The College Administrator's Survival Guide: Helping College Administrators Cope with Everyday Dilemmas.

The College Administrator's Survival Guide: Helping College Administrators Cope with Everyday Dilemmas By C.K. Gunsalus Harvard University Press, 2006; 244 pp.; $21.95; www.hup.harvard.edu

STEPPING INTO LEADERSHIP IN HIGHER ED is a special challenge. Those new to leading departments have often proven themselves brilliant in the lecture hall or the research lab, but may find their IQs drop 20 points the minute they have to organize anything beyond a seminar, notes this author.

"It is a major transition to move from a professorship where one largely controls one's own intellectual agenda to a position in which one can be nibbled to death by administrivia: the tyranny of the in-box, telephone, drop-in visitors, e-mail," writes C.K. Gunsalus, a former associate provost at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and now a special counsel and faculty member there.

With chapters such as "Embrace your fate" and "Bullies," the author reveals a down-to-earth style. Gunsalus says budgets and curriculum planning are a piece of cake when compared to people management. During her years in university administration she has had to investigate myriad problems, including sexual harassment and financial improprieties. The upside of confronting such "yucky problems" is her book, which reflects her hands-on experience with reworked procedures and managerial training.