I guess one thing that ah I thought about when we talked about doing this
interview was um there's nothing in there about my philosophy of
leadership and I thought I might just say a word about that, the people
that worked with me always heard from me that there were three things,
three rules that I wanted to try to live by and I wanted them to try to
live by. Um the first was to operate on the basis of principles and not
personalities. Um And by that we met treat people even handedly, I don't
want to have, I don't have to have a set of friends and a set of enemies.
We have a set of people we're dealing with. And if we're if we're going to
do something for one person, we're gonna do it for everybody that's
similarly eligible. And if we're going to say no to somebody, then we have
to say no to any anybody else that comes in for that because as Dean, you
have a a stream of people coming in and so we want to treat them fairly.
We don't want to have friends and enemies. Um Another point was, we all
spend an awful lot of time at work, Let's have fun. And so I think anybody
that worked with me will say that we laughed a lot. We had a lot of fun um
doing what we were doing and then the last, the last point maybe should be
the first. Uh and that was maximized good when you're in a leadership
position, You can, you receive requests, you're making decisions, you're
adjudicating differences.
Our university is there to serve a societal purpose. And so when those
things come to, you always try to maximize the good that comes out of the
encounter, whatever it happens to be. And so those are the three rules we
tried to live by and I think that they, I think they served us well and
and we enjoyed doing what we were doing.
You mentioned the fact that a lot of the most actual academic
administrators have no training in administration.
Did you feel that as a handicap or as an advantage or? Well, I didn't
really have any thought about it at all. Um Later on, when I say later on
, when I became chair,
I just became chair, I mean nothing happened except one day I was in this
office, the next day I was in that one. Um
when
when I became Dean actually when SAM was dean, I learned from him that one
Ought to try to develop the talent of the administrative team. And so he
started having retreats for department chairs where we would spend a day
talking about leadership and problem solving and we'd have a little case
studies. And the whole idea was to cause people to think about their
administrative role as a leadership one, not just as a first among equals
, which is that right phrase that people tend to use in higher education
about people that become department chairs. And and then um I don't
remember if this started with SAM or with me, but we begin to have um
workshops for new department chairs. And so each year in the college of
the size of ours we would have 3 to 5, six, maybe new department chairs.
And during the summer we would have them come in and we would go over each
of their areas of responsibility and spend time, here's what you need to
know, here's where you get the information, here's where you can go for
questions. These are this is the calendar, these are the events that are
going to occur. And so for the budget, they knew where they got their
information, what their responsibility was, where the information was
coming from in personnel, they knew here's what here's what you have to do
in promotion and tenure, here's what it's do, here's what you have to do
in terms of salary adjustments and an annual evaluation and here's what
it's due and um Mhm. We always would remind them that their departments
have bylaws that chair's probably ought to ought to be familiar with those
and and follow them. And just I really tried to help them get ready for
the job. Well, now there are all kinds of national programs uh for new
chairs and new deans and so on. And actually one of those, one of the
biggest ones for many years used the book I wrote on academic leadership
for the preparation of new deans, which was kind of nice. The were the
practices in the College of Arts and Sciences in terms in these terms um
going on in other colleges at the campus at the same time? Or was this
something that was unique in arts and Sciences? Well, I guess the honest
answer is I don't know what was going on going on in a way our scale
allowed us to do things that smaller
smaller colleges didn't have to do or maybe couldn't do. But the fact that
we had so many people in leadership positions and so much dependent on
them providing good leadership that we spent a lot of time on that and it
paid huge dividends. In fact,
an interesting transition. I think that occurred when Sam was dean. He was
enamored with the idea of bringing in department chairs from the outside.
And so almost every time we had a vacancy, we would do a national search
and try to bring somebody in um, to whip the department into line or
something. And other departments really didn't need to be whipped into
line, but well some, some of them were struggling with more issues than
others. But anyway, when I became dean, I looked back over that and I, I
saw two things. One bringing in external chairs was really expensive
and number two Our batting average was about 50% meaning about half of the
people came in and did a great job and about half the people came in and
struggled,
struggle is probably a kind word and then they just, they didn't bring
about the sorts of changes and positive leadership that we had hoped. Um,
and it wasn't always their fault. I mean the variety of things contributed
to it, but our batting average wasn't very good. And so When I, the 11
years I was dean, we hardly did an external search. Um, I felt like we
have all these faculty members, they've all been brought to us in national
searches. They know the culture of the university, they know the culture
of their department.
