I am an Associate Dean for Academics
TLDR: It’s a 40% role overseeing all teaching and learning in the UW iSchool. I’ll still do 40% research, 10% teaching, and 10% other service. I’m humbled by the responsibility of holding this much power. But I’m also excited to help create a culture of support and excellence in teaching, a humane and equitable workplace for our staff, and with them, a more accessible and equitable learning community for our 2,000+ students.
Does anyone really know what they wanted to do when they “grew up”? Throughout primary school, I thought I might write comics or groom cats. In middle school, I thought maybe I’d be mathematician or a video game designer, or play for a third string regional basketball team. In high school I fell in love with writing and books and thought I might write melancholy, low drama novels about star crossed friendships on long haul boats. My interests in coding and illustration were always there, but my career goals? Wildly unstable, and all bound up in an ambivalence about the fake me I was building to hide my gender troubles. Careers were people with futures; my game was survival.
That all changed Spring quarter of my 1st year of college. I was a shy computer science and psychology major, quickly realizing that the computer science I had learned on my own was not the one taught in school, and apparently not the one used in industry. I didn’t like any of them. But the bright pink undergraduate research assistant sign adversing a summer of discovery compelled me: $0.50 cents/hour more than the dormitory wifi installation job I’d found, and I’d get to explore, create, and learn? Sign me up! By the end of that summer hanging out with Margaret Burnett and Thomas R.G. Green thinking about spreadsheets, bugs, and in situ learning, I was sold. I wanted to be a professor, not have a boss, and just read, learn, teach, invent, and discover for a living.
That career goal was pretty fixed since the summer of 1999. Starting grad school, that was my goal. A wonderful summer interning at Microsoft Research in 2006 gave me pause, but ultimately wasn’t as compelling as a blend of teaching and discovery. Starting as faculty in 2008, I felt like I’d found my little nest, and the career quandary was solved. Even going on leave for two years in 2012 to found a software startup felt like a temporary detour. I always knew I would return to academia, where at least 50% of my time was my own, and the rest was full of curious young adults, creative colleagues, and the constant friction of not-for-profit scarcity. And just maybe it would be a place where I could be secure enough to sort out the rot in my suffocated identity.
When I returned from my startup and sabbatical, and my dean asked me to oversee our undergraduate program, it felt there was suddenly a hole in the floor of my cozy home. I didn’t sign up to manage resources and staff, I was here for the ideas! But curriculum was interesting, and so I chewed on that for several years, trying to steer our students’ learning in interesting directions. I didn’t quite fall in love with administration — it always felt like trying to make a cake with water and flour —but it certainly wasn’t boring. I think, for me, the joy was in the political part of it: trying to build consensus, work through the art of the possible, create coalitions around problems. It wasn’t as exciting as the big ideas in my scholarship, or trying radical pedagogies in my teaching, but it was exciting enough to displace some of that work out of duty.
When I went on sabbatical in 2022, I had a hunch that my dean would ask me to step up for more when I returned. I was good at the work, and very few others were willing to do it. But that year on leave was an existential one. I had only come out in late 2019, then promptly spent 2 years in global pandemic administrative hell, and 6 months recovering from a life changing major surgery. Is more administration really what I needed? Or did I deserve something different. I felt the dean’s future ask simmering under the freedom, creative joy, and self discovery of sabbatical.
When I got back, he did ask. The current Associate Dean for Academics had been in the role for 17 years. Will you take on the role and shape it into something that other faculty would be willing to do in the future? It was a vote of confidence, to be sure, but also far heavier an question than I expected. It was certainly not what I thought I’d be when I grew up. All that thinking I had done about whether I wanted it hadn’t really prepared me for what it would mean to be responsible for five academic programs, 75 faculty’s teaching, 30+ staff, and the primary revenue stream of a growing, complex, information school.
I talked to several people in similar positions for guidance. Some pointed out the joy of pivoting to administration. Others talked about brief tours of duty, as if administrative life was conscription into war. One told me flatly, you don’t have to do this; your needs matter too. That one brought me to tears, making me realize how many of my choices in life were more about meeting other people’s expectations to avoid having to face myself, or just survival, after an unstable, lower-middle class childhood. Only a few years after coming out as transgender, and only a year of true time to settle into my actual self after a global pandemic slowed down, wasn’t a stressful leadership role the last thing that I needed? I don’t even like holding power. I’m overwhelmed by the moral hazard.
