During my stay at Houston last week, I had one of those unexpected and highly-nutritious conversation with a colleague whom I respect very much. This particular professor has occupied positions of leadership as well as continued a very deep commitment to his research work. Our conversation on the role of a university leader was grounded on his experiences navigating the transitions that universities are currently undergoing.
Professors are not only pressured to produce more than ever, but the stability and respect that our profession had enjoyed for centuries is quickly vanishing. States across the US have consistently cut funding for universities. Research funding demands have grown exponentially over the past couple of decades. Perma-post-doc and adjunct positions have replaced the full-time, good-benefits, not-soft-money, no-strings-attached tenure-track positions. There is little hope for the majority of newly-graduated PhDs to find a job — let alone the job of their dreams, the job for which they spent nearly a decade preparing. Being good at math won’t exempt you from this, the weakness of job market is as true for the sciences as it is for the humanities. There are thousands of articles that convey these changes much more succinctly than I ever could.
It is easy to search for culprits in the midst of the loss of the traditional academic profession. The university administrator has become a favorite target for our grievances. Of the many reasons for such a choice, the two most present in my mind are that as professors most of us don’t identify ourselves with our leadership and the second is that most of us don’t interact with full-time administrators on a regular basis.
In my (limited!) experience, when typical faculty member takes up a leadership post, they seem to regard their work as onerous and, if at all possible, temporary. Their stories are often in that same vein as Cincinnatus burdened by power and wanting nothing else but returning to the fields to attend to his crops — or to the lab to attend to their research groups, as the case may be. To me, the common theme seems to be one of reassuring to the rest of us who remain on the teaching and research faculty that their role as administrators does not supersede their commitment to learning and to the creation of knowledge. And that is the crux of the difference… What we do as academics feels more like a calling than a job. Work for the sake of learning and knowledge. We would not be complete without giving free range to the lives of our minds and to the minds of others. In that, we often see university administrators as entirely different creatures, whose principles and goals are not entrenched into ideals inherited from the enlightenment. What could administrators know about the satisfaction of shaping intellects?
During my conversation with my colleague in Houston, he brought up the analogy of the priest either facing the altar or the congregation. Most of us, as academics, naturally tend to value the administrator that faces us, the congregation. Our preference would probably be an administrator willing to step up and defend our monastic dedication to new knowledge. We tend to admire the brave soul that faced with mountains of bad news, continues to defend the value of what we do in the front lines of higher education and to respect the administrators that understand how urgently society at large needs innovation to prosper. We often deride those who only see the value of applied knowledge and those who do not translate words into tangible deeds. Yet, it is impossible to deny that our universes of specialized knowledge are fragile bubbles embedded in a sea of paperwork, of government budgets, of growing utilitarian views of education, among many other currents. Administrators who neglect the altar do so at the peril of the existence of the university as an institution.
Personally, I see university administrators as entities suspended between nodes in a network: effective administrators serve as conduits between the powers vested in each node, align different and increasingly competing needs, and create opportunities for each node to develop to its full potential. Administration is a framework, not a show piece. But, it is also the invisible apparatus that sustains all other efforts for creation, innovation, connection, respect, and understanding.
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