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With a sense of relief and completion, we submitted what we thought was the final manuscript for this second edition of Reframing Academic Leadership. Then Covid‐19 hit with a vengeance. The world that everyone knew suddenly stopped in hope of slowing the viral spread – adding economic, political, societal, educational, and mental health challenges to the already devastating global health crisis of a fast‐spreading virus with no vaccine or cure. As we worked to tease out the myriad implications for academic leaders, Americans and allies around the world took to the streets for equity and racial justice following the death of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer. We knew that we could not ignore the impact of both on higher education. We recalled our submission and went back to the drawing board. Much of what we had written about academic leadership still holds, but no institution and none of us will ever be quite the same. Both stories remain very much in motion – and will for some time – but two things are very clear. Every crisis contains opportunities for innovation and progress if we stay strong and search for them, and leadership feels more important now than ever.

The death of George Floyd was the latest in a long line of police shootings of Black citizens, and the broad protest movement under the banner of Black Lives Matter had been pushing for reform since early 2012. It took the actions of a courageous 17‐year‐old girl who recorded the dramatic and painful 8 minutes and 46 seconds–long video of Floyd's death on her cell phone that was played and replayed on television and across the internet to finally open the eyes of a nation and the world to systemic racism and to send outraged citizens into the streets of large and small cities during a pandemic demanding change – to move the country, in the words of scholar Ibram Kendi (2016, 2019, 2020), from denying a history of racial injustice that has haunted the United States since the 17th century to launching a proactive, “anti‐racist revolution” (2020). To quote Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

The pandemic tells its own leadership story. It might have been stopped in its tracks in January 2020, but for an attempted coverup by local officials in Wuhan, China. The discovery of the “SARS coronavirus” in a group of Wuhan patients with an unusual and virulent pneumonia should have been entered into a high‐tech national reporting system that China had created expressly for such situations after the 2002 SARS epidemic (Cook, 2020; Kuo, 2020; Myer, 2020; Shi, Rauhala, and Sun, 2020). The rules and procedures were clear. But they were not followed. The failure was catastrophic, the coverup deadly. But the causes were dismayingly ordinary. Regardless of country or sector, leaders routinely try to protect themselves and their organizations by hiding problems in hopes of fixing them before anyone notices. They prioritize their own comfort and interests over those of their constituents and communities. They act as if they must choose between competing needs without recognizing there are options that address both. Officials in Wuhan unleashed a global disaster while trying to avoid local embarrassment. They failed to anticipate that their decisions would be catastrophic for themselves, their constituents, the globe, and, as one piece of the collateral damage, institutions of higher education.

Here's the rub: the same dynamics that produced the coverup in Wuhan – and allowed so many to deny the meaning and implications of Black Lives Matter for so long – are also endemic in academic leadership. In a later chapter on ethics (Chapter 14), we catalog examples of leaders in colleges and universities following their own versions of the Wuhan playbook. Even as we write in late 2020, academic leaders are wrestling with how to balance the financial health and even the survival of their institutions against possible health risks to faculty, staff, students, families, and local communities. At least implicitly, circumstances are asking them to put a price on human life.

Nearly 400,000 Covid‐19 infections and more than 90 college employee and student deaths were recorded across 1,800 institutions in 2020 (Ivory, Gebeloff, and Mervosh, 2020). Is this reason to celebrate the success of classroom safety measures? Are 90 deaths an acceptable sacrifice? Contact tracing and genetic analysis now confirm that community spread from students to their surrounding communities led to a higher death rate for older adults in college towns than elsewhere (Ivory, Gebeloff, and Mervosh, 2020). How far beyond campus borders do institutional responsibilities for health and welfare extend? How many constituent and community deaths should administrators risk in order to save their college and their stewardship of it? Sobering – and a strong incentive to clarify values and transcend either/or thinking.

These are indeed extraordinary times, and we have done our best to produce a volume that acknowledges the uncertainty and the possibilities in them. Returning from an unprecedented global calamity and seeking to build together a more just world, while overwhelming and disequilibrating, hold seeds for learning, innovation, and change. The world will go on and so will most – although probably not all – of our academic institutions. The wise and thoughtful will seize this transformational moment to recalibrate and to come back stronger and better. Louis Pasteur got it right: chance favors the prepared mind. Our goal for this new edition of Reframing Academic Leadership is the development of confident leaders who are prepared for the myriad opportunities and challenges they will face.

Threads of both continuity and change are woven throughout higher education's history. They continue as we enter the third decade of the 21^st century, magnified by the extraordinary turning point of Covid‐19. Both are central themes in this second edition of Reframing Academic Leadership. So is our belief in the vital role of academic leaders for bringing fresh thinking to perennial concerns like access, affordability, and quality.

