Deans, who often find themselves in unenviable positions on campuses, do well to heed the best advice of those who share their challenges, Bret S. Danilowicz and Anne-Marie McCartan suggest in their book Organizing Academic Colleges: A Guide for Deans.
“It can be a political circus, at times, in the dean’s office,” and of course deans serve at the pleasure of provosts and presidents, Danilowicz said, on the phone from Oklahoma State University at Stillwater, where he is in his sixth year as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
Hope for riding out intrigues and other challenges, he said, lies within the pages of the guide that he and McCartan, who was executive director of the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences from 2006 to 2016, have produced. The council is providing an interactive form of the book on its website, free of charge.
The authors interviewed scores of deans, and also pored over years of postings on the council’s email list. They found that deans fret about how to best proceed to get their work done, and how to shore themselves up for the task. How, for example, should they go about building the case for creating new associate-dean positions? And how do they effectively lead — and, when necessary, cajole — sometimes-fractious faculties?
The relative merit of different approaches is surprisingly little researched, Danilowicz said. “Every new dean who goes into the position has the same questions.”
Not only is the position politically fraught, but the workload is great, especially when, these days, 30 percent to 70 percent of deans’ time is consumed by fund raising for their colleges. Setting firm deadlines for tasks and delegating responsibility are essential, the authors advise.
A time-honored challenge, of course, is to quell discontent in professorial ranks, particularly after “years of festering warfare”; Danilowicz and McCartan have pages of advice on that.
Another is to respond judiciously to upper administrators’ requests, or demands, that they do something unpopular. Probably the decanal challenge du jour, said Danilowicz, is reorganizing colleges and campuses — in particular, merging institutions of a state system. “Many deans don’t know well how to handle that process,” he said.
It can be particularly challenging when ill advised, he noted: “Change can often be just to build a president’s or a provost’s CV, to document that they are doing something. Sometimes they’re actually taking away the distinctiveness of the institution. The more I got into this research, the more I realized that, unless there’s a crisis, the structure of colleges is best kept as it is.”
However daunting the challenges, he said — and this is near the top of his and McCartan’s long list of recommendations — “Communicate! Communicate! Communicate!” Talk to all parties: upper administration, affected departments and faculty members, students, even alumni.
And, wherever possible, pre-empt, he said: Don’t wait for a summons to a meeting with upper administration; rather, gauge needs, moods, and likely crises, real or imagined.
Yes, think politically, he said. And remember that often, ultimately, “when a decision is made above you, it’s your job to figure out how to do it. You may not agree with it, but it’s your job to make that a productive decision.”