Why don't we try to set up a process to find the best among them each time
and we'll do the best we can to bring them along to see to their
professional development
and
I'm biased, but I thought, I thought we had a tremendous department chairs
during that era, just one after another person steps forward and just did
a great job and a number of those have stated administration and gone on
and been very successful in other roles and many have returned to the
faculty and been very successful there, but we, we just had great chairs
and way less disruption and wasted way less money. I thought just going
internally and developing our own talent or drawing on our own talent
might be a better way to say it.
one thing I haven't talked about that I always felt good about was, was
the notion of difference makers?
The, what happened was to cause me to begin to think about this was, we
had some endowed professorships that we were going to fill and we filled
one with a famous person, uh, who came from a really good university and
came into one of our programs and he continued to be a wonderful faculty
member. Terrific researcher. But after watching him a few years, I noticed
that he lifted nobody but himself. Almost all his efforts really work
toward advancing his own career. And that's fairly typical of many faculty
members. Um, about the same time though, we'd hired another person, Jim
Mayor from an Eastern university who was a member of the National Academy.
But when I called,
I called john silk cox, who was the dean at Cornell where Jim Mayer was.
And I said, tell me about Jim. And he said, he's, He said, he's one of a
kind, one of a kind of course, he was one of a kind, you know, Jim Jim Jim
must be 80 years, 90 years. I don't know what he is now, but Jim has never
finished the sentence that he started. Um, in all that time. He would, he
would start a sentence and he'd interrupt himself and then he'd interrupt
that sentence interrupt and he was just a kick. In fact, He gave a talk up
the Navajo Nation one time and
he went on and on and on and they took a break and at the break he walked
over to one of the elders and he said, what do you think the elder said a
little long on story
jim is, he was amazing. He was over an art, working with people in the art
department to, to use his some kind of technology to see the picture that
was under the picture without destroying the picture that was on the front
, on oil paintings where they painted one painting over an old one. He uh
, he was over in engineering, working with people, he was in, in chemistry
and physics in solid state science. He was just everywhere. He in no time
at all. He had van that some somebody donated and he had an electron
microscope that went all over the state to high school. So kids could do
stuff on the electron microscope. He had high school kids in the summer.
He was just unbelievable. So he really was a catalyst for good. He was
amazing. And this individual got to campus, he seemed to connect with
everybody
in ways that caused a whole set of others to be more productive. And so
his very presence here. Well, he seemed to be spending no time on his own
work caused people all over to connect it and never connected to cause
work to occur. That never would have occurred to cause us to do good
things internally and externally. That would have never happened if he
wasn't here. And so I could see he really was a catalyst for good and I,
and so I got to thinking about this guy really makes a difference in the
broader institution. I wonder I need to look around and see who these
other difference makers are and then we need to try to recognize that and
support them so that they'll stay here and continue to do that. And so
over the last few years that I was Dean, we identified a number of people
that we thought were difference makers and with milk clicks help and
laddies help and with endowment money that was raised, we ended up putting
most of them on some sort of endowed appointment and not all of them, but
most of them. And, and then we began as we started looking further for
other endowed appointments to try to find people that would lift others
that would be difference makers. And so
I always felt good about good about that and think it helped the
institution.
What an interesting thing with with when Sam was Dean, Sam liked to have
everything.
He, he didn't like unpredictable stuff and so he wanted the Dean's, our
chairs meetings scripted, we're gonna do this for five minutes, this for
two minutes. This for three minutes and he had notes that were pages thick
so he could keep everybody on task and I always felt like that was just
too stilted. Uh you really couldn't get, you really couldn't, you could
disseminate information effectively, but you really couldn't get people
thinking together about issues. And so when I became Dean, we we just had
an agenda. It was just just just to keep us on track. But that was it. And
there was just a there was a lot of free discussion and he went all over
the place. But it was so healthy for all of us. Really enormously healthy.
Thank you very much. You're welcome. I've enjoyed it.