Fragmentation in academic leadership
Administrative roles in academia have never been the pinnacle of academic life. “Congratulations or condolences?” the saying goes when people hear of a leadership appointment. Quite often, no one wants the roles, and so faculty are “voluntold,” or rotate through them, sharing the duty as part of their university service, and learning leadership skills along the way. Of course, there are some who want the roles, for the opportunities for greater change they promise. And occasionally, there are people who want the power and the attention. Very few enter academia with administration as a goal and most lead it grateful they have managed to avoid it.
Here at the end of 2024, it has never been a worse time to enter higher education administration as a professor. College and university presidents are being called to congress to answer gotcha questions, only to resign under pressure for insisting on nuance. Balancing budgets and the competing interests of students, families, politicians, and donors is an impossible task. And the incoming President of the United States and his Vice President have declared universities a prime target, invoking Richard Nixon, and is recently unearthed statement that the “the professor is enemy.” Anyone considering any visible college or university leadership role does so now clear eyed: the coming years will be a stressful, grueling, political war of institutional survival.
And yet, as some of you know, about three months I began a 40% role as our Information School’s Associate Dean for Academics. Its far from the level of pressure of a university president, dean, or chair — it is classic middle management, balancing the needs of my Dean, Provost, and President, and 2,000+ students, 75+ faculty, 30+ staff that I serve with fixed budget and growing costs. But in many ways, it is a role exposed to all of the same political attacks as upper leadership. We teach classes on misinformation, algorithmic bias, racial, gender, and disability justice; our faculty, students, and staff are white, cis, upper-middle class men, but also Black, brown, Indigenous, queer, trans, disabled, and poor. I myself can easily be labeled enemy number one, as a queer and trans leftist who does research on educational justice that builds upon ideas of critical race theory and systems of oppression. And I oversee academic programs in which we teach our students about power, marginalization, and oppression, as much as we do data science, software development, and information technology. Being in progressive Seattle, in the one state in the recent election that did not swing right, we are an easy target, and my Dean and I, and many others, will be the ones to manage those academic crises.
So how has it been going? Well I’m not about to get into the details; I’ve learned enough about leadership to know that much of that is between me, my staff, and the faculty leaders who support our academic mission. I’ve started a lot of things, and they’re still very much in motion, so it’s going to take some time before we can call them a success or failure. And if they don’t work, I’ll be the first to take ownership of the mistakes, and leave those who report to me out of it. Partly what it means to be a leader is to save the progress reports for the stakeholders they serve, and many reading this are not in those groups.
But I am happy to share my experience of academic leadership so far, both for faculty in the community who are curious about administrative life, and for anyone else who is curious about the work, given it’s visibility in American politics right now. I’ll start with the things that I’m enjoying:
- I can pursue change. The role is a genuine opportunity to make change, in a local way, toward equity. In the past three months, I’ve started initiatives to seriously address access to learning for students with disabilities, to reduce friction in student life, to make the work of our staff more sustainable and human. None of these are anywhere near done, but I’m excited every day to keep chipping away at them, and grateful to have so many faculty and staff colleagues who share the same goals.
- It feeds my organization compulsion. I’ve enjoyed trying to bring order to chaos. I knew ever since I was a child that I had a strong compulsion to organize and explain. These two skills are key in small, growing organizations, where the weight of disorderly process and policy can lead to frustration, friction, and a sense of powerlessness. It’s a long, never-ending process, as entropy is always growing, but I do get satisfaction from finding a painful point of uncertainty and squashing it.
- It’s an opportunity to demonstrate integrity. I like learning how to bring humanity to leadership. I don’t think that’s particularly easy — I have to own decisions that make things decidedly worse, and often in ways that prioritize the survival of an institution over individuals’ wellbeing. And I’m certainly not succeeding at regularly yet. But searching for ways to avoid that by trying to see and know the harm of my decisions sustains my moral integrity in a way that is surprisingly important to my wellbeing.
Some of you are probably thinking, “Wow, that’s it? That’s not a very convincing list!” And you’re right. Academic leadership, probably like many forms of leadership, isn’t particularly glamorous, and wanting to do it badly is usually a strong sign that you shouldn’t. The joy is primarily in the struggle, not in the outcomes, which are often hard won, distant, and rare.
And then, there are the hard parts, which can easily wash away the upsides. I’ve found three challenges so far that I think structure the difficulties of academic leadership, and consume a significant portion of my limited time to manage. Let’s talk about them, and them circle back to the ways I think they affect the bigger political attacks on academia that are underway.
