Why research-active faculty should become deans (for a few years)

Now more than ever, universities need leaders who identify as scholars and teachers

Hello Forked Lightning readers! You haven’t heard from me in a while. I had hoped to write more this spring, but unfortunately it didn’t happen. Those of you who know me in real life know that I have been serving as the Academic Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School for the last three years.¹ In that job I oversee hiring, recruitment, promotion and tenure, and everything related to faculty research. It’s an especially busy job in the Spring when the faculty meeting calendar is full each week with cases. So that’s my excuse.

The happier news is that I am only a few short days away from completing my term as academic dean and returning to full-time research and teaching. That means you’ll be getting more Forked Lightning in your inbox very soon! Next year I will be on sabbatical, visiting the economics department and the Shaping the Future of Work Initiative at MIT. In addition to getting back into research more generally, I plan to shamelessly follow the hype cycle by pivoting to AI.

Starting in the fall I’ll be writing a multi-part series for Forked Lightning on technological disruption in the U.S. labor market. I will take a long-run perspective, studying past episodes of technological progress and disruption to gain insights into the coming AI wave. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a self-indulgent meditation on my time in academic administration. This is NOT a rant about the dismal state of affairs at elite universities. That’s an important topic, but I covered some aspects of it back in October, so go read that piece if you are interested.

If you came here for discussion of education, skills, jobs, and the future of work and don’t care about the inner workings of the academy, feel free to ignore the rest of this post and come back in September.

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What does an academic dean do?

There are two parts to the job. The first is the formal responsibility of overseeing faculty hiring, promotion, retention, and research. I decided with the Dean of the Kennedy School (Doug Elmendorf) on hiring priorities, chose chairs and search committees for hiring and promotion, and oversaw the Appointments Committee which guides cases through to the full faculty for a vote. I read and edited every internal tenure or promotion case and every report that recommended the hiring of an external candidate. When the HKS faculty voted on offers, I negotiated with candidates over salary and other terms and tried to convince them to join us. When one of my esteemed colleagues received an offer from another university, my job was to try to find a way to get them to stay. Over the past year, I also took on oversight of the appointment of Fellows, distinguished visitors to HKS who occasionally brought their share of controversy.

One cannot do this job well without some overall sense of the state of the school. Unlike an academic department, the Kennedy School is a “tub on its own bottom”, meaning it is financially independent from other schools at Harvard. This means that every offer and retention carries a highly salient opportunity cost, which is the available budget for faculty recruiting. While the Kennedy School has a substantial endowment, it’s nothing like Harvard Business School or the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Increasing our already sky-high tuition to do more hiring is a non-starter for obvious reasons. In an economics or political science department, hiring is determined by the allocation of faculty lines by the Dean of Arts and Sciences at each school. At HKS, it was determined by our own internal bottom line and by our ability to raise external funds through faculty chairs. This means that a good Academic Dean needs to understand the school’s finances and how they relate to the school’s strategic priorities.

This brings me to the other part of the job, which is a more general governance responsibility. The leadership team at HKS (and at most professional schools) includes the Dean, the Academic Dean(s), and senior staff across other areas like operations, finance, law and policy, development and fundraising, and student affairs. Each of them brings deep expertise in their area, as well as a point of view on the school’s priorities that reflect their own perspectives and interests. The operations people worry about infrastructure and the physical plant, the finance people worry about the budget, and the lawyers worry about intellectual property and legal risk. That’s true for everyone, including faculty of course - where you stand depends on where you sit as they say.

The voice of the faculty

I took it as my responsibility to represent the interests of the faculty in important decisions about the direction of the school. Concretely that means thinking about benefits as well as costs. For example, recruiting research-active faculty is a huge expense. They command high salaries but also big research budgets for labs and staff. And yet, research excellence is critical to fulfilling HKS’s mission of improving public policy and leadership to make the world a better place. Our best researchers are providing critical insights on the most important public problems – poverty and inequality, war and conflict, climate change, and many other topics. Great research and its byproducts don’t show up as profits on the balance sheet. But we are running a university, not a business.

Don’t get it twisted – the HKS finance team understood the importance of research, and they were indispensable in our efforts to hire great faculty. But there is, rightly, an immense pressure to cut costs. The best way to make a strong case for more spending on faculty (and on the right kind of faculty) is to have a research-active scholar sitting in the academic dean’s chair.

A second example is how the university thinks about legal and reputational risk. Faculty at HKS are carrying out research projects in autocratic countries with dismal human rights records. We are employing research staff in developing countries with labor laws that look quite different from the U.S. And of course, we are wading into controversial public policy issues every single day. There are huge risks to this kind of research activity, but it is also important and necessary work, and tied directly to our mission. We need faculty in the room to help university leadership weigh these tradeoffs.

