academic administration – Arts and Minds

A recent graduate fills in her major on a white board

Buzzed, pumped-up, enthusiastic … these aren’t the adjectives one expects to hear after shaking 2,300 hands and talking to 2,300 people, but they were the ones I was using after our last Arts Convocation on Friday. For three days, I had congratulated each of our graduates and asked them a variety of questions, the most common of which involved getting to know their plans for the next phase in their lives. Trying desperately not to hold up the line, I still try to get in a little banter with each student – it’s my exit poll regarding their education at UBC and their hopes for the future!

Those around me on the stage often ask what I’ve learned, and I have to admit that it’s difficult to summarize. But I try to recall the really different and interesting things our students are off to do as well as the general trends. So let’s start with some of the choices that were less common, more “off-the-beaten-path”.

• We’re graduating at least three professional athletes (this year we had a football player, a hockey player, and a baseball player all headed to the professional leagues), a swimmer training for the Rio Olympics, and someone just back from the world competition in cheerleading!

• I met a couple of future police officers, a fire fighter, someone headed to the armed forces, someone hoping to join the UN police, three who were off to become pilots, and one who was planning to work in the gas industry in the North.

• A few of our graduates are already working in government (MP offices) and one for the Liberal Party of Ontario (stepping right into an election cycle!). Not a single one of our students intended to work for Mayor Rob Ford of Toronto.

• At least three are working in aquariums (!) and a surprising number are working, at least for a while, at UBC (for example at MOA or in various central offices).

And now let’s look at some of the trends:

• Of our graduating librarian and archival students, one was working in the Vancouver Public Library, one for an archives, and another for a Vancouver area library. Similarly, our journalism students were heading to the CBC (2), to CTV and to a variety of print and electronic media. Most of these professional school students seemed to be already working! We know our co-op students are 90% employed by graduation, but I was heartened by the job prospects of our professional school students.

• Many of our Economics students were already working in banks or in finance or as brokers. Quite a significant number were heading to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo or Singapore with jobs already in hand.

• Many are off to do graduate or post-baccalaureate work in their fields, and a quick poll of where many were going turned up Oxford, the California system, NYU, Stanford, McGill, UofT, The University of Chicago, Columbia University, or to universities in Australia, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Germany, mainland China, and beyond. The most popular post-BA destination seemed to be Law and Education, both accounting for at least 100 students. One, though, was going on to seminary to become a missionary. For those wanting to combine something closer to technical training with a BA, they most often mention BCIT as a destination (a few were becoming designers of one sort or another). We have a few who are going on to Nursing, many to Occupational Therapy, Accounting (typically here at UBC), and many to Human Resources, and among our geographers, some were getting additional training in Global Information Systems (GIS). In theses cases, the combination of an Arts degree (perhaps Psychology, Economics or Sociology) and a technical training component will likely prove to be a strong combination for their rise to leadership in their fields.

• And one student mentioned her graduate studies in “forensic linguistics”. Okay, so as background, let me say that I work (on the side) as a forensic musicologist, providing expert witness testimony for music copyright cases, but I confess that I have absolutely no idea what a forensic linguist would do! Someone help me by writing into this blog to clarify please!

• A number of our students planned to work in their family’s business (very true of some of our students from China) or to start a business (some had started businesses already) and one was already working in a start-up and hoping to move up with the business.

• Sometimes the students don’t talk about their detailed plans but state ambitious goals: “Change the world!” or “The world is my oyster!”, and sometimes they respond with a much shorter timeframe in mind: “Sleep”, “Party”, “Lunch” or even in one case “Sushi!”. And although the following answer does not impress the Provincial government, some of our students shrug their shoulders and say: “We’ll see!” But the odd thing is that this was never said in a downbeat or pessimistic fashion but more along the lines of “We’ll see what great things come my way!”. Another variation on this was the decision to take a year to travel and work before getting onto more permanent work or graduate school.

