So You Want to Be a Dean?

My experience with the job market for senior administrators began benignly in the early ‘90s when I was nominated for a deanship at Emory University. In a fairly short time I was invited for a campus interview, which meant that I was on a middle shortlist of 10 to 12. I spent a pleasant day meeting various people and debating theory with members of the search committee, although to this day I can’t see why my theoretical views were in any way related to my fitness or nonfitness for the position.

Within a week or so I was invited back and told that I was now on the short shortlist. A date was set, and when it came I fell ill and had to reschedule; but in the interval I had second thoughts and ended up withdrawing. I don’t remember all my reasons, and of the two I am able to recall, one was bad and the other rested on a mistake.

The bad reason was that I didn’t like the location and physical appearance of the dean’s office (as a novice it never occurred to me that this is the kind of thing you might be able to change). The mistake that gave me the other reason was to think that because this had all been so easy, the future would bring many other opportunities, and I might as well wait for the one that felt absolutely right.

As it turned out, I spent the next six or seven years striking out all over the country: the University of California at Santa Barbara, UC-Davis, UC-Irvine, UCLA, USC, Kansas, Vanderbilt, George Mason, Lake Forest, Temple, Macalester, William and Mary, SUNY-Purchase, Johns Hopkins, Rutgers, the CUNY Graduate Center, Cardozo Law School, the University of Georgia, Indiana, Brown.

The experience of failure took many forms. In some cases, the whole thing ended when I indicated a willingness to be considered and sent in my CV. I just never heard a word back. In other cases, I was interviewed over the phone by a member of the search committee or by someone from a search firm, and also never heard back. In a few instances I flew into an airport and spent an awkward two hours in a room with all the charm of a prison cell, after which I took the very next flight out. (At least the waste of time didn’t take very much time.)

About half the time I made it to the full-blown campus interview -- two days of endless performance, hype, and self-promotion (on both sides). On four occasions there was a second visit with a second round of interrogations. Twice I was invited back for a third visit. (The brass ring was getting closer.) And once there was a fourth visit that had the feel of a coronation: My wife was invited too, and we spent several hours talking with university officials about the rehabbing of the president’s mansion. I didn’t get that job either.

What went wrong? Well, for one thing I really wasn’t qualified for many of those positions. (Now that I’ve been a dean for four years, I know just how unqualified I was.) My administrative experience consisted of two terms as a department chairman, and a stint as executive director of the Duke University Press. It was clear to anyone who thought about it for a minute that I was still mainly a scholar of the humanities and probably couldn’t explain what an indirect-cost recovery was if my life (or this job) depended on it.

Curiously enough it was this threadbare résumé that got me on so many shortlists. I could almost hear the committee members saying, “This guy doesn’t look like everyone else; it would be interesting to talk with him.” And I can just hear them at the end of the process saying the same thing -- “this guy just doesn’t look like everyone else” -- and deciding, quite reasonably, not to take the chance.

But that is probably too rational an answer to the question “what went wrong?” for in the somewhat wacky world of executive searches, what happens is often accidental, fortuitous, occasionally serendipitous, and always unpredictable. This is so in large part because of the great differences between these searches and faculty searches.

In a faculty search the people who know your work and come to hear your presentation are also the people who vote on you. In an executive search, most of the people you meet and talk to have never heard of you and have no interest (positive or negative) in your work. A search committee will typically be made up of faculty members from several disciplines, a couple of students and staff members, representatives from the library, admissions, the alumni association, and development offices, and, for presidential searches, at least two or three trustees.

Obviously no focused concern (except the concern to appear prepared and knowledgeable) unites these people who are constrained by their diversity to ask scripted and general questions about set topics -- the balance between teaching and research, the role of the public (or private) university, community outreach, fund raising, diversity, college athletics, and strategies for moving forward in an era of declining revenues.

And even if you perform well by producing the requisite commonplaces and managing to appear both relaxed and incredibly alert, and the search-committee members end up wanting you as their dean or provost or president, they are not the ones who have the real vote. That belongs to persons you may have met for 15 minutes or perhaps not at all, persons with motives and agendas that are finally determining even though they have never been announced or put on the table.

The result, as I have already suggested, is a discontinuity between an often lengthy process and its somewhat abrupt conclusion. At SUNY-Purchase, the site of my premature coronation, the search-committee vote was strongly in my favor, but the trustees immediately awarded the position to the candidate who came in a distant second. Protests followed, graduation ceremonies were disrupted, The New York Times ran an article, but, as you will have noticed, I am not now, nor ever have been, nor ever will be the president of the State University of New York at Purchase.

To the extent that the SUNY-Purchase scenario was played out in public, it was somewhat anomalous because the ultimate agency was visible even if discontinuous from the process. In other cases agency never made itself manifest and remained mysterious even to those in charge of the proceedings.

I actually treasure a phone call I got from the secretary of the search committee at Vanderbilt. She said, “I don’t know why we’re doing this,” before informing me that I wouldn’t be part of the next round of interviews. An insider informant at Kansas told me that a graduate-student member of the search committee inveighed against my views on interpretation and carried the day (as if anyone’s views on interpretation could have anything to do with the presence or absence of administrative skills). A few faculty members (not on the search committee) at Indiana mounted a campaign against my candidacy in protest of my position on the First Amendment (now many times anthologized and kind of ho-hum) and, logically enough, carried the campaign to the Bloomington newspaper.

These and other incursions from left field were possible and effective because, in the context of a process that was layered rather than stratified, anyone could intervene at any moment and usually did. (The occasional exception was a college like Macalester, where everything was above board, professional, and unfailingly courteous, so that even when things didn’t work out, it still seemed a pleasure.)

The picture gets even more complicated when two other forms of behind-the-scenes agency are factored in. First, there is the search firm that can only earn its commission by exerting more control and influence than it probably should. A search firm’s stock-in-trade is its Rolodex and the stable of names it contains, names of the-usual-suspect retreads, of bright up-and-coming young things, of the person or persons just right for you; and it is hardly surprising that when all is said and done those are the names you end up considering.

Sometimes a search firm is playing a multiple role, meeting with both the officially appointed committee and with the much smaller group -- unofficial, off the record, but making the key decisions -- that is calling the tune. You may suspect that such a group is operating in the background and that therefore the fix is already in for an inside candidate or for a pre-selected candidate from the outside, but you can’t really know, and you will be assured repeatedly that this search is genuine and completely open.

It would certainly be nice to think so, but I’m afraid there’s a good chance that you will have been an actor in a drama whose springs were hidden from you, a poor thing that fretted its hour on the stage and then was summarily dismissed.

So why endure it? In part because you learn a lot. There is a real intellectual pleasure in seeing how different universities organize themselves, conceptualize their missions, deal with the gap between ambitions and resources, retrofit their creaking infrastructures, self-present to their various constituencies, mobilize their alumni, etc. Every institution does these things in its own way, and every way teaches you something that will prove useful should you ever actually land one of these positions.

This leads to a final -- perhaps the first -- question: Why would you want to? Why would you want to be an administrator? If mamas should not let their children grow up to be cowboys, why should anyone be encouraged to grow up to be a dean or a provost or a chancellor? Maybe I’ll answer that question in a later column.