Sometimes as a faculty member, you make a deliberate choice to shift career tracks and pursue the long-drawn-out process of applying and interviewing for a position in campus administration. And sometimes you get “the call” — an unexpected offer to move into a leadership role.
In the moment, the call might seem “out of the blue,” as a professor at a research university in the Midwest described it, when he was asked to become an associate dean of the graduate school. But usually in quick transitions into administration, there is an underlying logic to the offer. That Midwestern professor, for example, had served on several graduate-school task forces and was well regarded for the success of his doctoral students and postdocs.
Logical or not, a move into administration can upturn your professional and personal life, and so it needs careful consideration. The wrinkle here: You won’t have the luxury of time when an opening emerges on short notice and the higher-ups want you to decide quickly.
In my previous Admin 101 column, I focused on how to position yourself so that you might get the call. This month, let’s assume your phone has rung with a surprise offer to become a chair, an associate or assistant dean, or some other leadership gig. Here are the main factors to guide your decision and the terms that you might request.
It’s a compliment, so be gracious. We counsel graduate students to negotiate every job offer, but to be positive and cordial in the process. After all, it’s not just a one-time, flea-market transaction but the first step in building long-term relationships that could be important for the duration of your career. The same etiquette applies when, say, the vice president for research asks you to be “director of humanities grants.” Being offered a leadership role is indeed a compliment to your character, reputation, and past achievements. You should feel good about getting the offer, and sound happy about it — even if your first instinct is to turn it down or haggle over the terms.
Consider this experience an early lesson in a fundamental truth about administration: Tone and manners matter.
You can probably get away with being gruff and inattentive as a celebrated (and tenured) scholar. But behave that way as a department chair and your job will grow harder until maybe you are the one who will be dumped unceremoniously and replaced quickly. As is often pointed out in the world of politics, you can make enemies by the way that you say “yes,” and friends by the way you say “no.”
So when you get the call to lead, even if you have doubts, express your sincere gratitude for the opportunity. Then get down to business about the nature of what is being offered.
Ask for an exact definition of the job title, role, and regular duties. Don’t worry about asking “obvious” or “dumb” questions. As a newcomer to administrative life, you will need many invisible details outlined for you. Things like:
- Beyond the title, what is the term of the position? That is, is this a regular appointment? Or are there “acting” or “interim” modifiers? At my university the former means the position is for 90 days; the latter, for longer. (Note: With interim positions, a senior administrator may call and ask you to apply for the opening, but you would still have to go through a conventional search process before the appointment is official.)
- Review the organizational chart and make sure you understand who would report to you. Which staff members or administrators would you supervise? If you’ve been asked to become department chair, for example, there might be an assistant chair, a graduate director, and other part-time administrative roles occupied by faculty members in the unit. But there will also be full-time or part-time staff members who report directly to you as their actual “boss,” not to mention graduate students, adjuncts, etc.
- Colleges and departments often have sub-units. You need to identify and understand the extent of your authority over them. A department may have several graduate programs. A college may contain multiple departments as well as centers, independent labs, or special student programs. Which ones, if any, will you oversee?
- Conversely, to whom will you report? You will “serve at the pleasure of” the administrator whose name sits directly above yours along a solid line on the organizational chart. But there may also be “dotted” lines to other higher-ups, or even unspecified but assumed lines of deference. As director of graduate studies in your department, for example, you would report to the chair, but the dean and other senior administrators can and will make decisions that affect your role.
- What are the job responsibilities? Be prepared for an extremely dense list. I have written and seen long appointment letters that detail more than 50 duties. For a chair, the list might include things like “prep accurate workload data for the department and submit reports each semester” and “evaluate and make judgments about all undergraduate transfer and study-abroad course equivalencies.”
Your initial conversations about the position may cover only some of those topics, but eventually, you will need to get all of the details in writing.
What would be your immediate priorities? You might have a soft landing into administration if your institution just wants somebody to handle the day-to-day procedures until a more formal selection process can be conducted. And perhaps you already have some ideas about the big, immediate challenges you would face if you accepted the job.
Even better is when there are great, experienced, and knowledgeable staff members who would expertly onboard you. A professor who was asked to lead her department on a week’s notice — the existing chair had stepped down to take another administrative post on the campus — told me that for the first six months she just had to “obey the staff” as she learned the job.
In other instances, however, you might be brought into the job with a mandate for “emergency” change. A professor who was quickly appointed to be interim chair of a university science department in the northeast, said his dean told him, “Your predecessor overspent wildly. Your budget is a mess. You need to balance it by the end of the month, or I will.”
Less dramatically, at the beginning of my administrative career when I stepped almost overnight into the role of interim associate dean of graduate affairs, the dean and I agreed on my top priority: Recruit for our new Ph.D. program. There were 100 other parts of the job, but this was No. 1 with a bullet.
In your preliminary discussions with the senior administrator who made you the offer, make sure the two of you are in agreement on what you will have to achieve in the short term.
Will you have any backup? Try to get a sense of how much support you will have in your new administrative position — resource-wise and politically.
A vice president for diversity once told me how, earlier in her career, she had been offered a deanship as a “next day” replacement for someone who had been noisily sacked. In her first meeting with the provost, he launched with gusto into a list of things “on fire” that he needed the new dean to resolve within a semester. Yet he offered no extra resources to do so. In addition, she said, it was clear that if she made the requested changes and complaints arose, “I would be on my own politically.” She turned down the “suicide mission” and found another road to administration.
Most of the time, unfortunately, you won’t be able to tell how much support you are likely to get on the job from your bosses. You will get rhetorical encouragement, but there’s no way to truly guarantee political or financial support. All you can do is try to have a candid talk with your future boss and ask for specific answers to two questions: (a) “What would my immediate priorities be?” and (b) “What actual resources (like money) will I have?” After that, it’s time to use your situational-awareness skills. If you have truly trusted friends on the campus, now is the time to consult them for an outside perspective.
Then, of course, some professors are at the point of their career where it really doesn’t matter if they take the reins and make unpopular changes. A now-emeritus professor at a southern university said that a key reason he was named dean of the honors college was because he was in his last year before retirement. He was willing to overhaul the troubled program quickly, take the political hits, and burn bridges because he got a huge pay boost and was planning to leave town.
Negotiate (gently) your compensation package. Only after you have identified your new duties and priorities is it time to talk about salary and perks. Such conversations involve a delicate interpersonal balance.
Clearly the upper administration values you or you would not have gotten the call. But there is a difference between winning a position after a national search and accepting an appointment via executive fiat. You have more bargaining power with the former than with the latter. As a last-minute appointee, you’re unlikely to get the full compensation package or a lot of extra stuff for yourself and your unit. Ask for too much, and the appointment may just go to the second person on their list.
Remember, though, not getting everything you want now doesn’t mean you won’t earn it later. I’ve known many interim administrators who performed so well that they won the permanent job and were then in a strong position to upgrade the terms of their compensation package.
So play the long(er) game. You could, as a conservative strategy, accept the personal terms of the package and negotiate for more resources for the program you’re about to lead. At this point, proving you’re a team player is more important to your career in administration than winning a short-term windfall.
Make no mistake: This is a difficult choice. There are many options and variables to weigh, but there’s one conversation you need to have before rendering a verdict. Anyone with ambitions to move into administration should have a sit-down with family members to talk about the long hours, the travel commitments, the weekend and evening obligations, and how the public pressures of administrative work might affect them and their lives.
Listen to what the people you care about have to say. Read the room here, too. And make your decision consensually and globally, not just for yourself.
