To Change a Campus, Talk to the Dean

When Kathryn J. Boor became a dean at Cornell University, change was at the center of her agenda from the very beginning.

She began leading the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences in 2010, when the Ivy League institution—like colleges everywhere at the time—was in the midst of streamlining operations and cutting costs. Just four months into Ms. Boor’s tenure, the college announced that its department of education would close. Cornell administrators said they didn’t have the money it would take to raise the small department’s national profile.

Since then, Ms. Boor has overseen a steady stream of change. In the spring, for example, she grouped five departments to create the new School of Integrative Plant Science, with the goal of showcasing the university’s strengths in plant and soil sciences and attracting federal grants, more students, and more top faculty.

“This took reorganizing people and getting people excited about a new structure and a new way of thinking,” says Ms. Boor, a food scientist. “This is a way to ensure our pre-eminence five and 10 years down the line.”

More than ever before, Ms. Boor and other academic deans are the ones top administrators rely on to push schools and colleges to evolve. As universities face new pressures to distinguish themselves from their peers and to demonstrate their worth, deans have their hands on more levers than almost anyone else on campus. Whether campuses can transform themselves, working within tight fiscal constraints, often comes down to their deans.

More than almost any other administrator, deans are in a better position to influence people and forge consensus. To succeed, they must manage up and down, engaging regularly with senior officials, the faculty, staff, and students.

As leaders of increasingly complex enterprises, deans must think big and be the public face of their schools even as they still tend to the day-to-day needs of professors and students. Deans must be able to motivate faculty and staff to embrace a university’s broad, strategic goals. They need to be shrewd money managers who can attract donations to augment limited budgets.

“Deans today are almost like mini-presidents,” says Jessica S. Kozloff, president of Academic Search Inc., a company that has helped colleges find deans for the past decade. “Like every other senior administrator today, they’re being called on to make really tough decisions and to try to convince people to change.” She adds, “You’re in the line of fire as a dean.”

Job ads reflect the kinds of pressures deans face. Institutions are turning to executive search committees to help them find movers and shakers who are part entrepreneur, part fund raiser, part marketer, and part seasoned administrator.

At Morgan State University, the new dean of the College of Liberal Arts will be charged with “transforming the curriculum to reflect the changes taking place in the world of higher education.” Eastern Michigan University wants its next dean of the College of Technology to know how to “implement interdisciplinary programs and projects.” Private institutions have big expectations for deans, too. Shenandoah University, with about 3,700 students, wants someone with “significant experience in faculty and administrative positions” and a record of landing donations and building community partnerships to be its next dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Compare that with the ads of two decades ago. Administrative experience wasn’t always required. Searches were led in house. And the dean’s role was described as being internally, not externally, focused.

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The candidates who now prove the best fits for the job are often senior professors with administrative experience—stints as department chair or associate dean here, directing a center or institute there. And the deans of today need an entrepreneurial bent, too, with the ability to build partnerships and develop strong new programs capable of generating revenue.

Nancy B. Songer, a former professor of science education and learning technologies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, directed a research center before becoming a dean.

As dean of Drexel University’s School of Education, where she’s been since August, Ms. Songer wants to build on the “mini-CEO role” she saw herself playing at the Michigan Center for Essential Science, which focused on getting more urban students into STEM fields.

At Drexel, one of Ms. Songer’s main goals is to ensure that the school keeps making a difference outside of Drexel. The university wants to build a public school on land that it bought near campus. “This is not only a chance for us to define ourselves as a school,” Ms. Songer said, “but to think of how we can redefine how a public school and a school of education partnership could be.”

To help herself learn how to be a good dean, Ms. Songer is reading books about leadership written by a mix of higher-education administration experts and business executives. “I’m trying to look at what I know about being an academic and what I’m learning about being a good business leader and put them together.”

Deans have to be careful, however, in how much of the corporate world they embody, says Mimi Wolverton, a retired professor of educational leadership who worked at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and is one of the authors of College Deans: Leading From Within.

“If they’re completely business oriented they alienate the faculty,” Ms. Wolverton says. “The better deans are able to maintain an academic mentality at one level, but also embrace a business orientation on another level. Being a dean is more like running a family business than a corporate business.”

In an academic environment, where shared governance is an integral part of the culture, the best leaders must be able to forge relationships with many people across a campus. If they are going to press change, they need a clear understanding of the culture where they work. They must be able to weigh multiple perspectives when making decisions, and to embrace the role of intermediary between professors and the provost.

Patrice Rankine, dean of Hope College’s Arts and Humanities division, leaned on prior experience to shape his interactions with the faculty. He came to Hope from Purdue University, where he was a professor of classics and an assistant head of the School of Languages and Cultures, a position in which he first began to hone his interpersonal skills.

“I would be the person people would come to to talk things out,” Mr. Rankine said. At Hope, where he became dean in July 2013, he has sought out opportunities to meet with faculty and alumni.

“I’m at a small college, and so alumni are really invested in what happens,” says Mr. Rankine. “I like to spend time with people and listen to them.”

But deans have to listen with a discerning ear to figure out how to balance competing interests.

