For the first time in my four years as a dean there is nothing on my schedule today, and I take this as partial evidence that one of the commonplaces administrators routinely hurl at one another is flat wrong: “It’s easy to be a dean when times are flush, but you really show what you’re made of when the money dries up and you are put to the test of moving forward in the absence of resources.”
The truth is the opposite: When there is no money, being a dean is easy and pretty much risk free; it is when the purse strings are loosened that you can really get into trouble. Take saying “no.” If you say no to someone in bad times, you have already said no to a dozen others; therefore the people you have just disappointed expected to be disappointed, and their departments expected them to fail. Since everyone knows that there is no money, the task is reduced to asking for it with no real hope of getting it.
Everyone goes away with nothing, and everyone goes away happy. The dean is happy because the requisite “firmness” has been demonstrated at the same time that the easy currency of sympathy has been dispensed (“I’d really like to do this for you, but my hands are tied”). The chair is happy because the obligatory requests have been made, and the department’s need and deservedness have been forcefully articulated. The department is happy because it knows that its leader has vigorously pressed its claims, and it can console itself by imagining the glorious moment in the future when it will present those claims in the form of an IOU to the dean, who will, if you are lucky, not be you.
But if you say no to someone in good times, happiness is in short supply. Immediately you will have to explain why you said “yes” last week to three other departments, which means that you will either have to tell the truth (“You guys are just hopeless, and you’re never going to get anything from me”) or lie (“Previous commitments have tied my hands, but we’ll get to you next year”). If you tell the truth, you’ve made enemies; if you lie, the lie will come back to haunt you when next year comes around and you’ll have to come up with a new lie.
The result? You’re unhappy and the people you said no to are unhappy. Only the departments you said yes to are happy, but they are now resented by the others and end up contributing to the general sum of unhappiness anyway.
But if saying no in good times creates problems, they are nothing compared to the problems awaiting you when you say yes. First of all, saying yes is an expenditure of judgment, and judgments can be faulty. You can make a mistake, and if you’ve said yes to something big, you can make a big mistake and saddle yourself and the college with a center that does nothing but eat up resources or with expensive recruits seen only in airports or with an ambitious program that draws no students or with a huge start-up package that is wasted when your star recruit takes the next better offer, leaving you with costly equipment no one else on the campus can use.
When these things happen (and they always do), you will be taking heat from every direction -- from the senior administrators who will regard you as a bad steward of resources they will now bestow elsewhere, from the departments you did not favor who will now say you should have given it (space, positions, staff) to them, and (oh, the ingratitude of it!) from the departments you did favor who will quickly find a way to blame you for the project or hire that didn’t work out.
In short, when there’s money, you can make bad decisions (and most administrative decisions are bad), but when the money disappears, there are no decisions to make, and as long you breathe the right combination of regret (“Gee, I wish I could”) and hope (“Wait till next year”) and don’t publicly criticize your superiors, you will smell like a rose, and everyone will love you and praise you for managing so well in hard times.
And as a bonus, no one will make an appointment to see you. As a general rule, people come to the dean’s office either to petition or to complain; but if the word is out that there are no resources, no one will expect anything; and if no one expects anything, no one will be disappointed; and if no one is disappointed, no one will complain (except of course those faculty members who will complain because the sun is out or because it isn’t).
Large empty spaces will open up in your calendar. You can take leisurely lunches. You can read a book in what used to be your discipline. You can sit around and have pleasant conversations with your associate deans, who are also living lives of relative ease. You can write columns for The Chronicle of Higher Education. And you can avoid and/or cancel meetings.
Meetings, after all, are generated by activity. If you are authorized to make such and such a number of new hires, you have to meet with and charge the same number of search committees and address the departments and later meet with the candidates and attend their presentations. If there is a new program to get off the ground, you have to meet with your fellow deans to discuss the appointment of a steering committee, and then you have to meet with that committee regularly over a period of years, and then you have to meet with the provost to report on the progress that committee is or is not making. If new buildings are being planned or old buildings are being renovated, you have to meet with everybody -- with architects, with people from capital projects, with potential users (now called stakeholders), with interior designers, with vendors, with landscapers.
There’s no end to it, but it all ends before it begins if there is no money and therefore no hires or programs or projects and therefore no meetings.
You will still have the “regularly scheduled” meetings with your department heads and elected advisory committee and your immediate superior; but these are meetings mostly taken up by reports on what’s going on and discussions about what to do next, and if there’s nothing much going on and little hope of doing anything next, you might as well cancel them and make everyone happy in the only way you are now able to make anyone happy.
Finally, after all these years, the good life -- a handsome salary, a fancy title, a big office, sufficient staff to do the “little things” (which are the only things left to do), a blank calendar, and no pressure whatsoever. But of course like every other dean, I would gladly trade all this leisure and equanimity for the chance once again to fall flat on my face.
Stanley Fish is dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He writes a monthly column on campus politics and academic careers for The Chronicle’s Career Network, where this article first appeared.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 18, Page B5
