At a recent department gathering, a colleague approached me and said, "So I understand you're 'The Man Who Would be King'?" I looked at him and squinted my eyes. "The Grand Poobah? Chairman of the Governing Council of Iraq?" he teased. I knew what he meant, but I was having none of it. "The grad director position," he continued. "You're going to do it next year?"
"I guess so," I said. "I'm really looking forward to it."
"Well, good luck," another skeptical colleague chimed in, leaving the "you're going to need it" part unspoken.
I am a freshly minted associate professor. The position of graduate director in our department has traditionally gone to senior colleagues with more institutional and professional experience than I possess. Have the chairman and the current graduate director turned to me because there is no one else? It seems that most senior faculty members are already serving in other capacities, are uninterested in administration, or are more compelled by their own research and teaching.
In my discipline, graduate director is usually the second or third most important administrative position in departments at research-intensive institutions. My own department has a graduate program that is in the middle of the national rankings, and I have great hope that we can improve our standing. As a department, however, we face some barriers. And I see others facing me as a new administrator.
The first problem is faculty apathy. It has been my experience that professors at state universities like to complain about their graduate programs. The students aren't perceived to be as good as they would be in the Ivy League. The faculty members often think of themselves as Ivy League quality and expect Ivy League perks. As careers get longer, and as the profession evolves rapidly, professors become more cynical. Graduate students lured to study with great minds find themselves without the guidance, sometimes without even the classes, that they had been promised.
Of course, another problem is a lack of resources. We don't have the money to offer new graduate students the reduced teaching schedules provided by elite programs. Our graduate students teach two courses a semester. Regardless of what my brilliant colleagues publish and what great new hires we make, we won't be able consistently to attract graduate students with the best credentials because our working conditions for teaching assistants simply aren't as attractive as institutions that we consider our peers.
To be fair, we have had moderate success. We have been able to recruit strong students and place them in good beginning faculty positions, particularly in certain subfields. That success has created an entrenched hierarchy in which the successful subfields are privileged over others throughout the department -- in faculty hiring, teaching assignments, pay raises, student recruitment, and even in preferential fellowships and teaching assistantships.
Those subfields rich in resources have no interest in changing the system. In some of the downtrodden areas, many have grown comfortable with things as they are. After all, maintaining a successful graduate program requires a lot of work, and if you can still get assigned to teach your graduate course once a year, who cares whether you have students eager to work with you?
As a faculty, we also suffer from low expectations. My colleague's cynicism about my taking the graduate-director position represents the typical response to midlevel administrators in our department.
People seem to be drawn to administration for money and power. And because the money and power associated with the jobs here are minimal, administrative positions are often occupied by faculty members with inactive research programs -- or by professors hoping to bump up their salaries in anticipation of retirement. As a result, the midlevel administrator is reduced to paper pushing, filling out forms, and fighting endless battles with ornery department committees, made up of faculty members looking out for their own interests.
Naturally, we face the frustrations of institutional bureaucracy. I am relatively new to my university. My experience at another university gives me outside perspective, but this is probably outweighed by my ignorance of how things work here.
I have served on only a few dissertation committees, and I have no personal experience with the dean of the graduate school or other university-level administrators. I am trying to absorb the rules of the university and our department's program, but I also know that much of what happens, for good and bad, is not contained in the rules. Finally, I have no one to "train me in." The current director is going to Europe on a fellowship next year. She is supportive and has generously offered to provide any help she can -- by e-mail.
When he heard the news of my becoming graduate director, one of our college's most distinguished researchers asked me, "Is it too late for you to turn down the appointment?" I gulped hard, but said yes, that it was too late: I had already given the chairman my acceptance. This researcher has been particularly supportive of my career at State U., dropping me a line every month or so and sharing lunch with me once a semester.
After I told my colleague that I had committed myself to the administrative position, he berated a system that called on associate professors to serve in this capacity. He has a Jeffersonian sense of obligation: He had chaired the department for two terms, but only after achieving the rank of full professor on the basis of continued outstanding scholarship. He told me he thinks I ought to work on my scholarship. I'll never make full professor by directing my department's graduate program, he said, and I'll never get enough scholarship done for promotion while I hold this position.
My first column breezily laid out competing claims for the attention of the newly tenured associate professor. I always knew that for any of my options to be realized fully, other opportunities must be laid aside. Taking a position in departmental administration will alter the course of my career.
Instead of finishing that book manuscript, I will be making sure that our graduate students have taken all their courses and have properly drawn up their committees. Some students will drop out; others will take 15 years to finish their degrees; some will complete strong dissertations but fail to find academic employment; and a lucky -- and hard-working -- few will land tenure-track jobs. I tell myself that these few justify my efforts as well as the commitment of our department to offering a Ph.D. program.
I do not see myself as a career administrator. Somehow my career has gone in a different direction than I intended, and I wonder if I will end up lamenting that path. At what point will I no longer be a fresh and ambitious new associate professor but an administrative hack? Will I become a tired associate professor doing scut work while my more successful colleagues advance quickly to the rank of full professor, win national fellowships, or take prestigious endowed chairs?
The relationship between the terms "academic career," "scholarly discipline," and "teaching vocation" has never seemed more complicated to me.
Neither good scholarship nor effective teaching is possible without the infrastructural support of a successful administration. In principle, positions like department chairman and dean go to faculty members who have distinguished themselves in an evolutionary struggle involving great teaching and important research. Thus, the logical endpoint of an academic career in the modern multiversity (to use Clark Kerr's term) removes a faculty member from the research and teaching that motivated entry to the profession in the first place.
I wonder how many career administrative "hacks" began with the same quixotic vision that has motivated my choice to become director of graduate studies: "Although much of my time in the next few years will be spent as a harmless drudge," I tell myself, "I will be secretly toiling away on the project that will make my scholarly reputation and prove to my colleagues, my family, and the world that I can do everything at the same time. I can contribute to my department and university by shaping and building an important institutional program, bringing it to national prominence; I can help guide promising students through the maze of graduate study; I can continue to teach brilliantly innovative courses; and, somehow, I can squeeze in the time to do groundbreaking research and publish the results."
Meanwhile, in the real world, I've already begun to work. I do not officially begin my new duties until the fall, but I have already made appointments to consult with administrators, faculty colleagues, and graduate students to draw up a limited list of areas I think I can improve in the short term with minimal additional resources. I want to streamline our graduate curriculum, which resembles the national tax code in its complexity and irrationality. I want to rewrite our required introductory course. And I hope to provide more support for students entering the job market.
Mine are small ambitions, but if I can fulfill them, I have high hopes that I will improve the lives and careers of our graduate students and contribute to the mission of the department and the long-term health of my discipline. If I lose my research edge during my stint, I have only myself to blame. And if it all works out -- even in my more modest imaginings -- who knows where it will lead?
