Reflections of a Failed Dean

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It's not working out. Is it the structure of the institution? Is it the faculty? Is it the president? Is it you? From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

"They say they can't work with you." With those words from the president, my life as chief academic officer ceased. Oh, I stayed on the job for a long time after that, but my value as a dean was effectively derailed. My career at, let's call it Hogwarts College, had ended . . . I'm a failed dean. There are a lot of us out here, but since many of us want to continue working for a living, we don't reveal ourselves, and we don't say much . . . There's a great deal of advice given to chief academic officers, and ever since my failure, I've read it assiduously to get a sense of what I did wrong.

Ask the Administrator: The Etiquette of Postmortems

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How useful is a critical look at a former CAO's successes and failures?

It's a tricky situation. When someone leaves campus, it's easy to make her the scapegoat after the fact for all manner of things. But since she'll still be around, that won't be as easy. And that's probably just as well . . . A study a few years ago found that the average length of service for a chief academic officer at an American college is three years. That's astonishingly short, but it makes sense when you consider the multiple and conflicting demands of the position. For someone to last as long as yours did, she must have been good at something.