Aug. 30, 2005
The Job No One Wants
My recent service on a search committee for the dean of my university’s College of Education left me thinking about the future of these positions.
The dean’s position, in a college with a historical commitment to teacher education and thousands of graduates per year, would seem an attractive one. Unlike many colleges and universities, my institution is not in danger of cutting education programs to make way for new enterprises; if anything, it has probably become more focused on education as enrollments in other areas have shrunk.
However, when it came time to develop our advertisement, it became clear that the requirements for the job had mushroomed since the previous search. First, with tight times in higher education, development and grants had become high priorities, The provost told us that his greatest need for the position was in the area of development and fund raising, and that he expected the successful candidate to have experience in that realm. On our campus, raising money for projects and initiatives — a job that at one time was performed by development offices — is being shifted to administrators at all levels.
Other areas also cried out for attention. We expected the successful applicant to be experienced in grants and contracts — if not in personally receiving them, then in encouraging faculty to do so. Faculty in the college expected the new dean to be an able researcher, teacher and administrator. Having a current research agenda was seen as important.
My own students, when I asked them about the position, wanted someone who was visible, approachable and would engage with students on campus. They also believed that the successful candidate should have recent classroom experience in public schools, as the federal No Child Left Behind law had so clearly changed education in the past five years.
Administrators and faculty in the college expressed concern that any candidates have a strong understanding of accreditation, and particularly a familiarity with the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. The dean would be expected to coordinate our efforts to bring about a new assessment system in the college that would smooth the way for our next review, still several years hence.
Unlike other deans, those in education schools must help fulfill federal and state accreditation requirements that are mandatory, not voluntary. Title II of the Higher Education Act forces colleges of education to report state test scores for their students on an annual basis, and many states require voluminous documentation for approval of teacher preparation programs.
“Voluntary” organizations, such as NCATE and the Teacher Education Accreditation Council, add another layer of complexity to the job. Our state virtually requires membership in one organization or the other. Both organizations require data collection and analysis of candidates, and keeping up with changes in accreditation and assessment has become a full time job in itself.
Deans of education are also expected to spearhead relations with public schools, which are in crisis as a result of No Child Left Behind. In our state, years of cuts have left school systems with fewer resources, able to hire fewer of our graduates, and forced to restructure schools that do not meet federal requirements for progress on standardized tests. Deans are expected to show leadership in the field of public education, and to be a political voice for restoring trust in a system routinely beaten up on by politicians and the public.
When added up, the qualifications became 15 different items in the final advertisement.
Can any one person do the job above? My service on the search committee leads me to doubt that there are enough people able to do it to fill all the positions out there now or coming open. The real lives and careers of human beings do not fit well into a job advertisement, especially a lengthy and complex list of characteristics.
Many administrators trade in a scholarly agenda for the demands of running a department or college. Corporate fund raising, donor cultivation, foundation relations and development are not always a strong point of even highly capable administrators. Those who are good at getting grants themselves may be uninspiring when working with faculty on their own grants (and vice versa).
While we ended our search hiring an excellent candidate, the process did not leave me optimistic about the future of the position. I feel that we were lucky, and any system that depends on luck is bound to fail sometimes.
Unless the job of dean of education is redefined into a doable set of tasks, the type of people we want to apply — people with integrity, a sense of balance, a sense of humor, a commitment to the well-being of students and children — are going to pass and stick to a faculty role. This would be a real tragedy for our field, as those are precisely the people we need to lead us into an uncertain future.