So You Want To Be a Professor?

Richard C. Wallace

Get Accustomed to Drawn-out Decision and Making, Less Authority, and Slower Lace Says a Superintendent Turned Academic

Many superintendents dream of ending their educational careers as college or university professors helping to prepare the next generation of teachers and administrators. After laboring in the vineyard for many years as superintendents, we believe we have much to offer future practitioners.

Many of us have had appointments as adjunct faculty at universities while practitioners and think we know what it is like to be a professor. However, the world of practice and the world of academe are very different.

The move from adjunct status to a full-time university position opens up a new world and culture. The culture of the work environment in school districts and universities is substantially different for a superintendent turned professor. A superintendent needs to make several major adjustments when entering the university culture.

Practitioner Realities

The superintendent works in a pressure cooker. Pressure from parents, the public, unions, and aggressive special interest groups to act (or not to act) is part of daily life. A fast-paced schedule of daily meetings lasting from early morning to late evening are the norm.

The superintendent's requirement to build constituencies among community stakeholder groups to achieve financial and educational support requires almost daily outreach to the community. Crisis management and effective relations with the news media create important demands on superintendents, especially in urban areas. Usually a superintendent has little time to reflect before taking action.

The legal demands of the job consume a great deal of time. Dealing with union contract administration, providing testimony in arbitration and court cases, and dealing with difficult personnel matters create another set of pressures. Family life often takes a back seat to the demands of the job. The work life of the superintendent is hectic.

Professor's World

In comparison to the superintendency, the professoriate is characterized by a less-hectic environment of reflection, teaching, discourse, writing, and research. It reflects a world of words. Discourse is the currency of the culture; knowledge, ideas and theory are its products.

The work environment, too, is typically less stressful than the world of the superintendent. Professors usually make their own schedules. Unless specific meetings are scheduled, the professor is free to structure his or her own time, providing that classes are met and office hours are posted and kept.

Depending on the norms of a given institution, the professor is expected to engage in writing and research as well as teaching. Some professors work in a publish-or-perish environment where tenure and advancement are dependent upon research, publications, or the amount of research monies secured. In these institutions, professional advancement often militates against community service or extended student contact. Other institutions may expect extensive service to the community.

In general, the professor's world is one that is not problem centered (as is the superintendent's) but one of self-initiation and self-direction.

Newly appointed assistant professors experience pressure to attain tenure. Becoming tenured as an associate professor, for example, is a significant milestone in one's career as an academic. There also is self-imposed pressure to attain and maintain professional status with peers and obtain merit raises.

Having attained tenure, external pressure gives way to self-imposed internal pressure to move to full professor. Externally imposed public pressures usually are not part of the university culture for a professor.

Contact with students will depend on the nature of the institution. Most universities that prepare educational administrators have part-time students who commute and have full-time jobs. As a result, contact with these students generally is limited to class hours. Professors must be flexible in responding to the needs of part-time students. Full-time students, on the other hand, have more access to faculty and often engage in research or field work with professors.

Stark Differences

Moving from the superintendency to the professoriate requires one to adjust to the culture of the university. The pace and the hours of the job provide the most dramatic contrast between these two positions.

The work week of a superintendent typically can range from 50 to 80 hours of pressure-packed action. The demand for night and weekend meetings with stakeholders of the public schools typically extends the workday and week far beyond that of a professor's. In addition to the freedom to set working hours, professors are not completely tied to the university. Some are in high demand as consultants to school districts and might use one day per week for such services.

While many professors work long hours at the office and at home completing research, writing books and articles, the extended workload is usually self-imposed.

The decision-making orientation also provides a striking contrast. Superintendents are accustomed to making decisions and implementing them--it's the nature of the job. Even when superintendents delegate authority through creating task forces, those responsible will be held accountable for completing work in a specific time frame.

Professors, on the other hand, work in a collegial environment where decisions most often are made by committees. Many university committees, such as budget or tenure and promotion committees, do work on a time-referenced, decision-making schedule related to the academic calendar.

Committees at the program level, on the other hand, seem to have difficulty making and implementing decisions because most academic issues require that a consensus be reached. A tendency exists to talk at great length about issues, bring them back for review and revision, and not reach consensus. Superintendents may find this consensus form of decision-making (or the dragging Out of the process) tedious.

