Public, Regional, Urban, Comprehensive

In 1995 I moved to Cleveland, Ohio to take up a position as an Instructor in the History Department at Cleveland State University (CSU).  For someone who had gotten her BA in the rarified atmosphere of a small liberal arts college and her MA and (soon to be PhD) at a Big Ten campus, CSU was a bit of a revelation.  I was young and ill-informed about the landscape of higher education and hadn’t really given much thought to urban, public regional campuses like CSU.  I had visited campus in February (not Cleveland’s best month) and my campus tour had consisted of a mad dash through hulking buildings that gave new meaning to brutalist architecture.  My job offer letter included language specifying that I would be expected to regularly teach in the evening and on weekends—at that time CSU had a particularly vigorous array of courses available to adult learners who worked full-time and needed the flexibility of such a schedule.  And so I taught at night.  And during the day.  And I taught students who were many years older than me.  After eight years or so in fairly bucolic and decidedly un-urban settings, I reveled in returning to a city (I grew up in Atlanta).  Cleveland was in the midst of one of its renaissances then and colleagues delighted in telling me about new restaurants and other amenities while introducing me to the city’s stalwart institutions like the Cleveland Museum of Art—that was in the words of its founders “for the benefit of all the people, forever,” and where the world-class permanent collection is free.  I endured the jokes of those from outside Cleveland who didn’t know better and thought I had moved to a rust-belt wasteland (they could not have been more wrong).

And I stayed.  My then-boyfriend moved here.  We got married.  We bought a house.  I found a dentist.  Got a library card.  I got tenure.   We did what I had hungered to do my last few years in graduate school: we put down roots.

And all the while I forged a relationship with the institution where I worked.  With each passing semester my respect for my students—who juggled jobs, family, debt, and food insecurity—deepened.  I became passionate about public education.  I got involved in faculty governance; I served on curriculum committees, faculty senate, faculty job search committees.  I made a commitment to this institution and its future.  I dipped a toe in administrative waters at the invitation of the the then-president of the university.  I liked the work so I took on a different administrative role.  I became department chair.  And then I took a bigger leap and applied and was fortunate enough to be chosen to be the dean of our honors college.

And I continued to teach, at all levels of our program: survey courses, upper-level courses for majors, and courses in our MA program.  I told anyone who would listen that our students were easily the best part of the job.  I loved watching the interactions between eighteen-year olds, new to university life, and returning adult students.  My best students routinely blew me out of the water with their insights and ideas.  My struggling students challenged me but typically worked hard and were determined to improve.  All of my students enriched my teaching with their life experiences and perspectives.

All the while I worked alongside amazing people.  As I moved into administration I connected with a broader cross-section of the university that included staff in academic advising, student life, and student support services.  I came to have a much greater appreciation of their tireless advocacy for our students.

And then suddenly (or so it seemed) I had been here twenty-four years.  I have served under four presidents, and at least twice as many provosts.  Is everything perfect here?  Of course not.  State funding for higher education has declined precipitously during that time.  There are many things we could do better.  But as administrators come and go and various faculty union and faculty governance battles are fought, we still, as an institution, have an important role to play.  Our mission remains unchanged.  Forty percent of our students are first-gen.  And the most striking part of this statistic for me is how little it has changed in my time here—there is plenty of work yet to be done.  Places like Cleveland State account for over a third of all the undergraduate students enrolled in four-year institutions.  So clearly, we are still doing absolutely vital, life-changing work.

An institution like Cleveland State is known by various monikers: public, urban, regional, comprehensive.  I just call it home.

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Department of Consolidation

Periodically, universities announce their intention to consolidate or outright cut academic departments.  Such a proposal is currently on the table at the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale.  As reported in Inside Higher Ed, the Chancellor there has proposed creating, for example, a “School of Humanities within the proposed College of Liberal and Performing Arts” where “there would still be programs, courses and majors in history, English, philosophy, philosophy and languages, cultures and international studies. But there would no longer be a departmental structure to support them.”

