Of the many complaining questions that faculty members ask, the one I used to hear most often was, “Why do you administrators make so much more money than we do?” The answer is simple: Administrators work harder, they have more work to do, and they actually do it.
Now that I have made the passage back from administrator to faculty member, I know how true that is. Where before my calendar was crowded and even double-booked, now the largely empty pages beckon me forward to a life of comparative ease and downright leisure. Sure, I have some students to teach, and some papers to correct, and I chair a committee and go to a few meetings and write columns and essays; but I did all of that when I was a dean in addition to everything I did because I was a dean.
I was responsible for a college with close to 30 departments and units, a budget of $50- to $55-million, 400 tenure-track faculty members, 700 staff employees, 10,000 undergraduates, 2,000 graduate students, and 17 buildings. On any given day, I had to deal with disciplinary proceedings, tenure and promotion cases, faculty searches, chair searches, enrollment problems, fund raising, community outreach, alumni relations, public relations, curriculum reform, counteroffers, technology failures, space allocation, information systems, department-head meetings, advisory-committee meetings, dean’s-council meetings, meetings with the provost, student complaints, faculty complaints, parent complaints, taxpayer complaints.
Office hours were 8:30 a.m. to whenever and often extended into the evenings and weekends. Vacations were few and far between (although I did take much of the summer off, per agreement before I was hired). The pressure never let up.
The burden of those duties has now been lifted, and I come and go as I please. No one checks up to see where I am and what I am doing. I could, if I were asked, give the all-purpose, expected, and perfectly acceptable answer: “I always work at home.”
But home is not where the work is; home is not where the students are; home is not where the colleagues are, and where the community might be formed. Working at home (if that’s really what’s going on; who’s to know?) is a way to default on the responsibilities we take on when we agree to accept a paycheck.
Stay-at-home moms are one thing; stay-at-home state employees are another.
The wonder is that faculty members have such a high opinion of themselves and of the nobility of what they do -- and of the rightness of not doing what they decline to do -- and such a low opinion of what administrators do, although they probably wouldn’t last two days if they tried to do it.
Recently, I spoke to some administrators who have been on the job for a short-enough time to be able still to remember what it was like to be a faculty member and what thoughts they had then about the work they do now.
One said that she has come to realize how narcissistic most academics are: An academic, she mused, is focused entirely on the intellectual stock market and watches its rises and falls with an anxious and self-regarding eye. As an academic, you’re trying to get ahead, she said, but as an administrator you’re trying “to make things happen for other people.” You’re “not advancing your own profile,” she added, “but advancing the institution, and you’re more service-oriented.”
“When I was a faculty member,” she recalled, “I used to see administrators as adversaries who had the power to give and take but whose work lacked substance and intellectual interest. Now I think that what professors do is quaint and nice and should continue to go on, but basically they live a life that is infantilizing; administrators are grown-ups.”
A second new administrator reports that he finds faculty members “unbelievably parochial, selfish, and self-indulgent.” They believe that their time is their own even when someone else is paying for it. They say things like “I don’t get paid for the summer.” They believe that they deserve everything and that if they are ever denied anything it could only be because an evil administrator has committed a great injustice. Although they are employees of the university (and, in public universities, of the state), they consider themselves independent contractors engaged fitfully in free-lance piecework. They have no idea of how comfortable a life they lead.
Neither, said a third administrator recently up from the ranks, do they have any idea of how the university operates. They seem proud of their parochialism and boast of their inability to understand the many systems that suture the enterprise together. Ignorance of these matters is not a failing to them, but a badge of honor. Their first response to budget crises is to call for a cut in the administration -- although, were the administrators to disappear, they wouldn’t be able to put one foot in front of the other. (How about a movie titled, A Day Without Administrators.)
Yes, chimed in a fourth new dean, “if only faculty members realized how much of their research and teaching was made possible by the tasks we do. It is amazing, considering how much time they waste, that they regard administration as a waste of time.”
No, it’s worse than that, said another; they regard administration as a conspiracy against their interests. “Whenever I lunch with my departmental colleagues, I’m shocked at how often they complain that we in the dean’s office are blocking their desires, taking away their autonomy, and preventing them from charting the glorious destiny that would surely be theirs if we would only get out of the way.” They all live in their “little insulated worlds,” and every once in a while they open their windows to take pot shots at us.
I should note that the men and women offering these observations acknowledged that the attitudes they find so distressing (and puerile) were attitudes they themselves held only a short time ago. “I can’t believe that I really thought those things,” one of them said, “and thought them for almost 20 years.”
They see themselves now as reformed sinners, born-again administrators finally able to see the light that could not penetrate the dark glass of faculty self-obsession. They are also grateful that the lives they now lead have a purpose larger than the furtherance of their own ambitions.
They have come to appreciate a form of activity that is at once intellectual (albeit in another tone) and productive of real results. They are pleased that they have learned to work together in a coordinated effort to solve extraordinarily complex problems. They are happy to be grown-ups and to have put away childish things, and they cast a rueful eye on the children whose wayward energies they must channel and manage.
Meanwhile (and this is where we began), they are paid well. But, of course, they pay a price, not only in the long hours and exhausting days, but also in the lost opportunity to pursue the projects for which they would have been rewarded by the academic community they serve.
“Going back to the faculty” is not as easy as it sounds. The administrator who is burned out, or who has lost his position in the wake of the arrival of a new senior-management team, or who has gotten just a little too old for the grind, may find that the discipline has passed him by or that its concerns no longer excite him, or (and this is almost a certainty) that his departmental colleagues still regard him as a representative of the dark side and don’t fully trust him.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not asking for pity for administrators. By and large they know what they’re getting into, and they know both the rewards and the costs. My only point is that administrators are not obstacles to the achievement of academic goals, but facilitators (and necessary ones) of the achievement of academic goals. They are honest and dedicated laborers in the vineyards, and, unlike some of those who revile them, they are more than worthy of their hire.
