What drew you to higher education? For many of us, it was our love for ideas and the life of the mind. Educators love thinking, learning, teaching, researching and writing. We believe in the power of education. Maybe when we were kids, we “played school” complete with chalkboard and copying passages from the Encyclopedia Britannica. Maybe in college we stayed up until 2:00 a.m. finishing lab reports or having philosophical conversations with our roommates. We continued on to graduate school to keep the passion going. The teamwork! The discoveries! The possibilities!
Time passed. We proved (perhaps contrary to our own best interests) to possess some special skills. Maybe we had been the facilitators of the lab marathons or late-night discussions. Perhaps we evinced an uncommon proclivity for organization, for reliability, for guiding a group of peers toward some shared end. Over time, inexorably, we accepted leadership roles. We were program directors or department chairs. And then it happened: we became deans.
I don’t know about you, but in my case, the job talk I gave for my current position as a dean was filled with idealistic visioning: mission principles and socio-cultural realities and deepening the already impressive work of colleagues across the college. I was really on a roll. I fervently believed everything I said—and still do!
And then. The COVID-19 pandemic and HR crises. Public skepticism and budget challenges. Facilities disasters, varied complaints and a big daily dose of what Pope Francis in Laudato Si’ calls the “technocratic paradigm.” By this, he means overreliance on technical solutions to the detriment of human relations and our collective flourishing. Surveying such factors, a thoughtful academic leader may ask: What keeps me going? What am I—what are we—doing here?
My perspective is undoubtedly shaped by being a humanities professor turned Arts & Sciences dean. We know that study of the liberal arts will support students in their work, life and civic engagement. And the same is true for us in higher education leadership. We are called to lead by example, to show that the life of the mind matters in what we do every day.
Making that happen, however, is no simple matter. As we move from faculty positions into leadership roles, we need to focus on the common good. We pivot from what is primarily a personal undertaking (degrees, publications, grants, classroom or lab teaching and so on) toward a more communal one. The ancients made a distinction between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa, assigning each endeavor to different groups, those who were privileged to pursue a life of the mind as opposed to those who undertook work and action in the public sphere. I’m advocating for an integrated approach. How might the life of the mind inform our leadership? How do we marry thinking and acting? How do institutional contexts and broader cultural realities help or hinder our efforts to become and remain mind-alive deans?
Signs do not point in a promising direction. I’ll offer a personal observation and then return to the institutional level. I’ve found the best literary reference for my topic here is Kurt Vonnegut’s zany, dystopian short story “Harrison Bergeron.” The story describes a world in which everyone is mandatorily equal. Aspiring intellectuals must wear earphones through which alarm bells sound at regular intervals, interrupting any hope for a coherent thought. Even if we don’t subscribe to the paranoid notion that there is a deliberate effort to thwart our thoughtfulness, we should acknowledge that circumstances often stifle the life of the mind. We then should ask who benefits from this arrangement—and who suffers. And, in line with a Nature editorial that in the print edition carried the title “Scientists Need More Time to Think,” we should consider how much better our institutions could be if they better supported the development of thought and habits of reflection.
The world is not going particularly well. We need to nudge things in a positive direction. Some days we may feel like Sisyphus perpetually rolling that boulder up a hill, or Atlas trying to shift the world on its axis while we bear its weight. Too often, the communal work of higher education is co-opted by the technocratic paradigm. Have you ever been asked “What is your vision for your college?” only to realize that the questioner merely wants to know what is the minimum number and proportion of tenure-track faculty that will keep your programs viable and the students happy? Witness an essay by renowned scientist and seasoned academic leader Holden Thorp called “The Post-Presidential Era.” Thorp argues that current circumstances have turned top university leaders away from visionary leadership and toward narrow technocracy. Must deans and other mid-level leaders succumb to a similar fate? Or, does our relative proximity—compared with executive administrators— to students, faculty and staff provide a horizon for more thoughtful work? My hope is that the reason we became and remain leaders can align with the reason we were drawn to higher education in the first place. Our work as deans can lead us to deeper insights and a more thoughtful approach to education, to others and ourselves, and to the future.
In my aforementioned litany of tasks—facilities disasters and so forth—I did not mention three central activities that likely consume a fair bit of your time (as they do mine), because in them I find the richest opportunity for thought in my daily work life: enhancing student success; supporting colleagues in their research, teaching and community engagement; and meeting with alumni and donors. Such experiences illustrate the thoughtfulness that informs and indeed drives some of the most important administrative work we do. We should all reflect upon similar experiences in our own work and continue to learn from them. Our life of the mind should mean something beyond ourselves. It should help us to disclose new possibilities. In so doing, we can truly claim to have made a difference.
It’s necessary but not sufficient simply to squeeze in time for thought. Rather, our thinking must be brought to bear on our work as deans. Our colleagues, supervisors and institutions must appreciate its value. And so we need to demonstrate the value. This change will require moving beyond simply quantitative measures. Similar to making a case to prospective students or donors, we have to put our best rhetorical skills to work.
In this regard, it is deeply instructive to consider how our forebears—both illustrious and lesser-known—have kept thought alive in challenging times. Being mind-alive means questioning the technocratic paradigm. The work of playwright and essayist Václav Havel provides a compelling example. Take, for example, his 1975 essay “Letter to Dr. Gustáv Husák.” With great restraint and impeccable logic, Havel eloquently outlines the corrosive effect of constraints in the freedom to express one’s deeply held convictions. He emphasizes the importance of human dignity and hope, noting the potential “harsh and long-lasting consequences” when creativity is suppressed (33). Without in any way suggesting an equivalence between our own circumstances as academic leaders and the plight of intellectuals under a repressive regime, I do believe that Havel’s cautionary words continue to ring true. And the mere fact of finding space and time to read an essay like his has become a rarer luxury for those of us attempting to provide high-quality leadership in higher education today. Yet finding such space and time grows increasingly urgent.
The bureaucratic tasks and routine stressors would be much more manageable (pun intended) if there were a healthier ecosystem to support leaders and their development in the first place. Such an effort is essential if we seek to foster resilient institutions. How might we ensure the time and focus to put the life of the mind at the center of our leadership? Our work needs to become less technical and more integral. Our universities need their deans—and, in fact, all members of the community—to have living minds.
The future of our universities depends upon making leadership roles appealing to our bright, promising junior colleagues. What if we could honestly tell them that they won’t have to turn off their deep thinking to do this work? That in fact, academic leadership could enrich the life of the mind? Drawing the life of the mind deeply into leadership also promotes both personal and communal flourishing. And doing so will help to ensure that we remain centered on values—we’ll resist the technocratic paradigm and permit good ideas to take flight. Remember that Havel the dissident playwright and essayist later became his country’s president. Thought is what people out there think is going on in here. Let’s strive to make it so.
Works Cited
Havel, Václav. (1987/ 1975). “Letter to Dr. Gustáv Husák.” From Václav Havel or Living in Truth, ed. Jan Vladislav. London: Faber and Faber.
Pope Francis. (2015). Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html Accessed January 3, 2025.
Thorp, Holden. (2024). “The Post-Presidential Era.” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 30, 2024. https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-post-presidential-era Accessed January 3, 2025
Vonnegut, Kurt. (1968). “Harrison Bergeron.” Welcome to the Monkey House. New York: Delacorte.
