From Dean to Deantrepreneur: The Academic Administrator as Translator
By Abby R. Kratz and Dennis M. Kratz
(reprinted from Translation Review 66 (2003))
(pdf version)

The academic title dean derives ultimately from the Latin word decanus, which refers to someone in charge of a group of ten. It was most commonly a Roman military term for the leader of a squad of ten soldiers. Caught in the crossfire of the changes sweeping through higher education, many current deans may find the military origin of their title uncomfortably appropriate. It is all too tempting to apply metaphors of war to all academic administrators, to think of them as the leaders of mercenary soldiers engaged in a noble crusade against ignorance or, less romantically, as under-equipped leaders of learned but unruly soldiers. Many colleges are struggling to establish their niches or "beachheads," are competing for increasingly scarce resources, and are discovering that they need to form strategic alliances to survive.

Without question, the position of dean stands directly in multiple lines of fire. The challenges facing academic deans and the changing nature of the position have spawned a significant corpus of criticism and commentary, with such instructive and intriguing recent titles as The Dilemma of the Deanship, "The Academic Dean: An Imperiled Species Searching for Balance," and The Changing Nature of the Academic Deanship. This essay addresses the role of the dean in an environment of change. We will view that role through the lens of our experience as administrators in a rapidly growing component of a large university system first in light of a conceptual frame developed by Rosabeth Moss Kanter with regard to corporate management in what she calls our "post-entrepreneurial" age. Second, we will posit the emergence of a new model of the deanship, the deantrepreneur, and suggest the implications of this model for the recruitment and preparation of the next generation of academic leaders. Third, we will argue that these changes make translation uniquely relevant to the practice of administration and, by extension, the education of administrators.

At first glance, linking academic administration and translation may seem fanciful, if not perverse. After all, translators have expressed the belief that they suffer a lack of respect in many academic settings. Nonetheless, recent developments in the nature of administration and in the theory of academic leadership, coupled with the emergence of translation as a model for understanding a wide range of cross-cultural communication, suggest that administrators are in fact "translating" much of the time. Therefore, practical acquaintance with the process of translation could make them better communicators and more effective leaders.

As apt as battle metaphor may be for the life of the contemporary dean, it is even more apt to apply to this enterprise imagery drawn from play and game theory, especially as developed by Johan Huizinga and his successors. Game imagery has been applied productively to numerous areas of endeavor. In her influential book When Giants Learn to Dance, Kanter made use of the same metaphor when she urged corporate executives to think of themselves as engaged not in war but in a worldwide fiscal Olympics. To be sure, academic administrators often think of themselves as engaged in games of a particularly challenging variety, games more like cartoonist Bill Watterson's "Calvinball," with its endless improvised variation, addition, and subtraction of rules, than pastimes like baseball or basketball. In a comparison that works equally well for education, Kanter likens the "game" of business to the croquet match in Alice in Wonderland, in which everything, including Alice's mallet (a flamingo), and the ball (a hedgehog with a mind of its own), keeps changing and shifting. The game of higher education in Texas, where we work, includes such new and elusive challenges as the pressures of externally imposed accountability, fiscal constraints allied with an idiosyncratic formula funding system, shifting demographics, diversity initiatives that are often linked with retention goals, and, of course, the far-reaching thrusts of technological advancement.

Indeed, Kanter's research on new approaches to management and the images she uses to relate her findings seem particularly applicable to higher education. Contemporary education at all levels is often likened to a business. Many changes, for better and worse, in current practice have resulted from the application, not excluding the misapplication, of business principles. The parallels between universities and businesses in today's environment of global economy, diversity, and rapid technological change are striking. Kanter's analysis of the situation of business at the start of the last decade as operating in a highly competitive global environment in which traditional hierarchies and assumptions are being continually challenged effectively describes the situation of higher education now. As she noted about business then, we in education are in the midst of an exciting and dangerous era that is a "good time for dreamers and visionaries" only if they are also "disciplined, frugal pragmatists" (Giants, 17-18). In Kanter's prescient words, "the future will belong to those who embrace the potential of wider opportunities but recognize the realities of constrained resources" (Giants, 18).