Teamwork and team-building illustrate another contrast. Teamwork is critical to an effective superintendency since the rewards come largely from group achievement. The rewards at the university level, however, are usually those of the individual, not the group. One advances in rank as an individual. There may be occasional group projects, but even in research institutions that require coordination of effort, professors tend to form loose federations of colleagues working in relative isolation rather than the closely knit teams with which superintendents are familiar.

Perhaps the greatest difference is in the area of support services. School administrators are accustomed to having secretarial support at their elbow. Typing, filing, placing calls, and a myriad of other things are carried out by secretarial/clerical staff.

At the university level, secretarial staff are shared among many colleagues. It is not uncommon to have one secretary serve 12 or more professors. Unless one serves in an administrative position such as a department chair, or has a chaired professorship, unlimited access to secretarial support service is just not available.

Another important difference resides in the respect for practice. Superintendents often have great respect for those colleagues who are effective practitioners. At the university depending on its nature and traditions, practitioners are often not accorded the same status of respect as theorists or researchers.

The mode of university discourse tends to be theoretical rather than practical. Practitioners and theorists may "talk past" one another because their use of language reflects their different experiences and a different frame of reference. The subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) lack of respect for practitioners in a university culture can be an eye-opener to a former superintendent.

Transition Steps

As someone who recently made this transition, I've compiled some general suggestions for making the move to higher education.

* Learn to slow down.

Prepare yourself for a different environment. The pace of daily life of a university professor is much more self-controlled than the hectic, other-controlled life you led as a superintendent. Adjusting to this less hectic pace of life can take time. Don't expect things, or change, to happen quickly, especially decision-making. Learn to be patient. Recognize that you must assume responsibility for your own work and productivity.

* Prepare for fewer support services.

Brush up your keyboarding skills--you will need them! If you don't have keyboarding skills, attend classes to acquire them. You will not have a full-time secretary at your disposal. Become comfortable with the computer and word processing skills. Learn how to file your own materials so that you can find them when you need them since you won't have a secretary to do it for you.

* Enhance your proposal-writing skills.

Write proposals for local and national foundations and governmental agencies to enhance your administrative preparation program or enrich the academic side of your program. This may be the only way you will be able to raise funds to provide yourself with secretarial help or an administrative assistant.

* Prepare for a world of discourse.

Adjust to the discourse of the university, and accept a different decision-making process and timeline. In school districts you are accustomed to a world of fast-paced action and decision making. At the university, extended discussion rather than quick decision-making is the norm. Recognize that accountability for outcomes often will be less clear at the university level.

Settling In

* Stay in close contact with the field.

Maintain contact with your colleagues in the field to help you keep current with the problems of practice. This will help you to continue to relate effectively to students. Things change fast in the schools! Write about your experiences in the schools as a way of maintaining close contact with the reality of public education.

* Make a commitment to work with those university colleagues who share your views and values.

Seek out colleagues who have ongoing working relationships with school districts and have a strong sense of the current issues. Find ways to join them in collaborative work within the university and in the field. Remember that the typical university culture is one of autonomy, but some colleagues will be willing to work with you if you seek them out.

* Develop a supportive environment for students.

Take extra steps to help part-time students meet their needs. Some university bureaucracies (like most others) are not perceived by students as "user friendly." Students often are caught in a bureaucratic red tape that conveys a lack of caring. You can help students adjust to the environment.

Treat your students, particularly at the doctoral level, as colleagues who share your vision and goals for school improvement. The more student contact you have, the more influence you can have in shaping the formation of future school administrators.

* Recognize that you have little authority.

Accept the fact that unless you have direct responsibility for a program you don't have decision-making authority as a professor. Also realize that university traditions and the organizational culture and structure can provide significant barriers to change. And, as a professor, you may have little influence (and less authority) to initiate change than you did as a superintendent.

Final Thoughts

Each higher education institution has its own culture. What I have described from my experience in research-oriented institutions will differ from a non-research-oriented institution.

As you understand the differences in the culture of schools and higher education institutions and adjust accordingly, you can develop a positive and productive working environment for yourself and with others. The psychic rewards will come from the satisfaction of working with students and colleagues.

You also can gain satisfaction through contributing to the literature on educational administration. If you have the opportunity to engage in program development and implementation that change the way school leaders are prepared, you can make a highly significant contribution to the profession and enjoy the work.

Richard Wallace, who spent 12 years as superintendent of Pittsburgh Public Schools before retiring in 1992, also co-directs his university's Superintendents Academy.

Who's Going to Evaluate Me and On What?

