All of my senior mentors are dead. Throughout my nearly 30-year academic career — from graduate school up through the faculty and administrative ranks — I’ve been lucky to have a cohort of reliable, trustworthy, and generous mentors. Two years ago, the last one passed away.
That loss has prompted me to rethink what it means to be a mentor — specifically, for current and future campus leaders in today’s volatile landscape. We live in an era of great crisis for campus administration. No doubt you’ve seen the headlines: on the lack of interest in the department chair’s job, the intense pressures of a college presidency, the “shallow” candidate pool in administrative hiring, the recruiting challenges, and most recently, the “spate of high-profile no-confidence votes.” Across academe and among search firms, the talk is of unusually high rates of turnover — not just retirements and firings but leaders at all ranks simply burning out on the job and giving up on administrative life.
Even if you are a faculty member who distrusts your campus leaders and doesn’t care about their job anxiety, you should be alarmed by the instability it causes everyone at every higher-education institution.
Success in a leadership position — whether you are a department chair, a dean, a vice president for research, or higher up the chain — is never purely a technical exercise. So I’ll be focusing this next series of Admin 101 essays on the emotional and political. In this first foray into how to cope with all the angst of modern academic administration, it makes sense to start with this question: Where do leaders go to get good advice these days?
Welcome “one issue” or “one off” mentors. The classic mentor of old was someone seasoned, senior, and usually male who advised someone younger and usually male on all aspects of work, relationships, and life. Even in our modern and increasingly diverse era, you can still find people of common sense to guide you generally on the personal and the professional.
But it is unproductive and unrealistic to think one human will be your one-stop mentor for every topic on which you might need advice. The modern administrative mentor can be a specialist with depth instead of a generalist with breadth.
With the passing of my senior mentors, I now turn for advice to a wide range of people of different ages and areas of expertise. For example, when I am working on a new teaching project, my first phone call is to a master teacher I know who also designs and consults on curriculum proposals. When I’m working on a complicated research or grant proposal, I call a retired faculty member who is an ace research methodologist. Still others are great sounding boards and discussants on issues as varied as the administrator job market, salary compression, and budget dilemmas.
None of those able advisers are universal mentors for me. That’s not a reflection of their limitations but rather of how complicated the university of the 2020s has become. Likewise, when I am asked for advice, I try to limit my responses to topics I understand well. We all have precincts of expertise and should admit them up front.
Recognize that you need caring criticism. Most academics have encountered a mentor who was a villain in disguise — someone who seems to be giving you good advice, but turns out to be malicious or self-serving. A new department chair, hired from outside of the university, told me how happy he was when a senior professor “went out of his way to take [him] under his wing.” Within a semester, however, the chair realized that this so-called mentor was merely trying to curry favor and gain an ally for his running feuds with departmental adversaries. His “advice” was neither altruistic nor constructive.
Likewise, relentless affirmation can be a problem when what you really need is worthwhile and applicable recommendations. A dean I know said he had an affirming and upbeat mentoring dyad with a retired provost but came to realize that the latter “liked me too much.” Everything the dean did was “wonderful” and “brilliant” — ego boosting but not effective in getting things done. “I saw him mostly as a cheerleader,” said the dean, which was good for his ego, but he went elsewhere for useful advice.
Ideal mentors in your administrative journey should, at baseline, have positive feelings for you, but must also be able to step back and offer astute criticism. Their main ethic should be to coach, not coddle, you.
The counsel they give might even sting. Early in my administrative career, when I was an associate dean of graduate studies, one of my mentors pointed out a big mistake that I had made in calculating funding requirements for a proposed new Ph.D. program. He was the first person to whom I had shown the draft, so I was very grateful for his tough(ish) love. He was right; I was wrong. Mentoring made the proposal better, which is what I wanted all along.
Seek out mutual mentors. Two other traditional components of classical mentoring are (a) an age and generational gap between the mentor and the protégé and (b) the flow of advice is one-way and linear from the “senior” to the “junior.” The novice seeks acumen; the elder dispenses it. That dynamic is unsustainable, unreasonable, and illogical today — and probably always was. People of all ages and ranks on any campus have wisdom, and we should no longer think of mentoring as a handoff so much as an exchange.
A case in point: a senior dean at a major research university had served for almost two decades and was trying to start a completely new area of research in the sciences. He found that a 20-something doctoral student demonstrated, time and time again, her sagacity on the cutting-edge topic and what to do to invest in it (via a lab). In turn, the dean tried to give as good as he got, helping the doctoral student with advice in areas of his own experience and insight — like preparing for the job market.
Welcome to the era of mutual mentoring with shattered stereotypes of who is fit to mentor whom.
Negative mentoring is also mentoring — of a kind. When I discussed the main tenets of this column with my mutual mentors and a couple of other administrators, each one separately asked if I was going to include the concept of “negative mentoring.” It reminded me of something my father, a psychologist and business-management professor, used to say: “Poor leaders are useful to study; you learn from them what you shouldn’t do.”
Indeed, years ago as a rookie administrator, I attended a leadership conference where a tablemate advised me that there was absolutely no reason for a chair or a dean to understand the vagaries of campus budgets. He thought “grubby” money questions were beneath his dignity as an academic and better left to the staff. I was young enough in my position that I didn’t argue, but I felt almost right away that probably the opposite course of action made more sense. I’ve tried over the years to learn all I can about financial dashboards, which are essential to understanding the modern university.
In short: Bad advice, and models of how not to do something, are worth at least a little of your time and consideration.
Administrators today need trustworthy and astute counsel, and mutual mentoring is the best path to get and give good advice. That said, you can learn from lousy, addled advice, and from shady players, too. In the end, your success will be decided by how well you can judge which is which.
