After 15 years as dean of the iSchool here at UT, I have decided that it is about time to move on to other challenges in my career. To this end, I will be stepping up to the faculty as a professor next Fall. I do so with great anticipation of returning once again to faculty life and enjoying the role I coveted so much in my earlier years. I don’t quite understand how I came to being a dean, it certainly was not part of any career plan I made (did I even have a plan beyond getting a job, engaging in interesting research and someday earning tenure?). But as I tell all my graduate students, there will be opportunities for which you cannot plan, only accept, though it helps to prepare for most academic eventualities by doing your best work with consistency.
Life as a dean in a public university is challenging. The onslaught of human-resource challenges, the demands for appearances and short speeches, the constant signing off on forms and approvals fill the days but really are not considered even the important parts of your job. And did I mention the constant accreditation and assessment reports you must generate for internal and external bureaucracies? As dean you are responsible ultimately for the quality of your faculty and educational offerings. If enrollments are dropping, student placement not quite what it was, or the classroom technology needs updating, the buck eventually stops with the dean. And these are just outcome measures. The intangibles of departmental culture, staff morale and junior faculty comfort rest on your shoulders too. If a faculty member is denied tenure, it must be the dean’s fault.
Deans now are required to fundraise without pause, and while this was always considered a core responsibility, there is a danger that it is becoming the main one. As funding for public education is continually challenged, more and more of the financial support for any moderately ambitious school or college falls on other revenue streams. Faculty certainly feel the pressure to secure external grants to fund doctoral students and their own labs, but more of the routine operations involving space renovation, faculty conference travel, student recruitment, equipment updates and furniture renewal need to be funded through gifts. Colleagues vary in their commitment of effort here but I don’t know a single dean who does not feel the need to make ‘development’ (as we euphemistically term it) a priority. In the arms race to advance an academic program over one’s peers, success is often measured rather simply in dollar terms.
None of this is too surprising, organizations require lines of responsibility through which to apportion credit and blame, though they would never use such terms. The challenge is to recognize these lines and shape communication through them in an open and two-way process that brings people into the decision making and collective goal-setting. What is surprising however, is how long it takes new deans to learn this and how little preparation universities provide to help them understand what is required. I remember asking, when I first joined UT, what training I could receive as a new dean? I was told there was none, the university expected us to learn by doing. I am not sure anything has changed in the intervening years but it’s a sad statement about higher education that its leaders are so informally prepared.
None of this will I miss too much but to linger on these misses the joys of the job. As dean, one gets to have final influence on the single most important determinant of program quality: faculty recruitment and promotion. There are multiple decisions, acts of persuasion, paperwork drudgery, PR initiatives and yes, fundraising efforts in the job but the most important one, always, is shaping the make up of the faculty. I’ve always believed that by recruiting the best professors we would attract the best students, develop the most innovative curriculum, initiate the most productive research programs, and advance the school’s reputation where it mattered. Everything else a dean does has to be in service of this goal if a school or college is to improve.
Of course, faculty recruitment is not a precise science. Sure, we consider educational background, publication rates, research focus, teaching qualities etc, and we do use these filters to reduce the inevitable deluge of applicants we receive every time we announce an opening. Yes, we consider coverage in the curriculum, though by now our school has moved beyond hiring for turf areas. But even then, there is something intangible about faculty selection that comes down to impressions gained in campus visits. Faculty expect fellow professors to be collegial, willing to partner, enthusiastic about joining us, and open to teaching that core class that most wish to avoid. I’ve seen otherwise strong applicants lose the faculty during their visit, damning their chances by their lack of engagement, apparent surliness or generally giving the impression of being entitled. We never pay the most so we assume anyone we want has a better offer somewhere. It’s good to be honest, but don’t rub the faculty’s noses in it. Much as we find faculty selection to have intangible elements, we expect those who wish to join us to recognize the same in us, and to understand that life in our school might be a better choice regardless of better salaries elsewhere. A school can only get to this point by hiring the right faculty, and it’s a slow process.
Once hired, a faculty member still has to earn tenure, and I use that term deliberately. Some young guns imagine it’s the department’s responsibility to tell them exactly what to do, and sadly, some senior faculty still act like they know. The reality here is that in most US public universities there remain senior faculty who would now not get tenure under current standards and are not well-positioned to advise new people on how to proceed productively. Again, this is where a dean is essential in communicating expectations and standards. It is sad to lose a faculty member at promotion and tenure time, but it is a travesty to ignore the limitations and promote anyway. Tenure is a near perfect reward system, but only if applied appropriately and consistently.
As I step back from the role, I am also reminded of the somewhat farcical nature of academic life: the egos, the arguments over minutiae, the comparative economy where office space, computer screens and scheduling form an unusual sense of worth and status for otherwise intelligent people, and where the humor is easily found but often unintentionally provided. I am promising the faculty that my time off will be spent producing a detailed account of my term here, replete with full character coverage and accurate plots based entirely on these years. This work will be written but almost certainly published as a novel since no normal reader would ever believe adults could actually behave this way. Move over David Lodge!