Have you ever been in a job interview where the committee prompts you to share your preferred leadership style? Some of you may consider yourselves transformative leaders, others may identify as inclusive leaders or as servant leaders.

If higher education were a patient, it would be in the ER, facing policy shocks, Dear Colleague letters, a strained funding model, decades of technical debt, shrinking execution capacity, and an AI tsunami most campuses are not ready for.

As a community college scholar, consultant, and advocate, I—like many others—have watched in distress as higher education has come under attack from forces both within and without the academy.

From the pandemic into a shifting economic landscape, faced with declining public faith in the value of a college degree and an aging population, higher education has been challenged to innovate, adapt, and evolve like no other time in its recent history.

America’s shortage of skilled workers is no longer an abstract forecast—it is here, immediate, and growing. The U.S. construction and roofing industries are experiencing some of the steepest workforce shortages in the country, with demand accelerating far faster than traditional training...