Abstract
We have written in this space before about our opportunities for, and commitment to, what we fondly term the Journal of Management Education (JME) Roadshow: author and reviewer engagement sessions we facilitate at any number of conferences, institutions, and faculty development meetings around the world. Last June (2018), however, we took advantage of an invitation to broaden JME’s reach and talk with Business School deans at the Southern Business Administration Association (SBAA) summer conference in Nashville. We presented a session in which we discussed the growing variety of article “impact” measurements (in addition to the ubiquitous but limiting Impact Factor) by which the deans could consider their own faculty’s scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) productivity. While we were greeted warmly and enthusiastically, and most participants perceived the session as useful, during the course of many conversations over the full 2 days of our attendance we were struck repeatedly by the chasm between where the B-School deans seemed to put their attention and energy and where we as current faculty members generally located the same. More pointedly, we were dismayed by what we heard as persistent “us” and “them” language when discussing the myriad initiatives and challenges these deans faced within the shared governance model of academia. Perhaps because we, as editors, have not spent much time immersed in an administrative environment, we were surprised by these distinctions, and find our chagrin has continued well into the new year. Thus, we decided to explore in this editorial and in this issue what we see as the unique area of interface among SOTL, teaching and learning practice, and administrators’ lived experiences from the academic corner office.
To be sure, we do not want to be seen as alarmist or over-invested in critique: Most of us have taken advantage of opportunities to share, trade ideas, and spiritedly vent with colleagues at similar meetings. We were energized by the participants’ willingness to be frank with us, to be specific about the challenges they face, and the passion with which they engage in business school leadership. We experienced their comments as reflecting true caring about their faculty, a call to do administrative work as a contribution to their school, and a belief that they are less effective at this work than they wanted to be. We do not want to sanitize, however, the expressions of anger, politicking, and sheer frustration those participants shared with us when discussing their faculty’s responses to much of the work and responsibilities for which they, as deans, were now accountable. These were not descriptions of faculty foibles, misunderstandings, or differences in opinion—these were energetic flash mobs of ire. To paraphrase and generalize, some of the deans with whom we spoke described faculty behavior as obstructive to any change initiative, deliberately mean spirited, dismissive of the B-School operation as a whole, selfish, and lacking any appreciation for the pressures deans felt or for the changes they had to make in response to initiatives or imperatives from one level up (or accreditors). This was true not only for changes to the teaching and learning enterprise, but to life in the School overall.
We began to ask ourselves, what happened to these folks in the shift from faculty to dean? What kind of alchemy has taken place? How do faculty members move into administrative roles and then come to view their former colleagues and compatriots as antagonists who keep them from doing the “right” work, the important work, perhaps the “averting disaster” work they so readily perceived in their current space? And what of the reverse process: How do faculty members come to view their former colleagues, suite-mates, maybe even coauthors as players in a new regime bent on doing harm to the B-School in myriad ways? What transforms a faculty member’s usually cheerful (or at least benign) participation in B-School life to engagement in a power-focused battle of wills, regardless of any initiative’s actual goals? As a result of our SBAA experience, we have become more alert to these types of behaviors in our and others’ institutions, and the ways in which such behavior can be demoralizing and energy-sapping for everyone.
Without exception (and this is true of the people with whom we spoke; it may not be true of all of the attendees of that SBAA), these deans had once been faculty themselves, and for some of them, being a member of the faculty was very recent history. Yet at the risk of oversimplifying, we might describe the distinction between deans and faculty as the view from the Ferris wheel and the view from the carousel—we are all at the amusement park but our vantage point is fundamentally different. Moreover, the paths forward are different when sitting in a dean’s chair; from a dean’s perspective, work immediacies and attention-grabbing contingencies transform whatever similarity of purpose exists into barriers between themselves and their faculty.
Jenkins (2018) wrote of the equivocal and sometimes diametrical ways by which a dean’s job is fashioned: both more and less control over outcomes; both harder and easier as to the nature of the work; both living in the grey of human interactions while enforcing the black and white boundaries of certain behaviors. He described the political and ambiguous nature of a dean’s role, assessing his own fit with the job as poor: “. . . I despise office politics (and am not particularly good at them). I tend to be pretty straightforward, even blunt, and have a low tolerance for ethical ambiguity.”
From their vantage point of “faculty turned administrator,” and noting that research outcomes are, in many ways, easier to measure and reward than teaching outcomes, Balkin and Mello’s (2012) curiosity about how the persistent research–teaching gap affected teaching and learning outcomes gives us insights into how a transition from faculty to administrator affects the latter’s views. From their research and experience, they concluded that the role of external constituencies is critical to blending, in healthy and energizing ways, those activities for faculty members. Engaging with the value of teaching and learning, despite measurement and sometimes resource issues, means staying alert to them in intentional ways—something that is not always easy or straightforward as a B-School dean. Yet, it is nearly impossible to contain the daily flux of day-to-day life in a B-School and shifting priorities derived from those further away from the action—further from the students, the classrooms, the triumphs and the difficulties—and the result is exasperation even for the steadiest among us.
As we considered ways to examine these changes in perspective, and to create space to think about how our work affects others in ways to which we may not even be present, we thought it wise to return to the core reason why many of us sought higher education credentialing in the first place. Academe allows a unique and privileged position by which to seek personally meaningful, fulfilling, and impactful work. Over the course and trajectory of our careers, how we define meaning, fulfillment, and impact can and does change, and academe yet again allows us a unique and privileged position by which to craft our personal definitions of impact on scores of students, community and industry partners, and our colleagues—for some of us—by moving into administrative roles. Given academe’s tradition of voice, autonomy, and certainly collegiality, in this issue we wanted to explore how to engage in dean’s work without the fractiousness of “us” versus “them” by considering teaching and learning from a dean’s perspective. As you will see below, this is a focus of a special themed section in this issue.
