Upon the Retirement of an Academic Administrator

The recent retirement of long term associate of mine has prompted many thoughts about administrative tasks at universities. Universities in some ways resemble law firms, hospitals, elected legislatures. There are a relatively small number of terminal-degreed professionals leading the organization, supported by a large number of staff.

PhD programs that produce academic faculty rarely expose their students to how to organize teams or manage people. Even PhD programs that prepare instructors of courses in organization theory or leadership often don’t expose students to actual sustained leadership experiences. Instead, PhD students are nurtured in a set of research areas, which, for many, become the primary focus for most of their lives. Faculty tend to be motivated by a set of longstanding unanswered research questions and deep scholarship attempting to answer them. Their instructional activities, ideally, enhance their insights into their research lives. So, too, their out-of-class interactions with students hopefully enrich the research lives.

Both self-selection to a life devoted to research and the doctoral training of PhDs, thus, naturally leads to an aversion to administrative duties. To many faculty, administrative activities are undesirable distractions from their research and teaching duties. Further, the faculty role often doesn’t offer other experiences in management, administering budgets, and supervision of staff.

When my colleague retired after years of being a lead administrator in a research center, I was reminded about centrality of staff administrators to the mission of a university. It is common that faculty department chairs, directors of programs, and directors of centers have fixed terms. There is a rotation across senior faculty in holding these positions.

Such rotation is not the practice usually for staff. Hence, administrative staff tend to hold the institutional memory of the unit. They form the glue across different leaders. They are the repository of what activities are in the discretion of the unit leadership and what activities require permission from higher authorities. Their tenure in the job has alerted them to short-run versus long-term goals of the school or campus they occupy.

Hence, the unspoken job of many administrators is to teach each new faculty head of the unit the responsibilities of the job.

These staff have to be wicked smart. They have to have a deep understanding of the mission of the unit but also of the larger university. This knowledge is key to supporting faculty directors whose focus is often on the accomplishments of their terms. The administrators tend to develop a longer viewpoint, and can offer advice that is based on experiences of many directors’ terms.

Working with faculty successfully as a staff administrator requires an honorable level of humility. This requires skills in what we have to come “EQ” the ability to discern the best manner to address interpersonal contacts. Just as we hear stories of nurses quietly and effectively informing a physician that the dosage prescribed was ill-suited to the patient’s condition, so too must administrators build a rapport with their director that permits them to remind them of necessary actions to take. I have many memories of gentle reminders to me to do the work I was reluctant to do.

Academic staff matter. Their work is invisible to most of the external world; they rarely get the glory of academic successes. However, they are almost always necessary to that success.