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The Perils of Interim Appointments

December 9, 2011, 12:28 pm

By Allison M. Vaillancourt

Every time I hop on a plane, I stuff my carry-on bag with a stack of backlogged reading material. During my most recent cloud-based read-a-thon, I stumbled on a higher-education “career moves” column and one of the entries made my eyes pop: “After 5 years, NAME is pleased to report that ‘interim’ has been removed from her dean title.”

Wait just one minute. Five years in an interim role? Five years??? Would you put up with that?

Reading this entry transported me back to a time several years ago when I was asked to assume leadership for my department while the director took a six-month medical leave. At first I was nervous. Then I was psyched. “Heck, yes; I am going to do this!” I said to myself. My excitement quickly turned to exhaustion as I attempted to do my old job and the new job while trying to be a somewhat decent mother to my two young daughters. Being a decent life partner didn’t really factor into the equation, as my husband can confirm, as one can only do so much.

When my boss returned with a clean bill of health half a year later, I was, I have to admit, conflicted. I was happy that she was healthy, but bummed out that I would no longer be in charge. But my angst didn’t last for long. A couple of months after her return, the illness re-emerged and my boss had to give up her position for good. That’s when eyes turned back to me. I was asked to once again assume the leadership role, this time with an “interim” title while a search was conducted. To my vice president’s surprise, I declined. “I’ve already proven that I can do this job,” I said. “You can give it to me outright, or I can go through the search process and take my chances, but I’m not interested in being perpetually temporary.”

To be sure, there can be upsides to serving in an interim role. It can be a chance to stretch, grow, and prove that you are ready for the next step. However, it is important to recognize there can be a dark side to these designations. If you want the permanent (not that anything is really permanent) role, the evaluation process begins the day you get the interim designation and it can be tempting to make choices that make yourself popular rather than effective. Also, while there are certainly exceptions, too often, interim appointees are treated like interims. “I know he wants us to move in this direction, but he’ll be gone soon, so let’s just pretend we are on board.” Perhaps most importantly, interim designations can sometimes be abusive. “Cool; we’ll give her a slight bump in pay, let her do both her current job and this interim gig and then we can watch her fail at both!”

How do you feel about interim appointments? Does your institution have policies that prohibit interims from being considered for permanent roles? What factors should be considered before accepting one of these appointments?

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  • barbarashell

    Quick word of advice – If your institution has a policy that prohibits interims from being considered for permanent roles.  Don’t do it. There can’t be a good enough reason to endure the %&#.

  • antiutopia

    Good article.  One caveat: may be a good thing to take an interim role when you’re truly uninterested in long-term service in the position.  In that case, you set a deadline for a permanent replacement and get kudos for service.  

  • oatmeal

    Interims can have a tough time. I think appointing interims who will not (or should not) apply for the permanent position is often the best approach because they do not have to “campaign” for the new permanent position and can just hold down the fort until the permanent person comes along. They can help with transitions too. I have seen many interim administrative appointments try for the permanent position and it never worked out as they hoped and it left a lot of hurt feelings. Interim chairs can have an especially difficult time. Interesting article though.

  • darccity

    Sorry. I got the best all time interim story. I dare anyone to match it! 

    I was made interim chair (with a $500 salary bonus) for the final 2 years before a tenure decision, thus conferring on me the pressure to do a gob of publishing as well as lacking the tenure to stand up to the ultimatums of full profs in the department. I was also charged with leading the search for permanent replacement the year following my hiring 3 new faculty, one an unmedicated violent schizophrenic the Dean ordered me to pick so we could have a woman. Then the Dean ordered me to fire all three (after first lying to the one that if he did X and Y, he’d be renewed) so that it wouldn’t look like we were discriminating against a woman.

    The senior faculty insisted I teach a 3 course load, all different preps because they hogged the choice, multi-section courses. Oh yeah, and my wife was ready to deliver our first child. At one point, my wife and I fled town with your 2 month old baby because the schizo was beating up 300 lb. security guards, living out of her office, and sweaping the streets on roller skates. The college prez penned my denial of tenure letter as his final outgoing act (at the behest of his special assistant, one of those senior colleagues I mentioned).

    Happy ending? You bet! I maneuvered to get a chair hired who refused to show up unless I was given tenure. Don’t you just love the rational tenure process? Don’t get me started about how I “earned” tenure at my next position.

  • darccity

    Even worse: lots of places appoint “interims” as a way around the constraints of a formal search. Higher up administrators never have to worry about EEOC or gender and racial considerations, nor do they have to take any guff from those interims who can be demoted without notice. I’ve been at institutions where almost every middle level administrator was an interim. How convenient!

