Helping to transform colleges and universities for the future

The Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership is a program for entrepreneurial leaders working in four-year higher education institutions. These individuals (fellows) seek to create innovation and change that enhances higher education’s reach and impact. Fellows recognize that leading in this context requires a life-long commitment to growing as a leader. 

As the imperative for innovation intensifies, the diversity of our campuses increases and the experiences, backgrounds and perspectives of our future students expand, we are committed to cultivating leaders that can effectively enable institutions to successfully meet this rising complexity. Equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging are at the center of both creating innovation and leading change inside higher education. Building leadership capacity to tackle systemic and structural inequity is central to leading in this context. 

The source of innovative and entrepreneurial leadership is a robust and diverse community of people with regard to race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, ability status, immigration status and national origin. We strive to create a cohort that is reflective of the future of higher education—its students, faculty and staff. We intentionally build a cohort to include many voices, maximize our understanding of the complexity of higher education, expand our perspectives on innovation and create a community in which each leader has a sense of belonging and connectedness. We seek to create an environment that is equitable and inclusive of all social identities, traditional and nontraditional paths to leadership in higher education, acknowledges the vast range of perspectives and expertise of the academe and honors each fellow’s experience and contributions.