A year ago, 34-year-old Tashni-Ann Dubroy marched into the administration building at Shaw University in four-inch heels and a sleeveless, bright-pink dress. She had just started as president of the small historically black college in Raleigh, N.C.
Ms. Dubroy had a challenging job on her hands: The university’s enrollment had declined by a third over the previous decade, and many alumni weren’t donating because they weren’t sure the institution had a future. And, as the second-youngest leader in the history of the 151-year-old, financially strapped college, she felt she had a special duty to shake up the status quo.
But she met resistance right when she walked through the door. “People told me, What you need to do is wear some Hillary pants,” says Ms. Dubroy. And pearls. And maybe stockings. “I can’t tell you how much I just ignored that.”
The 2002 Shaw graduate completed a Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry in 2007 and a business degree in 2010, and she founded a hair-care company and a hair salon before returning to her alma mater as a faculty member, in 2011. She’s among an increasing number of administrators and faculty members who, as part of the millennial generation, are assuming management roles in higher education with critical eyes and ambitious visions.
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While the dates vary, the term “millennial” is often used to describe people born at some point from 1981 to 2000. Many millennial managers are averse to the idea that things should simply be done the way they always have been. They are taking aim at traditional notions of communication, technology use, and business hours, and are seeking to make their departments more efficient, more productive, and more employee-friendly.
Their penchant for newness, however, can clash with the perspective of older employees, many of whom have spent decades at an institution. Future Workplace, a research firm, and a group called Beyond, The Career Network, jointly published the results of a survey last fall showing that, while 83 percent of respondents had seen millennials managing older colleagues in their offices, nearly half of baby-boomer and Generation X respondents felt that millennials’ lack of experience could negatively affect a company’s culture. The survey also found that more than one-third of millennial respondents believed it was difficult to manage members of older generations.
“It’s causing conflict,” says Dan Schawbel, partner and research director at Future Workplace. “The older generation, whether you agree or not, feels entitled to be managing millennials.”
Indeed, Ms. Dubroy’s youth and plans for the university have drawn criticism from Shaw alumni and other observers. But she says she has not been deterred, and has made some significant changes in her first year. One area she scrutinized almost immediately was the admissions office: Prospective students were still applying primarily through snail mail and during meetings with university representatives who visited local high schools. Ms. Dubroy found that bizarre.
So she created a new position — chief enrollment-management officer — and strengthened accountability in admissions. One admissions officer was let go, and two others resigned. Then Ms. Dubroy charged new officers with moving the paper-application process online. “They don’t even want to talk to you,” she says of current students. “They prefer being on their cellphones. We were using a recruitment method that wasn’t remotely in line with their methods of communication.”
Before this year, the highest number of applicants Shaw had ever received was 6,800. For admission this fall, however, the university had more than 9,000 applicants, a record number that is nearly twice as high as last fall’s figure. More than 3,000 of them came through the new online system. In August about 900 first-year students will enter Shaw, compared with just 400 last year.
Ms. Dubroy says she likes to conceptualize decision making “as though there is no box.” She attributes much of that boldness to her millennial status. “Because of my youth, I’m not afraid of taking risks,” she says. “I’m not afraid of making mistakes, either.”
Moving Shaw’s admissions online isn’t the only technological shift that Ms. Dubroy has prioritized. She has also ramped up the university’s social-media presence and encouraged faculty and staff members to join Twitter and spread positive news about Shaw.
“I’m not the only one who needs to be a brand ambassador,” Ms. Dubroy says. And that doesn’t just mean being more present online: “I want to see my faculty and staff on TV — I want them to be speaking as experts in their fields.”
A s the first generation of digital natives, most millennials believe technology should be a ubiquitous part of the workplace. Those entering academic management are often surprised when they find that’s not the case.
When John Mark Day, 35, took over 10 months ago as director of leadership and campus life at Oklahoma State University, he found typewriters in his new office. When he asked his staff why, he learned that the typewriters had been kept around in case students wanted to use them to fill out student-organization forms.
Since he started as director, his office has stopped accepting hard copies of the forms, and he met opposition from a few older staff members for getting rid of the typewriters. But he says other employees were pleased to see such changes happening, as he was replacing an administrator who’d worked at the university for 37 years.
I’ve gone to zero professional-development trainings on managing a baby boomer.
Most of Mr. Day’s 30 full-time staff members are older than he is. While he says they don’t usually question his authority to lead, he has run into a few technology conflicts. For instance, if he wants an immediate response from a colleague, rather than using email he’ll talk face to face or send a text message. Emails can sit for a little longer, he reasons. Many senior employees, however, see email as the best method for quick communications and expect prompt replies from him — which they might not always get.
Raymond J. DiSanza, who was recently tapped to serve as assistant academic chair of the English department at Suffolk County Community College’s largest campus, is frustrated by the sluggish embrace of technology, both in his unit and across the college. The 32-year-old says there is very little access to digital course materials, like e-books, at his institution, which is part of the State University of New York system. And he’s one of the few English faculty members to use social media to engage with students. (For urgent questions, Mr. DiSanza says, Twitter is a better way to reach him than email.)
One of his priorities in his management role — which involves overseeing a department of 30 full-time faculty members and dozens of adjuncts — will be encouraging conversations about how to integrate technology more fully into teaching.
Such generational divides over technology are common in academe, young managers say. Jason Husser, 29, is director of the Elon University Poll, which conducts public-opinion surveys, and an assistant professor of political science there. In meetings with other administrators, he’s almost always the youngest person in the room. Typically, he’ll take notes on his smartphone. But on a couple of occasions, senior administrators have looked over his shoulder quizzically, thinking he was playing a phone game during an important meeting.