Such plans are typically presented as an opportunity to (1) cut costs and (2) promote interdisciplinary collaboration and “innovative” thinking.  Both of these presumed opportunities are built on false narratives about higher education and are dangerous to our common enterprise.

Arguably, consolidating departments into larger units has the potential to save some money in staff and related bureaucratic costs.  Academic departments typically have support staff and fewer of those individuals will be needed if restructuring amalgamates and thereby reduces the number of academic units.  But such savings are a pittance in the grand scheme of things.  Support staff are often poorly paid and the financial savings of eliminating a few secretaries or administrative assistants would hardly solve the budget deficits that many universities face.

Additionally troubling is the administrative assertion that there is a kind of intellectual inefficiency that results from departments being disciplinarily distinct.  Breaking down those silo-ed barriers, it’s argued, will foster collaboration and multi/cross/interdisciplinary projects.  All well and good.  And I fully support this kind of work.

But until all academics attend graduate schools built on this interdisciplinary model and attend conferences and publish in journals that have erased all disciplinary singularity and identity, faculty are not likely to collaborate simply because they now belong to a “School of Humanities” instead of an English department or now have an office next door to someone outside their discipline.  This is simply the higher ed version of the “open office” plan–the notion that if you throw people together in a shared space–physical or metaphorical–the innovative ideas will simply jump off the page and be ushered to fruition.  And guess what?  The effectiveness of the open office plan has been largely disproved by several recent studies.  While consolidating departments does not include moving to a different configuration of actual workspaces, it does operate on the (unproven) assertion that the thing holding back interdisciplinary work is the self-containment of academic departments.

In fact, interdisciplinary research is stifled not by departmental singularity, but a host of other structural impediments that are practically written into the DNA of academe.  A recent report funded by the NSF and examining the need for but also impediments to interdisciplinary work in the sciences discovered that “‘excellence-based’ journal rankings have a systematic bias against interdisciplinary research. This may create or reinforce disincentives for researchers to engage in interdisciplinary research. When journal rankings are used to help determine the allocation of prestige and resources for faculty, it can hinder interdisciplinary research.”  In addition, although women have a demonstrated greater propensity to engage in interdisciplinary research, they also worry about the effects this will have on their career advancement: “compared with men, women expressed more desire to pursue additional opportunities for collaborative and interdisciplinary research. However, women also perceived greater institutional constraints. Women agreed more than men with the statement, ‘I would like to pursue more interdisciplinary research, but only after I am more established in my career.’ Compared with men, women agreed less with the statement, ‘Participation in collaborative research is viewed positively during the tenure/promotion review process.'”  With such impediments and disincentives in place it is little wonder that interdisciplinary work doesn’t occur more often.

The insidious effect of these false narratives about financial and intellectual inefficiency is to shift the blame to the academic side of the house.  It suggests, incorrectly, that the university is in financial trouble because faculty are not responding nimbly to student interest because they’re sequestered away in their departments instead of developing cool interdisciplinary programs that will draw the students in.  I find it hard to believe that the current combined budgetary/enrollment crisis facing some campuses is result of the History department being distinct from the English department.  Being flexible and responsive with curriculum might allow us to create opportunities for student-designed majors and other programs that blur disciplinary distinctions, and perhaps would attract students, but such efforts are not going to solve the multi-million dollar budget crises proliferating across college campuses.  The best way to retain and graduate students (thereby ensuring the financial health of the university), in fact, is to invest in faculty and student support services.

And despite these narratives shifting budgetary blame to academic departments, such reform programs are typically enacted with little if any consultation with the faculty in those very departments.  Some faculty at Southern Illinois are rightly arguing that collapsing departments into larger units has curricular and other implications that fall within the domain of shared governance.  While it would undoubtedly take more time, wouldn’t it be more interesting and constructive to ask faculty to be participants in these discussions, encouraging them to identify thematic overlap and potential areas for interdisciplinary collaboration?  This, however, will be hard work.  Departments can undoubtedly and demonstrably behave in unproductively silo-ed ways and shifting that culture will be no small feat.  But forcing such decisions will only destroy faculty morale, which in turn will yield little or none of the results that chancellors and others claim to be so desirable.

