A working framework drafted for academic administrators at RV University with ten cultural premises on language, judgement, accountability, and community in a multidisciplinary university. Offered here as one practitioner's notes, not as policy, in the hope that colleagues elsewhere may find some of it useful.
Examine the framework presented in these documents, from its distilled summary to its most detailed exposition:
Suggested citation:"Kakani, R. K. (2026). Ten characteristics of an ideal academic administrator: Notes from RV University. Retrieved from kakani.net/WritingAndIdeas"
See also: Contemporary Lessons, and Talks on Leadership. This framework belongs in conversation with those sections.
Companion Essay[1]
Why I Wrote the Ten Characteristics: "Notes Behind the Framework"
Most of what consumes a Vice Chancellor's (or Directors of Higher Education Institutes) time, I have come to believe, is not strategic. It is cultural. The strategy questions (schools, programmes, partnerships, accreditation, campuses) are difficult, but they are the kind of difficult that yields to study, consultation, and time. The cultural questions are harder, because they recur every day, in small forms, and the answers are written not in policy documents but in how we speak about each other when the meeting is over.
How do we describe a colleague we are unhappy with, in a corridor, in an email, in a review note? How do we correct someone without diminishing them? When a deadline is missed, do we treat it as a defect to be fixed or a verdict to be issued? When concerns travel informally, what do we do: repeat them, or stop them? These are the questions that, in a young multidisciplinary university, decide whether colleagues stay generous with each other or grow careful.
I wrote the Ten Characteristics because I noticed, over many months, that I was answering these questions one situation at a time, and that the answers were not always consistent. A colleague would describe a difficulty, I would respond as well as I could, and the response would depend partly on my mood, partly on the specifics, partly on whoever else had spoken to me that week. That is an ordinary human condition, but it is not a foundation for an institution. An institution needs answers that do not depend on who is in the room.
So, I sat down with my colleague Prof V Krishnappa (from our School of Liberal Arts and Sciences) to write what we believed about academic administration, in the plainest language we could manage. Not what the literature said, not what would sound impressive in a board meeting, but what I would want a colleague to receive if they were on the other side of the table. The result was ten premises. They draw on what we have learned from teachers, from administrators we respected, from administrators we did not, and from forty years of watching universities (or higher education institutes) work and not work. What is our contribution: is only the choice of these ten, in this order, in this language.
A few of them came easily. “Recognise the plurality of academic work” was almost the first thing I wrote, because I have seen too many colleagues judged on visibility alone, and I know what that costs. “Separate the issue from the person” came next; it is the single discipline that, if practised consistently, would change more about academic life than any structural reform I can imagine. “Avoid informal reputational judgements” was harder to write, because corridor talk is so ordinary that we rarely notice it as a moral choice. But it is the more consequential choices a senior colleague (Prof V Krishnappa) makes, and writing it down felt like a way of holding myself to it.
The translation for colleagues from technology and science was added later after piloting to our younger colleagues. RV University is multidisciplinary by design, and a framework written entirely in the vocabulary of the humanities will not reach an engineer who thinks in bug reports, design reviews, and reproducibility. I tried to find analogies that were not condescending & that respected the precision of scientific thinking and used it to illuminate, rather than soften, the same premises. Some of those analogies, I think, are sharper than the originals. “Do not draw conclusions from n = 1” says, in eight words, what the longer text takes a paragraph to convey.
The facilitator's guide came from a practical recognition: a document, however well-written, is not the same as a practice. Early-career faculty in particular benefit from working through these premises in cases, in conversation, in the company of peers. The guide is meant to give that work a shape. Colleagues at other institutions are welcome to adapt it; nothing in it is proprietary, and the premises themselves are commonplaces dressed in our own clothes.
I should be clear about what this framework is not. It is not policy. It is not a code of conduct. It is not a checklist by which colleagues should be evaluated. It is a set of cultural premises through a description of the kind of academic administrator we’re trying and the kind of colleagues I hope to work alongside. The ten characteristics are easier to write than to practise. I know this because I fail at them regularly. The point of writing them down is not to claim mastery; it is to make the failures visible to myself, and correctable.
A university is not a building or a charter. It is, finally, the accumulated record of how its members have chosen to treat each other. RV University is still being formed by what we choose to practise. These ten premises are my contribution to that formation, offered here in the hope that some of them may be useful to colleagues elsewhere as well.
- Ram Kumar Kakani
Bengaluru-Mysuru, May 2026
PS:This framework was drafted in capacity as Vice Chancellor, for internal use at RV University, Bengaluru. It is shared here as a personal reflection on academic administration, not as institutional policy, and the views expressed are my own.
[1] All interpretations, decisions, and final wording reflect the author(s) judgment.
Disclaimer: Personal opinions do not reflect those of our employer & drafted in my capacity as Vice Chancellor for internal use; shared here as personal reflection, not institutional policy.