Moving Up

The Age of Reason

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By Dennis M. Barden

Many years ago, when I was a young assistant dean at the University of Chicago Law School, faculty members there used to regale me with an anecdote about a legendary former dean, Edward H. Levi. In that story, Levi -- who would go on to serve as provost and president of the university and Attorney General of the United States -- spent the final weeks of every summer polishing the floors in the classrooms to ready them for the fall arrival of professors and students.

For faculty members, that was a wistful lament for those halcyon days of deans who knew what was truly important to their institutions and what was expected of them by the faculty.

I think of that story frequently these days as my fellow search consultants and I support institutions looking for academic leadership -- specifically deans, provosts, and presidents. As professors discuss their requirements, their desires, and their dreams for the institution's new leader, I never fail to be impressed by their passion for their work and their determination to play a central role in governing the institution.

It is also abundantly clear that many of them don't know what their deans, provosts, and presidents actually do on a daily basis, or the skills and talents necessary for the job.

Some of that is strategic, of course. Many faculty members purposefully absent themselves from the business end of the enterprise. Much of the time, it doesn't matter. Faculty members are happy to delegate responsibility for administration to their anointed leaders, and those leaders are happy to be guided by the principles of shared governance as long as the faculty stays out of their hair on a daily basis.

The rub comes when it is time for professors to give their two cents about the hiring of executive leadership. Their input is usually taken seriously, whether it is given informally when finalists make a campus visit or formally through service on a search committee. Sometimes, faculty opinion is even a deciding factor in the search process.

That's why any level of misconception about the responsibilities of the job at hand is dangerous at best and destructive at worst in the highly competitive marketplace for deans, provosts and presidents.

Past and Present

Once upon a time, deans, provosts, and presidents were perceived to be primus inter pares on the faculty. In that "Age of Giants," they led largely by example and intellectual influence, they enjoyed intimate relationships with a mere handful of people critical to their success, and they had real expectations of a happy faculty and student population. While that utopian view of educational leadership may or may not have ever actually existed, it is popularly conceived to have been a state of nature, and its passing is much mourned by professors who came of age in that era.

Then came the most virulent pestilence feared the denizens of higher education -- change.

Student expectations changed rapidly, as did the business of higher education. The financial stakes got higher just as money got tighter. Institutions became competitive in ways that transcended the gentlemanly contests of the golden past. Universities grew in size and complexity, and external constituencies, increasingly called upon to contribute considerable sums toward institutional aspirations, began to demand accountability and "deliverables." This era is perhaps best defined by Clark Kerr's famous description of a president's three major administrative problems: for the students, sex; for the alumni, athletics; and for the faculty, parking.

The central conundrum of this "After the Fall" era has been the failure of many faculty members to recognize the profundity of this change in terms of leadership.

While deans, provosts, and presidents increasingly have become the leaders of complex organizations that need strategic plans, institutional priorities, marketing strategies, enrollment-management strategies, partnerships, and massive amounts of fiscal and human capital, some faculty members continue to demand that the people hired for the top jobs look essentially like them -- teachers and researchers first, administrators only by necessity.

The failure to understand the nature of modern leadership has been incredibly costly. A kind of dual-track hiring process has emerged in which candidates have to look very familiar to the faculty while displaying superior executive skills to the institution's leadership. All too often, that has led to candidates who have proved to be a disappointment to one constituency or the other.

A more insidious downside is that academe has not effectively trained people to be deans, provosts, and presidents. Essentially, faculty members have created an ethos in which to become an executive leader -- even a highly successful one -- is to have failed as a scholar.

One dean I know had been a popular teaching and emerging scholar. Shortly after he took over as dean, I began hearing that he had accepted the appointment only because he thought his life as a scholar had reached an impasse and that administration was his only hope of maintaining his relevance in academe. The thing is, after a long and distinguished career in administration, he returned to the faculty and to an exceptionally productive life of teaching and research.

Even those who reject the stigma of administration and are amenable to, or even enthusiastic about, leadership are baited and switched. They are hired through faculty-dominated processes that emphasize scholarly excellence, only to find on arrival that the actual job requires very, very different skills and experiences for which they are all too seldom prepared.

The Coming of the "Age of Reason"

The good news is that we're starting to move beyond that. And money, typically, has been the driving force.

Whether or not they like it, faculty members are coming to understand that the institutions with the most resources have the greatest opportunities, and that it is a principal responsibility of organizational leadership to generate, to secure, to manage, and to allocate those dollars. As a result, professors are increasingly willing to exercise their imprimatur in the hiring process in deference to the actual requirements of the position in question.

A case in point is a friend of mine who recently took over as the CEO of a campus within a large system. While he has spent his career in higher education, his classroom experience was limited to adjunct teaching and he had never been tenured. The search committee hired him anyway and he is flourishing on the campus.

Faculty members who intend to play a role in the hiring process must first learn the actual substance of the job. While it may not be entirely comforting, they must realize that the best candidates will look less like themselves. They will have to balance job requirements that are intrinsically critical to them with the skills and experiences necessary to carry out the day-to-day responsibilities of the position.

It is reasonable, for example, to require presidential candidates to prove categorically that they understand and value teaching and research; it may not be reasonable to require that they are nationally recognized leaders in either -- or, heaven forbid, both.

More important, it will be increasingly necessary to identify and to train people for these top positions. To do so, faculty members must come to value, rather than to stigmatize, executive leadership. Once that barrier is reduced or eradicated, those with the greatest potential should receive a formal education in the issues facing academe in addition to the traditional on-the-job, sink-or-swim immersion that passes for training now.

Happily, some programs are already in place. Several of the national professional organizations in Washington, many consortia, and several colleges and universities have set up fellowships, certificate programs, or academies to provide such training. It is important that all of higher education support the best of those programs and recognize their graduates in the search process.

Would Edward Levi be a dean, a provost, or a president in this Age of Reason? Probably not. Is that a bad thing for academe? Probably not. It is also fair to ask, would Levi be happy in such a leadership position? Probably not.

He was a brilliant man, though. I like to think that he would have recognized, however grudgingly, that academe today needs a different kind of leader and that it is the responsibility of the faculty to see that only the most talented and best trained men and women are honored with those positions of trust.