Passing Houdini-like Through the Eye of the Needle: Entering the Academy Through Administration

by Chris Cumo

We’ve all heard the myth about the talented young idealist
who applied for an assistant professorship at Northwestern Trans Mississippi Valley State University in Idaho only to receive a rejection letter six months later stating that she had been among 300 applicants. If the search committee had considered all candidates of roughly equal merit, our applicant had had just one chance in 300 of landing the job. The odds of contracting yellow fever from a mosquito bite while on vacation in Bangladesh are probably more favorable.

But like a camel passing Houdini-like through the eye of a needle, one might enter the academy by another route. Consider administration. Ronald H. Heck, Chair of the Department of Educational Administration, has served on search committees at the University of Hawaii-Manoa in Honolulu for administrators at several ranks. The typical job advertisement attracts 50 applications, two-thirds of which “just don’t meet the minimum or desired qualifications,” says Heck. This leaves roughly 16 candidates for, say, Assistant Director of Paleolithic Studies in the Department of Anthropology. You’re in the hunt because you meet the minimum requirements; otherwise you wouldn’t have applied. You’re odds are not one in 300 but one in 16 (six percent), still low but 20 times better than your chances of teaching at that university in Idaho. Even if the same dynamics apply for both jobs, you’re chances of becoming Assistant Director are still six times better than those of becoming assistant professor.

“I’d wanted to be an English professor since my freshman year of college,” says Jamie Moss. “But…by the time I’d finished my Ph.D. in 1999, I’d begun to feel like I was putting my whole life on hold just to chase after that elusive job.”

The chase landed him a three-year appointment at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. After that, he faced the prospect of being just another underemployed academic. In July 2001, he left Georgia Tech for a dot.com that sold software to schools and nonprofits. A neighbor who worked at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia knew of an opening in development and gave Moss’ resume to the director. Moss is now Director of Annual Giving at the seminary.

He admits to an occasional longing for the “intellectual stimulation” of the classroom. The professor, hands coated with chalk dust, is the stuff of college brochures. She joins students in mourning the death of Willy Loman, in condemning the drunken excesses of Joseph McCarthy, in pondering the relationship between Neanderthal and modern Homo sapiens. The question of whether Blanche DuBois or Mitochondrial Eve is sexier, if it can be asked at all, can only be asked by someone with tenure.

The danger lies in dichotomy, in the tendency to separate administration and teaching. Theresa I. Madonna, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, does both. She teaches Strategic Management and Business Policy. Ann Saltzman, Co-Director of the Drew University Center for Holocaust/Genocide Studies in Madison, New Jersey, has taught Holocaust courses since 1990. She also teaches a seminar in the psychology of the Holocaust, social psychology, and the psychology of women. None of this means that teaching in addition to a full-time job in administration is easy. Jaime Moss, Director of Annual Giving at Columbia Theological Seminary, puts in his share of weeks that top 60 hours and has no plans to teach.

Administrators who don’t teach have other ways of staying current in and connected to their fields. Rebecca J. Sutcliffe, Acting Director of Research and Curriculum Innovation in the Division of Research at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, funds her research through grants from the university.

“It’s the best of both worlds really, and although I didn’t plan it that way it couldn’t have worked out better,” says Sutcliffe.

High turnover means lots of openings, and may explain why administrative jobs are more plentiful than full-time faculty lines.

“Just look at an organizational flow chart to get a feel for the number of administrators at a university,” says Deborah Floyd, an associate professor in the College of Education at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.

The Boston College Career Center lists 37 categories of jobs in higher-education administration. Each category in turn branches into a thicket of subcategories. The result is a system in which administrators and staff outnumber full-time faculty, says Jane Fried, professor in the School of Education and Professional Studies at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain.

The market dynamics are clear to Gary Rhoades, Director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

“Almost all the jobs in [administration] are full-time in comparison to faculty positions for which the growth area is part-time,” says Rhoades. “In short, higher-education programs are staffing all sorts of non-faculty positions in colleges and universities. Jobs can be found quite readily for both M.A. and Ph.D. folks at salaries that generally exceed those of faculty in education or the social science and humanities.”

Kathleen Aronson’s salary started at $30,000 a year, rose to $45,000 in two years and now she earns $62,500 as Assistant Director of Development at the University of Texas in Austin. During the 2002-2003 academic year, a chief academic officer at a college or university averaged $116,366 a year, an executive vice president averaged $125,000, and a president earned $164,686, according to a survey published in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

However, the field also includes plenty of staffers, the equivalents of utility players in baseball, the guys who play second base or right field in the ninth inning with their team down 11-3. Lower level positions in career services, Greek life, judicial affairs, admissions, and in other areas that multiply with the size of a university earn little, says Suzanne Estler, associate professor of higher educational leadership at the University of Maine in Orono.