Many younger administrators say they stay on the clock 24/7 through their phones and tablets, which can also lead to management challenges. Tiffany M. Onorato, director of pre-college programs at the Stevens Institute of Technology, in New Jersey, checks her email at all hours. She tells her staff: “I’m a workaholic, but that doesn’t mean you need to be.”
“But sometimes,” the 29-year-old admits, “I find myself getting annoyed, like ‘Why aren’t you answering me?’”
M any millennial managers in academe are also trying to break down “silos,” by focusing more heavily on collaboration. While administrators may work as a team within their own offices, they don’t always interact across units — for instance, technology staff and communications staff. Faculty members’ jobs tend to be highly autonomous.
When Mr. Day participates in meetings with other administrators at Oklahoma State, he often takes a moment to look around the table. “I’m having different conversations with the same group of people, over and over,” he says. “So I start thinking, Who’s missing from this conversation? Who do we need to be including?” He also gets the impression that certain employees aren’t used to having a manager ask for their opinion.
Ms. Onorato recalls asking a campus dean at Stevens to give a presentation on diversity at a recent training session. “She came up to me at the end of the presentation and said, ‘Thank you for inviting me, it was one of the first times I’ve been asked,’” Ms. Onorato says. “I thought, What? In my opinion, you’re probably the person on campus who knows the most about diversity and inclusion. Also, students love you! How have you not been approached to give presentations to other departments?”
At Suffolk County, Mr. DiSanza says an old dispute over a curricular matter has divided the English departments on the college’s three campuses. “It’s exactly the kind of thing we need to move beyond,” he says. As assistant chair, he’s hoping to help design a series of events that bring everyone together, where a few professors might present their research or speak on a topic of interest.
For younger managers, hierarchy seems to matter less, says Allison M. Vaillancourt, vice president for business affairs and human resources at the University of Arizona and a columnist for The Chronicle’s Vitae career hub. “Assistant professors,” she says, “are perceived to have as many interesting ideas as senior professors,” which helps foster a culture where more voices are heard.
One millennial manager who believes strongly in that idea is Tiffany Gause, who recently became chair of the department of sociology and women’s, ethnic, and Chicano studies at Santiago Canyon College, in California. She replaced someone who has worked at the two-year college for as long as Ms. Gause, 35, has been alive. Ms. Gause has noticed that deans often structure relationships with faculty members in a hierarchical way: You answer to your department chair, and the chair answers to me. Ms. Gause wants to offer her professors a support system while encouraging everyone to work together as equals.
“Even though I’m going to carry the title of department chair, I really see myself as the paperwork-turner-inner,” she says.
The focus on collaboration, says Mr. Schawbel of Future Workplace, also means younger managers often blend their personal and professional lives more than their older peers may have, and take a greater interest in who exactly is working for them and how their employees are doing. That was the case for Elizabeth Cox, 34, who served for the past year as interim senior director of Emory University’s Center for Community Engagement and Leadership. She spent her first couple of weeks focused on building morale and having one-on-one meetings with each of her employees. (She has now returned to the residence-life office as director of residential education.)
At Shaw, Ms. Dubroy says, faculty and staff members haven’t received a raise in more than a decade. Some have taken pay cuts to help the university stay financially sound. In the coming academic year, she plans to reverse those cuts and include merit-based salary increases in her budget.
T hough faculty members already tend to work outside normal business hours, many young administrators emphasize flexible schedules and working remotely. At Emory’s Center for Community Engagement and Leadership, at least one staff member is on the campus from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. on most weekdays during the academic year. “If you’re in the office until 10:30 at night, you don’t need to be here by 9 a.m. the next day,” Ms. Cox says.
What qualifies as work is also changing, she says. “One of the things I often talk about with my direct reports is, just because you’re sitting at your desk doesn’t mean you’re doing your job,” she says.
Younger managers, Ms. Cox adds, tend to ask a lot of “why?” questions about how their colleges are run.
One thing Ms. Gause has recently been questioning at Santiago Canyon College is the faculty-hiring process. Why is it structured primarily around rigid, formal interviews? she wonders. Why not focus more on getting to know candidates in casual settings and better establishing how they might work within a department?
Still, millennial managers say it can be challenging to push for flexibility within a system that’s not designed to be flexible. “Higher education is one of those industries where people remain at the institution forever,” Mr. Day, of Oklahoma State, says. “You do see antipathy to change because folks have been in their positions for so long.”
One reason, says Arizona’s Ms. Vaillancourt, could be that young managers in many workplaces don’t realize that building trust among their employees takes time. “Those with less experience tend not to understand that it takes more than a good idea to move change forward,” she says.
In some cases, young managers are overeager, Mr. Schawbel says. He believes that many millennials are assuming management roles too quickly, before they’ve received enough coaching and mentoring on how to lead. “A lot of people say millennials are so entitled, they want to be the CEO tomorrow,” he says. “The reality is, they’re moving up very quickly, and yet when they get into these positions, they’re unprepared.”
Mr. Day, for one, has had lots of training on how to manage the millennial work force. However, “I’ve gone to zero professional-development trainings on managing a baby boomer,” he says. “I don’t know how older folks learn and operate.”
Ms. Cox has faced questions from more-senior staff members at Emory about her youth and inexperience. Still, despite the growing pains, she believes that younger administrators — and faculty members — bring valuable traits to the academic workplace.
“Our student demographics and populations are changing so rapidly, and our structure has to be able to keep up with those changes,” she says. “That’s what millennial managers can bring: flexibility and adaptability.”
