Things They Don't Teach You in Grad School

As I was speaking at a faculty meeting the other day, I had a thought that comes to me with some regularity these days: Right now, almost nothing I do in my job as dean of the faculty is directly related to what I learned in graduate school, or to my original plans when set out to earn my Ph.D.

Does that surprise you? Read more from The Chronicle of Higher Education:

I certainly never thought that I would become an administrator, at least beyond the department chair level. Even as a visiting instructor, though, I quickly developed an intense interest in how my college worked. The analytical thinking and institutional skepticism inculcated by scholarly training in my discipline (English) most definitely contributed to that interest. I think they also made me a pain to our administration in ways that I now understand quite thoroughly.

But budgeting, student recruitment and retention, strategic planning, facilities, personnel, and other issues that I now deal with almost daily were definitely not on my agenda back then. Even as a young professor, a lot of the issues I encountered were simply not part of my graduate training. Life as a new faculty member was full of surprises, not all of them pleasant. The relative purity of graduate school’s scholarly agenda does not fit that cleanly with the life the vast majority of college and university faculty members end up leading.