely is the acrostic structure retained in translations (one exception is the beautiful translation and accompanying essay by David R. Slavitt) but to me the essential message of the book can’t be captured without it. While the lines speak of chaos and disorder on the surface, the deeper acrostic structure is a wordless reaffirmation of the persistence of meaning. Even in our worst moments of despair, we make art, love, and life and hence meaning. It is both our inescapable lot and our highest honor.

I find this same creative tension between meaninglessness and meaning in a song I’ve been listening to this week, Bob Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall. If you read the lyrics, you will have no trouble understanding why Dylan was worthy of the 2016 Nobel Prize for literature. Dylan’s genius is to marry a litany of despairing poetic images with a simple and beautiful melody sung by his plaintive conversational voice and guitar. As in Lamentations the contrast between the despair of grief and the uniquely human response of art making is subtle, poignant, and infinitely wise. To me this is what it means to say we are created in the image of G-d.

There is much to lament in our world right now. And we can hope that by noticing and speaking sad truths, we find the resources to repair all that is wrong and broken.

Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future

by Patrick J. Deneen

Deneen is professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame and provides the philosophical substructure for contemporary conservative criticisms of Liberalism (the big American ideal, not the leftist expression of it). Here he lays out his vision of a post-Liberal American future. The book helped me understand the perspective exemplified by J.D. Vance and some of the authors of Project 2025.

Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience

by Sophie Grace Chappell

In my year-long study of awe this book really stands out. Philosophically rich, yet very readable, it lays out a theory of the important role “wow moments” play in our ethical lives. For Chappell, moments of epiphany—both the more everyday ones and the ones that underlie humanity’s greatest achievement—are how we most directly encounter values and hence how we discover what matters.

The Art of Dying: Writings, 2019–2022

by Peter Schjeldahl

I am savoring this final essay by the late New Yorker art critic. The title essay describing his reaction to a diagnosis of lung cancer is as good a theology of life as any of us can get. Schjeldahl’s genius is not just in his art criticism. It's in the way he implicitly teaches each of us to see art and to draw out our own reaction and insight.

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