Another condition links business and education. Scholars in both worlds have been decrying the deleterious effects of fragmentation and extolling the value of systemic solutions and integrated approaches that promote agility, flexibility, and responsiveness. Peter Senge described the 1990s as the decade of "systems integration." Writing of creativity in education, psychologists Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein state that "there is no point in teaching a liberal arts and sciences curriculum that continues to fragment knowledge and creates specialists who cannot communicate across disciplinary lines. Education must focus on the trunk of the tree of knowledge, revealing the ways in which the branches, twigs, and leaves all emerge from a common core" (317). Kanter, who emphasizes the importance of adaptable structures in an era of rapid change, identified the following four characteristics of management that are outmoded and unsuited for the game now being played: elaborate hierarchies, slow decision-making processes, in-house rivalries, and risk-averse behavior (Giants, 344). We wonder how many of these four outmoded qualities still characterize the world of public and higher education. Underlying all four of her undesirable qualities is the assumption that slowness is a liability today, when swift response to rapidly changing conditions is often a requisite for survival. Kanter and others have argued persuasively that the new global environment requires not only new structures that foster innovation and adaptability but also a new kind of leadership. Writing more than a decade ago, Kanter based her proposal on the belief that business had entered a new age characterized by global interaction, an information-based economy, cultural diversity, and rapid technological change. She described this era as "postentrepreneurial" because it requires incorporating entrepreneurship, previously associated with individuals acting independently to create their own companies, into the life of the organization. The key characteristic of the entrepreneurial mind is generally considered to be the ability to recognize and seize opportunities and then convert these opportunities to marketable ideas. Kanter suggested that businesses need to nurture such people and such thinking within their ranks. We need, she declared, the "intrapreneur," or individual whose entrepreneurial actions take place within and for the company and receive organizational sanction, resources, and rewards (see Kuratko, 96). Companies, she argued, had to find a way to create a marriage between entrepreneurial creativity and corporate discipline, cooperation, and teamwork (Giants, 10-11). We suggest that higher education also has joined that era and is bound by its mandates for organizational change. Kanter's analysis proved correct for the world of commerce. It is time for universities to provide leadership and adopt new structures more suited to the demands of the post-entrepreneurial world.

Deans have begun to play an increasingly complex and pervasive role in this new environment. If we are to foster intrapreneurship - the process of creating valuable innovation within an organizational setting - the dean, as the primary liaison between the faculty and everyone else, is a vital link. This new kind of dean, the deantrepreneur, is the intrapreneur who understands the intricacies of the university and the world of education. The deantrepreneur knows how to involve faculty in developing appropriate and positive responses to the educational challenges facing colleges and universities today. The deantrepreneur is a visionary who can raise funds, realizing that vision without funding is hallucination. We suggest that in many universities, he and she already exist. Indeed, a review of the history of the deanship reveals an inexorable evolution of the role from dean to deantrepreneur.

The academic dean, the head of a discipline-specific college within a university, has a long and inconsistent history. It is a role that has never been standardized and is still evolving. Until the 1930s, the deanship tended to focus on student concerns. By the mid-1940s, however, the emphasis had shifted from direct supervision of students to concern specifically with curricula, faculty, and budgets. The addition of responsibility for budgets, along with increasing responsibility for hiring and promoting faculty, raised the status of academic deans and signaled their evolution into a role more like that of business leaders. This business orientation continued to grow during the following decades. To the deans' other considerable duties were added quasi-legal obligations related to grievance mediation, contract termination, and student complaints. During the past decade, the deanship has become increasingly managerial in nature, particularly as presidents began shifting such external duties as alumni relations and fundraising in part to the academic deans. Deans are now expected, in the words of a recent study, to take on administrative identities commonly associated with corporate business managers. These include "figurehead, leader, liaison, monitor, disseminator, spokesperson, entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, and negotiator " (Wolverton, 7-8). The lists of duties assigned to deans by university handbooks and the criteria by which they are evaluated reflect the growing complexity of the position. Advertisements for academic deans today reveal and reflect this evolution. The position now inevitably requires a capacity that has been described as "the maintenance of balance between the various external and internal demands" on universities (Wolverton, 7). The changed nature of the deanship has even reached the press. Consider the lead paragraph of an article that appeared in the Cavalier Daily from the University of Virginia on April 8, 1997: "University officials searching for two new important dean positions are beginning to realize the perfect recipe for a successful dean: a blend of academic background, mixed with leadership abilities and an essential dash of salesmanship " (italics ours). Of course, deans have always had to sell. They represent the agenda of the university to their faculty and persuade the university to provide requisite resources for the research and instruction needs of their College. Today's deans, however, increasingly have to take on a new kind of selling - the activities of fund-raising and friend-raising previously reserved for presidents and development offices. This combination of friend- and fund-raising has become an essential component of deaning. As the Law School Dean at Virginia succinctly declared in the same article: "There's a big difference today versus twenty years ago º [The dean's role] now encompasses not only fund raising but [also] keeping faculty and students competitive and being accountable to the public." Observing that the dean's job often rides on his or her fund-raising record, Ralph Lowenstein, dean emeritus of the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida, has stated, "deans are really graded on their fund-raising ability. That wasn't as true 18 years ago when I became a dean. But today, fund raising is an absolute necessity" (quoted in Mercer, 1).

