Recently I visited a history professor in his office to talk about getting help for my sole current research project. Sandwiched between my other scheduled events, on enterprise-risk management, personnel issues, external-grant processing, technology requests, budget-hearing preparation, parent complaints, donor calls, and hiring meetings, I felt as if I had stepped into another world.
It was a world I formally left almost 10 years ago, when I decided to pursue a career in academic administration. Yes, my colleague, too, had committee meetings, but his day’s agenda included teaching two classes and meeting with three graduate students to discuss their dissertations. His shelves were lined with hundreds of scholarly books; mine are stuffed with reports.
Facing a shortage of faculty candidates interested in administrative careers, some colleges are taking steps to nurture new leaders.
The contrast was striking — and made me somewhat wistful. Like many full-time academic leaders at the rank of dean or above, I teach no classes. I have chaired only one dissertation in five years. I go weeks at a time without holding a single conversation that would pass as “intellectual.” I consume nonadministrative readings mainly by audiobook and podcast while I’m in the car or on an airplane.
Assuredly, I am grateful for what I have. I enjoy steering the ship of a major campus unit, trying to help thousands of students and some 100 faculty and staff members achieve their goals. I love strategic planning, hiring new professors, fund raising, even budget meetings. But I am keenly aware of what I gave up.
So I have tried hard to remain a member of the faculty in spirit even if I am a dean in appointment. For symbolic value, when I ordered business cards, I made sure they read “professor and dean” and not the other way around. In a practical vein, I discovered best practices to retain some sense of faculty self-identification. Here they are.
Find a way to engage faculty members meaningfully outside your administrative role. Too many administrators, the higher in rank they go, have daily dealings only with staff, alumni, and other administrators. As a dean, your double-digit-hour workday is consumed with all things bureaucratic and processual, and you risk losing sense of what it is like to be a regular faculty member.
A simple expedient is to stay immersed, by various means, with the faculty. In my case, I created a faculty council for our college, made up of tenured, tenure-track, and adjunct professors. We meet regularly to talk about any ideas, issues, and concerns that they have.
To the same end, I try to venture outside my office and wander the hallways. An open door occasions a pop in to a faculty member or Ph.D. student and a “What are you working on?” query. I delight in keeping up with other people’s research and refreshing my knowledge of my own field.
My most formal faculty connection is through continuing membership in the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors. I attend meetings and try to take my dean hat off. I also find it enlightening to put forward trial balloons on issues I am thinking about. (Be forewarned that not every AAUP chapter will welcome a dean into its cloister.)
Keep in touch with students — by guest lecturing and meeting with groups. Once you get to be dean or above, regular teaching is hard to pull off. Travel, the unpredictability of schedules, and the sheer number of hours spoken for during the day make it impossible to commit to a full 16-week, three-hour-a-week class plus prep.
But some academic leaders find ways around the time logjam. Deans and even presidents will teach one-credit “leadership” classes. I personally relish guest lecturing, either by invitation or via a standing offer to cover a relevant class when an instructor is away. Polishing my material and answering questions from undergraduate and graduate students keep me thinking about them. I hold career workshops for our Ph.D. students on topics like “How to excel in an exit interview” and “How your dissertation can help you in the job hunt.”
Finally, whether you are a chair or chancellor, create a student advisory group. As any administrator can testify, what keeps you up at night is what you don’t know. Students tell me much, from the lack of toilet paper in the third-floor women’s bathroom to which of our faculty members are “super smooth.”
Student engagement helps me do my job; it also bolsters my morale. After all, I became an educator because I wanted to propel education — and students remind me what that means.
Remain involved in research, even if only as mentor. The greatest struggle for many administrators at research universities is staying current with their own research. For the first 10 years of my career, my focus was on my studies. I could put in a full workweek just in databases and archives. I wrote some dozen academic books and published many journal articles. I was twice elected by my peers to the central research committee in my field.
Then I turned to administration, and while I still publish magazine and newspaper essays, my scholarly productivity has crashed. At first I felt guilty, until I realized that helping other people achieve their research goals was even more satisfying than striving for my own.
I also found other outlets that were more in line with my diminished attention span but longer experience. In brief, I am a happy “last author.” If a doctoral student or assistant professor asks me, I enthusiastically collaborate. I explain up front that I can coach, guide, frame arguments, edit, choose the right journals, and write canny “revise and resubmit” letters. My days of long shifts in the archives are over, though. I feel stimulated by the shorter, shallower engagements but not overtaxed by the workload.
I decided, for my own selfish reasons, not to surrender some of the most satisfying elements of being a professor just because I am a dean. I don’t fool myself, however, that guest lecturing is the same as teaching a full class (with grading and office hours). Nor does a rewrite of an article in an academic journal equal the slog of completing a first draft. The point is not to pretend that I am still a full-time faculty member, but rather to not grow so distant from the faculty (and students) that I end up living on another planet.
Beyond the personal, I also see a problem for academe itself when administrators do nothing but administer. It is no secret that not a few academic leaders and faculty members hold “us vs. them” attitudes about each other. The cultural and caste divides on campuses concerning leadership, change, and governance are stark. Too many faculty members have no idea what administrators have to deal with — I did not, until I became one. And too many administrators have forgotten what the faculty perspective is. As much engagement with “the other” as you can muster is always beneficial, for ourselves and for higher education itself.
David D. Perlmutter is dean of the College of Media and Communication at Texas Tech University.
