Administrative Know-how Plays Bigger Role as Professors

Universities’ educational leadership programs increasingly rely on full-time clinical professors and adjunct faculty from the school leadership ranks to deliver instruction, growing from 1 percent of the professoriate to nearly 16 percent, according to the most recent research in this field.

The clinical faculty, sometimes known as professors of practice, hold considerably more experience in school and district administration than their tenure-line faculty colleagues. One study reported that 84 percent of clinical faculty members had worked as building-level or district-level administrators compared to 63 percent of tenure-track professors.

Researchers said the school and district administrators have been recruited to be content generalists, responsible for teaching university courses in leadership and the principalship, and they are assigned less commonly to more specialized classes in school law or organizational theory.