In sum, the new obligations of fund-raising, friendraising, and serving as a public ambassador have not merely added components to the already full plate of the dean, they have transformed the position. In the new academic world, the dean stands surrounded and buffeted by changes, often changes mandated in response to the pressures cited earlier. The dean works to meet the challenges to institutional and curricular traditions with faculty members who may not be overly fond of change. We posit a new model of the deanship: the deantrepreneur, who can function in the university much as the ideal manager described by Kanter operates in the corporate world. Kanter's approach to success in the "global Olympics" involves three essential strategies: (1) reshape the organization to promote synergies; (2) create alliances within the organization and with external organizations; and (3) foster the development of "newstreams," the new ideas and products that complement and extend the mainstream of the past (Giants, 344).

The implementation of these strategies requires both effective leadership and structural reorganization. The four characteristics of outmoded management that were cited earlier will hinder progress and could even cost victory. They must be replaced by the following integrated fabric of organizational characteristics: streamlined hierarchies, expeditious decision-making, and a collegial atmosphere that supports reasoned risk-taking (Giants, 344-351). The deantrepreneur must acquire the skills and receive training akin to that of his or her corporate counterpart to help bring about this environment in academic institutions.

What are the skills needed to serve effectively as a dean in the post-entrepreneurial academic world of the 21st century? We would argue that the position of dean has evolved, and the deanship now requires individuals adept at results-oriented communication with faculty, with potential supporters, and with the greater community. The dean must become a deantrepreneur and in that role must increasingly engage in activities related to translation.

We observe that academic administrators engage inactivity that can best be described as cross-cultural communication a good deal of the time and that they can improve their effectiveness when they engage in these interactions in the spirit of translation. Clearly, the dean now must communicate with a greater array of constituencies than ever before. Once relatively secure, or at least insecure within generally familiar surroundings, the dean's professional communication occurred primarily with other academics: the president and provost on one side, the faculty and students on the other. Now, deans find themselves explaining academic policies to members of the community and the business world who often are uneasy with intellectual, scientific, and artistic developments that seem to threaten "traditional" American values. Frequently, they must seek funding from these same sectors. In sum, deans must find a language to bridge the gap, and occasionally the chasm, between academe and the world at large. We take our inspiration to make the connection between these acts of communication and the process of translation from George Steiner's seminal work After Babel, in which the author makes the compelling point that all communication that must transcend boundaries of time, place, and cultural assumption involves translation (28). If we think of the dean's external constituents as culturally diverse nations, then we see that she or he must translate not only the specialized language of an academic discipline but also the attitudes of the scholar or artist.

Even internal communication involves translation. As Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal have shown, individuals in any organization bring different "frames" of understanding to any discussion. Bolman and Deal identify four major frames of reference, which they characterize as the structural, human resources, political, and symbolic frames. Although we find these categories enormously valuable in providing insight into organizational behavior, at the level of communication we also are struck by the realization that any question can be viewed through different frames and that any statement can provoke a wide range of interpretations and responses. In this regard, a policy question does not allow a definitive answer any more than a complex literary text allows a definitive translation. Within each of the frames, there can be responses that tend toward "literal" and those that tend toward "literary" readings. Moreover, American universities, like many sectors of contemporary American society, are experiencing a time of constant, unsettling change. What to teach, whom to teach, how to teach, how to measure success: all are the subject of an intense, necessary, and often contentious debate. Leadership in such a time of change places additional demands on the dean. There is no longer a position of neutrality: one is either promoting or resisting directions of change. In either role, the dean will face opposition, and his or her ability to respond productively to such opposition will influence the momentum of change as well as the outcome of each specific encounter.