 

Of Surgeries and Superwomen

I love the start of a new school year.  Even after 20+ years in higher education, I thrill to the new-ness of it all.  Fall temperatures, new students, and that “anything is possible” atmosphere all bring me great delight.

Thus, I was both surprised and disappointed when I found myself in the emergency room the night before the start of the semester, looking at the possibility of needing a surgery that week [spoiler: I’m fine; everything worked out; my health is good].

So I missed the first week of classes, had my surgery, and, as you’ve probably already anticipated, the world didn’t end.

But neither did my fretting, fear of falling behind, or general anxiety about missing so much work.  So I went back to the office the following week.  And lasted about four hours.  And then later that week I put in a twelve-hour day.  Which turned out to be a very bad idea.  I spent the next three days recovering from that decision.

Reflecting on the experience of those two weeks, I have realized that I let my desire to be a superwoman outweigh common sense.  “I’m tough,” I reasoned, “I can go back to work.”  I wanted to be some sort of shining example of resilience and determination.  This surgery couldn’t slow me down.  I’m a superwoman!

While I do not think that women exclusively fall prey to the temptation to be superheroes in these situations, I want to address this post to women in the academy and point out why this behavior and the temptation towards superwoman-hood does us a disservice.*

Senior superwomen: I suspect that we build this tendency towards superwomanhood when we are junior or contingent faculty, trying to be the best and most dedicated colleagues possible.  But what dismays me is that this behavior continues even later in our careers.  I was out once for drinks with a group of female colleagues who all held administrative positions at my university.  At one point the conversation devolved into a somewhat competitive round of who got to work earliest/stayed latest/put in the most extra hours.  It is telling that even senior women who are tenured and secure engage in this behavior. We are still trying to prove ourselves in a culture that whether explicitly or implicitly has not fully welcomed us.  Some places are better than others, but overall, women in the academy as reflected in service obligations, teaching evaluations, pay scale, or any host of other metrics still fight an uphill battle for acceptance.  So whether consciously or unconsciously we continue to try to prove ourselves and our worth and our right to be here.

That said, I try not to play along with my colleagues.  Whenever possible, I leave work at 5.  I don’t check my work email after I get home.  Weekends are for non-work activities.  Now certainly there are exceptions to this.  Big projects or the inconvenient overlap of multiple deadlines sometimes means I stay late or work on the weekends.  Sometimes my role as dean comes with evening and weekend responsibilities.  But generally speaking, making overwork and the dissolution of work-life boundaries a competitive sport is not productive.

Which brings me to my next point:

Modeling and normalizing: What message are we sending to our female colleagues when we try to be superwomen who prove their dedication and their talent through overwork?  We’re certainly modeling a behavior that says that self-care doesn’t matter.  We’re setting a presumed standard that values and perhaps even rewards overwork.  We are perpetuating the cycle and a culture that asks women to rise to the standard of superwomen at a possible expense to their health and well-being.

As I repeatedly argue on this blog, those of us in a secure position of power have an obligation to do the work to gradually shift the culture of academe.  So I would ask you: what example do you set for the women in your office or department?  If you are an administrator what policies do you lobby for at your institution?  Sometimes, for example, our jobs require us to work nights and weekends.  But if we’re going to normalize the expectation for that kind of work, then we also need to normalize the concept of comp time [this idea came from one of my wise female administrator friends].  Work four hours on Saturday at a recruitment event?  Fine.  The duties of the job require it.  But then when you take four hours on a Friday afternoon to have a life, you shouldn’t feel guilty or have to explain yourself to your provost.  We need to stand up for and beside our female colleagues when they make choices like these.