These are the “high-burnout positions,” requiring one to travel and work nights and weekends, says Michael Miller, Associate Dean of the College of Education at San Jose State University in California. Those in senior positions suffer burn-out, as well.

“If an institution has a president and a high-pressure physics professorship, the presidency will likely turn over two or three times before the professorship does,” says Robert Ackerman, clinical associate professor of educational leadership at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.

Even when pay is low and turnover high, administrative jobs can be enticing. Donald Snyder, Career Specialist at Kent State University’s Career Services Center in Kent, Ohio, has the same medical, dental and vision coverage as faculty. Because he is single, Snyder pays nothing out-of-pocket. Like faculty at all public colleges and universities in Ohio, Snyder pays into the State Teachers Retirement System, and can expect the same pension as a faculty member with the same number of years’ service. To benefits such as these, Jaime Moss of the Columbia Theological Seminary, adds sick leave and two-weeks for continuing education. Vacation is the one perk about which administrators and staff cannot boast. Whereas faculty reckon time off in months, Moss knows he is fortunate to have four weeks.

Another enticement is the fact that programs in higher-education administration place graduates in administrative and staff positions at rates far and above those programs that churn out faculty apprentices. Florida Atlantic University places all its education administration graduates, says associate professor Deborah Floyd. So does Stanford University, says Patricia J. Gumport, an associate professor of education and Director of the Stanford Institute for Higher Education Research.

Robert Schwartz, an associate professor and Coordinator of Higher Education Administration at Florida State University in Tallahassee puts the program’s graduate placement rate “close to 100 percent over the last five years.”

James P. Duncan, Ashbel Smith Professor and Program Director of Higher Education Administration at the University of Texas in Austin likewise cites a rate “at least close to 100 percent.”

By contrast, Modern Language Association surveys resigned consistently point out the fact that half the English and foreign-language Ph.D.s won’t get tenure-line faculty positions their first year on the market.
Donald Snyder, Career Specialist at Kent State University, attributes the high placement rates of academic administration programs to their focus on career preparation. Snyder is not an academic. He spent nine years in radio broadcasting before entering Kent’s M.A. program in higher-education administration. Kent State required Snyder, like everyone else on assistantship, to intern twenty hours per week in an administrative or staff post at a college, university, or nonprofit. He chose career services at Kent. Others have interned at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio and at the Cleveland Art Institute. In addition to an internship each semester, Kent State requires students to take two practicums, both of which mandate ten-hour internships, but in separate areas to broaden a student’s competitiveness for jobs. Kent places 95 percent of graduates.

Associate professor Deborah Floyd of Florida Atlantic University encourages temporary faculty to consider careers in administration. She suggests that those interested in making the switch from teaching to administration focus on two or three areas and talk to administrators to learn what skills each area requires and how to get that first job. If you already have the skills, build your CV around them and start applying for positions.

“You should survey your entire life to find skills that you can market,” says Anne Whisnant, Mellon Project Manager at Duke University’s John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute.

If you don’t have the skills, take a course in organizational leadership and management, says Deborah Floyd. Dress like an administrator.

“It’s a suit world,” says Floyd. “Pants, a shirt and a bow tie might be okay if you’re faculty, but not if you want to move into administration.”

Most important of all, build relationships and network.

“I never applied for a job merely by sending in my resume,” says Jaime Moss, Director of Annual Giving at Columbia Theological Seminary. “All the people who saw it did so because one of their friends handed it to them and said, ‘This person would be good for the job.’ Getting those contacts was crucial.”

Working in academic administration is not about how much you’ve published or taught. To play the game you have to know the right people. To win the game you have to become one of the right people.

“Who you know is important,” says Deborah Floyd of Florida Atlantic University. “You need to network.”

The preoccupation with networking underscores that academe is bifurcated into two worlds: the professorate and administration. The secret of becoming an assistant professor must be encoded in the Dead Sea Scrolls, for no rational process can be at work. You can do everything right–publish, teach well, volunteer to serve on committees–and still be among the 299 with a CV dead on arrival. By contrast, administration has a career path: coursework, internship, job. Don Snyder needed only one internship at Kent State University’s Career Services Center to land a job there.

“There are jobs in higher education,” says Deborah Floyd. “You just need to find one that’s right for you.”