Does the life of the mind matter in the work of the dean? The obvious, and probably overly simplistic answer is no doubt that it does. Those of us who have arrived at a dean’s job by moving up through the ranks of the professorate did not arrive at these positions merely because we mastered the art and science of strong organizational and administrative skills. Somewhere along the way we demonstrated a love for and a mastery of an academic discipline in which we published, taught, and mentored students and colleagues. Nurturing the life of the mind was an integral part of our faculty work. But how to make it matter in our roles as deans is a bit more of a challenge, and to address the question of how it matters is more complex.
As I began moving into greater administrative leadership roles, nurturing the life of the mind became a challenge, as the daily demands of administration drew more of my attention and energy than I could possibly imagine. The ability to nurture the life of the mind was going to require I do something more intentional than block a few hours a week like I used to as a faculty member for reading the latest research findings in my field and writing. It would require discipline and dedication to reading, even when tired, even when reading might feel like a guilty pleasure.
I’d like to say that I had a master plan to incorporate intentionality into my job as a dean, but I am not that planful. To get to that intentionality, rather, I have found myself taking advantage of a moment of serendipity, and some important lessons that have resulted from it. This moment came when COVID-19 forced faculty candidate job interviews to the virtual space instead of the usual face-to-face space, and I found my preparation for such interviews changing as a function of my role in them also changing. I was not unfamiliar with the routine or scripted nature of a faculty candidate interview, having served my college for a number of years as the Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, where part of my portfolio included meeting with faculty candidates to get a feel for their start-up and professional development expense needs and to share with them the dean’s expectations of faculty work prior to their meeting with the dean. I was appointed dean during the pandemic, though, and as the dean I would play a different role in the interview process than I did as associate dean and would need to prepare differently. I would also get more time with each candidate, an hour of time where I could discuss my expectations of faculty work, amongst many other things.
An hour of time in the virtual world was going to feel longer than an hour of time in the real world, so I found myself thinking long and hard about how to best use that time to avoid any long awkward pauses on either end of the screen. My search committees did an excellent job during the initial year of the pandemic of providing me with samples of candidates’ published works. I am not sure why. They typically did not do this when I was associate dDean. Maybe because it had been a few years since we had done any hiring, or maybe because they sensed the difficulty of conducting candidate interviews via Zoom, but whatever the reason, I used their good sense to my advantage. I took some time prior to each interview to give a quick read to these articles or chapters to take a few notes and jot down a few questions for my candidate meetings. I found myself taking advantage of the virtual environment, splitting my screen during these interviews, to put the candidate in one frame, their CV in another, and the article or chapter they had written in a third frame, to have it right in front of me for reference. In the interviews I then took time to tell each candidate that I had read their piece on their topic of interest and was interested in their perspective on that topic (a genuine statement). It made for great conversation in the interviews and filled the time remarkably well. It afforded me the opportunity to see not only how these faculty candidates would present their research to an educated but non-expert audience, but also how they might teach their research. The response, from nearly all of them was a very humbling, yet pleased, “You read my paper?” to which I responded, “Well, yes, you published it.” It was this exchange that stuck with me: the surprise from a faculty candidate that a dean would read their work. It has been my habit since those early COVID-19 days to always read something from faculty candidates. It brought such great value to our meetings, but more importantly, it started to bring great lessons to my role as dean.
Amongst the faculty in my college, word must have spread that the dean was reading faculty candidate publications. Not to be outdone, existing faculty started sending me their publications. Maybe this is what faculty do everywhere, to remind deans of the work they do too. I found myself not just flipping through these books and articles, but I began reading them. Could this be part of the deeper work that deans are called to do, where the real work of being a dean begins? I have embraced this part of my job because I learned from the responses of the job candidates that I met with during the early days of my deanship that this seems a surprising thing for us to do, but in doing so, important lessons are learned. These lessons go far beyond conversation fillers in meetings and go even beyond seeing the passion that drives our faculty research and scholarship (which is rewarding in and of itself to witness in their writing). Rather, I learned lessons that lay the groundwork for what I know is of critical importance in a liberal arts education. For me, this intentional activity of reading, if even only a portion of what faculty send me (because it is a lot), engages the life of the mind that we as deans know matters.