Talk about it: Wherever and whenever possible, we need to highlight this issue.  I posted on Twitter when I started working on this post and was surprised/not surprised at how many people responded, indicating that these issues resonated with them.  Despite an enthusiastic response for addressing this issue, I have never had a conversation about this with anyone on my campus.  That needs to change.  Again, those of us in secure positions need to take some risks and bring this up with the senior administration at our universities.  We need to forcefully and vocally advocate for female colleagues who we see trying to take care of themselves while still fulfilling their responsibilities.  We need to intervene when we see someone falling prey to the Superwoman Syndrome.  This last one, I think, is particularly tricky; we tend to praise, and even reward, superwomen, not caution them.

Our efforts to speak up and highlight this issue probably won’t go terribly smoothly.  We will probably be accused of whining or shirking.  And I am the first to acknowledge that institutional structures and cultures do not always support our ability to take care of ourselves and have fulfilling lives beyond our workdays.  But until those of us who are senior and reasonably well-protected begin modeling better behavior and advocating for ourselves and our female colleagues nothing will change.  We will be very unhappy superwomen.

 

*I want to be quick to say that I think this issue is undoubtedly relevant for scholars of color, contingent faculty, and others who find themselves feeling unwelcome in the academy and/or needing to prove themselves through overwork.

Administration and Faculty: Can This Relationship Be Saved?

A week or so ago I published a piece in Inside Higher Ed about bridging the divide in higher education that too-often separates the administration from the faculty.  It prompted some lively discussion.  I appreciate those of you who engaged with my argument and offer the following as things I learned from your feedback.

* Experiences vary: One thing that the response to my essay taught me is that experiences vary widely.  I would not have necessarily characterized the relationship between faculty and administration at my university as good, but I have learned that it certainly isn’t as difficult as it is elsewhere.

* Point taken: Several of you called me out for describing my colleague’s move from faculty to administration as a “promotion” since that contributed to the very divide that I was railing against.  You are absolutely right.  And such a description is part of the problem.  I will think and write differently about that as a consequence–thank you!  I need to avoid characterizing, and thus valuing, administrative work as something “above” the work that faculty do.

* There are administrators and there are administrators.  What do we mean when we say “administration”?  The responses to my piece would suggest that among faculty the word conjures up images of overpaid and ineffective presidents, vice presidents, deans and others in the upper echelons of administration.  My own definition is a bit more all-encompassing and includes individuals who occupy more modest, but nonetheless administrative, roles at the university–associate deans, directors, and department chairs, for example.  It is often these folks that I think of (though not exclusively) when I think of talented, dedicated colleagues who are not deserving of faculty antipathy.  So we need to be careful that we don’t paint “administration” with too broad a brush.

Which brings me to my next point.

* Bad actors: I resisted the urge to respond to each comment that trashed the bad behavior of a particular administrator or administration with a counterpoint story about the bad behavior of faculty.  I resisted, because that’s NOT THE POINT.  You’re mad because an administrator pushed through a bad policy without adequate faculty governance?  I’m mad at the tenured faculty member who never answers student emails and reads aloud from her textbook as a substitute for holding class.  Both of these individuals are outliers.  They are not the sole face of either the administration or the faculty.

Now, I will acknowledge that my analogy breaks down in the face of the power differential that often separates administrators from faculty.

Which brings me to my next point.

* Cultural v. structural: Admittedly, what I was arguing for was a change in the culture that often divides faculty from the administration.  But as many of you pointed out, there are often structures that mitigate against that.  On campuses without a strong tradition and culture of faculty governance it may be virtually impossible to work with the administration.  If the administration controls large swaths of the decision-making process and wields that power without input from faculty, small wonder that faculty might be inclined to view them in a negative light.  I don’t think this means that bridging the faculty-admin divide is impossible on campuses such as these, but it will face different and harder challenges.

Which brings me to my next point.