  • a_vaillancourt

    Darccity, you win. No question. I thought being granted department chair before being granted tenure was bad, but then I kept reading.

  • midevilprof

    I’ll bite… how did you get tenure at the next place?

  • oh_richard

    The interim person usually won’t apply for the job, while the acting person is free to apply, so I’ve thought.

    I was interim dept chair a semester after the quick promotion of our chair to a campus president position in another state left us with no other options. I crafted our annual budget, scheduled our classes, conducted performance reviews, oversaw admissions, and dealt with morale after four faculty were fired the previous semester. It was hell. Absolute. Hell.

    Part of what made it so was the lack of support. I had no idea how the previous chair determined some costs for the budget, had never done performance reviews, and was abruptly locked out of admissions processes even though they partly determined concurrent budgetting. Finance was the worst, but HR and admissions were also unpredictably either helpful or totally unresponsive.

    There were two things that allowed me to survive it. The first was the support of two people – my associate chair (partner in crime or co-misery, depending on how you look at it) who kept me sane, and the VPAA who added weight when I needed it to get answers or get things done.

    My advice? If you interim, do it only with the regular and meaningful support of a heavyweight above you who will get you access to people and processes to assure your success. Otherwise, your “newbie-ness” will mean you are unable to apply the right pressure and leverage to get things done. They may or may not be the person who also helps you keep your perspective, but you need one of them too.

    The second… well, the second thing that got me through was a pair of black leather biker boots I started wearing to work. Most of the time you couldn’t tell that’s what I was wearing, but Shakespeare had it right when he said the clothes oft make the man.

  • smclanton

    After several hiring problems, an ad hoc committee developed “search guidelines for faculty and academic administrators.” Among the stated policies for the latter is that after the appointment of an interim, a search for a permanent person must commence within a year. The interim is allowed to apply. Following that policy appears to be a problem, however.

  • agrudjr

    Here’s a piece I did in the CHE almost 10 years ago on the topic.
     
    http://chronicle.com/article/In-the-Interim/45985/

  • chemenecrawford

    Nice one, Allison!

  • engrbohn

    I have a story (not a horror story) from my time in a government lab.  The military branch chief moved on to another position, and there weren’t any military personnel of the appropriate rank to move in.  The higher-ups decided to move one of the more senior civilians in the branch into the branch chief position.  For months, he signed paperwork as “Acting Branch Chief”.  After a few weeks of this, I advised him: “Stop *acting* as the branch chief and *be* the branch chief”.  (I later learned that until his position description was amended to include supervisory duties, he technically couldn’t hold the “branch chief” duty title.)
    My point was that he needed a mental mindset both in himself and in those he dealt with.  People going into a temporary position of responsibilty seem to do an acceptable job of managing, but they almost never lead.  They don’t want to institute new policies that’ll be re-adjusted once the permanent person comes in.  That’s quite understandable, but “permanent temporary” is a common ailment, and the organization flounders.  The flip side of it, as others have noted, is that the person in charge, however temporarily, cannot afford to be viewed as a seat-filler, or s/he won’t be shown the appropriate respect and the organization will suffer.

  • mxims

    Here’s an interesting interim story:  The person who held a particular lab director position was promoted to another directorship that she didn’t want; it was one of those offers that she apparently dared not refuse, but she complained to everyone who would listen how much she loathed this new position.  I had just received my PhD from this institution and was asked by this colleague to apply as interim director for the lab position she was vacating.  The chair of our department said she absolutely would never consider the department hiring one of its own graduates, even though all on the hiring committee told her that I was the only person with the appropriate technical experience who’d applied.  The chair was forced to accept me in the interim position.  During that year, I introduced several innovative procedures that made the lab’s operation more efficient and effective.  At the end of the year, the chair, who’d made it a point never to invite me to any faculty functions, even though I was considered full faculty by virtue of that appointment, said, “Everyone’s told me you’re perfect for the job, but I won’t hire you.”  The person that was hired for this technology-based position later told one of my colleagues that, secretly, he “hates and fears” technology.  But the most galling outcome of this interim experiment was that the colleague who’d recommended me for the position never spoke to me again when it ended.  Word on the street was that she felt my performance as interim director made hers look less than innovative and she wanted to dump her new directorship as soon as possible and take back the lab directorship herself.  So much for stepping up to the plate.

  • pfreeman

    Yes, there is some doubt about whether or not Quintus Cicero wrote the letter. I talk about this in the introduction to the edition. I say there that classicists agree it was written in the first century BCE or CE, and whoever the author is, that he knows Roman politics well. The point of the letter is the content, not the author.

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