Ask the Administrator: The Etiquette of Postmortems

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How useful is a critical look at a former CAO's successes and failures?

It's a tricky situation. When someone leaves campus, it's easy to make her the scapegoat after the fact for all manner of things. But since she'll still be around, that won't be as easy. And that's probably just as well . . . A study a few years ago found that the average length of service for a chief academic officer at an American college is three years. That's astonishingly short, but it makes sense when you consider the multiple and conflicting demands of the position. For someone to last as long as yours did, she must have been good at something.