Why I liked being Dean

David's Story

Among many faculty, the thought of taking a leadership position is met with reluctance if not outright derision. Some of this may reflect a deep commitment to the research and/or teaching that originally attracted them into their career. For others, the potential attraction of a leadership role is overshadowed by concerns — real or imagined — about the downsides of the role. Endless meetings, dealing with grumpy colleagues, problematic students, intractable budget challenges…none of that sounds like a particularly fun way to spend your day. Even those who have a sufficiently heightened sense of responsibility to their institutions enter into leadership roles with resignation. “It was my turn” said reluctantly, until it is someone else’s.

I admit to believing in all those drawbacks, and steadily ducking any leadership responsibility, through the first 20 years of my career. And one beautiful Friday in August 2014 I found myself in the Provost’s office, a summons that felt much like being called to see the principal as a badly behaved 3rd grader. He said, “Your Dean will be stepping down on Monday, I would like you to serve as interim Dean, just for a few months until we can do a quick search and get someone permanent in the role”.

I don’t think I will ever know why he asked me, other than perhaps he’d been turned down by all the other candidates. But with a day’s deliberation I decided to say yes. After all, it was only a few months, I’d had idle thoughts about how to make the institution better, and was curious to see behind the curtain of how the school and the university really ran.

That search never really started, and 8 months later the interim tag was taken off the title. I served for 9 years, a period during which we made significant strides in enrollment, launched fantastic new programming, raised $300 million, and rejuvenated an aging faculty with young and talented researchers and teachers. And while there were plenty of frustrating days and many hours of lost sleep, I am happy to say that my previous views of academic leadership were wildly misplaced and I was very glad to have had the experience.

Why I liked being a Dean

When you interact with alumni who’ve had outstanding careers in business you hear a frequent refrain: they are drawn to institutions where they see a possibility of making a difference on a larger and more noble scale. For all the criticism of universities, some well-deserved and others less so, the bottom line is that they are remarkable institutions. Where else do you find collections of brilliant people who have dedicated their lives to deeply understanding important areas of study? And in doing so, advancing society by educating young people, and producing meaningful additions to humanity’s stock of knowledge?

There is a literature that asks why the quality of institutional leaders (in business, government, academia) are so important. One answer is that good leaders have a multiplicative effect on productivity that becomes larger as the group of people they lead grows. That comes from identifying and allocating resources more effectively, reducing time wasting inefficiencies, finding synergies across individuals and groups, and, at the risk of getting a bit woo woo, maybe even inspiring others with a vision of what could be accomplished together.

Good leadership probably doesn’t have an enormous effect on any one individual. Imagine, for example, that a good leader makes each member of a group just 5% more productive. At small scales that is a modest effect. But as an organization grows it becomes more profound. In a modestly sized department of 20, it’s like having 1 more faculty member. In a college of 200, it’s like having 10 more faculty, and in a university of 2000, it’s equivalent to 100 more. Put another way, imagine that by leading units effectively so that scholars and students are more productive in their pursuits, you could magnify your impact a hundred-fold!

A really good Dean is something like a venture capitalist. What do VCs do? They identify investment opportunities — nascent companies that have an idea, and a plan for implementation that could grow to have outsized impact. Then they go out and find resources to make that investment. They might also connect those startups with non-financial resources: expertise, connections, suppliers and customers, to ensure that the promise of the business plan and the investment is more likely to be realized.

That is precisely what a good Dean should do. Faculty and staff have ideas, about research, about programming, about student services. Those ideas need investment, and occasionally other complementary inputs, but faculty/staff typically don’t know where to look, or the credibility with investors (donors, central administrators, corporate partners) that a Dean can have. A good Dean doesn’t directly produce, but they facilitate excellence in others production.

Some of the best moments of my Deanship came from that sort of facilitation. Convincing the central administration to invest in more faculty lines or convincing a donor to fund a new research center or student-oriented programming. And sometimes that inspiration flowed in the other direction, with ideas brought by leadership or by donors providing a seed that faculty and staff could grow.

Many of us have a natural bit of chauvinism about our own disciplines. We gravitated to particular areas of study because we found the questions or the methodology employed more compelling than other disciplines we could have pursued. And it’s easy go from there to holding a dismissive attitude about others – they are too soft or too narrow, too theoretical or too ungrounded, too unconcerned about real world problems or too willing to chase daily fads.

But serving as a Dean exposes you to richness contained in many of those other disciplines. Faculty in a great research university are doing deep work on thousands of problems where real progress can only come from devoting a lifetime to an area of study. As Dean you start to appreciate how these individual pieces combine to give us richer insights into our physical world, emerging technologies, human behavior, our society and its institutions, and you start to think about how you might facilitate interactions that make the whole more than the sum of the parts.

What was challenging?

But look, the skeptical are not all wrong.

There are a lot of meetings. Way too many meetings. And far too much email. Some of this you can control if you are extremely thoughtful about how information should flow within and between units on campus. (More on this in a later post!) Some of this you really shouldn’t control because an inaccessible Dean will not be trusted or followed: faculty and staff really need to see you in person.

Recent research throws cold water on the idea that anyone can “multi-task”. Every email, call, and office drop by that diverts your attention imposes a cognitive load. And as you jump from meeting to meeting over the course of a day that engages all of the considerable span of control that a Dean needs to master, you need to be adept at spinning up from long term memory the context-specific history of the issue at hand, and seeing the connections between it and other aspects of unit operations, including any second-order effects spun off by some decision. And there are always second-order effects.

You have to get really comfortable with making decisions. A lot of decisions. And you have to get comfortable with uncertainty, making choices without the comfort that comes from knowing everything you might want to know in advance. That can be paralyzing at first. And then your comfort grows. And then perhaps you get moving too quickly and with insufficient deliberation in order to get issues off your desk.

And then there is the HR stuff. You will find that a university is no different from any other large and complex organization. There are people in key positions who are not good at their jobs. There are people who don’t want to do their jobs. There are folks struggling with personal tragedies or personal triumphs that take their focus away. And there is no shortage of people just being crummy to each other, treating fellow faculty and staff with disrespect or worse. Deans are on the hook for a lot of this, the ultimate stewards of culture, even if they aren’t the first line of defense for addressing each one of these issues.

In the End

All that said, for every long-tenured faculty member acting like a turkey, there are a half dozen promising scholars who are seeing their dreams realized as they work to perfect their teaching and research. There are staff who work tirelessly, with deep commitment to the mission. There are alumni who have led extraordinary lives and careers and are eager to share these stories and give back to the institutions that fostered them. And there are students, living through what might be the most exciting time of their lives, building connections and knowledge and experience that will carry them for decades.

What other job can you imagine where you can not only see and meaningfully interact with all of these groups, you can make concrete progress in improving how the university and your unit serves them all?

Nine years is a long time, but because I started as Dean at a tender age (46), I have been able to return successfully to the research and teaching that were my first love. This time around I appreciate the richness of faculty life much more deeply than I ever did before I became Dean. I’m working harder and more joyfully than ever, and with a perspective I would never have developed without time in leadership.

And out of all the things I’ve just described, that is the aspect of serving as Dean for which I am most grateful.

“Finding Equilibrium” is coauthored by Jay Akridge, Professor of Agricultural Economics, Trustee Chair in Teaching and Learning Excellence, and Provost Emeritus at Purdue University and David Hummels, Distinguished Professor of Economics and Dean Emeritus at the Daniels School of Business at Purdue.