Dean for a Year: Twilight Musing Autobiography (Part 22)
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Toward the end of my sabbatical year in England, I received a spate of phone calls from back home at UM-Dearborn. The first was from Dennis Papazian, chair of the Division of Arts, Sciences, & Letters, whom I had served as his associate chair. He informed me that a cabal of faculty were at work seeking to prevent him from continuing in his position as head of the unit for a year while a search was conducted for a Dean of the College of Arts, Sciences and Letters (CASL). The renaming of the position from Division Chair to Dean, would be part of the reorganization of the academic units through a new set of bylaws, a kind of constitution for the governance of the campus. Dennis was pleading with me not to accept a coming offer to take the post of Acting Dean for the next academic year. The second call came from two colleagues who were leading the “rebellion” against Dennis, urging me to accept the offer when it came from the Chancellor. They described the alleged offenses of Dennis as Chair and described the wide support they had found (generated?) for deposing Dennis and appointing me. The third call came from the Chancellor, who detailed the generous terms of the appointment and said he was acting on a petition for my appointment from a number of faculty in liberal arts.
All of this was very heady stuff for a still young mid-grade faculty member. Laquita and I talked it over, and I called the Chancellor back and accepted. We flew back home with mixed delight and apprehension for the task that lay ahead. With just about everybody except Dennis Papazian, I was the golden-haired boy (though I didn’t have much hair of any color left by that time), and I’m afraid I didn’t approach the job with any great humility. As soon as I could after I arrived back at campus, I went to see the Provost (chief academic officer) of the campus, Eugene Arden, who was a mentor and advocate for me throughout the rest of his years at UM-D. His administrative assistant, Elnora Ford, greeted me warmly, and I was announced and ushered into the Provost’s office for my first interview with him. He was a New York Jew who had the brash and often acerbic wit that one associates with New Yorkers. He could be very gentle and helpful toward those he thought deserved it, but bitingly dismissive of those he thought were being dishonest or manipulative. (Later, he described a group of dissident faculty members who called themselves the “Committee of Concerned Faculty,“ as the “Committee of Disturbed Faculty.”) He warned me of the politics that had been the source of my being appointed, and he assigned me an associate dean from the Social Sciences Dept. to “balance the ticket,” so to speak.
Dennis Papazian very much wanted to talk to me, so I went to his office on the first day or two after I returned. He complained bitterly of how he had been treated and blamed primarily Claude Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, two of my colleagues in English and, in the future, my next-door neighbors. He said they spearheaded the campaign to depose him, and that the power they showed did not bode well for the future. On that matter, he proved to be right, as I would discover to my great distress. But for the moment, he was primarily wanting to convey his feeling that, after having been trained by him to do administrative work and being his close associate, I turned on him and was willing to accept the Acting Dean appointment without any regard to loyalty that I owed him. In my naivete, I had not even thought about that aspect of the offer, especially since I rather agreed with his critics that he was a wheeler-dealer who sometimes cut corners ethically. Unfortunately, my relationship with Dennis remained strained for many years after that.
I went to get settled into my office in the extemporized quarters for CASL administration, one of several “temporary” modular units (actually some of them stayed around for 10 to 15 years). The Dean’s office was located in the corner of Module 8, which also housed the College secretaries and associate administrators, including the administrative secretary, Fern Ledford, and the financial assistant, Joe Rath. Don Proctor, my associate dean, also had an office there. Since he was also chairman of the Social Sciences Dept., his Module 8 office was secondary. Fern Ledford kept my calendar and took my calls, so I worked quite closely with her; and Joe Rath made sure that I was aware of the state of College accounts and knew of any inappropriate expenditures.
As Dean, I chaired the Administrative Council (department chairs) and the Executive Committee (elected representatives from each department responsible for setting academic policy for the College). We met on a regular basis so that we would be mutually informed of what was going on in the departments and could make decisions appropriate to each body. There had been much tension during the past year among these groups because of the movement to oust Dennis Papazian from his position, so my first job was to assure my colleagues that I would deal openly, transparently, and honestly with them, to the best of my ability. In the discussion of starting the search for a permanent dean, I had to make the decision of whether I would be a candidate. I declined to do so, lest my candidacy taint my ability to carry out disinterestedly my job as Acting Dean. Although I made the decision from good motives, as things turned out, I think the College might have been better off had I elected to run, since the man who was appointed, Kim Bruhn, was not a happy choice and was replaced after only one term.
I think that in general people wanted me to succeed in restoring some harmony to College administration. I was able during the year to convince people that I wanted to deal with them straightforwardly. Early in my year’s tenure, I was able to carry out a deal with the Natural Science Dept. to purchase a key piece of equipment that they needed by implementing a creative way of financing the transaction and getting it approved by the Provost. That was an indication that I was broadly supportive of all departments, not just Humanities, and that I was sympathetic to the special (and expensive) equipment needs of the sciences. I also established a good working relationship with the other Colleges and the academic support units, such as Admissions, Registration and Records, and staff members in the Chancellor’s office.
I learned a lot that year that laid the foundation for further administrative duties, but I never held the top spot again. At the end of the year the Provost asked me to stay on as Associate Dean of the College to provide continuity and to be able to use my administrative talents to help the College to function smoothly. UM-D was still growing at the time, and CASL needed to be guided to absorb that growth without sacrificing either good order or quality of programs. The next installment will cover my two years as Associate Dean.
Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.
