dean

Like most deans, I’ve had to learn my craft on the job. For the first six months or so, it felt like an unending game of whack-a-mole, simply moving from crisis to crisis. As a faculty member, I wondered why so many administrators seemed to have only the vaguest grasp on what they were doing; having crossed over to the dark side, and having managed now at two very different colleges, I can say it’s because there’s no such thing as dean school.

Although I’m far from ready to outline a curriculum for dean school, I do have a few lectures prepared for the intro course:

• Tenure. Never take a dean’s position in which your faculty have tenure and you don’t (at least as a faculty member). It makes for an unfair fight from the get-go. If this has been the norm for some time, many faculty will have adopted the attitude "this too shall pass" toward administrators, and they will be right.
• Demographics. Know the demographics of your faculty. (This is especially important if you’re taking a position at a new institution.) Is your faculty mostly senior or mostly new? (Either can work, but their trip wires are very different.) Does it have a lot of former administrators in it? If so, why?
• The Rashomon principle. As in the classic film, you will quickly discover that different people will interpret the same event in drastically different ways. Some of their interpretations will never have occurred to you. Learn to keep a straight face while being accused of all manner of perfidy in response to a request for travel receipts.
• Procedures. Even a relatively settled college will constantly be improvising new procedures. My impression is that this is worse than it used to be, as technical changes multiply. Learn to navigate ever-changing procedures, and how to endure the resulting indignant faculty monologues on the evils of bureaucracy, change, computers, and anyone born after 1950.
• Incentives. Chances are, the incentives at your college are drastically perverse. Learning to isolate the incentives is the first step; learning to change them will probably be an upper-level course unto itself. (The incentives that surround tenure merit a graduate seminar.)
• The acoustics of hierarchy. Rookie managers who came from the faculty sometimes make the mistake of assuming that they have the same freedom of speech in management that they had on faculty. They don’t. Hierarchy is an amplifier; statements that nobody would even have noticed, when you were on the faculty, will get taken out of context, read into, blown up, and taken as evidence of any number of grand, evil conspiracies. Every so often, you will be confronted by a tearful professor, asking why you said you were eliminating his program. You will spend the first 30 minutes trying to figure out why he thinks you ever said that. It will trace back to an offhand comment you once made about legislative cutbacks. If you’ve played "telephone" as a kid, you know the principle.
• Budget lines. Many faculty fantasize that deans’ offices are like Scrooge McDuck’s bank vault, and the dean is the guard. In fact, money is allocated to various budget lines from various sources, each with its own rules. Learning the finer points of which lines can be used for which purposes, without violating either rules or ethics, takes time. Learning to explain to indignant faculty why we have money for a new building but not for a replacement professor is a graduate seminar.
• Body language. Keep in mind, as a dean, that you aren’t a "first responder." Typically, by the time someone comes to you with an issue, she has already decided that the issue is beyond both her and her department chair, and she is probably already fairly frazzled. Learning to keep an even keel while highly-credentialed, intelligent people have random meltdowns in your office is an important skill. Master the art of showing concern while keeping an appropriate distance. Keep plenty of Kleenex on hand.
• Public face. As a dean, you are a relatively public figure on campus, and a representative of the college off-campus. This is fine when you’re at an official function. It’s disconcerting when you’re schlepping your kids to the A&P on a Saturday and you get cornered. Learn to project an appropriately decanal presence while dressed in a t-shirt, holding an infant, and keeping an eye on a four-year old who likes to run with shopping carts.
• Sifting. Much of what you will be told on campus will be false. Most of the people who tell you these falsehoods won’t know they’re doing it. Learning to sift through the “I want this to be true” to keep the nuggets of “this is true” takes time, but can’t be skipped.
• Seasonal planning. Assume that November and late April/early May will be completely spoken for with external functions. Structure family life (and holiday shopping!) accordingly. Make amends with significant others when possible. Learn to like chicken in white sauce.
• Secretaries. Keep them happy. Good secretaries are worth more than you will ever know. Annoyed secretaries can wreak untold damage, when provoked.
• Feet of clay. One of the privileges of being on the faculty is that you get to imagine that managers have feet of clay, but that faculty members are motivated solely by the selfless love of education. Crossing over, you’ll be quickly disabused. In fact, you will be confronted, with disconcerting frequency, with the feet of clay of people you have otherwise held in high regard. You will find that some very intelligent people are also capable of acts of high stupidity. You will have to find ways to acknowledge and deal with stupidity, without deflating their motivation for their core job. (True example: “I applaud your willingness to develop an online course. And I share your sense that the technology learning curve can be frustrating. However, I’d appreciate it if, in the future, you refrained from running over your laptop with your car again.”)
• Etiquette. You will be expected to know the etiquette for any given situation, no matter how odd it may be. (True example: in the hallway, I saw a young male student lift his shirt to his shoulders in front of a female professor, apparently to show a scar. What’s the etiquette here?) This is where ironic detachment becomes invaluable. 

I’d go on, but some moles are poking their heads up again....