Making the Transition

I just started a new position this week as vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty at Buena Vista University, so I have been thinking about career transitions and institutional fit.

My new university bears many strong similarities to the small college where I started my faculty career. At times, I find the similarities ironic, as many of them are things I found irritating as a young junior faculty member but today I see as positive aspects of my professional life.

For example, at the small college, my first job after graduate school, I struggled with my new colleagues’ apparently odd and counterproductive obsession with institutional procedures and policies. I thought many governance committees, activities, and protocols were a waste of faculty time and more properly the purview of administrators who were getting paid a lot of money to care about such matters.

Now, though, I see such committees, policies, and procedures as vital. While they can, indeed, be a waste of time on occasion, they also smooth and clarify institutional operations. Sure, it’s a bad thing when an obsession with process obstructs progress. But a clear process is an excellent way to make sure that institutions are governed fairly.

I moved from a deanship to a position as a chief academic officer. Obviously, the transition from graduate school to a first faculty position is different. But one thing all transitions have in common: the risk that you will overestimate your ability to understand a new institution’s culture and make painful mistakes in your first months on the job.

Maybe you were hired to bring a fresh perspective to a department, division, or institution, and that new perspective clashes with established institutional norms. With experience, though, some of those norms may turn out to make a great deal more sense to you than they did at the outset.

Care to share your experiences on starting a new job, or your advice on how to ease the transition to a new institutional culture?