Local vs. National

We’re about to advertise for a new dean of our school of education. This particular position poses an interesting dilemma for our search, because on a certain level the job is intensely local and involves extensive connections with schools in the area as well as the state educational organizations and bureaucracies here in Iowa.

Iowa is a special case in this regard, as it has a long and powerful tradition of local control for its schools and thus a very complex relationship between schools of education and the state department of education, as well as with local schools and the area education agencies that provide resources and services for schools that often lack them due to the small size of many Iowa school districts. In short, we have a quirky system of public education, productive engagement with which takes a certain degree of local knowledge that only comes with experience here in the state.

At the same time, we are very interested in diversifying the experiences and backgrounds of our faculty, which in this instance may be seen to run directly counter to the local needs that must be met by our new dean. I love living and working in Iowa—I’ve been here before, for 10 years, and am happy to be here now, in my fourth year—but until recently the state was not very diverse in any respect. Even now it has an unusually high proportion of residents who have lived here all their lives, and, relative to the country as a whole, a significantly higher proportion of people moving out of the state vs. moving into it. From time to time it’s pretty clear to me that Iowa is in serious need of outside perspectives, and I think that’s especially true when it comes to education.

Still, in a society that has been more than usually self-contained, coming in from the outside with little knowledge of local conditions and mores is not likely to assist a new dean’s success in creating relationships and moving our school of education ahead. I have a strong suspicion that we will end up with a new dean with extensive experience in Iowa, as creating and facilitating such success has to be our first priority in this particular search.

The longer I’m around, and the more searches I see, the more I am struck by how academic hiring is often a clash of more-or-less incompatible institutional priorities. It is always a challenge to balance these priorities, and to decide which are most urgent in each particular case. I look forward to the progress of this search, and am intrigued to see how it comes out.