* Growing administrators: If your campus is plagued by a toxic environment that divides the faculty from the administration, then perhaps you need to think about moving some of those faculty (or yourself!) into the ranks of administration.  Many of you lamented the fact that some of the most troublesome administrators come from outside the institution and don’t stick around very long.  I agree that this creates disruption and distrust.  One remedy is to encourage talented and dedicated faculty (and again, maybe YOU are one of these faculty) to consider moving into these positions.  The faculty perspective, institutional memory, and commitment to the institution that these individuals bring to the table could go a long way to creating better relations between the administration and faculty.

 

If I learned nothing else from the comments on my essay, it’s that the relationship between faculty and administration is fraught and often outright contentious on most campuses.  But I remain resolute in my insistence that there are things we can do to change that.  I welcome your continued thoughts and suggestions.

We Are All Bunnies

I’m sitting at my desk today watching the reactions and commentary about the situation at Mount St. Mary pour in via Twitter and Facebook.  In case you haven’t read about it yet: here’s the latest.  Those of us who recognize the value of tenure, still believe there is a place for respectful disagreement in higher ed, and want better things for our own students and institutions are a bit speechless (which would be a wise strategy if you were at Mount St. Mary).  Horrified and shocked and saddened seem the most common emotions.

I’m guessing that this drama isn’t over yet.  I expect lawsuits, alumni protest (at least the president can’t fire them), and hopefully, some response from the college’s Board of Trustees.  But in the meantime I think we faculty and administrators at other institutions need to do three things.

The first is to engage in some self-education.  What are the policies and procedures at your institution governing speech?  In one of the first ripples in the drama at Mount St. Mary it became clear that the university had a policy that “all university employees must clear any communications with reporters first with the university spokesman.”  What is YOUR university’s policy in these matters?  Perhaps there isn’t a policy, which is probably a good thing.  But my PSA to you is to find out.

The second two items hinge on the assumption that in the current higher ed climate no one is immune from these kind of actions.  We can shake our heads and wring our hands and say how messed up things are at Mount St. Mary, but I bet our colleagues there didn’t see this coming, either.

So the second item is to become the allies of vulnerable individuals at your institution who might end up in the firing line.  A particularly troubling part of the recent developments is that the untenured facultly advisor to the student newspaper, which leaked the president’s emails, was one of the faculty members fired.  I’m not sure what sort of things might have protected this individual, but having senior, tenured members of the faculty recognize his vulnerability would be a good place to start.

The third item is to write and tweet and post about this as much as possible.  And sign this petition.  We need to recognize not just that this could happen to us wherever we are, but that we need to be in solidarity with our colleagues at other institutions.  It is easier to pick off faculty like this if the perception is that they are isolated.  And I say this to my fellow administrators, too.  We need to say that this kind of management is unacceptable and an insult to the enterprise of higher education.

Kitchen Tales, Part I

So…about a week ago I posted a blog entry about verbal abuse and bullying in academe.  I asked friends and colleagues to repost, tweet, and spread it.  The results were–by the usual measures of my small-time blog–rather astounding.  Since first going up the post has received over 1700 views.  My previous record was around 600.  I credit my generous and supportive colleagues with this result.  But the accompanying comments on my Facebook pages, on their Facebook pages, and on the blog itself, and the private messages I received would suggest that I tapped into a broader concern.  People shared stories of being on the receiving end of verbal abuse.  Others talked about trying to change departmental and campus cultures to  limit these behaviors.  Many expressed understandable frustration that more wasn’t being done on their campus and by their colleagues to root out this unacceptable behavior.

All of this seemed to me to warrant some follow-up posts: a series that I will call “Kitchen Tales” (since the original post talked about turning down the heat in the kitchen and as a play on the blog’s name).

So, today in Part One I offer some observations.

First observation: words matter.  People who verbally abuse others are not “blunt” or “speaking their mind” or “assertive” or “forthright.”  They are engaging in bad behavior and we need to name it appropriately.  We don’t need to be inflammatory, but we do need to call this behavior inappropriate and unacceptable.  We need to resist those who would dress it up or cover it up with a vocabulary that justifies or downplays it.