I decided to do my due diligence and work through the pros and the cons. The downsides were clear: stress from workload, conflict, and crisis, and worsened split attention between research, teaching, service, and administration. Thankless, complex work that most people in academia do not understand and do not value. Blame for systems failure. The common question in academia, “congratulations or condolences?”, given to someone tapped to be a department chair or administrative leader, usually refers to these specific downsides to academic leadership.
The pros were harder to find. But I found some and they ended up being very personal and situational:
- Despite a year of sabbatical, even a quarter back to teaching at scale and I was burned out. I found myself angry at students and impatient with their unwillingness to talk, attend class, and write. ChatGPT, lockdowns, and social media in general seemed to have changed them, and not for the better. No matter how hard I tried, my efforts to try to find a spark of curiosity in them mostly led to resistance and blank stares — “I’m not here to learn”, they would say, “I’m here to get a job.” I think I needed a break from industrialized education, to rediscover my patience.
- I love a juicy wicked problem, and our iSchool’s particular potpourri of academic program diversity, faculty diversity, and student diversity was a compelling one. Would it be possible to meaningfully address faculty, staff, and student inequities, redesign our teaching for students of all abilities, and create a culture of teaching excellence? My curious brain wanted to find out, either how, or if not, why not, and tell everyone.
- Something about a mixture of research and administration felt compelling. Maybe there would be a different cadence to life being behind the scenes rather than in the inevitable chaos of the classroom. I was curious to try.
I negotiated with my dean, landed on a 40% role, two tiny classes (one in the College of Education preparing CS teachers, one a research studio with undergrads working on Wordplay), one doctoral student slot per year, full summer support, an administrative salary bump, and a commitment to support the long necessary academics reorganization necessary to make that 40% possible. That, plus the curiosity and healing above, and a strong sense of duty, were enough for a mildly enthusiastic yes.
The rest of the 2023–24 academic year was shadowing with our current Associate Dean for Academics, the ever plucky Matt Saxton. Week by week, I picked up the full scope of his role, slivers of 17 years of tacit knowledge, and joined a group of other Associate Deans on campus for some peer support. It was a good 9 months of observing the role, but not quite doing it, plus planning an extremely complex reorganization.
That brings me to today, my first official day in the role. While it’s exciting, the full weight of balancing research and administration is already settling in. I have a dozen budget requests from faculty and staff; another dozen special cases to triage; a massive backlog of policy to write to address inequities and streamline work; and all the usual maintenance of teaching assignments, course planning, academic misconduct, and more. I am quite good at managing an overwhelming number of responsibilities, but this volume already feels only just barely possible. I suppose that means I’m learning!
One of the projects I worked on as a hobby to try to make it more possible is a wonky web app called Adminima. I’d noticed a gap in our administrative work, where roles were ill defined, processes weren’t written down, and the accountability and responsibility in the organization were often vague to everyone evolved. As I planned the reorganization, I tried to capture this information, and ended up with a huge unruly spreadsheet with roles in columns and processes in rows, with an A for accountable, R for responsible, C for consulted, and I for informed (an “ARCI chart”, for those in the biz). A spreadsheet was definitely a bad way to represent all of this information (we had nearly 200 processes and 50 roles). Adminima makes it easier to capture all of this information in a way that lets a person in a role focus on the specific processes they are accountable or responsible for. It also makes it easy to capture change requests about an organization. It’s very much a beta, but my new Academics Operations Manager and I are having a great time using it as a way to capture all of the undocumented work that happens, and slowly building out features to help it meet our needs.
If all of this sounds horrifying to you, don’t let that deter you from leadership work. If there’s anything I’ve learned, there is no single reason people do it, or end up liking it. For me, it’s a mix of timing, love of organizing, and the broader goal of enabling great teaching and learning to happen. In the weeds, it doesn’t sound nearly as inspiring, but at that higher level, the north star shines bright. Whether faculty like to admit it or not, nothing good happens in academia without someone to organize the work and resources.
Meanwhile, I have all the usual time for my five PhD students, my postdoc, to write a few grant proposals a year, and carry on with my other external service roles as Editor-in-Chief of ACM TOCE and director of CS for All Washington. All of that is plenty, and probably too much. But at least for now, it’s feeling like just the right eclectic balance of discovery, politics, and systems change that keeps me curious.
Talk to me again in three years and see if I still feel that way :)
