Academic Strategic Advisors
The partner of choice for academic leadership.
We partner with senior academic administrative leaders to address enduring higher education challenges.
Presidents, provosts, deans, and their senior academic leadership teams are responsible for issues of institutional consequence at the intersection of mission and resources.
As former institutional leaders ourselves, we know that a tailored service, working in deep partnership, can help address embedded difficulties that bedevil leadership and inhibit institutional change and strategic progress.
Our team partners with institutional leaders to solve their most urgent and consequential challenges.
Our Services
We pair our extensive personal experience with frequent interactions and with distillation of insights from a wide range of peer institutions. We bring these to bear in developing our assistance tailored to each particular client institution’s situation. Illustrative examples of our services include:
Linking strategic priorities to resources and execution.
Restructuring internal organizational and budget models to improve accountability, coordination, and strategically directed behavior among distributed schools and administrative units.
Comprehensive strategic reassessment of an individual school’s investments and resources, aligning the leadership team around shared goals, strategic options, and financial sustainability.
Benchmarking and systematic comparison with other institutions of higher education.
Funds flow and prioritization within schools of medicine and academic medical centers and their relationship to the rest of the academic enterprise.
Personal coaching for transitions, and, over extended tenures, for leadership effectiveness.
Our Approach: Analytical Rigor, Outside Perspective, Pragmatic Understanding
We employ the highest level of analytical rigor and outside perspective to challenge preconceived notions, balanced with a pragmatic understanding that the best solution for each university is the one the university can embrace and implement.
Our Team: Higher Education Leadership, Operational and Strategic Expertise
Our team is a partnership involving Ad Verum Partners, a strategy consulting firm founded with the goal of helping universities better achieve their core missions; seasoned Isaacson, Miller higher education executive search consultants; and former provosts of Duke and Yale universities. The team is built to address each client institution’s unique context.
John Isaacson, Isaacson, Miller
Founder and Chair
Peter Lange, Duke University
Provost Emeritus
Isaacson, Miller, Higher Education Strategy Consultant
Tim Pavlis, Ad Verum Partners
Founder and Partner
Ben Polak, Yale University
Former Provost, Professor of Economics
Over Peter Lange and Ben Polak's considerable tenures as provosts of Duke and Yale, they brought their intellectual and managerial skills to deliver critical and transformative change.
Tim Pavlis founded Ad Verum Partners after creating Yale’s internal strategy and analytics team, and after more than a decade in professional services at leading consulting firms including Bain & Co.
John Isaacson founded Isaacson, Miller, and for over four decades has been engaged in leadership searches for the nation’s most elite higher education institutions and academic medical centers.