The Difference a Boss Makes

By Paula Krebs

In the perhaps naïve belief that no one at my institution reads my columns (go on, prove me wrong), I have decided to spend some time reflecting on my current state of uncertainty as a middle manager who doesn’t know who her next boss will be.

Waiting out the search for your new boss is unnerving. Because when you’re a dean, your boss makes a big difference in how you do your job—and, sometimes, in how well you do your job. Tenure-line faculty members don’t have bosses. Administrators really, really do.

In an academic department, your boss is your department chair—and that might someday be you. Department chairs are drafted or elected or take their turns in rotation, and they usually slide back into their normal roles as department members after. Knowing that someone down the hall will be your next boss serves a real function in keeping most of us honest as department chairs. The colleague you offend today could be your chair in a few years.

Of course, the powers of chairs vary across types of institutions, but chairs are faculty members. And that’s an important category difference, ultimately.

For department chairs, deans or provosts are the boss. But that’s a bit laughable. Everyone knows that faculty members—and chairs are faculty members—can just wait out most administrators. Tenured professors will see deans and provosts come and go many times over the course of a career at one institution.

When you are the chair, the dean to whom you report can make a difference when it comes to your funding or your hiring plans. He or she can make your life difficult by getting in the way of an agenda you might have for the department.

But it’s the rare chair who spends more than a few years in the job, so the frustrations come with an endpoint attached. Most of us know, right from the beginning, that we’ll either return to our teaching or move on into administrative roles.

And tenured faculty members’ jobs go on regardless of administrative politics, with a dean or without one. You teach, you write or paint or work in your lab, no matter who’s in the administrative building.

Not so for the deans. Our success often depends on bosses who create or maintain the conditions that allow us to succeed. Some deans have more autonomy than I do, but if I want to help a department to build in a particular area, I have to persuade my boss. I don’t control the tenure-line allocations or much of the funding. My success as a dean (which I can measure only by looking at the success of the departments in my college) is heavily dependent on my ability to advocate for the departments to the folks who are my bosses—the provost, the president, the occasional other cabinet member.

Of course, all these generalizations about administrators and faculty members and bosses go out the window when you consider the majority of the teaching faculty in the country: the contingent labor force. Adjuncts do have bosses. Their success in their jobs—like the availability of those jobs, as a matter of fact—depends on department chairs. Like administrators, most adjuncts can be terminated at the will of those bosses; unlike most administrators, adjuncts have no fallback position at an institution should they lose their jobs. If someone can fire you, you have a boss.

I am, of course, in a very privileged position as an administrator. I get to do big things, and I’m in the job because I want to do big things, to help folks do a better job for a population of students that deserves the best. I have my ideas about the ways I want to pursue my agenda. But will that agenda coincide with the designs of my new boss?

So I worry about who this person will be. What will he or she think about interdisciplinarity? About community engagement? About adjunct labor? About digital pedagogy? How much autonomy will New Boss want deans to have? What will New Boss’s relationship with the president be like?

And, most of all, will New Boss want new deans?