A few years ago at a leadership workshop, I gave a talk on “good things about being an academic administrator.” The audience was largely made up of faculty members considering the leadership path. They listened politely, but I sensed that I was not making the sale. When the Q&A period came, the queries and comments immediately shifted to all the negatives: toxic professors, budget shortfalls, underprepared students, and so on. Few of them saw any visible positive aspects to administrative service — except salary.
In this series, David D. Perlmutter writes about pursuing a career in academic administration and about surviving and thriving as a leader:
Lately that has seemed more true than ever. Social-media posts and headlines in The Chronicle make clear: This is not a joyful era for higher education. But that doesn’t mean we want or need doom-and-gloom leaders. There’s a big difference between being realistic about academe’s future and being resigned to hopelessness. And if you fall among the latter, you shouldn’t be in administration.
I’ve been focusing the Admin 101 column on administrative anxiety — how to make sure your attention is on work that matters (as opposed to the minutiae), how to overcome the creeping culture of distrust on college campuses, and how to take “no” for an answer without rancor. This month’s column is on how to fight against the metastasizing pessimism that is gripping many academic leaders.
The high rates of turnover and failure among academic administrators are, reciprocally, symptoms and causes of the many crises of higher education. Nevertheless, becoming a full-time pessimist is bad for your institution, undermines the causes and constituencies you serve, and corrodes your soul as a leader — not to mention hurts your career prospects. A bleak leadership style can and should be overcome, but by reason and sense, not by ignoring harsh realities.
Positive does not mean foolish. Academics are not generally seen as “positive” bunch. In popular culture, the stereotype of the troubled, cynical, misanthropic intellectual is so common that in graduate school you feel social pressure to repress any outward signs of happiness. Like the scornful patriarch Logan Roy on Succession, we want to be considered “serious” people investigating “serious” subjects.
Nevertheless, most scholars I know — from the jocular to the dour in temperament — marry optimism about solving a problem with practical pessimism about certain proposed solutions. A cancer researcher, for example, once explained to me that while he felt disheartened when a line of inquiry had failed to yield positive results, he just took it as a charge to keep trying other paths: “I’m not going to give up on fighting cancer!” That’s just good science. A thousand flops are often necessary in the path to a breakthrough.
That brand of optimism, inspired by the scientific method, should be an article of faith for any administrator tempted to embrace a fatalistic outlook in the face of tough odds.
An associate dean of undergraduate affairs I know offers a case in point. Nobody I have met is more aware of the mental-health, social-skills, and academic challenges of today’s college students. She is a “serious” professional steeped in the data and active on the front lines. She does not cover up problems, ignore them, or proceed in a Pollyannaish manner. But she radiates a “can do” attitude that I think positively encourages faculty and staff members.
Pessimism guarantees failure. In my 10 years as a dean, I was lucky to work at a university and in a state where budgets were generally in the black and opportunities for innovation were open. When we made a proposal, there was a good chance it would be approved, if we had aligned its ROI to the priorities of the institution. But in higher education today, and at all of my previous institutions, the opposite was true. As a colleague at a regional state university in the northeast put it: “You know you are going to be turned down for anything new, and even for just holding on to what you have.”
It follows that, in many academic sectors, doomsayers are often just being pragmatic. The game can indeed be fixed against you — but you have to play as if winning is a possibility:
- If you go into a big meeting thinking that your proposal will fail, you undermine its quality and your sales skills, even unconsciously. Your audience can often tell when you don’t quite believe what you’re advocating.
- In dire times, confidence (without crossing over into delusion) can be inspiring. Our woes will not be solved by just giving up, and the people who have mentally surrendered to despair will definitely not get their proposals and budget requests supported.
- Accepting failure as the norm will eat away at your soul and make your time as a leader all the more painful.
So force yourself to be positive for your own sake as well as for the people you serve. Note that “positive” is less about being upbeat and more about continually “working the problem.” Just because you don’t have a solution in yesteryear’s playbook doesn’t mean there isn’t one yet discovered. Even at many struggling colleges, good people are trying to find new ways to reach reasonable goals.
Pessimism may leave you unprepared for opportunity. Not only might a negative mentality prompt negative outcomes, but it also gets in the way of positive ones.
The chair of a humanities department at a struggling, demoralized, liberal-arts college described how getting what he wanted created an unexpectedly stressful situation. When a longtime professor announced his retirement, the chair dutifully put together a hiring plan to keep the position. He had grown pessimistic over his decade as chair because the senior administration had rejected his previous tenure-track requests, citing budget woes and other “prioritized” areas for new hires. This time, to his shock, he got exactly what he asked for. Unfortunately, he could not savor the victory. The department immediately fell into squabbling about the choice of hiring area, the timetable, and the makeup of the search committee.
Eventually he realized that the doom-and-gloom culture of his department had sidelined his management skills, and he resolved to turn the situation around. The hire was accomplished. And he worked hard to convince his faculty colleagues that just because dire forecasts were often correct didn’t mean they could not still do their best work on a hiring proposal and be better prepared if the news was good next time.
Pessimism has hidden downsides. A leader’s dour attitude affects the day-to-day operation of the office, not just the high-stakes proposals and projects. It casts a shadow on the “invisible” choices that people make about their jobs, including whether to stay at the institution and whether to move into administration.
It’s part of your mandate to effectively communicate ideas, standards, goals, plans, and processes. But the people you oversee will pick up on your tone and manner — sometimes more than your actual words. A dean of an education college described how demoralized everyone felt in the transition back to the campus after Covid lockdowns. He tried to acknowledge that people “were in the dumps” but also that “we had a job to do.” He understood that people would take their cues from him if he radiated dismal vibrations. He resolved to always be the most optimistic person in the room.
A negative work environment also drives away the good people. Further, those demographic groups that traditionally have been dissuaded, undermined, or outright discouraged from seeking leadership positions are even more likely to avoid applying if they associate being a leader with endless woes. When you dive into the pessimism pit, you may be lowering the expectations of those around you and unconsciously perpetuating impediments to others to join you.
After 20-some years of writing about academic leadership and almost as long practicing it, I can testify that pessimism in higher education is not delusional: People, budgets, and processes can often disappoint you. Across many campuses, a grim expectation or a gloomy prophecy may very well be the correct one.
But pessimism becomes self-perpetuating if we assume all hope is lost and there’s no way and no point in trying to do our jobs. If a few professors or staff members “quiet quit” in despair, well, that’s not good. But if the people who run the institution do — the department chairs, deans, vice chancellors for student affairs, provosts, and presidents — then game over. An accurate assessment of challenges is needed to keep up morale and to keep trying to solve our problems. But “serious” people have to be optimists.