MAX E. PIERSON

Someone who has worked as a superintendent will find a university professorship usually provides more freedom and less stress. That often is true, but the stress appears in different forms. (And since most superintendents tend to be adrenalin junkies anyway, they tend to find ways to create their own stress even when none seems to exist.)

For the professor, nothing can cause more strain or distress than professional evaluation. It's a whole different ballgame from a school board evaluation.

A Defined Job

In the public schools, the superintendent is typically evaluated semi-annually or annually by the board of education. While the input for that evaluation comes from various sources, the board ultimately decides whether or not the superintendent will be retained and given a pay raise.

Typically, this evaluation is grounded in the superintendent's job description, as found in the board policy or the superintendent's contract, and modified during yearly board/superintendent goal-setting sessions.

While board evaluations are important, one cannot overlook the highly political nature of the superintendency, which often results in highly competent, highly qualified superintendents being dismissed for matters beyond their control. In any case, the bottom line is that superintendents had better keep the majority of the board members happy, or they will be searching for new employment.

Nebulous Criteria

In higher education, the evaluation process differs greatly. First, the criteria for evaluation for promotion, retention, and tenure are more standardized between colleges and universities across the nation than are criteria for evaluating superintendents.

In higher education, research, teaching, and service comprise the three basic areas for evaluation criteria. The relative importance of each of those areas depends on many factors. These include the mission and/or status of the university (is it a major state university or a small liberal arts college?), the history of the school/college/department, the enrollment needs of the department, the need for stature within the university by the department (since funds follow stature), and the age and interests of the faculty members.

If a university has a strong teaching tradition, then student evaluation scores, the creation of new course syllabi, and pedagogy become paramount. If, however, the focus is research, then external funding, refereed articles, and scholarly presentations at national research gatherings take top billing. The issue for most faculty members becomes "How much is enough?"

The performance standard for faculty to attain tenure or promotion usually is not strictly defined. Instead, the formal, written criteria refer to "significant scholarly output, in recognized publications appropriate to the field." Does that mean five refereed articles before tenure or 12? Some institutions require an individual to publish a book before tenure. The standard for faculty tenure is usually six years of successful service. Is it better to have an article published in Educational Leadership, an edited journal with a circulation of 200,000, or Planning and Changing, a refereed journal with a circulation of 550? These are the questions that amuse and amaze faculty members attempting to reach tenure and be promoted.

The actual credential review process offers another anomaly. First, the faculty member presents a portfolio of products and documentation, which is evaluated by a committee of peers. This review usually happens at the department level.

This evaluation receives considerable weight since the faculty members working closest to you should have the greatest knowledge about your expertise, the ease or difficulty of being published in your field, and the level of student expectations of professors in the program (i.e., the interpretation of scores on student evaluations of your teaching performance).

The next level of evaluation is usually by the department chairperson, then by the dean, followed by a campus committee composed of your peers, and finally by the provost and/or university president. Depending on the size of the institution, the evaluations beyond the college level usually depend heavily on the results of those conducted by the departmental committee, chair, and dean.

The anomaly is that the people with the greatest power to retain or promote you are the furthest removed and least likely to be familiar with your work.

Another interesting situation is that most college administrators have received their training on the job. For example, only one of the past three presidents at my institution had a degree in educational administration. The rest had their formal training in history, English, or some other liberal arts area. While most public school faculty members would argue that this is exactly the situation they find themselves in, it is disturbing to a superintendent who is accustomed to pleasing just seven board members instead of a larger, less-defined population, most of whose members the professor has never met.

Collegiality Reigns

The redeeming part of this whole evaluation process is that it works. Peers who serve on the department personnel committee realize they hold the livelihood of a colleague in their hands. They weigh decisions carefully and commit considerable time to portfolio review.

Even when university politics dictate which departments will flourish and which will be extinguished, personality conflicts and petty arguments seem to be forgotten in the best sense of collegiality and professionalism. The university community seems to understand, appreciate, and tolerate the nuances and eccentricities of individuals better than most other populations, including school districts.

The worth of the individual is measured by the nature, character, and quantity of scholarly production, and not nearly as much by public relations or individual charisma as is too often the case with public school superintendents.

Max Pierson earlier served 14.5 years as a superintendent in three districts.

Struggling to Adjust to a New Life in Academe

C. DANIEL RAISCH

Having served as a superintendent for 18 years, I decided on a career change. In 1991, I was selected to fill a position of assistant professor in a department of educational administration at a medium-size private university. I was beginning all over again.