Second observation: Combating and resisting these behaviors will not be easy work and there will be risks.  Colleagues behave like this, in part, because they can get away with it and have been getting away with it.  Even if you are completely and totally in the right in calling this person out, be prepared for potential negative fallout.  Some will applaud you, but some may ask why you’re making such a fuss or picking on this person or suggest that you are the problem, not the person doling out the abuse.  I don’t say this to be discouraging.  I say it because–as with all whistle-blowing–it’s not guaranteed to go smoothly and you need to be prepared.

Third observation: Know your institution.  What kind of institutional support is there if you or someone else decides to stand up to verbal abuse or bullying?  Do you know what your institution’s anti-harassment policy is?  Or if there is one?  If there is, what does it look like?  The one at my university, for example, groups harassment with discrimination more broadly and sexual harassment more specifically.  While I am grateful that we have a policy that covers many possible unacceptable behaviors, the grouping of all of these categories makes the policy a bit opaque and the path for pursuing a complaint involving verbal abuse is muddled as a consequence.  Perhaps, then, this is an area that needs attention.

Which brings me to my fourth observation: Each campus culture and structure is distinctive and solutions will need to be local.  In a future post I will talk about some general precepts and principles, but implementing these will depend greatly on conditions and circumstances that are specific to your campus.

So your homework is this: start learning about your institution’s policies and procedures. Hypothetically, what would it look like–e.g.what office would you go through, who would you talk to, etc–if you wanted to file a complaint against someone?

 

A Tale of Two Campuses

The news of and reaction to the budget cuts at the University of Akron fueled and animated my Facebook and Twitter feeds last week.  Faced with a deficit that could reach as much as $60 million in the coming year, the Akron administration has cut approximately 200 positions, including the entire staff of its university press.  The outrage has been clear and vocal.  And those protesting have noted various ironies: the football team loses money but remains, the president is the beneficiary of numerous perks, at least one of their deans makes over $200,000 a year (more than the equivalent of the entire press staff’s salaries).

It is possible that there are valid explanations for why these specific cuts were made and why the seeming ironies do, in fact, make sense.   But herein lies the problem: the Akron administration has been notably un-transparent about its decision-making process and has offered vague and opaque explanations in the press.

Contrast this with the case of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire–profiled in this excellent piece by Inside Higher Ed reporter Kellie Woodhouse.  This campus was faced with a similarly daunting financial situation–a $12.3 million deficit, a consequence of Governor Scott Walker’s deep cuts to higher education.  The Eau Claire administration’s behavior and leadership during this time of crisis and low morale, however, embody many important lessons for the administration of Akron and others.  I’ll highlight a few:

* “The majority of eliminated positions will be administrative” and many of these will be at senior levels.  Nothing angers faculty faster than being asked to bear budget cuts when the administrative ranks continue to grow and garner large salaries.  Administrations need to demonstrate that the cuts will be felt at all levels–even the senior ones.

* “Eau Claire didn’t hire consultants…but instead asked about a dozen alumni with business experience to share their expertise and recommendations.”  Another thing that often angers faculty and other observers is the tendency to pay high-priced consultants to help you manage budget crises.  But the decision to use alumni instead?  What a great way to demonstrate your faith in the degrees you award.  Brilliant!

* “Eau Claire assembled a group to consider how such changes might affect the curriculum.”  Proactively managing change encourages transparency (you can’t manage it, if you don’t say what it’s going to be), involves other participants, and generally helps sow the seeds of good will.

* “Schmidt [the Chancellor] says he’s consulted with faculty through each run of restructuring…Members from the Eau Claire’s University Senate agree that they’ve been part of the process, and that administrators have been transparent and communicative about reductions.”  Many things to love about this: consulting, transparency, and communication top the list.