"Opposition response" has attracted much attention in the literature of leadership. Michael Fullan, for example, argues that educational initiatives often "misfire because we fail to learn from those who disagree with us" (159). In turbulent times, he continues, "the key task of leadership is not to arrive at early consensus, but to create opportunities for learning from dissonance" (159). One way to view the shifting membership of "the opposition" is to regard opposing groups as the equivalents of foreign nations, usually allies but currently engaged in a policy difference. Convincing them requires more than arguments that appeal to the dean. Convincing the "other" requires an understanding of both their positions and the underlying attitudes they reflect. In Beyond Machiavelli: Tools for Coping With Conflict, Robert Fisher emphasizes that "to be persuasive, we need to understand how others see the world, their motivations, emotions and aspirations" (21). The power to function as a leader, in Fisher's words, "depends on our ability to put ourselves in other people's shoes and to see the world from their point of view" (21). Fisher's position is essentially that expressed by Bolman and Deal, who assert that confusion and conflict are the predictable results of any discussion that includes differing frames that are neither recognized nor reconciled. The leader who clings to one perspective, disregarding or disrespecting the others, is less likely to bring about the cohesion necessary to promote positive action. Taken together, all these developments have made communication skills across barriers essential to effective academic administration. The deantrepreneur must build coalitions within and beyond the confines of the academic unit and, therefore, must be able to communicate through a wide range of "frames" of understanding. Deans must translate visions into programs and then express them in language that convinces faculty, other administrators, and outside constituencies. These outside constituencies may include high-ranking business leaders and legislators.

Other aspects of decanal responsibility can be profitably viewed through the lens of translation. The curriculum, for example, represents an attempt to translate the ideal educational mission of the institution into an interrelated sequence of courses. Between the ideal and the curriculum lie challenges analogous to those faced by the literary translator. The translator must deal with the limitations imposed by the language into which she or he is making the translation; the dean must take into account the restrictions imposed by the nature of the particular university, its traditions, mission, and faculty. The truism that there can be no definitively correct translation applies equally to curricula. A faculty must make choices of emphasis, each of which precludes other possible emphases.

The training of deans and other academic administrators should take into consideration the new context of academic leadership in the post-entrepreneurial world. Given the reality that deans and other administrators will constantly engage in cross-cultural communication of various kinds, we argue for the development of training programs designed to nurture such skills. The practice of literary translation provides an obvious model for such training, because translators have long recognized that "seeing the world from their author's perspective" is essential to their art and craft. Since translation is based on the fusion of theory with practice, its value as a model for the modern dean is suspect without specific examples of how to translate the insight into action. We envision translation-based workshops designed to help deans hone their interpretive skills and gain the ability to listen to the "others" among their faculties and other constituents within and outside the university . Numerous exercises associated with Translation Workshops can be adapted to this task. To illustrate the concept that communication across cultural or temporal gaps, even within the same apparent language, requires translation, participants in an "administration as translation" workshop might be asked to translate English texts from previous centuries into contemporary language. In part, this exercise would be designed to show how the changing language reflects changing frames through which issues are viewed. It is one thing to believe that one understands an issue from various frames, quite another to create arguments for and against a specific proposal from these perspectives.

Such exercises will also improve the ability of participants to improve their ability to "hear" opposing voices. Building on such exercises designed to demonstrate the value of regarding communication as translation, we then can engage participants in translating academic ideas or programs into language that expresses concepts understandable to various external constituents. Finally, we would join with the participants to recall instances from which case studies might be designed to illustrate the difficulties that can arise when participants in a discussion fail to recognize how radically different perspectives influence communication.

These are merely initial suggestions. The development and implementation of such workshops would serve, as befits translation, multiple purposes. It could improve the communication skills of administrators, thus improving higher education. It could also, by demonstrating to deans and others the importance of translation, gain more support for translators, translation-based courses, and research in the application of translation to other academic fields. Instead of waging war to protect turf, administrators could devote more energy to building bridges that promote the transfer of ideas across barriers of language, culture, and frames of reference.

Works Cited

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Mercer, Joyce. "Fund Raising Has Become a Job Requirement for Many Deans." Chronicle of Higher Education, July 18, 1997. October 15, 2002.
Root-Bernstein, Robert and Root-Bernstein, Michele. Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.
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