Through all of our interactions with the SBAA deans and with other administrators at our own institutions, we have now come to understand that there has never been a time in Business Schools, and really in higher education per se, that is as critical for us to work collaboratively as it is now. All of our collective and good energy is needed to pull forward in the same directions; none can be spent sparring over initiatives simply for the sake of sparring, and leveraging the voice that faculty so deeply cherish and guard must be done wisely and generously. And, it has also never been more important to critically evaluate school-level changes and initiatives. That tension of maintaining a cautious orientation toward saying “yes” to new initiatives and norms while remaining committed to academic values of autonomy, academic freedom, and long-term learning outcomes requires unflagging mental energy among all members of a business school community.
In This Issue
In our first article for this issue, William Carter and Lisa Stickney sit at a macro level to discuss their need for, and ultimately a description of, an integrating experience of what should be, but was not, the discipline-unifying capstone course. Carter and Stickney addressed that gap within their institution’s own capstone course experience and provide Instructional Innovation details for readers who want to integrate such a high-level opportunity for their own soon-to-graduate business students.
In our special Essays section, we are pleased to offer JME’s readers a set of deeply thoughtful, experience-based, and emotionally potent essays from seven current or former business school deans who write about teaching and learning from their vantage points. As we read the deans’ essays as a collective, we got a sense that they are helping us to see the “new normal.” That is, that there is a collaborative imperative for faculty and administrators to work together on the challenges that face us all. Additionally, reading them together offered us new ways of appreciating our experience at the SBAA—being a dean is a high-velocity and complex undertaking that can be thankless and frustrating, often experienced as “one step forward, two steps back.” Being a dean means sitting at the nexus of faculty members and external forces in our profession that can be difficult to define and almost always experienced as threats. Deans run interference for us and they walk tightropes in mostly windy weather. Why do they do this to themselves? As noted above and shared in some of their writing, at a certain point in their careers these authors’ sense of purpose shifted; their vocational energy moved toward a different way of impacting others and who the “others” are also changed. We invite readers to consider this issue collectively—the essays as well as the instructional innovation—and sit with what our authors are saying about their need to look at teaching and learning from the view at the (macro-level) top.
Barbara A. Ritter shares her experiences of where faculty work and administrative work might overlap before moving to where such work necessarily diverges. She notes the role of external forces and competition in how she frames her perspective, and challenges us to see the need for the much-maligned and often whimsical student-reported “satisfaction” construct in considering and constructing successful teaching and learning cultures.
Writing from his specialized role of Associate Dean for Teaching and Learning (an even more nuanced blend of administration and teaching practices), George Hrivnak succinctly articulates perhaps all of our authors’ positions in that he is “regularly confronted with difficult decisions aimed at resolving ill-defined problems with incomplete information, involving conflicting stakeholder interests, and unclear, yet potentially significant consequences.” Hrivnak responds to such complexity using curriculum design as the frame within which impactful conversations and work are grounded, offering readers a way forward when they find themselves in similar situations.
Dan Moshavi distills his dean’s attentional focus on four elements he likens to “charged particles” that, if in alignment, create “electric” possibilities for not only teaching and learning but also for a professor’s entire career experience. Strategy, budget, curriculum, and delivery combine as The Four Horsemen (sorry, this is Kathy’s Knute Rockne allusion) of engaging faculty energy and creativity in the service of excellence in teaching and learning outcomes. In another analogy, Moshavi considers the dean’s role, at root, to be one of stewardship.
Using a writing style for which his effervescence belies the serious concepts, Angus Laing notes that “the business of learning” is a serious enterprise where once again vantage point matters. Leveraging his discussion of nine “preoccupations” of deans with respect to teaching and learning to enhance readers’ understanding of the sometimes bewildering chasm between faculty and deans’ viewpoints, Laing makes a provocative point that the similarity of physical space—the university setting—may only (ironically) serve to underscore the differences between such perspectives.
Teaching as craft within an accessible, studio-based space predicated on Ericsson’s notion of “deliberate practice” forms the cornerstone of Steven Taylor’s vision for business schools. Problematizing the entire notion of “expertise” as it relates to teaching practice at the intersection of multiple disciplines, criteria of excellence, and institutional spheres, Taylor provides a thought experiment for all readers as to what Business Schools are, could be, and in his experience, should be.
John Stark writes of his experience engaging with diverging viewpoints about what is important in business school teaching and learning, wondering “where everyone went” as he reflects on his time(s) serving as dean. The view from the top offers challenges to maintaining relevance and connection to what is happening on the ground, particularly when a dean truly loves being in the classroom with students and engaging with those “micro” types of teaching and learning imperatives. Of his own transition from faculty member to dean, Stark notes that the change was quite literally overnight in the new ways he had to consider what he did day-to-day.
Of the myriad issues she could have treated as dean of a large U.K. institution connected with a host of external stakeholders, Catherine Cassell chose four complex yet specific challenges she has faced as dean: how the high-velocity external environment affects teaching, how teaching should be evaluated, how teaching expertise is developed, and how curriculum is crafted and updated. Writing from within what she calls the audit and performance cultures of the U.K. higher educational institution, her article shares a roadmap of sorts for readers to get to the heart of a dean’s perspective in a rapidly shifting environment—the macro issues that keep deans awake at night.