By Chris Fauske

This past September, I traded in a spacious, comfortable administrator's office for a faculty cubicle that is, at best, 6 feet by 6 feet. I was ready to be a professor again, so it was an ideal trade. But it has left me with a problem.

Now I know things. I possess insider knowledge almost unique on the faculty. That should be good for something, given that knowledge is the fundamental purpose of existence in higher education. Instead, most days I find myself wondering if there's a manual for how to unknow what I know.

I am now an associate professor at Salem State College, one of Massachusetts' nine state colleges. I was a dean before that, and previously, prior to that, an associate dean. In an institution that has no tradition of administrators' joining the faculty, I now sit in department meetings and on faculty committees and wonder what I am supposed to admit to knowing.

I find it difficult to think of my erstwhile administrative colleagues as just that—erstwhile—as if somehow they have a different agenda from that of faculty members. Yet my faculty colleagues tend to ask me things like how we might best approach "them," or "the administration," or "him" (my lucky successor as dean of arts and sciences).

Was I so faceless and anonymous an entity myself until September 1, when my job description changed so abruptly?

I struggle, too, with my newfound freedom to think and teach without worrying about anything that goes on outside my classroom walls. It is a relief to discover after so many years out of the classroom that teaching is still both a reward and the most challenging of opportunities. It is with something approaching wonder that I start my days before the morning paper has landed on the stoop, reading e-mail messages from my students, answering those that can be answered, and pondering how what I am reading might redirect the manner in which we'll arrive together at the promised end-point of the semester.

I check in with my advisees. I wonder how to make sure they know they are not alone in juggling work, family, and college commitments. How do I reassure young men and women for whom each day is a puzzle of balancing personal expectations with confusing exhortations to study harder, take responsibility, and try more and different extracurricular activities? Should I let my students know I can pick up the phone or send an e-mail message and get an answer to a question that their other professors couldn't come by so quickly? Should I encourage my students to learn to navigate financial, academic, and administrative processes on their own, or should I introduce them to the shortcuts that will work, but only if not too many people take advantage of them? Which is the better life lesson? Does it matter?

And what of my colleagues? In our small corner of recession-afflicted higher education, the deans are engaged in an increasingly implausible attempt to reconcile expectations with diminishing resources. And there are plenty of expectations, not least from legislators and citizens (speaking in harmony on that topic, by and large) who would like to know how our pronouncements of poverty square with rising enrollments, steadily increasing fees, and a seemingly endless rise in the number of programs available for study.

Interestingly, such questions tend to be the exact ones posed by faculty members on the campus. Because I was a dean, I can speak to how state bonding authority works ("we'll build you a building, but it's for you to pay for its upkeep and operation"), why more students and a consequent increase in student fees don't begin to cover increased costs, and why … well, you get the drift.

But this really isn't my parish any longer. It's not for me to make the case.

In my new parish, we're interested in how our academic programs should grow, why they should grow, and how much additional support we deserve in order to grow them. We are, after all, the appropriate people to determine how best we can serve the cause of our field. Who better than us?

The task of the communications department, or any department, is to educate well—a task that changes with each shift in technological possibility, each increase in information, and each redefinition of appropriate practice. And because my fellow professors in the communications department are honest about the limits of our claims to knowledge, we wouldn't begin to speak for any other department or program. We wouldn't begin to suggest where it might be possible to adjust the budget in order to support our own needs and expectations.

But in administrative circles, the talk is about how we need a better sense of focus and purpose collegewide. The challenge facing us collectively is that we don't have a tidy, identifiable core mission.

As faculty members, we recognize the occasional narrowness of our vision. And I could tell you from recent experience that administrators recognize that, too. As faculty members, we tend to argue that discussion and care are needed to make sure that all the disparate parts that make up the academic whole get a voice. As administrators, we tend—or should I say "we tended?"—to appreciate that sooner or later some decisions have to be made and others decisions deferred.

I listen now to conversations about decisions I helped make and why they didn't turn out as we faculty members might have hoped or would have envisioned. Would it help if I told them that those same complaints were raised and discussed at administrative meetings, but that the decision was made to go ahead? Dirty laundry should not be aired in public; other people's dirty laundry, in particular, should remain out of sight. I have, in a very real sense, changed how and where it is appropriate to air my laundry, and I am left wondering what to do with all those old hampers.

I remain, in many ways, on both sides of the conversation. I often wonder which way to look, and to whom I should address any remarks I might care to make.

So I have come to a decision. At least for now, I'm quite happy with a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Don't ask me what I think should be done, and I won't tell you what I would do.

Chris Fauske is an associate professor of communications and former dean of arts and sciences at Salem State College.