More than twenty-five years in higher education — including sixteen as a department chair — taught me that most capable leaders aren’t lacking skills. They’re lacking someone who will ask the right questions and tell them the truth.
I grew up in Alabama, earned my undergraduate degrees at Auburn and UAB, and completed my doctorate at Auburn in 1998. My academic career began at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, where I spent nine years teaching history and eventually serving as Head of the Department of History — my first real reckoning with the gap between being good at your work and knowing how to lead people who do that work. In 2008 I returned to Alabama, joining Jacksonville State University, where I’ve spent the past eighteen years. I’ve served as department chair, built programs, navigated budget pressures and personnel decisions, managed conflict, and tried to support colleagues through the kinds of transitions that don’t come with instruction manuals. I’m currently a Distinguished Professor of History and serve as Administrative Fellow to the Provost and Executive Vice-President, where my focus is on policy development, grant compliance, and process improvement.
01 Get clear before you get busy. Most of the leaders I work with don't have a strategy problem. They have a clarity problem they've been treating like a strategy problem. We slow down long enough to figure out what's actually going on before we start making moves.
02 You already know more than you think. I'm not going to hand you my answers. Partly because they're mine, not yours — and partly because you probably already have yours. My job is to ask the questions that surface them, and then make sure you actually do something about it.
03 I'll tell you the truth. Not cruelly. But directly. Most people in your life are too polite, too cautious, or too close to the situation to say what they actually see. I'm none of those things. That's the point.
04 I've done this work. Sixteen years as a department chair. Budget cuts, personnel crises, institutional politics, difficult people, harder decisions. I'm not working from a framework I read in a book. I know what it feels like to be in that chair because I sat in it for a long time.
05 Understanding something isn't the same as changing it. Every engagement ends with action — something you're going to do differently, starting now. Insight is useful. Insight plus accountability is what actually moves the needle.
Over those years I also built a scholarly record — my scholarly home is the recent American South — its politics, its leaders, and the people who tried to change it. I've written about governors who pushed education reform in the post-civil rights era, tracked the political career of Florida's Reubin Askew through one of the more interesting decades in that state's history, and co-edited a volume on Wayne Flynt, one of the South's great scholar-activists. Along the way I've written on environmental politics in Florida and helped build the Encyclopedia of Alabama from the ground up as a founding consulting editor.
My current projects don't fit neatly into my usual scholarly lanes — which is part of what makes them interesting
One is about bike messengers in San Francisco in the late 1990s — specifically, their fight to organize for labor rights in a city that didn't quite know what to do with them. It's a labor history, but it's also a story about what happens when people doing hard, invisible work decide they've had enough. The gig economy didn't invent that problem; it just gave it a new name.
The other is about what it was like to be a beat cop in 1950s San Francisco — the street-level experience of doing that job in a city that was changing faster than anyone could keep up with. I'm less interested in the institution than in the people inside it, and what the work actually felt like day to day.
Both projects are really about the same thing I've always been drawn to: what happens to ordinary people when they run up against systems that weren't built for them
I earned my executive coaching certification through the International Coaching Group. I work with leaders at all levels — inside and outside of higher education — as well as anyone navigating a career pivot or a life transition. My clients tend to be capable people who are stuck, or newly promoted people who are overwhelmed, or experienced professionals who sense that something needs to change and aren’t sure what.
I live and run in northeastern Alabama. I lam a trail runner, I shoot street photography, and have become interested in the way workwear from all eras shapes modern fashion today
Whether you’re stepping into leadership, feeling plateaued, or standing at a crossroads — let’s talk. The first conversation is free — 30 minutes to understand where you are and whether coaching makes sense right now.
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