{"id":8475,"date":"2017-12-01T20:54:20","date_gmt":"2017-12-02T03:54:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=8475"},"modified":"2017-12-01T20:54:38","modified_gmt":"2017-12-02T03:54:38","slug":"dean-prospectus-omissions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=8475","title":{"rendered":"Dean prospectus omissions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After 6 years in various administrative roles, I&#8217;ve become a Usual Suspect for a certain slice of dean searches, mostly smaller private and regional public colleges\/universities. At one point rumors were apparently circulating that I was interviewing, and I&#8217;m glad that a colleague told me so I could point out that, no, I&#8217;m pretty happy in my current position, and if you knew me well enough, you&#8217;d know why I wasn&#8217;t likely to be looking around. But I receive a few contacts every year, and from the standpoint of someone who is\u00a0<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">not<\/span> looking, it is pretty easy to see what the various executive-search prospectus narratives typically miss with the colleges of education I tend to receive search information on:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Trends in enrollment, budgets, and hiring<\/li>\n<li>Fundraising profile of the institution, especially emphasis among areas (athletics, financial aid, health sciences, other sciences, everything else)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>On the whole, the last fifteen years have not been very kind to these colleges, and I understand why this information would not be front and center. Yet, at the same time, a prospectus typically tries to signal the type of person the college or university is looking for. And for some people, specific challenges are attractive&#8230; and a provost at these institutions should want someone who looks for that challenge. Yes, everyone wants to be higher-ranked in [name your ranking magazine], have more grant funding, have a broader impact, and so forth. We all know this language, and you don&#8217;t call forth the Potential Miracle Dean by pointing out your needs in a way that cries, &#8220;Please, apply. We&#8217;re desperate.&#8221; But is there a middle path?<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Some time ago I received an email from a search firm and skimmed the prospectus before replying. My thoughts, roughly:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>This college has about the same number of faculty as my current unit, and half the number of students. They have the capacity to teach a lot more, but they probably don&#8217;t know how. There are [small # of] departments, so that&#8217;s an opportunity to mentor department chairs. They&#8217;re CAEP-accredited. I wonder if it&#8217;s possible to get out from under that quickly and focus on more of what matters.<\/p>\n<p>No mention of endowed chairs or anything on fundraising for the university, and fundraising experience is low on the preferred-qualifications list. So that&#8217;s not a priority for potential deans, but there are also long-term budget problems given what I know about the region. That probably means they have a history of low-balling junior faculty on offers for long stretches, and so there&#8217;s likely to be high loss of good faculty and compression\/inversion with morale problems. There\u00a0<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">is<\/span> a clear mention in qualifications of a history of mentoring faculty, which usually isn&#8217;t a dean&#8217;s role, so there is serious dissatisfaction with treatment of junior faculty in the recent past. So: faculty relationships are a key need here, and on an urgent\/emergency basis. That often entails intrafaculty disputes, too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>If I were in a different position in my life, I might well jump at this, because I know I could help this college; it will never be #3 on Usually Headlined List, but it can be a lot more functional, and faculty happier regardless of the low-salary turnover. I think I saw that primarily because I <em>don&#8217;t<\/em> want another position. But is there a way to attract someone with that capacity and desire in the prospectus? I suspect so; but it would be a very different document. In that type of prospectus\/job description, the university would need to state bluntly that it was looking for a dean who knew how to advance the college in several institutionally-meaningful goals (whatever they are&#8211;I&#8217;m sure enrollment, financial sustainability, and a few other things), make the college more effective and renowned in its regional role, and develop future leadership of the college as well as great faculty.<\/p>\n<p>In other words, in a prospectus you don&#8217;t have to identify the fires raging in the back to make clear whom you need.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After 6 years in various administrative roles, I&#8217;ve become a Usual Suspect for a certain slice of dean searches, mostly smaller private and regional public colleges\/universities. At one point rumors were apparently circulating that I was interviewing, and I&#8217;m glad that a colleague told me so I could point out that, no, I&#8217;m pretty happy [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-academic-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-2cH","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8475"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8483,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8475\/revisions\/8483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}