A big component of faculty life for many professors is attending academic conferences. I rarely attended them, as I focused on writing academic articles directly instead of creating conference presentations that would later lead to articles. As a dean, however, it seems that I will be attending quite a few leadership conferences. Last week I was in La Crosse, WI for a meeting of arts and liberal studies deans in the University of Wisconsin system, tomorrow I’m off to Jacksonville, FL for the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences annual meeting, and in two weeks I’ll fly to San Francisco for the Learning Resources Network (LERN) annual conference. Whew!