Dr. Laurie A. Sharp is a nationally recognized scholar and higher education leader who has served in faculty and executive roles at Tarrant County College, Tarleton State University, West Texas A&M University, and Utah Valley University. Currently Senior Associate Provost for Academic Programs, Assessment, and Accreditation at Utah Valley University and a Commissioner for the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, Laurie has authored more than 100 publications on literacy, teacher preparation, and student success. Her career centers on creating innovative, student-centered systems that expand opportunity and strengthen institutional impact.
From the classroom to the C-suite of academia, Laurie Sharp will always be a teacher at heart. Her move into academic leadership was “teaching amplified,” designing systems that remove barriers and open doors for thousands of students.
Laurie’s early years with elementary students shaped her leadership philosophy. “When you work with a nine-year-old struggling to grasp a concept, you learn that transformation happens through relationships, not bureaucracy. You see how high expectations, paired with genuine care, can change a life,” she observes.
Laurie adds that at the institutional level, the scale is bigger, but the core question is the same: What does this student need to flourish? “Whether I’m shaping policy, supporting program design, or analyzing data for resource decisions, I’m still serving individual human potential – only now, it’s 40,000 stories instead of 25,” she reflects.
“At its core, education is about unlocking individual stories of possibility.” – Dr. Laurie Sharp.
Keeping Academic Programs Future-Ready Through Horizon Planning
With the unprecedented disruption in higher education, Laurie’s challenge is to keep academic program portfolios relevant, ahead of the curve, and dynamic, complementing timeless, cross-cutting knowledge and skills with programs that evolve with emerging trends and workforce needs. It’s not enough to respond to change, but to anticipate it and align offerings with current demands and future opportunities ahead of market needs.
At Utah Valley University, Laurie pioneered “horizon planning,” a futures-forward process where each school and college creates a “Horizon Document” – a long-range academic plan that looks five to ten years ahead. This rests on three pillars that every global institution should adopt. First, Utah Valley University transformed its data analytics approach to forecast labor market trends, track graduate outcomes, and assess the health of every academic program to identify and prepare for emerging opportunities.
Second, Utah Valley University strengthened engagement with advisory boards through sustained industry partnerships. Employers provide timely, practical feedback that informs program development, ensuring preparation for present and future roles.
Third, faculty are central, serving as program architects, leveraging subject-matter expertise and industry experience to design academically rigorous and market-relevant offerings.
Transformational Leadership in an Era of Disruption
Laurie notes that academic leadership requires a blend of visionary thinking and practical implementation, with vision, empathy, and persistence being the qualities that separate transformational leaders in higher education from mere administrators.
Vision helps anticipate emerging opportunities. Empathy builds trust and ensures decisions honor the human impact. Persistence helps leaders navigate complexity, overcome resistance, and sustain momentum through challenges.
Transformational leaders also need to understand the data and people behind it. Updating Utah Valley University’s academic master plan, combining careful analysis with thoughtful listening, produced a strategic planning tool that faculty and academic leaders truly own.
Finally, Laurie insists that transformational leaders must embrace the “paradox of persistent disruption” and create stability through constant change. They must be vulnerable, celebrate others’ successes, and reimagine approaches based on evidence, keeping the needs of the institution and the team above their own.
Resilient Leadership That Puts Mission Above Conformity
Laurie observes that every challenge, no matter how big or small, helps leaders grow stronger. “Resilience is something I cultivate every day as an academic leader. I’m a lifelong learner who continuously seeks opportunities for self-improvement and reflection. Over time, I’ve learned – and continue to refine – how to balance candor with empathy and pace change strategically, always keeping student-centeredness at the forefront,” she shares.
Laurie believes that the work of educators is bigger than any one person, and advancing it sometimes means stepping on toes. “Disruption, when grounded in mission, is not to be avoided!” she declares. “It is often necessary to spark progress and remove barriers to student success.”
But changing culture takes time, and it’s crucial not to cave to pressures to “fit in” if it compromises the mission. Recognize when being direct is essential, accept that some messages will never be well received, and remain committed to the mission and students rather than yielding to conformity.
