Why refuse to lead?
Most faculty are familiar with all of the shortcomings of going into leadership roles. Junior faculty in particular are justifiably concerned about the possible negative impact on their longt erm career of getting bogged down in administration. It is easy to list many of the potential drawbacks.
Specifically, a list of reasons to refuse leadership positions include:
- It takes away from research and education.
- It is hard to gear back into research and
education later on.
- Leadership requires
too much politics, both within an organization and outside.
- Leadership usually requires fundraising of some kind.
- Leadership requires a skill set you may not have including
managing staff and central
budgets.
The first item is a genuine drawback, at least for most of us -- something has to go.
Happily not everything has to go, people typically cut back on some aspects and not others.
Department chairs and deans often give up most
classroom
teaching, but keep on with research and graduate
advising. Some chairs cut back on research responsibilities and continue teaching.
It is usually not difficult to return to teaching after a break, but it can be difficult
to start a new pipeline of grad
students and write grants from scratch.
Henry Kissenger was quoted as saying that
"University politics are vicious precisely
because the stakes are so small."
It's a reality that chairs (and deans and others) spend
much of their time doing fundraising. But fund raising is
not in any way
inconsistent with our traditional missions of
education, research and service.
Indeed, the opposite is true -- it provides an opportunity
where we must, in a highly effective way, articulate why
we do what we do, and this seems to be a wonderful
obligation. Universities have a simple pair of
goals -- produce extraordinary people and fantastic ideas.
Our people are students, post-docs, faculty, and staff. We are judged more by the
success of the people that leave the university than those of us who
remain here.
Our ideas are conveyed in a broad set of ways -- by papers,
books, company formation, technology transfer, artwork and
performances, and many others.
Conveying the excitement and the value of our people and
our ideas is the core of fundraising -- and it's fun!
The required skill set for administrative leadership is awesome. It typically involves:
- Budgeting (how do you control it when others are spending it?)
- Planning (how do you make a five year strategic plan?)
- Building consensus and obtaining cooperation (hearding cats)
- Hiring (and startup packages)
- Fundraising (getting to know the alumni/ae)
- Alumni, company, community engagement
- Timing-when do you move to administration?
Few of us receive genuine training in these skills. But then most of us were never trained
to be an educator or mentor, either.
If you have good staff, you can rely on them
to do some (much) of this, and you can
learn some on-the-fly, too. Most learn through first serving in assistant or associate
positions or by shadowing the person whom they will assist or succeed. Some have the
extraordinary good luck to be at an institution which actually has effective leadership programs
or workshops
for its faculty.
An example of such a program is the Purdue
Committee on Institutional Cooperation
Academic Leadership Program
Program Agenda which provides the following agenda:
- Plenary Address
- Working with Faculty
- Raises and Incentives
- Sources of Funding for Higher Education
- Models of University Budgeting
- Planning and Budgeting in Tough Times
- Planning Facilities for the Academic Mission
- Planning Strategically
- Demands of Changing Technology
- Changing Role of Faculty
Mentoring programs also have a role to play here and are considered in section
*.
Robert M. Gray, September 12, 2004
