Deanship
My friend Gary spent many years as a Provost of a number of Universities. The Provost is the chief operating or administrative officer of the university and is basically charged with the running of the business of the university. The President of the university is the top leader of a university, butt his job is far less administrative and far more about the primary mission of fundraising and making bigger picture mission or policy decisions for the university. When you drop down a level to the college or school entity of an institution of higher learning, the jobs get blended into one and the most often used title is Dean, and he or she has the majority of the authority to direct the business and activities of that particular academic unit. As is probably the case with many universities (and to a certain extent, many businesses generally), there is a great deal of overlap between units and what we might call mission creep takes place where academic units define or redefine their missions in such a way as to broaden their mandates. This is the manifest destiny approach to education and before you know it, certain base activities or core colors become evident in multiple academic units. These areas of overlap are not all across the board, so it is unlikely that a college of humanities will delve into Nono-technology, but some disciplines like economics and business tend to crop up like mushrooms in many different academic units.
Several years ago, Cornell University found itself in a funny place. It had economics units and therefore economics professors in several of its academic units at the same time. They existed in the Law School, the Agriculture School, the Hotel Management School, the School of Labor and Industrial Relations (a unique academic beast, to the say the least), the School of Human Ecology (used to be called Home Economics) and the College of Arts and Sciences, where the rest of the social sciences resided. Cornell is a competitive institution and there was concern that they were not optimizing their franchise by having the economics discipline so widely spread rather than concentrated. Other schools were claiming dominance in the field by virtue of listing their economics faculty as bigger and better than Cornell’s and Cornell had to tell the story of how it spread its discipline across different units. No one has the patience for stories in the competitive arena and Cornell found that in rankings, something that universities have come to live by in order to attract top students and top faculty, it was suffering for its diasporatic ways. So, eventually they got some successful economics grad to sponsor a new matrixed unit called The Department of Economics. It cross-cut the various colleges and all economists were technically listed both in their colleges and in this newly formed Department. I can only imagine the managerial hassle of organizing a department meeting amongst these faculty that were perhaps big dogs in their specialized realms and suddenly part of a new pack by organizational definition. I don’t know for sure, but I bet whoever held sway over salaries, offices and parking spots is the person who commanded the leadership loyalty of the bulk of the faculty members.
That was probably a dicey situation since many faculty supplement their incomes significantly by their outside consulting capabilities. Their services as experts and general consultants might easily far outweigh their earnings capability as academics. In general that works for the university because these academics maintained their status and gravitas in the outside world by virtue of their tenure in the renown of their University positions. It may be publish or perish academically, but economically it is consult or do without (new homes, expensive vacations, recreational toys, etc.). That probably results in confused loyalties and not an insignificant amount of “who gives a shit” when it comes to things like faculty meeting attendance. The life of an academic leader is a challenging role to fill and has always struck me as oddly attractive (the sense of running a brain trust) and at the same time oddly frustrating, with influence management techniques at a serious premium. The carrot and the stick are very hard to divine in that world so who knows what levers need to be pulled or pushed to make things happen. Leaders in every arena has some version of this problem, but it always seemed to me that the challenges in academia are more so.
Many novels have included the characterization of the department chairman as one of the worst positions since it carries so little extra status and benefit and so much more administrative burden. A true responsibility without authority situation that must often be assigned by vote to whomever is not in the room where it happens come voting time. Congratulations Mr. Chairman…for a five year term. The next most challenging position is to be the Dean of an academic unit. The star professors respect only intellect (very narrowly defined per their field of inquiry) and eschew administrative duties, but the also-ran academics who get bored with their chosen field (not an uncommon occurrence from what I know) and that leaves them few directions for achievement other than to pursue a deanship position where teaching gets mostly left behind and leadership becomes the key defining characteristic for success.
At various times at Cornell, I contemplated throwing my hat into the ring to become the Dean of the business school. My stock and trade was business and leadership much more than academics and while some schools opt for practitioner leaders, it is far more common to seek someone who has at least the credentials (a Doctorate) to be considered as a tenured academician and someone who can face off against the intellectually arrogant of the faculty rather than someone who can only press his face up against the glass of the academy. Those thoughts never went very far and they got further dashed once the real nature of the job became more obvious to me. Teaching can be fun and hanging around the academy is certainly fun and rewarding, but herding the faculty cats is far from an enjoyable endeavor.
This evening, we are hosting a Barbecue for two of the prior Deans of the Johnson Graduate School of Management here at Cornell. They were both professors when I was here as a student and were both instrumental Deans while I was involved as an active alumnus and then a faculty member. Joe was the first business school professor I knew and the guy who taught me Operations Management and such wonderful concepts as economic order quantity. Back in 1975 he sported a big handlebar mustache and with his tall and lanky physique, he could have been the Marlboro Man minus the cigarettes. He spent time as the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and then rose to several stints as the Dean of the Johnson School and even one stint as Dean of the College of Business at Cornell (another academic accumulation unit of just a few years ago). He was not only my first business professor, but also my first Dean since he hired me first as an Entrepreneur in Residence and then promoted me to Clinical Professor of Finance (a job I did for a decade). Joe and his wife, Marney, are long friends.
Bob is a very interesting guy. He was a professor of accounting and while I knew him when I went to the school, I never took his more advanced accounting courses. Bob went on to be head of the accounting regulatory body, the FASB and then returned as a two-term Dean of the Johnson School. He held that position while I was Chairman of the school’s Advisory Council. He was the Dean who added me to the school’s top alumni grouping as a member of the Johnson School Hall of Honor. My face sits in bronze on a wall with fifteen of my peers from the last 75 years. That all happened twenty years ago, so it seems like the distant past. Bob also has the distinction of having been the Lead Accounting Director on the board of General Electric for a decade or more, making him, arguably, the top accountant in the world. He and his wife Pam have been long-time friends as well.
These two Deans define my relationship with the School and the University and they are the best of my memories of the institution. Their Deanships were the pinnacle of my Cornell involvement and so tonight I will grill them some kebabs and sausages in their honor.