Precisely because the modern university is so sprawling, faculty leadership is critical to keeping us focused on our research and teaching mission. Universities are landlords, hedge funds, social service agencies for enrolled students, and major employers that contribute to local economic development. Unless we deeply internalize our purpose, we will suffer from mission creep, and important university decisions will focus too much on downside and not enough on upside.

Why would anyone want to do a job like that?

Many colleagues expressed appreciation for my service. Others expressed bewilderment that I would choose to spend my time that way. A few even seemed to judge me for revealing myself to be a deanly type rather than a “true” scholar.

“Why would anyone want to do a job like that?” is the wrong question. I didn’t seek it out. I did it because I was asked, because I thought I could do a reasonably good job, and because I felt a sense of duty. If you are a mid-career academic, you may be worried that taking a leadership role will be the end of your research career. It doesn’t have to be.

I’ll admit that I toyed with the idea of stepping onto the administrative track. But even after three years as academic dean plus some other admin roles before that, my enthusiasm for research and teaching never diminished.

Even though I moved projects along at a slower pace, I still managed to stay relevant. And you can too! In fact, I think universities would be better off if deans and provosts stayed closer to the academic mission. This might mean shorter terms and more rotation in and out of dean jobs. Academic leadership (except perhaps at the very top, where the job is mostly about fundraising and speechifying) should be a temporary waystation rather than a one-way ticket to a different career.

Even for a college president, there are benefits to staying personally connected to the academic mission. Michael Roth, the longtime president of Wesleyan University, still teaches classes in the Philosophy department and writes regularly, including publishing his 7^th book just last year. He has even written about the controversial and heartbreaking events unfolding in Israel and Gaza, managing to keep both his scholarly voice and his job in the process. While not everyone has the political skills to pull this off, it puts the lie to the idea that faculty must give up on scholarship to become university leaders.

Is it your time in the barrel?

Disempowerment and distrust of leadership have been big themes this year at Harvard. Some faculty have formed independent political organizations, and we are currently considering a proposal to form a senate, which would bring faculty together around important issues related to teaching, research, and university governance more generally.

I’m not opposed to the idea of a faculty senate. However, as I understand it, the motivation is largely to give faculty greater voice. That doesn’t go far enough. For many of my colleagues, “empowerment” feels like getting to tell the deans what to do. If we the faculty want more power – and I believe we should – we also need to take on more responsibility. That means making decisions but also taking responsibility for their implementation by serving in roles that require our time and energy. Statements and proclamations alone won’t improve university governance. We need people to roll up their sleeves and get to work.

(It may be that the Faculty Senate will take up a serious legislative and policymaking role at Harvard. But color me skeptical. Even if the Senate legislates, responsibility for implementation will likely still fall on people with the word “Dean” in their title.)

Research-active senior faculty should be more willing to take on academic leadership roles, not for careerist reasons, but out of a sense of duty. It shouldn’t feel like a change in career focus, but rather a part-time and short-term obligation. I know of one economics department where the senior faculty keep an ordered list of whose turn it is to be department chair. I like that logic a lot and think it should apply to higher levels of university administration. Three-year terms should be the norm, with lots of rotation in and out of different roles.

A few of my favorite things

By now I’ve drafted you into service, right? Great. I’ll leave you with a few things that I really enjoyed about my job, and a few things that I simply endured.

First, I got to know every corner of the school and the great people and projects that inhabited them. Faculty are rewarded professionally for going deep in our own areas of expertise. That’s the price of excellence, but it can also leave you with a very limited sense of how you fit in. I leave the job with a much greater understanding and appreciation for everything that goes on at HKS and around the university.

Second, I really enjoyed faculty recruiting. Faculty searches are grueling, and having gotten candidates through with a successful vote, the pressure is on to convert offers into hires. There’s a fun performance-based aspect to that part of the job, in contrast to the many meetings in which I’m never sure if anything I said or did made an impact at all. Even more gratifying were the relationships I built with people I recruited to HKS. You get to know someone well while helping them transition their research operations and their families to Harvard. I’ll miss that part of the job very much.

The thing I won’t miss is the emotional labor of delivering hard news to people. I tried to do it with kindness and humanity, but probably didn’t always succeed. You can’t be a good dean unless you say no to people on occasion. The vast majority understand and don’t take it personally. But I did sometimes get crosswise with faculty who I regard as friends and colleagues. I won’t miss that one bit.

If I had it to do over again, would I still say yes? Probably, although if I could pick the ideal 3-year window it wouldn’t have started in 2021 with the post-COVID hangover and ended this past year with October 7^th and the associated fallout. Still, I learned a ton, and it makes me appreciate more than ever how amazingly lucky I am to be able to teach and do research for a living!

1. I’m also a Faculty Dean of Kirkland House at Harvard College (along with my wife), but that’s a very different job that I am not giving up anytime soon!