Extreme focus fragmentation
Fragmented focus is not unique to academic leadership, or even leadership in general. All of us struggle to allocate our attention in mindful ways, particularly with the many sources of interruption and distraction in the world. Faculty life has a particularly high degree of this because we cram so many jobs into one: scholar, teacher, volunteer, evaluator, recruiter, manager, fundraiser, speaker, and more. These many different roles, and our freedom to overcommit, means that we often divide our attention in ways that threaten our ability to succeed at any of them.
My argument here is that administrative life amplifies fragmentation to an untenable extreme. Because my role is 40%, I still have research, teaching, and other service to attend to. By the numbers, I have 5 doctoral students, 1 postdoc, 7 undergraduate researchers, 5–10 research papers I write each year, 2 classes to prepare and teach, $3.5 million in grants to manage, grant proposals to write, an academic journal to edit with 25+ submissions each month, 15–20 tenure and promotion letters to write per year, another 30 student letters of recommendation, 2–3 university committees, 2–3 national or international committees, and the occasional invited talk to prepare and give. That is what I do with 60% of my time; the administrative role comes with 4 staff direct reports, 5 faculty program chairs to support, 35 staff overall, and more than 2,000 students who advocate to me for change. My dean offered a release of two classes, research funding, and full summer salary to make this workable.
An dyet, all of those disparate responsibilities mean that my week is one of constant switching between not only tasks, but entirely different domains of thought and leadership. At any given time, my goal might be managing our school’s academic budget, envisioning the future of our field’s peer review, managing a complex theoretical problem for a research paper, designing some instruction for my class, or giving a public talk at another university about big ideas.
The only way I’ve found to defragment my focus is to defragment my time. I’ve taken advantage of the fact that most people have to work around my schedule to do this.
- I reserve Mondays and Wednesdays for research, with a 4 hour block on each morning for focused research time (research paper and grant writing, reading), and 4 hours in the afternoon for meetings with collaborators and students. On those days, I do my best to not read administrative email or do administrative tasks; I mainly just respond to requests from staff who are blocked by something can respond to in a minute.
- On Tuesdays, I go to a different building (the “UW Tower”) and do 4 hours of administrative tasks in the morning, then 4 hours of administrative meetings in the afternoon. I spend Thursday afternoon in more administrative meetings, but in a different building, where different staff are.
- On Thursdays mornings, I do 2 hours of Editor-in-Chief work for ACM Transactions on Computing Education, and then 2 hours of other service work (primarily advocacy, including CS for All Washington and other community building, but also tenure and promotion letters, award committees, and other peer review). These forms of external service are unavoidable and a part of senior faculty life (though I could probably do fewer).
- Friday is a free-for-all of faculty meetings, committee meetings, and administrative tasks, wherever I can fit them in during the chaos of the day.
- Oh, and I teach Wednesday nights from 5:30–6:50, a research studio on Wordplay. In Spring, I will also teach Monday and Thursday 4:30–6:20.
- I squeeze in lunch breaks to do email from 12–1 each day, and sometimes a research seminar.
These segments of time ensure that I can put my attention on one domain at a time, freeing me to have research days, administration days, and service days. The large blocks of task time also enable me to give sustained attention to longer term projects.
This is far from perfect, of course. My Dean and other committees don’t work around my schedule, and so there are exceptions all over my calendar that I can’t control. In practice, this means that I usually only get 1–3 hours of contiguous focus time maybe twice per week, even with significant efforts to protect that time. That severely limits the pace of work on long term goals, but also the complexity of the goals I work on. It often takes 1–2 hours just to get back into a hard problem, which only leaves me 1 hour a week at most of time for deep thought about it. Extrapolate to a year, and the number of distinct goals I have to work on, and that probably means 3–4 hours of progress on each big goal each year. Yikes!
And the time commitment is unsustainable. I am most well working 45 hours a week, but at the moment, my Monday through Friday are 7:30–6, and I often have to do overflow work all day Saturday from 8–5, especially on tasks that require much more in-depth focus time. A typical week is 65 hours, with the most extreme weeks full of crises upwards of 70–75. This should decline after the staff reorganization I began last Spring is fully implemented by this coming Spring and a subset of my administrative tasks disappear or can be delegated to a new staff leader, but for now, it is a grueling schedule.
Extreme space fragmentation
By space, I do mean literal physical space, and particularly our ability to gather in it. And I don’t just mean being scattered across many buildings (our Information School is currently scattered across five buildings and as much as 20 minute walks, which certainly doesn’t help). I mean the opportunities for people who need to collaborate to be in synchronous communication with another.