Undoubtedly, there are other factors that play into things not going well for Akron and things going better at UW-Eau Claire.  But I can’t help but be struck by the Eau Claire administration’s playbook.  It seems to me that they are managing a bad situation by setting an example (cuts at senior levels), demonstrating transparency, and encouraging conversation.  It’s not a mysterious or complicated strategy, but it’s one that other universities would we well-served to embrace.

 

Change Happens

I have written frequently here about change.  But I have typically been on the receiving end.  I changed jobs just a couple of months ago.  I weathered and helped manage a huge curricular change–not of my own making–while I was department chair.  But now I find myself in charge of leading a change.  And as with all change, there is grumbling (is there ever NOT grumbling about change?) and there are pockets of discontent.  Change happens, but how?  And what should you do when you have a leading role to play in making it happen?

Without wishing to give too much away, the change is this: converting a program into a free-standing college.  And I am the interim (more on the benefits and perils of being an interim in a future post) director of the program, tasked with writing a proposal that articulates this change and argues for its approval.  The proposal will then move through the various administrative and shared governance channels.  My goal?  Get the proposal approved within four months (which, as many of you know, would be fast by the standards of most university bureaucracies).

So the time seemed ripe for a few observations and lessons learned along the way:

1.  Know the players.  Who are your allies?  Who are the people (committee chairs, administrators, etc) who will play a role in the approval process?  Who are your possible adversaries?  You know, the ones who object to every idea, just because.  Or who might have good reason or cause to interpret the proposal as a problem or threat?  Mapping the terrain of participants early on will help you to build alliances and anticipate bumps in the road.

2.  Meetings before the meetings.  Before I even started work on the proposal, I gathered together a group of faculty leaders for a preliminary conversation.  My basic message: “Tell me what the big questions and issues are so that I can be proactive in my approach.”  You can’t really do this until you’ve done #1.

3.  Follow Up and Through:  Vigilantly follow the path of the proposal.  Don’t allow it to languish in committee.  Not sure where the proposal is in the process?  Don’t wait for someone to tell you, call the committee chair/dean/whoever and find out.  It’s unlikely that others are as invested in the efficient and timely approval of your proposal as you are.  You need to be proactive.

4.  Elevator speech: I learned this one the hard way.  You need a succinct and pithy statement of what you are proposing and why it should be approved.  In other words, something that you could communicate in a 30-second ride on an elevator with someone.  I say I learned this the hard way because sometimes the only way to hone this speech is to be tested.  I got grilled at a committee meeting about my proposal.  Somewhere in the course of responding to their questions, I hit upon my elevator speech.  Now I have it for the next round of questions.

5.  Keep your cool.  You love your proposal.  You don’t know why anyone would object to its eloquent beauty and persuasive objectives.  But they will.  Don’t respond with defensiveness.  Launch into that elevator speech.  A moderate and reasonable tone, which can still be assertive and forceful, is remarkably disarming when others are being combative.

So far, my proposal has cleared two hurdles.  Next week it’s on to a new one.  I’ll keep you posted.

Well Done

No, this won’t be a culinary tutorial in overcooking things.  Instead it’s a post inspired by a quotation from Benjamin Franklin that I recently came across” Well done is better than well said.”  Putting aside my abiding love of eloquence, I take his point.  And it’s another one of those deceptively simple lessons that would serve administrators well.

In this case, I’ll adapt it to a particular set of circumstances and the issue of follow through.  For several years I attended an annual meeting of leaders in my college.  The afternoon included a brainstorming session to generate ideas about how to improve the college’s stature on campus, recruit majors, and other worthy endeavors.  But nothing ever came of these sessions.  Great ideas were generated but then vanished into the well-meaning ether of good intentions.  By the second or third time I’d watched this happen, I’d become completely disenchanted, and as a consequence, disengaged.  What good were any good plans we might identify if no one would ever try to implement them?

Clearly, this was a flawed process.  But aside from its immediate flaws, it unwittingly fostered apathy and disgruntlement.  So the long-term effects were probably more pernicious than the short-term ones.