• And yes, just because this is an Arts faculty (and here I’m playing with the stereotypes!), one student did say “barista” and one was continuing to work as a server at a restaurant on West Broadway, and indeed one said “unemployment”, but it seemed to be said lightly.

Only one student tripped (on the way down the stairs) but several lost their mortarboard hats on stage (it is one of my duties to pick these up!). There is no logical explanation for the design of mortarboards, but if future graduates are reading this blog, my recommendation is to bring bobby pins to keep them on your head!

Along with the handshakes came a few high-fives, a couple fist bumps, and a few hugs. I got to pose for selfies, turn around for pictures by parents, and comment on some interesting choices in footware or body adornment or on the relative merits of the students’ professors, who were sitting behind me. And of course I followed it up with a quick trip to the Purel dispenser.

But there’s nothing like a sea of excited students and proud parents, a rendition of “O Canada” led by our Opera Program Director Nancy Hermiston, some stirring march music played by the School of Music brass students, a sea of flash cameras, and the sheer exhaustion of it all to leave one, strangely, wanting more. I was buoyed considerably by a comment to me by our outgoing Chancellor, Sarah Morgan Sylvester, who finds Arts students much more optimistic and full of spirit than she did five years ago.

Can I conclude this little sampler blog about our Convocation with the biggest props possible for our outgoing Chancellor as well as our outgoing Vice-Chancellor and President, Stephen J. Toope, both of whom do about 22 convocations every spring with unflagging enthusiasm and dedication to our students as well as the heartfelt and thoughtful speeches that they compose for each convocation season. Their stamina and commitment to students continues to inspire.

Congratulations to the extraordinary UBC Arts Class of 2014. I’m exhausted and exhilarated just thinking about it!

I was having lunch the other day with a former dean, and once again the conversation veered into the motivations for doing this job. My colleague missed being at the table and in charge. Why does someone become a dean? I do get asked this a lot, especially by colleagues in my own discipline who wonder why I would want to do less of everything that they’re trying to do more of? It is an oft-stated truism about deanship that no one starts out in academia wanting to be a dean, and essentially no one is trained to be one!

For my part, I think it’s related in the first instance to my background. In high school I directed plays and managed my town’s nature centre. By the time I went to graduate school, I had already run a tenant union and large music festivals. And from 1976 onward, I’m a little embarrassed to say, I’ve crafted six-month goals and objectives for work and all aspects of my life. So what we in academia call academic administration came more naturally to me than to some colleagues, for whom it’s akin to wearing a rough wool garment and flogging oneself. And let me be very honest: I like the responsibility of running things. I’ve said on a few occasions that if I’m going to have to put up with living inside a bureaucratic institution, I’d at least like to have a say in how it’s run.

I recall one particular interaction that crystallized my dissatisfaction with having no say. When I was an Assistant Professor, I was working with another professor to develop a long-range and encompassing fundraising plan for my Music Department, but it was scuttled when the Chair decided instead to approach our major donor for a piano. A major opportunity lost, I regretted that I was on the periphery of decision-making and had no effect on strategy. So a few weeks later, when another university came calling for a future Chair of a Music Department, I was primed to want to try my hand. I wanted to be in the conversation, not screaming from the periphery.

As a chair, I discovered an interesting thing about administration: when it works it can create the same kind of magic I used to think I could help to create as a musician, festival director, or teacher. At my own festivals, for example, I would go from stage to stage to sample how my programming was working with the audiences. After months of scheduling artists on particular stages and linking performance thematically, I could see if my imagination had been effective, and I would get a thrill if the audience was reacting as I had imagined, or even if moving and unpredictable interactions were occurring. My guiding principle was to create an event so well run that its architecture was invisible, and to all the world it looked like a great, spontaneous party.

