Leadership in Place

Jon F. Wergin is professor of educational studies in the Ph.D. Program in Leadership and Change at Antioch University. He received his Ph.D. in educational psychology in 1973 from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. For nearly 30 years he held faculty positions at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), serving in both administrative and faculty roles, and won awards for both teaching (1996) and scholarship (1998). As a faculty member in the School of Education he taught courses in adult and higher education and coordinated the Preparing Future Faculty for the Professions program through VCU's Graduate School. In 1992, he took a leave from VCU to be the founding director of the Forum on Faculty Roles and Rewards within the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), and continued an active association with AAH until its demise in 2004, focusing his scholarship on evaluation and change in academic departments. His monograph The Collaborative Department (1994) was the first published by AAHE under the auspices of the Forum. His other books and monographs include Educating Professionals (1993, with L. Curry), which won the best Scholarly Publication award from Division I of the American Educational Research Association; Analyzing Faculty Workload (1994): Analyzing and Evaluating Educational Research (1996, 2001, and 2005, with J. McMillan): and Departmental Assessment: How Some Campuses are Effectively Evaluating the Collective Work of Faculty (AAHE, 2000, with J. N. Swingen), Which reports the results of a national survey of departmental assessment practices of the Pew Charitable Trusts. He has also published numerous journal articles on such topics as professional education, assessment, and the restructuring of faculty work, including two articles in Change magazine on accreditation and student learning (2005). His most recent book is Departments That Work: Creating and Sustaining Cultures of Excellence in Academic Departments (Anker, 2003).
Dr. Wergin is past Divisional vice president of the American Educational Research Association (Division I, Education in the Professions), and has served as chief evaluator of two national centers for research in higher education. In 2003, he completed work on a project funded by the Pew Chartable Trusts aimed at integrating efforts to assess student learning by the eight regional accrediting associations. He is a member of the National Academy for Higher Education Leadership, and has consulted with scores of national associations, accrediting bodies, and colleges and universities on issues related to evaluation and change in higher education.