Unless you land an endowed chair or make a mint writing textbooks, administration is where the money is in higher education. That’s just as true at two-year colleges as it is at four-year ones.
Some people might say it’s a shame that the best and brightest have to abandon the classroom in order to be adequately compensated. Others would argue that administrators are rarely the best and brightest. But no one can dispute the obvious: Administrators, as a rule, make a lot more money than faculty members.
Is money the best reason to go into administration? Of course not. The best reason is that you’re an obsessive-compulsive type-A personality. However, as a motivator, money is not a bad runner-up.
But if you’re considering a move into administration, you ought to consider a number of factors besides salary. I was a department chairman for seven years and have served for the past nine months as an interim dean, so perhaps my experience will be helpful to those of you about to take the plunge.
The first thing you should know is that administration is hard work. In his recent column, Stanley Fish wrote that administrators make more money because “they work harder, they have more work to do, and they actually do it.” I don’t know that I’d go quite that far. As a full-time instructor, I often taught five sections of freshman composition in a single term, meaning I had about 125 papers to grade every two weeks. I can’t honestly say that being a department chairman or dean is more work than that.
It might be more accurate to say that being an administrator is more stressful and carries greater responsibility. There isn’t necessarily more to do -- in fact, at times I think administrators have less to do than instructors -- but what we do is ultimately of greater consequence.
That’s not to disparage the work of the classroom instructor. But while that instructor may be responsible for one or two hundred students, department heads and deans control the fate of thousands. They have to make sure all the right classes are offered at the right times, that everything is adequately housed and appropriately staffed. If they fall down on the job, the college can’t function.
On top of that are the personnel matters -- hiring, firing, evaluation, promotion, tenure -- for which department heads and deans are largely responsible on most campuses. Botch a few of those decisions and you will come to know the true meaning of misery. Sometimes that happens even when you make the right decision.
And then there’s the (often-false) sense of urgency that attends everything a midlevel administrator does. As a professor, I could pace myself throughout the week, perhaps grading 20 papers a day, for instance. As an administrator, I don’t have that luxury. When my superiors need something from me, they need it right then.
So being an administrator, if not more labor intensive than teaching, is certainly more stressful. Many capable people never bother making the move into administration for precisely that reason -- they don’t want the hassle. Others, after a game attempt, simply decide the extra stress is not worth the additional cash. That’s something to think about before you apply.
Another thing you need to know is that an administrator’s job can be extremely tedious: interminable meetings, multiple and duplicative forms, mind-numbing reports, stacks of documents, endless class schedules, redundant evaluations. (A few months ago my 6-year-old asked me what I do at work. As I patiently described a typical day, I could see that he was growing increasingly disenchanted. Finally he interrupted. “Dad,” he asked, “are you a paper pusher?”)
Even more tedious, perhaps, than the busy times are the not-so-busy times. In fact, one of the worst things about being an administrator is that I have to be in my office from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day, whether I have anything administrative to do or not. That is, of course, barring all of those meetings, during which I merely wish I were in my office.
I tend to be very efficient when it comes to paperwork, so once in a while, there are days when I have no meetings and finish everything before noon. A professor could simply leave at that point. An administrator can’t. You have to sit there until 5 p.m. (with a generous lunch break, to be sure), in case somebody comes by with a complaint. For an administrator, simply being there is a large part of the job.
OK, you’re thinking, I could have sworn he mentioned pros in the introduction. Isn’t there anything good about being an administrator? Of course there is.
Many of the positives are obvious -- money, prestige, a degree of control. But some aren’t. For example, probably the best thing about being a midlevel administrator, from my perspective, is the opportunity to be an advocate for faculty members: to assist them in their bids for promotion and tenure, to help them find travel money, to be a mentor to those who are new to the profession. Even something as mundane as helping a faculty member move her class into a better-equipped room can be a major source of satisfaction.
Another source of satisfaction lies in knowing that you’ve played a role in making the college a better place for everyone. Believe it or not, among the long list of committees on which I’ve served over the years are some that actually performed good and useful work, such as the calendar committee that revamped the summer schedule to create longer breaks or the committee that helped design classrooms for a new building.
Of course faculty members can serve on such committees as well, but administrators get to do it more often. With so many committee assignments, some of them are bound to be worthwhile.
Finally, as a department head and dean I’ve been able to help students in ways I couldn’t as a faculty member -- for example, by allowing them to register or pay fees or withdraw after a deadline, when circumstances warrant. Of course I can’t say “yes” to every request. Indeed sometimes I feel like I say “no” to most of them. But the look on the face of a deserving student when I help him or her out of a tight spot certainly makes me glad I showed up for work that day.
Keeping these pros and cons in mind, I hope you’ll consider applying for that chairmanship or deanship when it comes open on your campus, especially if you’re an experienced faculty member who’s been thinking about making the move for some time. Two-year colleges need good administrators as much as they need good teachers -- and the former, in my experience, are much harder to find.
And, hey, if you’re not a type-A personality, don’t worry. Once you get the job, you will be.
Rob Jenkins is an associate professor of English and interim dean of academic services at the Lawrenceville campus of Georgia Perimeter College. He will write occasionally for our new community-college column.
If you would like to write for our regular column on faculty and administrative careers at two-year colleges, or have a topic to propose -- on any aspect of finding jobs at two-year colleges, getting promoted, or doing the jobs -- we would like to hear from you. Send your ideas to careers@chronicle.com.
