Strategic | Supportive | Synthesized
On Administration
My journey into the role of administrator is less a clearly demarcated, pathed road, and far more a collection of salient moments of learning that resulted in pivots, untraveled paths, and timely connections. As such, I view administration as both an art and a science: a combined effort of methodological rationale and precision with artistic creativity and finesse. In its truest form, beyond these spheres, administration at its core is rooted in the deep work of responsible care—to be an administrator is to be a purveyor of guardianship and good will. Thus, the administrator is a steward not just of the past, present, and future of their domain, but of those they support within their world.
As a director of a graduate school program, as well as an experienced junior administrator in the contexts of an academic department, WPA work, and Student Affairs, my familiarity with the bureaucratic landscape at my institution is widely mapped. In my work through each of these venues, my philosophy as an administrator has shaped into the following tenets: thinking forward, mapping, and philia.
Thinking Forward,
Forward Thinking
Throughout much of my scholarship, I theorize and reflect on the workings of hope: how hope develops and grows, when and why it falters, and in what moments it might be kindled or rebuilt. This is a parallel throughline in my administrative philosophy. It is crucial, in my mind, to operate not from a place of what might go wrong, but to envision what can go right. In other words, administrators often find themselves enacting their practice through damage control: acting responsively as opposed to proactively. While responsiveness cannot be understated in importance, administrators are also uniquely positioned to dream brightly and joyfully.
Mapping is a practice of institutional partnership building that focuses on the big picture of organizational directionality: in other words, seeing the creation of collaborative cross pollination not as a single task, but as a series of strategically illuminated points to reach a united destination. This work involves both forging and maintaining: tending to established relationships while extending the communicative hand to new partnerships with the objective of worldbuilding. Commonly, in conversations surrounding institutional critique, the university is noted as a collective, a single monstrous entity—so too, the practice is the same for administration: as in, the administration doesn’t allow for, sponsor, or otherwise enable patterns and practices of behavior. In reality, the institution and the administration are complex maps of people, power, and layered contexts that must be carefully evaluated, dismantled, and deconstructed to enact real change.
In my role as director, I am determined to map the institution by tending to these communal alliances: recognizing heritage relationships while welcoming new collaborations. As an administrator, I make the conscious choice to think of the institution as a mapped community, rather than a common and untouchable enemy. My program came with a complex history of university relationality, including a soured relationship with a supportive senior organization. My first priority in considering how to build a collaborative network was to repair what was damaged: I offered not only amend-making measures but explained clearly how my vision for the revamped organization might align with theirs. This repaired heritage relationship led to a variety of new collaborations with sibling organizations.
Mapping
Philia
Administrators have an indisputable weight to carry: prioritizers of law and logic, balancers of dreams and reality, liaisons between students, faculty, and stakeholders. Within administrative spaces, reception and receivability of care scale on a fluctuating scale. Yet, I believe that practicing, delegating, and aspirationally scaffolding programmatic pursuits through the lens of philia—the positing of an affectionate, mutually respectful, believing, platonic love—not only can this work be honoring and propelling of good will between the administrator and others, but a high-yielding topos of joy making. I believe in running a program that is strategically designed, with clearly identified and reachable objectives, ambitious in its aspiration to make significant difference. So too, I believe in fostering a program that cares: cares for longevity, for contextualization, for its people.
Philia is particularly crucial in moments of conflict, discord, and rancor. In general, approaching the unsavory with good will, with respect, with attentive recognition of the “why” behind the animus facilitates better outcomes. Administration not only involves interactive networks with faculty, staff, and students, but multiple layers and eras of each category: early and late career faculty, levels of staff, undergraduate and graduate students. Understanding the immense reach of administrative power, as well as its tenuous failings of power, and proceeding through those contexts with love and good will, disrupts existing venomous narratives.