Administration

A Further Activity of My Life

  So far I have reported on four activities I have engaged in during a good part of my life. “Activity” is the vague and somewhat arbitrary term with which, so far, I have referred to doing woodwork, pursuing the study and teaching  of philosophy, being variously involved with classical music and being engaged with writing. If you think—rightly, for sure—that I’ve treated these themes with cavalier sketchiness, that fate is about to befall in spades, to the last activity I want to take up, administration. That theme is, in a way, more multifaceted than the others, so just conveying what one does when administering, cannot be made reasonably evident in a couple of pages. Accordingly, what I will say here will be exceedingly sketchy.¹

   I was involved with administration from the time that I was an assistant professor at San Francisco State until just before I retired, a span of more than three decades. I started at SF State soon after I got my PhD and not very long after I got there the philosophy department wanted to recruit as chairman a “visible” philosopher. He, Sidney Zink, agreed to come, provided he did not have to do the “drudge work of chairmen, such as make up the schedules of department members—course assignments, class-times, room assignment, etc. I was drafted to be “assistant chairman” to do what Sidney didn’t want to do. Alas, Sidney, by then a good friend, died not very long after joining us of a virulent cancer. Willy-nilly, I became departmental chairman, still only an assistant professor.

   That was the first of three such philosophy chairmanships, that at Vassar and the University of Pittsburgh were the next two. I never sought out to chair anything and never resisted when I became papabile. I don’t really know why I was picked for those jobs. Perhaps simply because I was willing to take them on. To be sure, I was rational, calm, and task minded and not ideological. Perhaps my modest successes were the consequence of lying low.

   At Vassar, besides chairing philosophy, I became a BMOC, Big Man On Campus—or a big fish in a small pond—serving on various “important” campus-wide committees. My proudest achievement was to rewrite and rationalize Vassar’s faculty housing policy: how Vassar-owned houses should be assigned to faculty members. I wonder whether some version of it is still in force.

   After a stretch of such activities, I came to think that instead of spending much time on quasi-administrative chores, I should try full time administering and, perhaps, accomplish more. Accordingly, I let myself be considered in searches for administrative jobs and, before long, was selected to be dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University.

   Parenthetically, I might add that Fannia, was delighted. While she had adjusted remarkably well to living in Poughkeepsie, she did not think that any place with a population of less than a million was really a city. Indeed, she soon became a valued staff member of the Chicago Historical Society and edited their magazine.

   I had two advantages going into that deanship, neither having to do with me. First, there had  been no stability in that office for more than a decade. The last proper dean had served only a short time before considerable Vietnam-related unrest propelled him to become Northwestern’s president. His elevation was followed by a couple of years of interim appointments that were, in turn followed by a year of Hanna Gray in her first job as an administrator, who, shortly after her appointment as NU dean was induced to be provost at Yale. [A quaint coincidence, Northwestern’ College of Arts and Sciences had two deans in a row—Hanna and me—born in Heidelberg, though she was quite young when she left for the US in 1934 with her father, the historian, Hajo Holborn.

   As a result of this very checkered history at Northwestern, just about everything concerning the dean’s office had for years been neglected—curriculum, personnel, organization, etcetera. Everyone, especially the college’s faculty, was ready for a steady, but active hand at the helm. The second advantage was the fact that the provost, to whom I reported, was, to say the least, not a “hands on” administrator. I would see him in his office to tell him what I was going to do (when that was not routine) and just about always I got the answer my parents gave when I told them, as a teenager, what I wanted to do: “if you think so, Rudy”—except the provost didn’t say that in German, but quietly in English.

   So, at Northwestern I became an administrator full time. That divides into two categories: means and ends. Both matter, but, emphatically, ends have undisputed priority. At all times—all times!—one has to be clear about what one wants to achieve. What’s the goal ? What are you trying to accomplish there? Administration—at least as I conceive it—is not getting the paper out of the in basket into the out basket; that’s “merely” managing which, to be sure, must be done. Administration, at its core, is making effective moves toward envisaged goals.

   Sounds simple? Well it ain’t. Those goals have to be desirable—it would it be a good thing if they were brought about—and feasible—the means can be mustered to accomplish them. It’s obvious that the means to be picked must aim to bring about the ends to be achieved, but when we are talking about administration, it should be equally obvious that what is to be achieved must be determined with knowledge of what’s possible.

   All of this is terribly abstract until you realize that administration is an activity in institutions that have a structure and a history and, above all, have been brought into existence to perform a certain set of functions. So, a college of arts and sciences has a faculty, mostly organized into departments, brought together to teach students and to engage in what is called “research,” that is additions to the store of knowledge in the world.

   But of course administration is not creation ex nihilo, but is essentially modifying, whether in small or large ways, a preexisting structure with a given organization consisting of a cadre of personnel, and a great many practices, both formally determined or created by institutional history.

  Enough of these quasi-philosophical abstractions. They are relevant, but they don’t tell you much of daily administrative jobs. I’d say that the most important trait on that “lower” action level calls for two mundane traits. One is the ability to listen and to determine what is actually happening and the second calls for the ability to persuade the relevant people to do what is wanted. In short, a large ingredient in the activity of administration is rhetorical.

  This disquisition has been at too lofty a level of abstraction and the reader might well complain that she has found out little about administration. That is certainly true and I apologize for misleading you. But the fact is that but I’m not really inclined to give a nitty-gritty account of what it is to administer a chunk of humanity—a very big job.       

  ¹ Fitting Form to Function:  A Primer on the Organization of Academic Institutions. Second edition, Rowman & Littlefield/American Council on Education, 2011.