I never thought I would find myself working in college administration. Through most of my teaching career, I had very little idea of what administrators actually did. In 2002, I was teaching literature courses at an American college in Europe, enjoying the novelty of academic life on a small international campus in a medieval German town. At the time, I was certain I had found the perfect job.
That idyllic state of affairs came to an abrupt end when the parent university withdrew its financial support and the college closed.
Faculty members, many of whom were ingeniously creative in the classroom, found themselves exercising some of that ingenuity -- first in locating transfer opportunities for 300 students from 50 nations, none of whom were on their home turf, and then in finding new job opportunities for themselves midcareer.
Under those strange circumstances, I moved from a college closing its doors to one that was just opening, from a slumbering medieval town to a larger city, and from teaching students how to read fiction to opening an admissions office.
I moved from teaching to admissions work without the misgivings that such a transition usually entails. I wasn't dissatisfied with academe or anxious that administration would be a step down.
My job search was a short one. A brief mention in an article on international education about a new college opening in Berlin made me look carefully for job postings there, and I acted as soon as one appeared. I started work as the dean's assistant a few months later. No ponderous deliberations brought me to admissions but rather, in the words of Milan Kundera from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a "fluttering down" of fortuities "like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders."
That was five years ago. Since then, I believe I have gained some perspective on how to make the crossover from faculty member to administrator a good experience.
I had already strayed into the liminal area between academics and administration in the last months of being a faculty member. It was a surreal time. Classes, workshops, language labs, and seminars continued, postponing the reality of the college's closure.
At the same time, college offices began shutting down: placement, admissions, enrollment, registration, counseling, accounting, financial aid, communications, residential life -- all the areas that had anchored campus life. It was like watching a film reel, only in slow motion and in reverse.
Looking back on that phase, I see that it marked the first time that my faculty colleagues and I had directed our gaze away from our insular world -- the courses, conference presentations, and committee work in which we were immersed -- and turned it outward to the rest of academic life.
In those final weeks before the college closed, we faculty members became more aware of administrative offices and the people who led them. Even in a college as small as ours, those offices had complex structures and required staff members who carried out their responsibilities with imagination, creativity, a sense of humanity, and generosity.
That perspective served me well when I began my first foray into administrative work. At the time, my college was the youngest of the international schools in Germany and was only just introducing a yearlong program in the humanities. It had, as yet, no blueprint for a full-scale college administration.
Now the reel of film was spooling in fast-forward motion and I became involved in the process of creating an administrative structure from the ground up. Here the challenge was to understand the academic plan and identify the essential administrative functions that would undergird that plan.
I now run the admissions office that I helped create in that process, and reading novels is what I do outside of the office.
Still, my former and present jobs are not disconnected. The exchanges I had with students when I was a faculty member inform the conversations I have with students in the admissions office. I recognize in application materials those qualities that Lloyd Thacker, in his book College Unranked: Ending the College Admissions Frenzy, refers to as "studenthood" -- curiosity, self-discipline, effort, intellectual verve -- because I encountered them previously in the classroom. And student advising prepared me well for the personal approach to admissions on which my college's mission depends.
At the same time, my current position sharpens my awareness that the work done by the administration is crucial to the life of a college, making possible the teaching, the student life, and, in the end, the mission of the college.
Regardless of my next step, I know that the shift in my perspective has been valuable. While my personal experience is drawn only from two small international colleges in Europe, I have learned this: Administrative work, especially in a small college, depends for its success on a group of people who are not only skilled in their areas but can work together as a team. An administration that can translate the institution's general philosophy into practical terms is often one of the clearest indications that a campus is as genuinely "student-centered" as its brochures claim.
My advice for faculty members and graduate students who are considering administrative positions: Consider the European job market in higher education. In the last 10 years, the number of European colleges and universities organized on the American model has increased. That means those institutions have recently introduced, or are still building, administrative structures. That means job openings.
So keep your eye on those fluttering fortuities. They may not bring you the kind of position you once dreamed of, but they may indeed bring you satisfying work.