After a few months on the job, several superintendent colleagues asked me if many differences existed between being a superintendent and working in the school of education. I was sure they wanted me to tell them that the pressures were substantially less in academe, that I had more free time, few committee appointments, and not as many night meetings, and that I experience few, if any, blistering sessions, and no late-night calls from board members or concerned constituencies.

I probably disappointed them with my response. For what I found in making the transition is that the pressures on the new academic, while certainly different from those experienced by the superintendent, are substantive. I emphasize the term academic because while the parallels between the superintendency and the professoriate are few, the differences between the lives of the superintendent and the academic can be described under two categories: the source of direction and the press for scholarly productivity.

Time Management

I find the pressures at the university more subtle and less directive than those I faced as a superintendent. In that role, the demands on my personal time--that came from levy planning, meetings with disgruntled parents, community events, and board meetings--were impossible to control. By contrast, the amount of other-directed time now required of me is sane. Other than running my classes and attending administrative meetings, I determine my own schedule.

No one directs me to publish two or three articles annually in refereed journals, to present at regional or national conferences, or to provide school, community, or university service. But these behaviors are expected. If I want to succeed in academe (minimally defined as earning tenure), the pressure to produce is very real. I have considerable control over the how, when, and where questions that need to be answered about productivity This element of control differs substantially from anything I previously experienced.

The shift from other-directive to self-directive has not been easy.

I have struggled, for example, to make time to write. I have night classes, many committee meetings, daily sessions with my advisees, and numerous planning meetings with administrators of schools and districts with whom I have agreed to work. I also receive frequent calls at home from students. I allow them to call me early in the morning or late at night because most teach and are unavailable during the day. They can fill every available moment if I'm not careful, and therein lies the trap.

Unless a professor sets aside time to research, write, edit, rewrite, and edit some more, time passes and one will not earn tenure. For no matter how effective one is as a teacher and community servant, one either achieves a standard on the third leg of the trinity--publishing--or one's appointment will not be renewed. At this university, my past experiences as a superintendent help minimally in the tenure process.

In this accountability sense, the professoriate is much like the superintendency. If I don't achieve according to the standards established by the organization, my time in the role is destined to be limited.

Scholarly Pursuits

Active school administrators who transition to academe do so primarily to make a difference in the lives of other educators at the school level. They want to influence teachers and students in positive ways. At the university, the goal of those involved in administrator preparation is the same, just one level removed.

I found a not-so-subtle distinction between what school administrators and academics do is in the way in which they communicate, largely because of the differences in constituencies.

My clients as a school leader were teachers, students, and community members, and my primary means of communication was oral. I wrote little, and when I did it tended to be in outline or executive summary form.

As a professor, my constituencies are students, other members of the university community, school administrators, teachers, and other academics. Communication with the first four groups tends to be oral. With other academics, communication is written. Communication with this peer constituency is the singular most significant process toward achieving tenure, which comes only with successful publication. Publishing new knowledge is at the heart of the university's mission.

I've learned to accept the importance of the publication dimension of academe, not as an end unto itself, but because it is important to model for students what it means to be a practitioner-scholar. I've also struggled to meet this expectation.

For some people, writing is easy. I've found it difficult, exhausting, and exhilarating. A positive comment about one of my articles from a colleague is thus especially rewarding. When my articles are read by people in the field who then give me feedback about how their contents are being used, I believe for a few moments that I am making a difference.

Enter Humbly

The grass always looks greener on the other side. In reality it seldom is. This maxim is particularly true in looking from a practitioner's perspective at life in academe.

As I struggle to make the adjustment, the question I keep asking myself is what advice can I share?

The first is that one should come to the university only if one is committed to making a career change that includes learning new skills, accepting different responsibilities, and being genuinely engaged. Then the transition will work.

Second, anyone making the transition to the university must enter the new world with humility, prepared to practice the language of collegiality, that is, teaming, sharing, cooperating, and making time from a servant perspective. This means working from the perspective that practical experience has a place along with theory and research and that the three constitute a trinity. One is not more or less important than the other. It also suggests the need to come to the new culture with a commitment to work with new people, to integrate oneself into this new culture, to share new experiences, and to be an active, supportive member of a new community.

By approaching the new career from a servant perspective, the practitioner can emulate the characteristics necessary to both achieve success in the academic world and remain a productive member of the educational community.

Daniel Raisch previously served as superintendent in the Ohio districts of Oakwood and Versailles.

COPYRIGHT 1995 American Association of School Administrators
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