The essence of this challenge is that I have many people to collaborate with, who also have fragmented focus, and we all need different things from another. In normal faculty life, this fragmentation is normal. As a journal Editor, I need decisions from Associate Editors that would benefit from conversation, but we are distributed across five continents and all time zones, so that’s not going to happen easily. As a research mentor to my postdocs and doctoral students, we need time to brainstorm, whiteboard, build trust. As a teacher, having a physical, collocated space to share with students enables serendipity, active learning, and relationship building. Orchestrating these gatherings requires an elaborate amount of planning to allocate physical space and time.
Academic leadership requires collocation for many things: to build trust amongst teams and supervisees, to give voice to staff, faculty, and students who feel disempowered, to make joint decisions that require dialog. A student organization reached out recently asking that I join their in-person town hall on a Thursday from 5:30–7; I told them that they should invite the program chair of their masters program instead, but they insisted that face time with me was crucial at this time of leadership transition — and they are right. Like teaching, administrative work is relational, and doing it well means sharing space with people to build and maintain those relationships. Unfortunately, because of administrative focus fragmentation, finding time to share space is exceptionally difficult. We are in different buildings, different campuses, different time zones. Many of the people I work with have physical disabilities that limit their mobility. Some have caregiving duties that put sharp constraints on their work times. Add all of those together, and any group larger than three becomes quite difficult to connect.
There are several fallbacks, each with their limitations. If physical collocation is important, than we wait for it, finding the time in three weeks we are all free, waiting for that annual conference. The time scale for any administrative work that requires collocation stretches into weeks or months, and then places great pressure on that limited time to be extremely well-prepared. If it is not, it is viewed as wasted, and teams fall back to remote synchronous meetings. These can often happen sooner, but at the expense of some of the relationship maintenance that only collocation can offer, as well as at the expense of mindful presence, as most attendees on that video chat are at least sometimes doing something else. The last resort is to move to asynchronous, which works for many tasks — information gathering, ideation, analysis, and coordination—but is downright abysmal for building and maintaining working relationships.
I manage this by trying to be mindful about choosing the appropriate medium for the work:
- Is there a new relationship to form? Is the work complex, requires deliberation, dialog, and decision making by a group? We wait for an ample block of collocated time, and plan it aggressively, to ensure those relationships are built, and the the hard work gets done. Recently, that’s been things like our Fall Dean’s retreat and my weekly huddles with my direct reports. Those are in-person by default.
- If the work is primarily about sharing information, analyzing and critiquing, or generating ideas, I make a shared document, and we do it asynchronously, letting everyone fit it into whatever focus time they have. There is no need for that to happen in shared space.
Extreme stakeholder fragmentation
For most faculty, their research and teaching roles have relatively focused stakeholder groups, even when there are complexities within those communities. Researchers have a research audience, and maybe a complex public audience that is secondary. Even community-engaged work can focus on a community and it’s particular fragmentation. The same is generally true of teaching: whatever diversity in stakeholder needs shows up in a classroom, it is often constrained to the particular course design a professor has envisioned. In both of these, the people to please may be diverse in their wishes, but they are relatively manageable and knowable.
In academic leadership, the stakeholder groups are far more numerous and often unknowable. In just the past three months, here are some of the groups whose needs I’ve had to serve:
- My Dean’s vision and goals.
- Over 2,000 students across five academic programs.
- My 75+ faculty’s personal and professional needs.
- My 35+ staff’s personal and professional needs.
- Over 2,000 students across five academic programs, trying to pay for school, manage their time, and navigate our institutional friction.
- Prospective students from across the world, who want to join our programs or do research with me.
- Parents and families, who email and call me, frustrated and demanding about our institution’s failures, and what are their taxes paying for anyway?
- Faculty and staff leaders in the university, including those governing IT, Accessibility, Human Resources, Student Conduct, Title IX, and more. Their work is often shaped by regulatory and legal changes, like the recent Department of Justice ruling about digital content accessibility for public institutions.
- My Provost’s vision and goals; I have never met her.
- My President’s vision and goals; I met her once for 15 seconds.
- State Representatives and Senators in our state legislature, who have their own political agendas.
- Board of Regents, appointed by the Governor, who have divergent views of the mission and values of our university.
- Queer and trans students seeking refuge in Seattle, looking for guidance on how to find their way here.
- Random citizens, who seem to view me as a source of free consultation, because I am a public employee.
- Industry partners, who support our school, but also see our graduates as a source of talent.
I wonder what other stakeholder groups, especially at the federal level, who might come knocking in the next four years?
