Learn From My Mistakes as a Dean

If you’re reading this, you most likely are either a new dean or you aspire to the job. Perhaps you are about to start your first deanship this summer. Whether you become a dean at your current institution or at a new one, here are a few things to keep in mind — advice entirely based on what I did wrong in my first few years as a dean.

Don’t tell them what to do. The worst way to start a deanship is by immediately sharing your great ideas for how people can do things better. Sure, when you interviewed for the job with the provost or the search committee, you probably had to suggest a few plausible changes you would make as dean. But wise candidates know better than to offer too many critiques of the institution during a campus visit. If you got the job, you must have been one of the wise ones. That means you listened, and then answered specific questions with examples of things you had accomplished at your current institution. But you didn’t go into great detail during the interview about what they should be doing, and you shouldn’t do it at this early stage of your appointment, either.

You were hired because of what you’ve achieved, and you have every reason to think that you can duplicate some of your previous successes at your new institution. It’ll take some time, however, to work out the context in which you now operate. You got things done at your old place because you knew how to get things done there. You had been there a while, and you knew the faculty you dealt with every day.

I used to teach first-year writing as well as upper-level literature courses, and one thing that stood out for me was that students who left my composition class writing beautiful essays often produced lousy first drafts as students enrolled months later in my upper-division courses. It wasn’t that they had forgotten everything I’d taught them about writing. It was that the new context — writing in a literature course — took some getting used to, and it required a lot of concentration, which kept them from being able to write the way I knew they could. Think of yourself in your deanship as that undergraduate: You were good at certain aspects of management in your role as chair (or whatever) in your last institution. In this new position, though, you have so much unfamiliar context to absorb that it will take time for you to be able to be a good manager again.

The listening needs to happen before the talking starts. It took me years to repair my relationship with one department at my new institution after our first meeting, at which I cheerfully offered what seemed to me to be very helpful suggestions about their hiring practices.

Don’t talk about your previous employer. Yes, I know you spent 15 or more years there. You accumulated a lot of experience and a good deal of success, and you built the confidence to enable you to move into administration. You learned a ton on the job there, and you’re bringing to this new position some good judgment honed at that institution. By all means, apply that good judgment. After your initial listening period, you’ll be able to make some suggestions for how to handle situations at the new place. But don’t ever start a sentence with any variation of “At Old University we … .”

You’re at New University now, and you need to absorb its culture. Everyone wants your head in the game here. It can upset your new colleagues — faculty and administrators — to know that you’re always thinking about the place you left. They don’t want to be told how much better Old University did anything. That is especially true if you’ve switched sectors — four-year to two-year, public to private, big to small. There will already be suspicion in some quarters that, given your background, you couldn’t possibly understand New U. Once you’ve absorbed the culture and context of your new campus, go ahead and make good use of what you learned at your old one. Just don’t talk about it.

Listen to what people say about the students. Don’t assume you know who the students are at your new institution, or what they need. But likewise, don’t think the administration and faculty have the total picture on that front, either.

Here’s where your outsider status can help. You can ask a lot of questions, naïve questions, that folks long embedded in the institution can’t. Why are so many students failing and repeating courses? Why do biology majors take so few humanities courses? You’ll never be in a better position to start making changes than now, but you don’t have enough information to do so effectively.

Your best course of action, then, is to ask questions, and keep asking them, so you can identify the places where you can eventually intervene: Where are the achievement gaps between students of color and the general student population, or between male and female students? How are commuters performing? Are students applying for scholarships and fellowships? Do faculty members push them?

Find out what kind of expectations your new faculty has of its students. If you’ve moved to a college that’s not highly selective, spend time talking to faculty members about what their students do after graduation. You’ll get a sense for how much faculty respect students and their choices, how much professors see it as their role to influence such choices, and whether they see students’ postgraduate lives and careers as predetermined. You might find one group of faculty members that pushes students to apply for fellowships while another group designs syllabi to allow for multiple absences for students with heavy family responsibilities. As dean, you’ll need to find out if those two groups are working from different understandings of who the students are and what they can achieve. Find out whether the faculty has a single coherent view of the students, and whether that view clashes with what the college’s admissions office or career services thinks. Much of what you’ll be able to achieve will depend on shared understandings about your students’ capacities and aspirations.

Find a few good mentors. For some new deans, finding the time to listen to people and absorb the campus culture can be a luxury. You will inevitably need to act quickly to put out some fires or move some plans along. To minimize your mess-ups in those early days, find at least two trustworthy mentors — one from the administration (preferably a dean, associate provost, or director) and one from the faculty.

You’ll never get a complete picture from just one mentor, no matter how smart or dedicated that person is. The administrative mentor will give institutional context and the important history of decision-making (but beware mentors whose version of institutional history is “We tried that once; it didn’t work”).

Don’t expect your immediate boss to mentor you. Managing is not the same thing as mentoring. Figure out which other dean gets things done, and find out how. Lunch separately and often with lots of colleagues — that’s just good practice. But find one or two special administrative colleagues on whom you can rely for sound advice. You don’t have to always, or even often, agree with those mentors. But you do have to be able to trust them.

A faculty mentor will remind you that administrative and faculty priorities sometimes overlap — and sometimes don’t. That mentor should be able to give you a good sense of how likely your actions are to succeed, and will — if you’ve chosen well —toss you a timely warning when you’ve made a misstep.

I’m not advocating that you recruit a spy. I’m talking about seeking the advice of a faculty member or two whose judgment is trusted by the majority of their colleagues, on and off the tenure track. Navigating that kind of relationship can be tricky, and it depends entirely on honesty and ethics on your part. You make more money than a faculty member, and it would be pretty slimy to ask this mentor to do extra, uncompensated work to make you better at your job. If a couple of powerful faculty members sense that you can make things better for their colleagues if they help you, then they will do so. That’s how they came to be trusted in the first place.

But be sparing in your reliance on the goodwill of these faculty mentors. Do not compromise their standing in the faculty by making a public show of your relationship. You shouldn’t expect uncompensated work from them, but you don’t want it to look like you bought their support, either. Find a reward structure that seems fair — for example, offer mentoring in return.

Any faculty member who is a good source of advice would probably make a good administrator, poor thing. Just as it can be cruel to encourage undergraduates to pursue doctorates, at least in my field, deans usually think twice before encouraging faculty members to move into administration. But if, in a year or two and despite your example, your faculty mentor does decide to give it a try, you can always pass along this article.