Too often, leaders confuse dissensus with disdain, conflict with catastrophe, and transparency with trouble. A visionary leader sees dissensus as discovery, conflict as collaboration, and transparency as a touchstone. They know that trust, not agreement, is the true measure of a leader’s success. – Dr. Jordan Allen
Turning Accreditation Into a Catalyst for Innovation
While innovation often clashes with tradition, especially around accreditation, Laurie views the latter not as a constraint, but as a framework for quality. When compliance requirements are seamlessly integrated into academic processes, they become a launchpad for creativity. The key is to streamline processes and focus on meaningful measures that drive accountability and educational innovation.
Working with Utah Valley University’s faculty and academic leaders to revamp its program assessment process to meet accreditation standards while generating actionable insights, Laurie realized that rigorous assessment can actually accelerate innovation. By measuring learning outcomes effectively, faculty can experiment confidently to identify what enhances the student experience.
“The lesson is clear: when we integrate accreditation into the fabric of our work thoughtfully, it stops being a checklist and becomes a launchpad for creativity, flexibility, and continuous improvement,” she affirms.
Cultivating Integrity and Adaptability Through Mentorship
Mentorship has been central to Laurie’s growth, and she pays it forward intentionally. She develops leadership capacity in teams by optimizing roles, aligning responsibilities with individual strengths, fostering a culture of service excellence, and providing candid feedback to help others lead authentically and confidently.
“Great leaders are rare – that’s why we remember them. Leadership is not defined by title or scope of influence, but by readiness: the willingness to shoulder accountability, make difficult decisions, and act with integrity, even under pressure. In mentoring the next generation, I emphasize these qualities, helping emerging leaders understand that true leadership is about responsibility and impact, not recognition or authority,” Laurie states.
Mentorship means preparing leaders for current challenges and those we cannot yet anticipate. Laurie focuses on developing strategic thinking, adaptability, and ethical decision-making to help emerging leaders navigate complexity while keeping students and mission at the center. This ensures they’re ready to make a meaningful, lasting impact on the institutions and people they serve.
Staying Future-Focused Through Engagement and Reflection
Laurie stays informed and inspired by actively engaging with higher education networks and thought leadership both within and beyond the field. Her role as a Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities Commissioner provides a front-row view of innovative practices. She participates in national and international conferences, webinars, and professional forums, and engages in regular dialogue with colleagues, mentors, and thought leaders, exchanging ideas, challenging assumptions, and exploring emerging solutions.
Beyond higher education, Laurie reads widely to spark fresh approaches to complex challenges and prioritizes structured reflection to think strategically, integrate insights from peers, and foster student-centered innovation. This combination of engagement, reading, and reflection helps her remain adaptive and forward-focused while leading large-scale academic initiatives.
Finding Balance Through Purpose and Priorities
Laurie approaches work-life integration as dynamic rather than fixed, shifting with the seasons of leadership. She sets clear priorities, protects non-negotiable personal commitments, and says “no” when necessary, to ensure she can say “yes” to what matters most.
Laurie also aligns her professional responsibilities with her personal values. “The work we do in education is bigger than any one of us. It’s about students and how we serve the public. That shared purpose keeps me grounded and inspired, even during periods of disruption and change,” she reflects.
Laurie maintains personal well-being by eating healthily, exercising several times a week, spending quality time with family and friends, and carving out intentional “me” time, whether reading fiction, enjoying a quiet walk with her poodle, or simply stepping back to reflect.
From “I” to “We”: Building Bridges in Leadership
Laurie’s journey from K–12 classrooms to higher education leadership taught her that authentic collaboration forms the foundation of institutional transformation. Whether developing curriculum or initiatives to improve student outcomes, sustainable change happens by working across traditional boundaries with shared purpose and mutual trust.
Building these bridges starts with shifting from an “I” to a “we” mindset, approaching every conversation with genuine curiosity about others’ perspectives and expertise. “Effective leadership requires the humility to recognize that I’m rarely the smartest person in the room, and that’s exactly where I want to be!” she states.
Laurie notes that practical collaboration thrives on clear communication about roles, expectations, and decision-making processes. When faculty understand how their input shapes policy, staff see their operational insights valued in strategic planning, and administrators actively listen to frontline concerns, it creates an environment where everyone’s expertise contributes to collective success.
“Trust is built through consistency – following through on commitments, acknowledging when I don’t know something, and creating space for honest feedback, even when it challenges my initial thinking. These habits transform working relationships from transactional exchanges into genuine partnerships focused on student success and institutional excellence,” Laurie explains.
