Note: In the “Ask the Chair” series, the author of How to Chair a Department answers your questions about departmental leadership. Send your queries via Facebook or email. Read previous columns here.
Question: You often write about the importance of chairs working collaboratively with their dean, and I’ve tried to take that advice to heart. But now that I’m working under a new dean, I’m beginning to realize that it’s not just a structural imperative, but a personal one. Deans are people, not just nodes on the org chart, and some are, well, more collaborative than others. With my recently retired dean, working in concert wasn’t a big problem; with my new dean, it threatens to be.
What can I do to move the needle — to try to garner support from this dean, whose backing is crucial both to my success as chair and to the success of my department?
Signed,
Dancing With Myself
Dear Dancing,
Well now you’ve done it: I’ve got a Billy Idol earworm lodged in my brain. If the prose that results replicates his hiccuping rhythm, it’s your fault.
Still, I appreciate the provocation because you’re right: Deans aren’t abstractions. They have variable, fallible, human relationships with department chairs. Which is why, even if you do your best to find common ground with your dean, results will vary.
In the 16 years I’ve spent at my current institution, we’ve had nine different deans: That’s a lot of learning curves. I’ve worked with all nine in my 12 years as chair. In terms of personal style, our deans have run the gamut. Some were confident enough to enter a discussion or a negotiation with an open mind and had meetings in which something truly innovative emerged. Others treated meetings with chairs and professors as mere formalities, a “due diligence” check-off box. I’ve worked with deans who managed from a mind-set of abundance, as well as those who operated out of a sense of scarcity. Of the nine, the one most universally admired by the faculty was the one I found personally very difficult to deal with — because that dean seemed to have no interest in, or sympathy for, the work done in my department or division.
When so much of a chair’s success depends on support from a higher-up, what’s to be done when you encounter instability at that level?
I recommend a two-pronged approach, focusing on both the formal, structural aspects of the relationship and the variable, personality facets. Whenever the two of you interact, keep in mind that your dean is both The Dean and, let’s say, “Brenda.” The Dean has certain institutional obligations; Brenda has personality quirks that influence how she leads and collaborates.
Unwritten rules of collegiality. On the institutional side, expectations for both chairs and deans are spelled out somewhere in your institution’s governing documents, often in a faculty handbook. As chair, I have to staff my department’s course offerings, run hiring and personnel committees, and submit annual reports, among other things. My dean, in turn, has to provide an annual operating budget for my department, respond to requests for new or replacement faculty lines, and generally provide the leadership resources and authority that chairs don’t command.
Looking at my own college’s faculty handbook, however, I was surprised to see just how little it says about the dean’s specific responsibility to their chairs. And for that reason, much of that relationship is governed by unwritten rules of collegiality.
Some resources flow naturally and unbidden from the dean’s office to the department, but a significant portion of its needs are met only when you as the chair bring them to the dean’s attention. And the bulk of the rules governing those requests are affective, not bureaucratic.
Those rules change, of course, as deans change: There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for making the dean care about the things that your department cares about. I’ve talked sometimes in this column about the fuzzy but real distinction between management and leadership: Some deans are primarily managers; some are leaders. Some deans are visionaries; some are functionaries.
If your dean is a manager, your arguments, to be successful, need to connect your department’s goals to resources and institutional priorities. If your dean is a leader, you might instead be able to tap into their ambitions for the college and for your department: Paint an inspiring picture of a reality not yet in place, and make the dean your partner in bringing that vision to life.
Different institutions need different things at different points in their life cycles. The way that you’ll advance your department’s agenda depends to a great degree on who is now running the academic-affairs side of the house, and how they see their role.
So figure that out, and then use it. Imagine, for instance, that you and your colleagues see potential in adding a new area to the department’s curriculum. Is your dean a risk taker, or risk averse? Would she be excited by a proposal to add one or two faculty lines to your department, raising money to support them with the help of the fund-raising office? Or would she rather see how your department might expand into this new area gradually, at least at first, reorganizing teaching assignments among existing faculty members to allow coursework in this new area to be offered? Is there a problem at the college level, perhaps enrollments, that your new program can help her solve?
