Burnout has always been one of the causes of administrative turnover. But academe has been losing more leaders than ever, as the amount of work, the pressure of getting through it, and the constant controversies have intensified year after year since Covid.
In my first days as a dean in 2013, I used to receive 20 to 30 substantive emails a day; on my last day as dean in 2023, that number could easily surpass 100 messages a day requiring my attention. Likewise, a colleague at a research university in the Midwest who had been a dean in the 1970s told me that there was certainly a lot of work back then, but by the 2020s, he said, “toxicity and overwork” made him wonder why anyone would want a senior leadership position.
In this series, David D. Perlmutter writes about pursuing a career in academic administration and about surviving and thriving as a leader:
I’ve been focusing the Admin 101 column on this crisis of administrator anxiety: on doing work that matters, overcoming a culture of distrust, reacting constructively to failure, and resisting the tide of pessimism sweeping academe. This month’s column is on how to get through the day and the semester without crushing your health and spirit. There are, after all, sound ways to approach the herculean labors of being a chair, dean, vice president, or president that make the effort less of a grind and more manageable.
You don’t have to do “everything, everywhere, all at once.” Nothing that academic administrators must do on the job these days would surprise me. A dean I know worked 10 hours a day for weeks to secure a major gift for his college. A chair of a California science department described a personnel issue that “ate up a month.” After the sudden departure of his undergraduate coordinator, a chair in a humanities department with hundreds of sections was consumed with course, instructor, and classroom scheduling — so much so that he thought about quitting himself.
The key factor in getting through such deep slogs is identifying which things must be immediately attended to and which can be placed on the backburner or covered by others. It helps to have a great team in place. Some leaders, protective of their turf and reputation, are reluctant to delegate duties. They try to do it all and end up burned out.
In the case of the department chair consumed by scheduling woes, he was trusted enough by his faculty and staff that he held a meeting explaining that all of his focus and time had to be diverted to this “one big thing” for weeks to come. To his gratification, almost everyone pitched in to deal with his other routine duties. The chair had time to concentrate on the crucial scheduling task, and the esprit de corps of the department increased as well.
Schedule breaks, transition periods, and “reaction intervals.” Once you hit the level of dean or above, it is very likely that every minute of your weekly calendar is accounted for — and not by you. I was lucky in my career to be consistently blessed with staff members who not only knew how to physically populate my calendar but also had great instincts about the choreography and timing of a jammed administrative day.
Knowing when not to schedule something is vital. The president of a small-town college where everything was within walking distance told me that she was fine with short intervals between scheduled meetings. In contrast, a dean I know who works in a big city sometimes has meetings that take place across town, so his schedule needs to include enough time (plus extra) for him to get from one appointment to the other. Being repeatedly late for meetings is not going to reduce your stress levels, so plan accordingly.
You — or whoever is organizing your calendar — can also minimize the pressure of a difficult day by scheduling “reaction” time. Some kinds of meetings run overlong because of the open-ended or controversial nature of their content. For unhappy personnel matters, for example, you never know what might arise in the meeting. You’ll be less anxious if breathing room before the next thing is built into your day. (Sometimes, of course, it helps to have another meeting as a handy excuse to escape a difficult one.)
Likewise, when you’re making a big proposal to the upper administration, make sure you have some unscheduled time afterward. As dean, I routinely gave myself a long empty period after a presentation to the provost or president. Ideally, that time would be filled with a celebration if my idea was approved, or a quick mobilization to get things moving. If things went badly, I used that window of time as an opportunity to clear my head and figure out my next move.
Accept that crises (major and minor) are part of the job and prepare yourself psychologically for disruptions. I’ve heard a lot of administrators say that they like the day-to-day work of academic leadership but can’t stomach all the sudden emergencies that aren’t logged in a planner.
My first major research project in graduate school was a multi-year visual ethnography of a police department. Basically, I sat in a squad car, observed and took pictures of officers at their work, and talked with them about the events that unfolded. Although they had occasional downtime, their job was a series of big and small emergencies. It certainly gave me a perspective about not being irritated when my calendar was disrupted by some surprise. In fact, I came to expect interruptions as a norm, not an anomaly. A later running text joke with a dean friend was, “Hey, it’s 4:59 p.m. and still no crisis! What’s wrong???”
A lot of administrators don’t learn that lesson early enough in their careers. And some burn out because they never learn it. That is especially problematic now, in an era when political, budgetary, and personnel upsets are just part of the daily dose of academic administration. How good you are at managing a crisis is a separate issue. But they are going to happen (not infrequently at 4:59 p.m. on a Friday).
It’s understandable to be miffed at the antics of people who create a problem and time it as inconveniently as possible to resolve. But administration might not be for you if you are stressed out by surprises to your carefully planned day. Learn to accept them as a reality of campus leadership, as much as you would any other part of your administrative portfolio. And if you can’t, it’s probably time to step down.
Don’t let ego drive you to intervene too fast. Early in my administrative career, I was copied, along with the dean of the college, on an email about what seemed to me a pretty pressing matter. Before responding I dropped by her office to discuss it. I was sort of surprised because I thought she would want to chime in right away, set up a meeting — basically leap into administrative mode. She smiled and said that, in administration, some issues get worse if you don’t get involved right away, while others resolve themselves if given a short interval of “wait and see.”
Over the years, her observation proved correct. There’s a natural human inclination — and it seems to swell when you become an administrator — to exaggerate your own importance in solving a problem. In our age of overcommunication, people expect an immediate response. But get in the habit of giving yourself a little time to think. You might realize that holding off would be the wiser (not to mention, less stressful) course on a particular issue.
A department chair at a university in the Southeast said he was checking his email on a Sunday evening when he spotted an all-caps, multi-exclamation-point message from a faculty member declaring that the learning-management software was down “for the entire campus,” and predicting disaster in classes the next day. The chair sensed that (a) a universitywide software crash was unlikely, (b) it was further doubtful that only one professor had noticed, (c) there was no chance that the chair of a language department was going to be able to do anything about it, and (d) he didn’t want to train faculty members to expect him to check his email on Sunday nights. So he had dinner, watched a movie, and went to bed. Sure enough, that same professor emailed the next morning to say, “Sorry, I had forgotten my password; that’s why I couldn’t get in.” Apocalypse averted.
Every administrator has different responsibilities and serves constituencies with competing expectations. Not reflexively jumping into the fray “to save the day” can preserve your sanity and even help create an atmosphere of more individual responsibility. It will also lessen your workload and stress levels.
It would be very tempting (and popular) to promise current and future administrators that if you work “smart,” you don’t necessarily have to put in long hours. Unfortunately, the workload of the modern academic administrator at every rank is objectively huge and unavoidable. But your organization of that labor, your attitude toward it, and your philosophy about it can affect its quality and sometimes its quantity. You don’t have to burn out if you commit to pragmatism.