Every single one of those groups is a source of email, advocacy, policy change, process change, change in school resources, and it’s partly my job to take in all of those changes, organize them, decide what is important, and act upon them, and then communicate to everyone whose priority I didn’t choose that they will have to wait. And of course, progress comes perhaps 2–3 hours a week of focus at a time, which means addressing all of the decrees and demands for change is slow and frustrating for anyone who’s reached out.
I defragment stakeholder needs through a few practices:
- I built Adminima to help us track change requests and organize information about them. A spreadsheet would have been easier to create, but quickly becomes unruly, because there is so much text and documentation about each change and it’s hard to make views of it that are legible. Issue tracking tools like Jira, Trello, GitHub Issues, and other project management tools can also work, but are really built for projects, not ongoing administrative work that spans years, and is deeply entwined with organizational processes and policies, as opposed to a product. Adminima also lets us make some change requests public, which increases transparency, reducing or streamlining requests from stakeholders for status updates.
- I have an Academic Operations Manager, the wonderful Victor Aque, who organizes all of the incoming information in Adminima. We meet weekly for an hour to triage new information, reprioritize work, identify who we are blocked on, and celebrate when we resolve a change request. Having someone own that change management work allows me to focus on the changes themselves.
This defragmentation makes the information manageable, but it doesn’t make the volume tractable. We currently have 92 active change requests and growing, each requiring my attention and decision, spanning all of the groups above, and roughly 2–3 get my decision time each week during my fragmented focus time. The rest of my time is just taking in information.
Academic leadership, wither or flourish?
People who know me know that I am good at these problems above. I manage my time and tasks effectively, I’m conscientious and responsive. I do not forget things and I reach due dates, often in advance. This is not boasting; I just know how many faculty struggle with productivity, because I mentor so many seeking advice, and so I’ve learned that I excel at it.
That all of the above seems intractable to me, even with strong tools, staff support, practices, and mentorship, is a strong sign that academic leadership roles are intrinsically intractable. It is not simply a matter of skill or organization. These jobs are hard, and there are few reasons to entice people to them. I’m sure this has been true for decades, and it has only become more so as colleges and universities have recently become a target by fascists in power.
What then does this mean for the current and coming attacks on the college and university leadership? I think there are many:
- If academic leaders don’t have their shit together — I barely do, despite being good it — I am not confident in their capacity to respond to the attacks and crises to come. Now — even the next month!— is the time to get organized, to create capacity, to sharpen those practices, because the crises will break them otherwise. Since that’s hard, I expect many leaders to fall, many academic units to buckle, further eroding what little motivation there is to take academic leadership positions, because who wants to clean up a mess? And we all know what happens to institutions without strong leaders: they die.
- Because aligning focus, space, and stakeholders can be so hard, and the challenges to come are so complex in scale and crisis, it’s time to start thinking about more extreme measures to defragment. I’ve seen some academic units ban email and meetings on particular weeks of a quarter or semester, or pile everyone’s classes onto 3 days week to ensure the other two days are available for focus time. The classic study, The Time Famine, might be a good guide for ways to restructure time to meet our needs. These are controversial measures, and hard to enforce, but if there is to be time to come together to act, it is essential.
- Implicit in all of the above are daily, hourly decisions about what to attend to. That means sorting out your values, communicating them, and sticking to them when things get hard. That’s how we decide not only what to say in times of crises, but at the much lower level, what changes to prioritize or pause, what meetings to have, and what to do with our limited resources. I decided to write this on a Sunday morning instead of working on a hobby project, because I needed to sort out for myself the nature of the challenges ahead before I felt capable of taking a break. But now, I will take a week of rest, recenter myself around my values, so I can come to 2025 a bit refreshed, ready to stress test my preparation and principles.
With all of that, it’s entirely reasonable to wonder why I or anyone else continues to do academic leadership. I mentioned my measly reasons above, and there’s always a vague sense of duty to keep us in the work. But I think the real reason for myself, underlying all of this struggle, is that I fundamentally believe in academia’s promise as an institution. We are the last institution that prioritizes truth, inquiry, dialog, and learning over all else, and as often as our faculty and leaders abandon those values to serve capitalism or political power, we also continue to embrace them, and place them at the center of our teaching, research, and activism. That cannot be said of industry, of government, of communities, of philanthropy, or even of many other not-for-profits, who are beholden to the many of these other institutions to serve their missions. We educate the future generations who will lead us, and in trade, imagine the futures that might be on society’s behalf. That is an institution I will fight for, as flawed as it is, no matter how hard it is.