Earlier this year, an essay in The Chronicle on obtaining — and surviving — a “meaningful” administrator review was optimistic and open-hearted about its potential benefits. It should be formative, the essay argued, not evaluative: “An ‘administrator review’ is supposed to be a coaching tool to help leaders improve on the job, not decide if they get to keep it.”
In an ideal world, sure. But on more than a few campuses, criticism — not coaching — is the real intention behind administrator reviews. And as a result, the process can seem arbitrary for the many deans, vice presidents, and other senior leaders who undergo such reviews.
I had a bad experience with my administrator review. It wasn’t just hurtful; it was a traumatic professional event that changed the course of my career. Equally important, it did not serve my institution well.
My situation was complicated by the fact that I was an outside hire. When administrators are hired externally, it’s usually because there is tough work to be done and no internal candidates willing or able to do it. Bringing in an external leader is a huge investment for a campus. I offer my thoughts here in the hope that colleges and universities will conduct periodic reviews in a manner consistent with the investment they make in hiring chairs, deans, provosts, and other administrators.
Administrator reviews often include written self-assessments and anonymous internal surveys on multiple dimensions of the person’s leadership. But nationally, there is no accepted process for conducting administrator reviews and no clearly articulated purposes, both of which are sorely needed.
The review process could be fair and useful, and I hope that I can use my own bad experience to outline changes that could make it more valuable, both to the leaders under review and to the faculty and staff members whose success is the ultimate measure of an administrator’s excellence. It would be helpful if national higher-education organizations would do a deep analysis of this issue and write guidelines that could be used by individual institutions.
I’ve written plenty about losing my job as dean and associate vice president at Arizona State University, a position I held for four years after leaving the University of Missouri at Columbia, where I was a graduate dean and vice provost. Right before my boss at Arizona State, its then provost, told me he was naming someone to replace me as dean — “We’re going in a different direction” — he had said: “You’ve recently undergone an administrator review.” The implication was that one thing (the review) led to another (the different direction).
Yet when I asked for a copy, the provost said, “I don’t share that with the person who had the review, but I’ll talk with you about it.”
So I set up a meeting to do just that. “The review told me you had lost the confidence of the faculty,” he said. “Admittedly, you had some complicated people to work with, but that’s what the review revealed.” That was as specific as he got.
One thing that could make administrator reviews meaningful and effective: Share the results with the subject. I still don’t know if I had a legal right to see the raw data from the internal surveys about my leadership. Trusted associates discouraged me from making a formal request for the data as part of my personnel record. After all, they said, a request might anger the provost, and what would be the benefit, anyway? This provost did not provide review results even to administrators who had retained their positions.
What, then, is the use of a review when the details are not shared with the person being evaluated? If the review is meant to provide leadership guidance, wouldn’t detailed results help you lead more effectively? At my institution, deans serve at the pleasure of the provost, on one-year annually renewing contracts. The provost didn’t need the survey to decide not to renew my contract. Without seeing the results, I don’t believe my review had anything to do with his decision.
Sharing the full results — even of a negative review for a soon-to-be ex-administrator — can be helpful to an institution, too. Most universities are happy for deposed deans to continue their administrative careers elsewhere. Knowing more specifically what had gone wrong in my deanship could have helped me in a search for another position. Conversations with search consultants confirmed that for me. They would ask: “What exactly went wrong? Search committees will want to know.” The only answer I ever got that made any sense was from the university’s president: “You didn’t manage up very well.” I wonder if that problem showed up in the administrator review. Probably not.
As I was writing this essay, I asked the provost’s office if, finally, I could gain access to the survey data from my review. I was told that it had been thrown out, and that the provost at the time had not created a formal report. And so: Hundreds of faculty members, dozens of peer administrators, and some valuable external partners spent time filling out a detailed survey, including written responses, only to have the data discarded — even though the message inviting them to fill out the survey had promised that the results would be shared with me.
So how can academe improve the administrator-review process?
Reviews can be particularly problematic for leaders who are recruited from other institutions. I did necessary — and difficult — work to shape the future of the humanities departments I oversaw as dean. That work, at times, appeared “top down,” and it earned me the wrath of some established figures on the campus. However, everything I did was approved in the college or by the provost. And in my four years as dean, I didn’t once receive an annual evaluation from my supervisors, even as I wrote detailed annual reviews with face-to-face meetings for the people who reported to me.
A more productive administrator-review process would:
- Tailor the review to the leader’s circumstances, including evaluation of the competencies needed to make tough, potentially unpopular decisions. An effective job-performance review is an art, not a science: Comments from faculty members should be placed in the context of the work the administrator has been asked to do, especially if it involves changes not only in process, but in teaching and research culture. Perhaps “the numbers don’t lie,” but in the context of our institutions of higher education, numbers can certainly mislead. All reviews should be qualitative as well as quantitative.
- Focus survey questions directly on the leader’s duties and role. Rather than vague, open-ended questions, the survey should ask about specific elements of the administrator’s work: for example, hiring, tenure and promotion, annual reviews, encouragement of teaching, research, and service excellence, and collaboration with others outside of the leader’s unit. There needs to be space for faculty members to provide important information that might lie outside of the standard questions. But the formal report should exclude commentary not related to job requirements.
- Share the results with the administrator under review. Of course any inappropriate and extraneous commentary should be removed. If some of the survey comments reflect bias toward a leader’s gender, race, ethnicity, or related characteristics, that should prompt the administration to better train campus employees (including those who oversee and fill out the reviews) on how to recognize and mitigate the impact of their own bias in evaluations of leaders. I can’t see that this would have been an issue for me. But for academic leaders who are women, of color, or not heterosexual, the anonymity of administrator reviews can unearth a lot of ugliness.
- Use, as the earlier Chronicle essay proposed, a formative evaluation process. That would entail a frank conversation between the administrator under review and the person’s boss about both job performance and career trajectory. Ideally, formative evaluation and feedback (linked to the explicit expectations in the job description) would be provided annually.
- Give the leader a chance to change. In the event that a review has identified problems, it should be timed to provide at least a year for the administrator to improve performance — or to find another job.
Would such a system have changed the outcome of my deanship? I don’t know. I do know that the provost, who hadn’t hired me, didn’t like me.
The real outcome of an administrator review should be stronger leadership and a stronger institution, regardless of the review’s impact on any particular career. At the least, the data in my review could have helped my successor understand faculty needs within each of the college’s departments and research centers.
In any case, I’m happy now with the best job in the country: a tenured professorship with wonderful colleagues and students, and a research agenda that is energizing and, I believe, important. And — in what feels like a vote of confidence somewhat different from the provost’s interpretation of the survey data that I will never see — I’ve been voted onto the Faculty Senate by my departmental colleagues. There’s still a lot of work to be done, and I hope to continue trying to make my institution better.
