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by Lisa Jasinski, Ph.D.
Matej Kastelic/Shutterstock
Novelist Thomas Wolfe famously warned that you can’t go home again. And yet, each year, former college presidents, provosts, deans, and other administrators attempt to do the impossible by returning to the faculty.
Reprising professorial duties is the ultimate test of balance. The promise of harmony — according to former leaders — resides somewhere in the artful blending of the past and the future.
Carving out time and energy to lay the groundwork for returning to the faculty is a real challenge, especially when administrators are already stretched too thin. For many administrators, reaching the bottom of a to-do list is a Sisyphean ordeal. This leaves little attention to think about future roles and responsibilities. But in the current higher ed climate, failing to connect regularly with your faculty self also carries a cost.
Many former senior academic leaders attributed the relative ease or difficulty of returning to the faculty to the extent to which they took proactive, anticipatory steps. These efforts can take many forms, and yes, even some can be accomplished in the rare spare hour between meetings.
Pick a Future “Home”
Current academic leaders can start by scanning the landscape for possible future “homes” to inhabit when their administrative appointment ends. While the most predictable and standard option is to return to the academic department of one’s tenure, this is not the only option. After many years away from the discipline, such a place might feel alien. New homes could be an interdisciplinary center that better aligns with current interests or an educational leadership department.
Some former leaders set their sights externally and create a home amongst colleagues in a disciplinary society, current higher education leaders, or the local community. Returning to the faculty can mean fulfilling one’s teaching obligations and channeling professional energies elsewhere (e.g., disciplinary organizations, leadership development programs, granting agencies, community boards). These are valid and fulfilling ways for rechristened faculty members to find belonging and purpose. “Off-campus” options can be especially appealing if the leader’s return to the faculty is ugly, sudden, or unwelcome.
Maintain and Strengthen Relationships
After picking a domain, leaders should invest time and energy to build relationships with their once and future colleagues. This process usually starts with putting in the face time but rarely ends there.
Administrators have ample opportunity to interact with faculty colleagues while conducting everyday university business or during social events. Each conversation is a chance to make an authentic connection and permit your colleagues to see you as something more than a suit. This might mean, occasionally, forgoing talking about how busy you are or championing the merits of a new initiative and instead breaking the stereotype that leaders are consumed by their jobs.
Give your faculty colleagues cause to see you as “one of them.” Ask them about a current debate in the field or mention a seminar you might want to teach. Let chance interactions enable real human connections; inquire about a colleague’s children or share an update about your ailing parent. If you want to increase the likelihood of being seen as a faculty peer, stop acting like the boss all the time.
Ensuring you feel at home in an external community also takes effort. It means blocking the days to attend the annual conference, schmoozing with colleagues at a reception, reviewing a manuscript proposal, or volunteering to be an organization officer. If you envision yourself playing an active role in an external group later, begin the process by becoming a known quantity now.
Remain Connected to “Faculty Work”
Doing the core work of a faculty member — keeping a foot in the classroom, the lab, or the archive — builds the foundation for a future faculty home. If the demands of your administrative job prevent you from keeping a foot in those spaces, try to dip your toe in on occasion. Use moments of respite to do faculty things and think faculty thoughts.
These lighter forms of engagement include teaching or co-teaching a class with some frequency (in your field or a first-year seminar), attending disciplinary conferences (even if not presenting), or writing book reviews of new titles in your field (or reading them). Attending workshops in the teaching and learning center will help you keep your finger on the pulse of classroom instruction and shifts in contemporary pedagogy. If the prospect of returning to the faculty is important to you, make it a habit to hit pause periodically. One administrator told me she blocked a monthly “Power Hour” to make slow and steady progress on an article.
Be Ready for a Sudden Return
The past year has included many sudden, high-profile administrative departures, including presidential resignations at Texas A&M, Stanford University, Michigan State, Ohio State, Seton Hall, and Broward College (among others). While several factors contributed to cases, the warning is the same: leaders do not always control when and how they step away.
Administrators facing a sudden or involuntary exit are destined to meet an impossibly steep learning curve on top of raw emotions. Perhaps to a greater extent than at any point in history, leaders need to take steps to protect themselves should circumstances lead them to exit their roles earlier than expected. The ability to think about a scholarly life tomorrow, next week, or next semester is a luxury. All leaders should be thinking about it now.
Equip a Successor
While the importance and nuances of succession planning are more complex than I can fully address here, empowering others to “step up” is another way administrators prepare themselves and their colleges for their eventual departure. Inviting an able colleague to join a project or even to take the lead allows that individual to expand their skills and demonstrate to others that institutional progress will continue even if you are not at the helm. There are many ways to support the next generation of leaders: nominate a colleague to participate in a leadership academy, encourage a direct report to pilot a new approach, or provide guidance and mentorships as someone does something new. Not only will these activities have a potentially transformative role in the lives of your colleagues, but they remind you that talented others stand ready to pick up the baton when the time comes.
Embrace Change
Pulling back the layers of meaning in Wolfe’s famous epitaph on homecoming, many former administrators have found their faculty “home” changed in both expected and unexpected ways. Rather than revel in nostalgia for the good old days, former leaders are wise to embrace the fulsomeness of change (both in themselves and their surroundings).
It seems shortsighted, if not futile, to approach returning to the faculty as an effort to recover the past. Instead of trying to be the faculty member you were five or ten years ago, embrace the scholar, leader, mentor, and teacher you have become. This might mean teaching different things or teaching the same things differently. For many former leaders, creatively blending the familiar and the novel makes returning to the faculty fun, rewarding, and interesting.
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