Let’s extrapolate that to university administration! What if the machinery of recruitment, admissions, orientation, advising and course registration worked seamlessly for students, and they didn’t have to spend their lives standing in line and being bounced around from office to office? What if the process or recruiting faculty, mentoring them, assisting their teaching, enabling their research, and facilitating great interactions with colleagues were friction-free in terms of guidelines and approvals? What if we could achieve a truly diverse, intellectually challenging, collegial atmosphere for debate and the free flow of ideas? What results when some of this is in place can also be like magic. Students can be turned on by ideas and experiences, people innovate and work with others to solve intractable problems. This is idealist thinking, I recognize, but when we’re effective in solving the everyday problems and overcoming the irritants and frustrations of academic life, we get a little closer to the functioning of an ideal collegium. This part of the job I love, and it thrills me to every once in a while to see a bit of magic take place.

IMG_1245 comp — Speaking after I was given a toilet plunger by a department, a metaphor for the job of dean.

Let me raise another aspect of the job that’s immensely appealing to me. I had a particularly difficult time in coming to know what I wanted to “do with my life”, at least on a long-term basis, because I’m by nature an insatiably curious person. I was lucky growing up on a game farm where my parents indulged my curiosity with Time-Life Books and National Geographic Magazines and whatever they could get on astronomy, archeology, calligraphy, or, to cite my favorite: animal tracks and spore! As I’ve written previously, my early adult life was characterized by a string of very different jobs. In fact, one could describe my current job as “therapy for the insatiably curious”. On a given day, I might read cases or have conversations about tourism in the USSR, Shakespeare’s innovations with vengeance plays, Coast Salish language revitalization, sustainability in China, Aristotle’s philosophy of nature, the relationship between political parties and development in a village in Rajasthan, or the use of drone bombs in contemporary American warfare. And in a small way I get to contribute to sustaining the foundation for all of this great research and teaching to happen.

I’ve realized over the years that I’m a visual thinker and a systems thinker, and that I’ve always been attracted to the challenges of solving problems. In fact, I’m a sucker for challenges. As my wife is fond of reminding me, every academic job I’ve taken has been at a smaller effective salary than my last job, but they’ve always resulted in bigger challenges. And a deanship might be viewed as a succession of challenges, generally scores of them every day: structure a spousal hiring for retention of a faculty member; review and respond to an external review; figure out how to fund a construction project for a department; seek out donors for an endowed professorship; cancel a professorial search to reinforce the importance of diversity; determine the routing of a difficult tenure and promotion case; try to solve the long-term insolvency of a unit; consider a major new program with another Faculty; review appointment letters; review proposals to Senate; convince candidates to serve as Heads; see if we can assist in a retirement … that’s just culled from a portion of the docket on one day this week.

Every once in a while, I even get to teach a class, and thankfully I get to interact with students much the time. And if I’m ridiculously disciplined, or maybe selfish, I can eke out a little time to work on research and publication – I’m setting up a research lab/office, and I escape there whenever I can. In the most enjoyable moments of the job, I’m surrounded by and interacting with smart and creative people, I get to explore ideas and solutions and plan, maybe even laugh at some of the absurdities of institutional life, and I even get to help a little magic to happen. Being a part of the decision making, indulging my curiosity, helping some good things to happen that affect student’s lives and that can have a beneficial impact on society – these are the core attractions of the deanship for me. This is what makes putting up with the pace of the job and the stresses of having to make hard decisions and the constant strains on Faculty finances all tolerable. My lunch partner the other day talked about how much fun it had been to be a dean, and mentioned that in her current work she was having to find out how to influence the course of academic life and programs without having the authority to make it happen. I can relate — it is fun! It can also be incredibly stressful and consuming, and to use a word beloved of deans these days: relentless. But it is never boring.

I remember an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education many years ago that looked at what people do after serving as a dean. Less that a quarter of them went back into the classroom as full-time professors. Most have been too far removed from the literature and the changes in classroom technology and pedagogy to feel that they are the still the kinds of effective instructors that they looked for in their faculty. Most either retire or go onto other academic administrative positions. I have no idea what I will want to do when the time comes around, but it looks like I will once again have to ask myself the question: “What do I want to do when I grow up?”