I’ve worked with each of those styles of dean. When I was first (unbeknownst to me) laying the groundwork for the small humanities center that I now direct, we started small, with a year of visiting speakers supported by an outside grant. I met regularly during the year with my dean, Janice, and those conversations often centered on some version of her question, “What do you want to have happen?”
I remember being baffled at first — I mean, to my mind, it was already happening. We were bringing in speakers from across the country and having great conversations. I was happy. But my dean was a visionary: She kept pushing me to think about how to ensure that such conversations were sustained into the future. Years later, that evolved into the Humanities Studio at Pomona College.
Born collaborators versus lone wolves. As your letter highlights, Dancing, another of the variables here is a dean’s individual comfort level with teamwork. Janice was a collaborative dean: I think she was probably hired because both the faculty and the president admired that about her style. But not every dean who preceded her, nor all those who have followed, have been built quite the same way.
I never had the sense that Janice had encouraged me to dream big because a new humanities center would be a feather in her cap: She just recognized that supporting students and faculty members in the humanities would be good for the college. But another kind of dean might have been sold on the idea, too, even if operating out of different motives.
We may as well say it: Some deans — just like plenty of professors — are actively in search of feathers for their caps. Bold, new programs look good on a CV for that next administrative job. In the midst of a campus controversy, some deans are unwilling to spend their personal capital to support you and your department, or even faculty welfare more broadly. But they just might be interested in something that gives them bragging rights: Very few such projects can succeed without faculty buy-in.
Viewed from your relatively powerless position of chair, it’s easy to think primarily about what you need from your dean to succeed. But, don’t forget, they need us, too. Without descending into pure cynicism, there may be ways to leverage that insight and gain the dean’s support for your department’s pet project by finding a way to mesh it with the dean’s big plan. As Jerry McGuire might say, “Help me help you!”
It can be risky, of course, to let institutional priorities dictate, rather than gently shape, your department’s needs. Early in my career I worked in an English department that was approached by a wealthy donor who offered us a lot of money to endow a faculty position in “sports communication.” That position would have massaged his ego but do little or nothing to advance the strategic goals of the department: I was pleased that we had the backbone to refuse the gift.
Yet there’s wisdom, too, in knowing which way the winds are blowing at your institution, and positioning your department’s own projects in that direction. Major campus goals usually are laid out in a strategic plan. Faculty members tend to be averse to such bureaucratic-sounding documents, but, as chair, it’s incumbent upon you to be familiar with them. Say, for instance, that you’re chair of a math department that is concerned about the persistence of first-generation students in the major and you’d like to develop a cohort program to improve student success. Surely your institution is also invested in the success of historically underrepresented students (although anti-DEI legislation makes such programs challenging in some states). When you ask the dean for money for the program, can you frame the request in terms of the institution’s own stated support for first-generation college students?
Sometimes (whether we like it or not), deans are moved by the knowledge that a donor stands ready to pay for a new departmental program. Tread carefully here. Advancement offices get very nervous — strike that, downright territorial — when individual professors or departments try to cultivate donors for their own projects. If you get an inkling that a donor might be interested in making a big gift to your department, go immediately to your contact in the advancement office and put that burgeoning conversation on their radar. Should that relationship grow organically, everyone wins.
Finally, let’s have a bit of sympathy for deans. I’ve complained of having to figure out how to work with nine different deans during my terms as chair: That’s a lot of dating profiles to understand. Meanwhile, each of those deans has had to work with 45-plus department chairs and program coordinators — they’re managing a pretty-heavy affective load, too.
We want predictability in our leaders. But we don’t want to be managed by robots. We need to get to the place where we appreciate the complicated, human (all too human, Nietzsche would say) relationships that characterize our work not as noise but as signal. Those sometimes-pesky personalities aren’t a bug in our system, but a feature. And it’s not only deans who have them.
