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In mid-2021 I completed the final draft of an essay on medieval abbesses. In it I charted how abbesses had to juggle a host of responsibilities: negotiating with local political leaders, administering complex budgets and estates, and managing the querulous personalities within the convent. As I prepared to write this essay, it occurred to me: these women were basically department chairs and deans! Although revered for their piety, it is striking to me that contemporaries praised two of the abbesses I cited in that essay for their temporal agency: they took charge of the convent's finances and physical plant and made substantial improvements. Additionally, their champions commended their ability to accomplish this because of the security and prosperity it brought to their communities.
And I began to wonder about the ways in which my own experience in higher education administration might be influenced by or a reflection of what I have studied all these years. I have worked at Cleveland State University, a regional public comprehensive institution, for twenty-seven years and have served in various administrative roles. Like the experiences of these abbesses, my work as a department chair and then a dean have been a constant problem-solving exercise at the intersection of people, budgets, and politics. Like these abbesses, what has always mattered most to me is creating strong communities. That community could be a department, a faculty working group, a college, or a curriculum committee.
Yet we receive very little guidance on how to do this work. We step up because it is our turn to be department chair. Maybe we aspire to a higher rung on the administrative ladder, like dean or provost. The one thing I wish I had done differently when I started in these roles was to be deliberately reflective. I stumbled into a leadership style along the way and might have saved myself some trouble if I had thought about it a bit more. That said, I learned on the job, started a reflective practice (in the form of a blog: https://talesoutofschoolblog.wordpress.com) a few years in, and now have been given this opportunity to reflect again.
The literature on leadership is a vast industry and runs the gamut from books of the pop psychology sort to sustained academic...
