Feniosky Peña-Mora may be the epitome of the new college dean. No longer middle managers with an inward-facing focus on academics, deans such as Mr. Peña-Mora, who leads Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, are stepping off their campuses to fill the roles of college ambassador, chief visionary, and major fund raiser.
Three to four nights a week, Mr. Peña-Mora goes out to dinner with donors or attends school-related activities. He travels at least once a month to meet alumni, parents, and business leaders. This year he has already been to California, Washington, Australia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Abu Dhabi. In one minicampaign last year, he added 10 endowed chairs to the engineering school, leading an effort that brought in $30-million, more private money than many small colleges secure in a year.
“The notion that a dean is an administrator is obsolete,” he says. “It has become a leadership position, almost like a CEO of a company.”
Higher-education observers say the dean’s role, which has undergone major changes in the past five to 10 years, is continuing its shift to an outward focus. As budgets grow tighter and colleges’ ambitions swell, deans are taking on some of the fund-raising, strategic planning, and partner-seeking duties that were once the bailiwick of the university president.
Want a new project at your school? Cultivate the donor who can get the idea off the ground. Looking to hire a new professor? Decide what area to move the money from or find new dollars to do so. Students asking for more internship opportunities? Go out and meet with companies, government leaders, and influential parents and alumni who can help make that happen.
The switch from an internal focus to an external one for deans happened first at major research universities and colleges with longstanding fund-raising operations. Now smaller teaching colleges say they, too, are looking at the model. At public universities, which are facing steep cuts from cash-strapped states, college leaders are looking to their deans more and more to shore up support and help pay for new classroom buildings, faculty positions, and student scholarships.
Help With the Day-to-Day
This new role requires some adjustments. As deans spend more of their time off the campus, they are unable to play as close a role in the day-to-day operations of a school or in teaching students or conducting research as they did before, a change that some may find unwelcome.
To compensate for a dean’s absence, colleges are putting teams of support personnel in place to help run day-to-day operations when the dean is away. At Columbia, for example, Mr. Peña-Mora had a full-time vice dean when he started, in 2009, but decided that one support person couldn’t cover all the needs of the engineering school. He created positions that include a vice dean for research; a vice dean for academic affairs, focusing on graduate education; an adviser for undergraduate education; a senior associate dean for industry, government, and global education; an associate dean for advancement; and a director of strategic communications. The positions included new full-time positions, new half-time positions that were given to faculty members, and redefined jobs from existing positions. The dean paid for them by reallocating money in the school’s budget.
“Today the dean is running a complex business,” says Lester A. Lefton, president of Kent State University and a former dean of arts and sciences at George Washington University and at the University of South Carolina. That is especially true at universities where individual schools are responsible for setting their own budgets. There, deans need not only expertise in their field, but also the business sense of a college president and the ability to communicate to external audiences what they’re doing.
Aaron Conley, vice president for development and alumni relations at the University of Texas at Dallas, says deans are more often being held accountable for fund-raising goals. How much time they devote to seeking donations varies by institution and individual. While some deans enjoy meeting prospective donors and netting big gifts, others are less comfortable asking for money.
Many colleges now let prospective deans know about fund-raising expectations by mentioning it in job postings. “The surprise,” Mr. Conley says, “may be in the percentage of time they have to dedicate to it.”
Dennis A. Ahlburg, president of Trinity University, in San Antonio, says he spends less time talking with donors and traveling on behalf of his institution now than he did when he was dean of the business school at the University of Colorado at Boulder. During his four years at Colorado, he spent 70 percent of his time on external activities. That compares with 50 percent in his current job. And he travels less now, because he can hold some fund-raising and alumni events in his home.
Soon after taking the Colorado job, in 2005, Mr. Ahlburg hit the road to ask for money to construct a $38-million academic building. “If you want to make investments, the money is not coming from the state,” he says. “It has to come from somewhere else.”
The amount of time Mr. Ahlburg spent away from the school and his family was wearing, he says, and it led to tensions with faculty members who would joke about a dean sighting when they spotted him in the building. A senior associate dean—a position he elevated from associate dean to signify second-in-command—helped run the internal functions of the business school, including meetings with department chairs and other faculty members.
Still, the external nature of the job wasn’t always understood by the faculty, Mr. Ahlburg says. In preparing for his first review by a faculty committee at Colorado, he recalls, he was surprised that none of the more than two dozen questions he was evaluated on dealt with external activities. He pushed to get three added: on his ability to raise money, connect with businesses, and represent the university.
