The Difficult, Good Job of Being a Dean

A Message from Stacy Hartman

Being a dean at an American university is, by many accounts, a difficult job. You sit squarely in the middle of the university hierarchy, so you are accountable to the faculty below you and the provost and president above you. You may be held responsible for events and policies you have no real power to affect. You may deal with an insufficient budget, fractious colleagues, demanding students, and the persistent feeling that no one really understands just how hard the job is. 

And yet, being a dean at an American university is also, by many accounts, a good job. You sit squarely in the middle of the university hierarchy, so you have an understanding of what faculty members need from you and more direct contact with them than the provost or the president. You also have an understanding of how decisions are made within the institution, and (in well-resourced institutions) access to resources that can be applied to improving life for students and faculty alike.  

The combination of connection to the faculty and institutional understanding means that deans have the opportunity to affect change at both the curricular and policy levels. Over the past year, former ACLS Program Officer Heather Hewett and I have spoken with a number of faculty members and administrators across the country, many of them part of the ACLS Research University Consortium and Associate networks, who have made innovative changes at their institutions for our Innovation in Action: Case Studies for Change in Higher Education series. Those stories make clear how important it is for new deans to spend time listening to faculty members and building relationships while also familiarizing themselves with student data and campus policies. Several of our latest studies emphasize the changes that are possible when new deans identify opportunities for solving problems and building new initiatives that benefit multiple units across campus.

When Brian Reed was appointed Divisional Dean of Humanities at the University of Washington (UW) in 2018, he and his team realized they had a “pipeline problem.” The number of humanities majors at UW were down because incoming undeclared students had no idea what “the humanities” were. They needed a new recruitment strategy. A grant from the Mellon Foundation allowed them to build Humanities First, a cohort-building, first year program that fulfills general education requirements and introduces students to the humanities. Since the launch of the program in 2020, there has been a steady increase in humanities majors, as well as 201% increase in enrolled “Humanities Interested” students. 

Jasmine Alinder F’97, F’09 brought her experience as a public historian to her role as Dean of the Humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). UCSC has a long history of community engaged teaching and learning, and Alinder looked for ways to support and expand work that was already happening. She won a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that allowed her to build relationships between STEM majors and the humanities with the Humanizing Technology Certificate Program, intended for engineering students. Another grant, this one from the Mellon Foundation, enabled her to build on a previous Public Fellows program to create Employing Humanities, which supports service-learning opportunities, career paths and programs for humanities majors, and new humanities curricular innovations.

For Alinder, expanding experiential learning opportunities for humanities majors and creating opportunities for STEM majors to engage with the humanities are part of a larger institutional change vision with several interconnected pieces. Another critical piece of that plan was developing tenure and promotion guidelines that support faculty members across the humanities, arts, and social sciences who do community engaged work. Between 2020 and 2023, Alinder worked closely with faculty members in sociology and with members of the Committee on Academic Personnel to draft and refine campus-wide guidelines that would make it possible for faculty members to be promoted on the basis of their community engaged research and teaching. Although much of this work was driven by faculty members, the support of Alinder and her colleagues in the arts and social sciences were crucial in changing campus culture and practice, which in many places continue to inhibit public and community engaged scholarship.

The public humanities were also at the center of the work that Alain-Philippe Durand has done at the University of Arizona to establish the department of Public and Applied Humanities (PAH) in 2017. Rather than offering traditional humanities majors, PAH offers concentrations that are largely pre-professional, such as Business Administration, Rural Leadership and Renewal, and Environmental Systems, and infuses them with the humanities. Classes are offered through the department but students are also encouraged to take courses across eight other colleges. Durand regards PAH as one piece of a larger project to re-center the humanities at the University of Arizona. By fall of 2023, PAH had 346 majors, and the number of majors in the College of Humanities has increased by 34% since 2016.

Although these are the Innovation in Action stories that feature deans most prominently, many of the other stories note how important a dean or multiple deans were to accomplishing something new and innovative. Leonard Cassuto and Robert Weisbuch wrote about the importance of the graduate dean for transforming graduate education in their book, The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education (Johns Hopkins, 2021). When asked what qualities they felt made a dean especially effective, Cassuto said, “A dean who can get things done is someone with a vision and the tools to implement it. Those tools can be personal (the art of persuasion), analytical (understanding where the greatest needs lie), tactical (understanding how a place works, and who you need to talk to in order to move the ball), and material (deans need their own budgets).” Weisbuch concurred with Cassuto and added that another important quality “is the capacity to encourage innovation in others so that it’s not just having a vision but of making it porous, collective rather than rigid and imposed. That often means seeing oneself as a resource to help faculty and occasionally students take their ideas and make them real.”   

And yet, as Weisbuch pointed out, at many institutions, there is very little formal training for the job, which can lead to problems. Some institutions have recognized this problem and developed their own training for new deans. However, that training sometimes focuses more on enforcing university policies or ensuring compliance than on building new deans’ capacity for values-based leadership; this can be especially frustrating for deans who come into their position hoping to make institutional change. A number of organizations have sought to fill this gap, from the ACLS pilot Leadership Institute for a New Academy to training and institutes offered by (to name a few examples) the American Conference of Academic Deans, the American Association of Colleges and Universities, the American Council of Education, and the Academic Leadership Institute. The Modern Language Association and American Historical Association both offer workshops and training for department chairs, some of whom will go on to further leadership positions. Despite these resources, the path to mentorship and learning about administration remains murky for many potential deans. 

The stories of Reed, Alinder, and Durand demonstrate how critically important an effective dean can be for advancing the agenda of the humanities and addressing structural issues within their institutions. The role requires both vision and pragmatism, the ability to listen and the ability to lead. For all that a dean’s job may be difficult, we should not lose sight of the fact that the opportunity to affect change that touches the lives of students and faculty across campus also makes it a really good job––a job that does good.