So how could this process have been better?  In other words, how do you facilitate follow through?

To begin with, write it down.  Keep track of what gets said.  Be sure that someone is the designated note-taker and record-keeper.  In other words there need to be minutes of what transpired.  Taking minutes seem too old-fashioned?  Another possibility is to write the notes on big sheets of butcher paper or a blackboard and then take photos of them.

Once the group has finished brainstorming or generating ideas, look them back over and determine who is going to follow up on which idea.  In my experience, everyone is at least pretty good at coming up with clever ideas.  Where the rubber hits the road is in implementation.  So get people to volunteer or assign them tasks.  And circulate the minutes or photos of the work as soon as possible after the meeting.  Keep everyone engaged in the task at hand.

But wait, you’re not quite done yet.  You also need to set deadlines or some expectation of reporting back.  How long does everyone have to follow through on their assigned idea/task?  Will there be another meeting to discuss progress (if so, you’ve got everyone already assembled, set the date now while everyone’s in the room!).  Will there be sub-groups that need to set their own timeline?  Unless there’s some accountability you risk another encounter with the well-meaning ether of good intentions.

While some may grumble while you make these assignments and set these timetables, the payoff of promoting follow through and producing results will foster faith in your leadership and contribute to greater engagement in the long run.

The Fine Art of Delegating

Delegating.  Put it at the top of the list of things I do badly.  After five years of being chair I know this about myself and still haven’t figured out a way to do it better.  So in this period of slowed-down summer timetables, I offer the following reflections on why academic chairs need to delegate and some strategies for how to do it.

The most obvious reason for delegating is to reduce or at least redistribute your workload.  Even though we all know that we can’t do it all, we consistently behave otherwise.  Call it micromanaging, call it control issues, but whatever you do, call an end to it.  I doubt any of us need more to do.

Another reason to delegate is that your colleagues need to be both cognizant of and invested in the work of the department.  If you do everything, magically and behind the scenes, you risk creating a faculty culture of disengagement where faculty don’t know, for example, the work that goes into identifying and recruiting students for the departmental honor society.  Or the logistics of organizing an event with a visiting speaker.  And what happens when you’re not chair anymore?  There will be a profound lack of institutional knowledge and memory that will make your successor’s job that much more difficult.  Further, as we know from our best classroom practices, the more students participate, the more they are invested in their education.  So, too, with faculty.  Delegating will help to create a participatory and engaged department culture.

Delegating also signals your confidence in your colleagues.  Managing everything yourself may make others think that you don’t trust them with certain responsibilities.  Even if that’s not the case, you don’t want to mistakenly foster that impression.

So, there are clearly benefits to delegating.  But doing it should be purposeful and directed.

To begin with, delegate strategically.  Simply going into a faculty meeting and asking for volunteers to work on various tasks or projects may not always be the best strategy.  You may not get the best people for the job.  Instead, try to match people well–play to the strengths and passions of your faculty.  It’s no good assigning someone with poor organizational skills to a project that will involve managing complicated spreadsheets.  Someone with a talent for chatting and conversation is the one you want to send to the open house for freshmen who are choosing a major.  Such maneuvering can even be a way to get otherwise reluctant faculty to take on projects.  If Dr. X has consistently expressed concerns about the declining number of majors then maybe Dr. X could work on designing an outreach program.

Next, build in some accountability.  Delegating makes me nervous because it means releasing control of a task or project.  I do much better when I release it with expectations like “Report back to me by such and a such a time,” or “Bring me a draft of the document in a week,” or “Please be prepared to make a report at the next faculty meeting.  You get the idea.

Finally, be prepared for delegating to fail sometimes.  Even the most strategic and deliberate delegation with clearly articulated expectations may flop if there is a failure of responsibility and follow through.  And the buck does stop with you, so you will need to pick up the pieces.  Try to figure out what didn’t work in that particular instance and apply it to future decisions.  In all, the benefits of letting go will outweigh those instances where it doesn’t work.