Interviewed in the midst of the pandemic, E. Gordon Gee – who has held more university presidencies than any other American – noted that when he began his first presidency in 1981, surveys found that 95 percent of the population believed higher education was important. Now, said Gee, it's less than 50 percent, “even though higher education is the most important element in our culture and our economy right now” (Carlson & Friga, 2020). When Covid‐19 threatened health and lives around the globe, political leaders turned to university‐educated scientists, physicians, professors, and campus‐based research centers and labs to help them understand and manage what was happening and what could be done about it. When they ignored or downplayed that expertise, they paid a price in lives and livelihoods lost. The pandemic is a particularly dramatic example of the extraordinary pace of change in our society and around the world that has put new pressures on colleges and universities to adapt and to deliver – and of the value when they do. History reminds us that innovation and change in response to radically shifting circumstances have always been key to the sector's survival and growth. Our goal in this revision is to support academic leaders as they find ways to do that again.

We are writing for an audience of readers who care deeply about colleges and universities, appreciate their strengths and imperfections, and are committed to making them better. We have worked to provide a research‐based yet pragmatic approach to academic leadership. This new volume reflects changes in higher education, in the world, and in our own understandings. Additions, revisions, and occasional excisions all contribute to a book that aims to offer guidance for today and beyond. This second edition includes four new chapters – one each on ethics and on strategy and governance, and two on understanding the changing higher education landscape. Meanwhile, many ideas and some of the cases that we used in the first edition return because they are as relevant and instructive as ever. Throughout, the emphasis is on encouraging academic leaders to understand the unique context in which they work and to build their skills and confidence so as to lead well in response to it.

There are many roads to careers in academic administration. Some leaders in student affairs, advancement, business, operations, and other nonfaculty posts bring extensive training in their fields and in higher education administration. Other administrators are scholars and educators who hope for impact in a leadership role or who have chosen a different path in response to disappointment with the pace and focus of faculty life or to an honest assessment of their interests and strengths. Then there are the many accidental leaders for whom an administrative career just seems to happen. A nudge from somewhere combines with a willingness to serve – to fill an unanticipated administrative gap, to take one's turn as a division chair, to use one's talents to salvage a program or launch a needed project. Before long, service turns into more than a temporary assignment. Many an interim becomes permanent after a year or so on the job. This sets in motion a series of choices, consequences, and rewards that can turn an initial administrative foray into a longer journey down a road with no turning back: years away from teaching require retooling for the classroom, and scholarship once put on hold gets ever harder to restart as fields march forward.

The administrative world is different from faculty life, and it offers many rewards. Academic leadership is a highly social endeavor. The collaboration and partnerships needed to get things done foster a sense of community, connection, and shared purpose often missing in the isolation of the classroom, research desk, or laboratory. Much as we may complain, a calendar filled with meetings and events has its charms. Administrative life offers a pace, rhythm, and structure that focus one's time and energy. Deadlines and academic calendars encourage discipline and closure. And there is deep excitement and satisfaction in seeing tangible and measurable outcomes from one's efforts. A new degree program, dormitory, or sports complex has a durability and sense of completeness that are not always as easy to find in teaching and research.

But along with its benefits, academic leadership brings challenges and even heartaches, particularly in times of political controversy, public doubts, technological changes, demographic shifts, mission drift, and financial crisis. In the pandemic of 2020, administrators had to solve problems they had never encountered under extraordinary pressures of time and resources. Mistakes get made in decision‐making under conditions of uncertainty and emergency, and many campuses will find in after‐action reviews that some things could have been done better. But even under the best of conditions, higher education administration is demanding work that tests the mind, soul, and stamina of all who attempt it. We know because we've been there, and we have worked with many others over the years to help them learn to do it better. We have studied the factors that make the work so difficult, written about them, and benefited from the research of colleagues. Colleges and universities constitute a special type of organization whose complex mission, dynamics, personnel structures, and values require a distinct set of understandings and skills to lead and manage well. That is what this book aims to provide: ideas, tools, and encouragement to help readers make better sense of their work and their institutions, and to become more skilled and versatile in handling the vicissitudes of daily life.

Our approach builds from multiple sources. One is our experience both working in and teaching higher education leadership for more years than either of us likes to acknowledge. One or both of us have served as an adjunct instructor, tenured faculty member, alumni affairs officer, principal investigator, academic program director, campus accreditation coordinator, department chair, dean, academic vice president, and special assistant to a university president for strategic planning. We have studied, lived, and worked in both elite private and urban public institutions, large and small. We have years of experience teaching higher education leadership to aspiring professionals in graduate and undergraduate courses and to experienced administrators in executive programs and summer institutes. We hope this book reflects all that we have learned from our experiences and from our students and colleagues. We are grateful and better for having had them in our lives.

Throughout this second edition are cases and examples drawn from our experiences and from the experience of the many thousands of academic leaders with whom we have worked over the years. Some of the cases are clearly labeled public examples. Others are amended and disguised. Some are composites created, like good teaching cases, to illustrate dynamics regularly seen across institutions and situations. You're likely to encounter more than one example that sounds a lot like something that happened at your institution not so long ago, but that is purely coincidental. In higher education, it can truly be said, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again” (Eccl. 1:9, NIV). That is true even of pandemics. A century ago, more than half the students on many campuses were infected with the Spanish flu, a virus that was particularly lethal for young people. The University of North Carolina lost two presidents within a few months to the disease (Carlton, 2020; Cozens, 2020). Masks, social distancing, and outdoor classes were all among the methods universities employed then to combat the deadly disease (Carlton, 2020).