Leadership is often a path paved with challenges – demanding decisions, heavy responsibilities, and moments of solitude. Yet, it is also a journey filled with profound purpose and the potential for lasting impact. – Dr. Dianne McAdams-Jones
Transforming Knowledge Into a Shared Resource
Among Laurie’s numerous achievements, one that stands out is her systematic approach to process documentation and institutional knowledge preservation. Earlier, very little was documented procedurally, making their work entirely people-dependent and opaque to anyone outside their immediate teams. Complex processes like curriculum development created significant vulnerability and inefficiency.
Laurie immediately established team norms around business process continuity, comprehensively documenting every major workflow, creating handbooks and step-by-step guides that transformed institutional knowledge from collective wisdom into accessible resources. Cross-functional teams with the right expertise captured these processes, implemented peer review, and centralized storage in a shared repository.
This initiative transformed more than efficiency. New team members were onboarded effectively, departments collaborated seamlessly, and constant interruptions were eliminated. Processes became more responsive and streamlined with fewer bottlenecks, and adapted quickly to changing institutional needs. Documents are now revisited, updated, and treated as living resources.
This created institutional resilience so work could continue and improve regardless of personnel changes. An operational necessity became a cultural shift toward transparency, collaboration, and sustainable excellence, enabling every other initiative and proving that the most transformational work happens in the infrastructure that supports everything else.
Reimagining Higher Education for Lifelong Learning
Looking forward, Laurie insists that higher education must move beyond the traditional model, which entails predictable, fixed points, to one where learners navigate seamlessly between formal education, workplace experiences, and community engagement, accumulating knowledge and credentials over a lifetime.
Technology can help scale individualized attention, while flexible pathways and competency-based programs serve as prototypes. Success is measured by the ability to remove barriers, spark curiosity, and empower students and educators to dream bigger and achieve more, transforming their lives and communities to create lasting impact.
“The systems we build today must be transparent, data-informed, and inherently flexible to support learners. As academic leaders, we serve as bridge-builders, connecting where institutions are with where they need to go. This requires balancing visionary thinking with pragmatic implementation. We must be comfortable holding creative tension between innovation and stability and ensure transformation strengthens rather than disrupts student success,” Laurie observes.
The most important person I’m educating in this job is myself. In this day and age, the attitude is, “I want to learn it all.” – Dr. Astrid Tuminez (2025 Utah Valley University Faculty Convocation)
Leadership Grounded in Outcomes and Shared Success
Laurie’s advice to educational leaders: Fall in love with the problem, not your solution. Too many emerging leaders are attached to specific strategies rather than outcomes. When you’re truly committed to student success, you become endlessly creative about finding new approaches when current ones aren’t working.
Today’s decisions shape tomorrow’s possibilities. Build trust, relationships, and coalitions across roles and divisions as the foundation for navigating future challenges. Lead with integrity: take accountability for mistakes and don’t undermine or use colleagues for personal gain. Support one another and prioritize collective success for stronger, sustainable outcomes.
Amid the growing uncertainty in higher education, institutions should prioritize elevating the voices of students, faculty, staff, and communities while fostering relationships rooted in reciprocity and co-creation. – Dr. Sean Crossland
Designing a Truly Learner-Centered Ecosystem
Laurie hopes to create a truly learner-centered ecosystem that values flexibility, accessibility, and real-world relevance in higher education, moving away from rigid, institution-centric structures to modular, interconnected pathways where learning is portable, stackable, and recognized across institutions and industries.
This way, students can pause for meaningful work experience, transfer seamlessly, and build credentials that employers truly value without being constrained by debt or outdated one-size-fits-all models. Learners can customize their educational journey to fit their goals, circumstances, and evolving career needs.
Noting that learning happens everywhere – in traditional classrooms, workplaces, communities, and through lived experience – Laurie hopes that by centering students in every decision, higher education can unlock human potential and create pathways for every learner to thrive, no matter where they begin.
Conclusion
Laurie Sharp’s courage, resilience, and service remind us that true leadership is about vision and lifting others forward. Her mentorship and advocacy have empowered innovation, strengthened collaboration, and positioned higher education as a space where every learner’s potential is unlocked. Laurie’s vision for lifelong, learner-centered ecosystems ensures the impact of her leadership will extend well beyond Utah Valley University and influence how higher education institutions reimagine education for generations to come.
