In which the faculty member glimpses her future.

One of the facts that seems sometimes to escape the notice of university faculty (especially early-career faculty) is that a sizable proportion of university administrators used to be regular faculty members. Fortuitously, my early encounters with administrators kept underlining this fact for me.

When I started my appointment at my university, the Associate Dean of my college was a member of the Philosophy Department. He wasn’t teaching any courses for the department then (because Associate Dean-ing was a full-time gig), but he was very much connected to the culture of the department. And, the fact that he ran the weekly meetings of the College Curriculum Committee (on which I was the representative for my department) meant I got to see first-hand how, as an administrator, he helped facilitate something like a culture of the college from the different departmental cultures that informed the committee members as they dealt with matters curricular. Getting those different interests to play well with each other, for the most part, would have been a much harder job for someone without experience living in a department and trying to get the daily work of that department done.

As an aside, I suspect that some readers will react with horror to the idea of a first-year faculty member being assigned committee work, especially on a college level committee, rather than being left to get the teaching assignment and research activities under control. My department has a policy of assigning committee work to all regular faculty, partly because there is a large amount of important committee work to be done (i.e., impacting on the well-being of our students and faculty, and on the resources on which we depend) relative to the number of regular faculty members. And, spreading the committee work around as we do is part of how we get a three-course load (while the university’s standard per semester is four). Practically, serving on this college-level committee in my very first semester on the ground helped me understand the culture beyond my own department — and a lot of the nuts and bolts of getting things done at this particular university — much faster. That was a help. It also helped me make friends in other departments, which often comes in handy.

Anyway, as events unfolded during my first few years here, I was in a position to notice faculty members rising through the ranks of administration. When we got a new university president, my college’s dean became the university’s provost. The faculty member who chaired the chemistry department when I was hired became Associate Vice President of Graduate Studies and Research for the university. Other chemistry professors of my acquaintance (what is it with the chemists) became associate deans in undergraduate studies and student support units. (What is it with the chemists and administration, I wonder?)

One of the things I learned is that it is really, really helpful to have people who understand the challenges of teaching and conducting research, especially in times when resources are scarce, involved in making the plans that will shape how teaching and research go forward. The administrators who have been faculty members are committed to actively involving people who have a stake in the decisions in the decision-making. Sometimes this means the decision-making takes more time and effort, but it also seems to result in policies that actually work. That is a good thing.

A danger, though, in working closely with administrators (something I, for one, might have done less of were they not people to whom I could relate because of their origins in the faculty) is that you start seeing how important the administrative work is in supporting the core missions of teaching and research. More than this, you start imagining strategies that could effectively address the persistent problems you’ve started to notice in achieving some particular goal you care about. You develop insight into how to fix things, and also, if you’ve been blessed to watch effective administrators at work, insight into how to get people with distinct interests to work together effectively to pursue common goals.

At first, you freak the hell out when your dean uses phrases like “untapped administrative potential” to describe you. After a while, you stop freaking out and start making peace with the idea that at some point, you will probably step up and try to do what needs to be done. And, you will do it not because it is your ambition to be an administrator, but instead because you care about your department, your college, your university, your colleagues, your students — because you are part of the community and you want to help it be as good as it can be.

That’s how they get you.

I think I have some time, though. I have a book to finish writing. I have kids’ soccer to coach, something that doesn’t lend itself to the long official business hours administrators seem to work. And, I would need to work out how to dress like a responsible adult rather than a graduate student trying to look like a grown-up.

But my sense is that my future may hold more business hours and more grown-up clothes. And, because this university community and what we do matters to me, I’m okay with that.