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Blame It on Me

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By Gene C. Fant Jr.

The week my university's president named me the dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, I helped the English department celebrate Shakespeare's birthday.

As a part of our annual celebration, we served cake to students outside the cafeteria at lunchtime. I volunteered to slice the huge cake and quickly set about divvying it up. After a few minutes, I realized that one of my colleagues was watching me rather carefully.

"Do you want a slice?" I asked, pushing a plate in his direction.

"Nah," he replied with a laugh, "I just wanted to see what size slices the dean would cut."

In a nutshell, that moment articulated one of the most difficult parts of an academic dean's job: resource allocation. I have spent the past year as the acting dean of the college and, in that temporary capacity, could plead ignorance in many situations when various departments approached me with their requests.

The learning curve for a dean, especially one in a college as varied as arts and sciences, is unbelievably steep. I have done a double take more than once looking over purchase orders for oboes, body parts, and painting supplies. I have done my best to accommodate those requests, but my temporary status seemed to hinder my ability to be an effective advocate in some cases.

Once the term "acting" was removed from my title, though, I found myself having to say "no" to so many requests that I started worrying that I was in some kind of surreal academic version of Oklahoma!, singing a reworked refrain that went something like "I'm just a dean who only says 'No!'"

That is not a word that comes naturally to me. I'm pretty gregarious, and when I was first appointed as a department chairman some eight years ago, the president at the time warned me that my people-pleasing tendencies could be my undoing.

"Fant," he warned, "you've got to learn to say 'No.' If you don't, it will undermine your effectiveness."

But as department chairman, I saw my role as one of facilitator. When faculty members needed something, it was my job to find the money to meet that need. I solicited gifts from alumni and friends of the department. I watched for grant opportunities. I shuffled the budget to free up the nickels and dimes that could turn into a few bucks that might make the difference between a "yes" and a "no." One department member started calling me "Dad" whenever he needed something from me; I was awkwardly amused.

I was unable to find the money in every case, of course. But as chairman, I had one trump card that could always get me out of trouble: "Sorry," I could tell my faculty members, "the dean says 'No.'"

I could count on invoking that well-worn "good cop, bad cop" scenario, and blaming the dean's penurious ways. I could roll my eyes and bemoan the tight budgets or plead with clenched hands that I had done everything possible, only to run into a stern, towering rejection.

Now I have moved down the long hallway that bisects our massive building, and I'm the dean. The department heads are quoting me as the source of all the negativity.

I am confronted daily with a reality that I could only intuit as a department chairman: The dean really does have a completely different view of the academic universe. More than ever, I am painfully aware of the finitude of the budget. I am reminded constantly of the competition that exists between equally valid requests for personnel, for travel money, for additional scholarships, and so forth. I am particularly sensitive to requests that reflect a genuine need that could transform a program.

As an administrator, I've learned to pursue fairness as a goal rather than uniformity. My experience has been that when administrators try assiduously to maintain uniformity among all of their stakeholders, they end up cultivating mediocrity. A bar that is set with everyone and every situation in mind is a low bar indeed.

When I was chairman, I sought to divide up the spoils, such as they were, among my faculty members. Everyone was not treated equally within the snapshot of a single year, but I kept careful records, and over the span of several years, was able to make sure that each person in the department received something.

That approach required patience from my colleagues and discipline from me. It made for a few tense moments at the start but created a strong sense of teamwork over the long haul. For me, it was liberating: It allowed me to say "yes" on a more regular basis.

I will try to pursue that same approach as a dean, but I cannot dispense resources willy-nilly. I try to say yes to as many of the smaller requests as possible, the ones where I can carve out a small bit of the dollars that are at my disposal. It's very difficult, though, to fulfill the more expensive needs, especially the personnel requests, which must be considered within the context of the entire university community. For every request for a new faculty position that comes out of arts and sciences, there are similar requests pouring in from each of the other four academic divisions of my university.

As I begin to have a better feel for the ebb and flow of the budget year, and learn more about new grant opportunities, I will be able to find ways to say "yes" more often. I am learning how the academic calendar itself is a huge function of resource allocation: There are windows of opportunity that open and close throughout the year.

I suspect that my department heads and program directors will likewise gain a sense of what I can and cannot do as dean. I know that we can work together to form a formidable team. The talent and the opportunities are here, I just need to persist in telling the numerous good stories within my college. As those stories find a wider audience and I gain more experience, I hope that a greater diversity of resources will become available. Perhaps, then, I can be more of a "yes" man to my departments.