“If you’re going to go to this model, you have to think it all the way through,” he says. That includes providing administrative and operating support for deans and adjusting how they are evaluated in their jobs.
New Job Descriptions
Alan Runge, provost at Concordia University Texas, has been working since he started the job, in 2007, to increase the stature and responsibilities of the dean’s position there. He wanted to see it go from one in which the dean serves primarily as the top faculty member, with a half-time teaching load, to one in which the dean is more of an administrator, serving as an academic leader who leads strategic planning and meets frequently with outside audiences.
To start the process, he rewrote the job descriptions for deans, defining the role as a leadership position with duties that include promoting the university to external constituencies, such as local business groups. He cut back on the amount of teaching expected of deans: one class per year. Not everyone was happy with the change. One dean decided to go back to being a full-time faculty member. Another wanted to teach more, but Mr. Runge told the dean someone else would need to pick up the additional classes.
Concordia’s deans aren’t yet required to raise money. Mr. Runge says the university would need to increase its fund-raising and administrative staffs first, including hiring associate deans.
At bigger institutions, with more-ambitious money-raising goals, fund raising is becoming a standard part of deans’ jobs. Over the past 10 years at Washington State University, for example—where a $1-billion campaign is under way—such external duties have been written into their job descriptions. The university’s president, Elson S. Floyd says the deans’ job evaluation now includes fund-raising performance. Deans are attractive as fund raisers because they can speak directly to potential donors about what is happening in a college in terms of faculty hires, student recruitment, and research. “Donors really want to hear from deans,” Mr. Floyd says.
At Ohio State University, the senior vice president for development, Andrew A. Sorensen, is taking the unusual step of talking about fund raising with dean candidates in engineering, medicine, nursing, and dentistry. He does not recommend whom the university should hire but does emphasize to them the magnitude of the fund-raising expectations that come with the job, and the goal that each school is expected to meet, as Ohio State gets ready to announce a $2-billion-plus campaign.
Mr. Sorensen, who has served as a dean and as a college president, expects Ohio State’s deans to spend about 50 percent of their time seeking donations and grants and performing other externally focused activities, such as meeting with lawmakers and parents.
Without the deans, the campaign will not be successful, Mr. Sorensen says: “I can’t do it with just myself and my development officers.”
Many deans have not had formal training in fund raising when they start the job. Some come to the position with misconceptions about the practice, thinking of it as an intrusive activity or one involving cold calls to prospective donors, say development professionals who work with them.
“They definitely feel the pressures of having no experience in this area,” says Penelepe C. Hunt, who trains deans at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she is vice chancellor for development, and at seminars sponsored by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.
Advice for Beginners
Accordingly, colleges with large fund-raising operations often put trained development-office staff in various schools to provide direct support and advice to deans about whom, and how, to solicit for money.
At Columbia, Mr. Peña-Mora says he learned how to ask for money by doing it. He did have experience bringing in private dollars for research in his previous job, as associate provost at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but he hadn’t worked much with donors. To help, he hired Peggy Maher for the newly reimagined position of associate dean for advancement, which had previously been a director of development job within the school.
The two recently traveled to California to meet alumni. Ms. Maher says their reaction to Mr. Peña-Mora is different from what a development-staff member would experience. People like to hear about the direction of the school from the dean, who is making the decisions. And he likes to ask them how their Columbia education influenced their lives.
For deans who are less comfortable chatting up potential donors, CASE holds its development conference for deans twice a year, an effort it started more than five years ago. The group expanded the program in 2008 to include advanced training for deans with basic fund-raising experience. The most recent conference, held last month in Tampa, Fla., attracted about 200 people.
Part of the training focuses on how deans can find time to fit fund-raising into their already full schedules. Ms. Hunt also helps them find easy ways to get started if they’re nervous about asking for money—making thank-you calls, for example.
“All deans recognize that, whether they like it or not, it is part of their job,” she says. “It used to be only presidents were required to do fund raising. Now it’s just standard for deans.”
The next generation of deans may be able to skip right to the advanced training. As more colleges of all types increase their reliance on private dollars, fund raising and other external duties are trickling down from the top to the positions occupied by the people in line to be tomorrow’s deans, Ms. Hunt says. The next step: department chairs.