“Everybody’s perspective collides in the dean’s office,” says Gary S. Krahenbuhl, a retired academic administrator whose career included 11 years as dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. He is also the author of Building the Academic Deanship. “The dean is trying to manage the expectations of all the different people and move the college forward as best as he or she can,” says Mr. Krahenbuhl. “It’s not easy because each group thinks their way is the right way.”

He says deans with a track record of advocating for both faculty and administrative goals are more likely to get the benefit of the doubt from faculty when administrative priorities win out.

“There’s almost nothing that buys more good will than people knowing that you’re going to be fair and objective and even-handed,” Mr. Krahenbuhl says.

Cultivating internal relationships is part of the job, but now so is interacting extensively with outsiders. For the dean of the School of Education at Indiana University at Bloomington, external advocacy has taken the form of speaking out against proposed policies or laws that he believes could harm his school or higher education in general.

“There are a lot of attacks that are being launched on schools of education,” says Gerardo M. Gonzalez, who has been dean for 15 years. “I spend a good deal of my time fending off policy initiatives that are ill-informed. I don’t remember doing this in the early days of my career.” The Indianapolis Star this month published a letter to the editor from Mr. Gonzalez, explaining how he sees Indiana’s school-reform policies contributing to the drop in enrollment in teacher-education programs.

Another recent addition to the dean’s job is the role of ambassador. Deans are now expected to crisscross the globe to make connections with alumni, recruit students, and set up partnerships that will provide students with a global education. As universities branch out globally, establishing programs overseas and drawing more international students, that kind of outreach has become key.

In the spring, Mr. Gonzalez will travel to Cuba, his native country, for a cultural-exchange tour with a group of alumni. The School of Education also has a program that gives students the opportunity to teach in foreign countries, and it hosts scholars from around the world who work with education professors on research.

“None of these kind of agreements would happen without the dean,” he says. “I’m the point person.”

As the deanship becomes more complex, training for the job has become a bigger priority. The Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences holds a summer seminar for new deans. The American Conference of Academic Deans created its Deans’ Institute four years ago after its members—a mix of deans of all levels and provosts—asked for such a gathering. Attendees at next year’s daylong institute, held during the association’s annual meeting, will hear seasoned deans discuss how their role has changed, the challenges of the job, and how to achieve work-life balance.

Deans with years of experience may have a better handle on the job than newcomers, but they, too, are navigating change as the nature of their job constantly evolves. They’re overseeing schools or colleges that have larger faculty ranks than in the past, growing student populations, and programs that are changing to reflect student and scholarly interests.

Deans are also spending more of their time as fund raisers, and they’re focused on different markers of success than in the past. They are now being asked, for example, to do more to measure how much students are learning.

Graduate-school deans are starting to focus more on tracking student outcomes. Karen Klomparens, dean of the graduate school at Michigan State University since 1997, says she pays more attention now to collecting data about how graduate students move through, and out of, the university’s advanced-degree programs.

The national conversation about graduate education has included vigorous debate about whether it takes students too long to earn a Ph.D. and what kinds of jobs await them. The changing academic workplace, in which tenure-track jobs are scarce, means graduate schools have to take a broader view than they have in the past of students’ post-Ph.D. opportunities. Ms. Klomparens has, in recent years, works with Michigan State’s Ph.D. career-services office to offer graduate students career- and professional-development workshops, along with an interactive website to help them pursue careers in higher education and beyond.

“We’ve really invested resources in this new focus on career outcomes,” says Ms. Klomparens, who is also associate provost for graduate education.

It’s the kind of focus that calls for buy-in from the graduate programs on campus—a task that falls to deans like Ms. Klomparens. She relies on her reputation, in part, to help her drum up support.

“What I hope I have is influence. And that influence comes from being a trusted source of information,” Ms. Klomparens says. “I’m a pretty well-known quantity because I’ve been here so long.”

A key strategy to create buy-in, she says, is to be a reliable source of information and a frequent communicator with a wide range of people on campus.

“My email group on campus has 350 people—deans, associate deans, chairs, graduate program directors, graduate secretaries,” she says. “I think it’s important to have every level of person who is working with graduate students in the information loop.”

Ms. Klomparens, dean of a long-established graduate school, never faced the learning curve that goes with being a dean of a fledgling graduate school. That’s a position that Benjamin D. Caldwell discovered he wasn’t fully prepared for, even with five years as a department chair behind him.

Mr. Caldwell, in his third year as dean of the graduate school at Missouri Western State University, has learned on the job how to do the kind of marketing needed to promote the new school’s programs to potential students so the graduate school can grow. He’s also been trying to bring in money to offer assistantships to the students in the master’s-only program.

Despite the challenges of the job, Mr. Caldwell wrote a column that ran in a magazine for his discipline this year, with tips on what readers should think about if they are considering a move to administration.

Among them: Ask what you can contribute to the larger goals of your unit or institution and how can you add to the institution’s main goals. Both questions underscore how critical it is for deans to maintain a bird’s-eye view. Ms. Boor, who has been a faculty member at Cornell since 1994, remembers how that shift in mind-set was one of her biggest challenges as a new dean.

“As a faculty member you’re generally doing things yourself as opposed to moving to the next level where you have to delegate,” Ms. Boor says. “One of the hardest things was just learning to look at things from the 30,000-foot level.”