The best way to be an academic administrator is to give it as little attention as necessary.
Minimizing the importance of leadership can be the worst form of academic administration. This is the attitude that leaves important skills and responsibilities undeveloped, ignored, or held with disdain.
It’s treating academic administration as a necessary evil. It produces what evil produces: harm to all involved.
Faculty, staff, and students are left to cope, compensate, fall through the cracks, give up, succeed in spite of, get angry, or retreat to a micro-environment with a different reality.
But this same comment can also represent the best of academic leadership.
At its best, this is a leader who knows where and how to set priorities and boundaries in order to succeed on all fronts.
They know what their role requires and they develop the most efficient and effective strategies to accomplish those goals – for this department/college/university, this moment in time, with this person in the role.
This is the academic leader who knows how much and how little their role matters in relation to the central missions of academia (teaching, research, the advancement of society). And they can bring humor and perspective to the very real challenge of this paradox.
To lead or not to lead…that’s not really the question.
Academic organizations need a structure to function, and faculty leadership is necessary to that structure.
Taking on administrative roles with reluctance, apathy, and disdain accomplishes very little and creates a host of problems.
Smart academics bring intelligence to the role, defining scholar leader as the way to be.
