At some point in the last decade, most research universities made a quiet institutional bet: that a faculty member who was excellent at scholarship would, with enough time and goodwill, become an effective leader.
It is not a bet that has paid off particularly well.
Across departments and divisions, the pattern is consistent: a distinguished scholar is appointed department chair or associate dean. They are excellent at their discipline. They have institutional respect. They are, by every academic measure, the right person for the role.
And then the calls start coming in. Faculty members raising concerns. HR flagging unresolved tension. A grievance that could have been handled in a conversation six months ago is now a formal complaint. The new leader, brilliant in every other context, has no idea what went wrong.
The Promotion Is Not the Problem
It is worth being precise about where the failure actually sits. The problem is not that institutions promote scholars into leadership. Academic leadership requires deep disciplinary credibility. A dean who cannot earn the respect of their faculty is ineffective regardless of their managerial training.
The problem is what happens after the appointment. The institution promotes the person, hands them a new title, adjusts their course load, and considers the matter resolved. What it does not do is prepare them for the part of the job that will consume most of their time and cause most of their failures: managing people.
Managing faculty, specifically. Which is its own discipline.
What Nobody Told Them
Faculty are not a typical workforce. They operate with significant autonomy, often protected by tenure, frequently represented by unions, and deeply invested in their own intellectual independence. The interpersonal dynamics of an academic department are unlike those of almost any other professional environment.
A new department chair needs to know how to deliver difficult performance feedback to a tenured colleague. How to manage a conflict between two faculty members without taking sides in a way that fractures the department. How to navigate the boundary between informal coaching and formal disciplinary process. How to recognize when a personnel situation has crossed into legal territory and what to do about it.
None of this was covered in their doctoral program. None of it appears in the faculty handbook. And in most institutions, none of it is covered in any meaningful way before the person takes the role.
The one system that measured this found what you would expect. When the California State University surveyed its department chairs across all twenty-three campuses, 66.4 percent reported receiving zero hours of formal orientation before assuming the role. The range ran from 36 percent of chairs on one campus to 100 percent on another. The survey is from 2002 and covers a single state system, which is itself worth noticing: the most recent national data on what chairs are given before they start is more than thirty years old. Nobody has thought it important enough to measure since.
What the national data did capture was the cost. In a survey of 808 chairs at 101 research and doctoral universities, 88 percent reported losing time for research and writing after taking the role, and 82 percent lost time keeping current in their discipline.
The Cost of Unpreparedness
When academic leaders are underprepared, the costs are not abstract. They show up in specific, measurable ways.
Conflicts that should be resolved at the department level escalate to the dean's office or to HR, consuming senior leadership time that could be spent elsewhere. Faculty members who feel poorly managed disengage, affecting teaching quality and research output. In the worst cases, poorly handled personnel situations generate formal grievances, EEOC complaints, or litigation, with legal costs that dwarf what structured preparation would have required.
There is also a subtler cost that rarely appears in any report: the toll on the leader themselves. Many capable scholars leave academic administration not because they were bad at the work, but because nobody gave them the tools to do it, and the resulting stress was unsustainable.
What Preparation Actually Looks Like
Effective preparation for academic leadership is not a two-day workshop before the semester starts. It is not a reading list or an orientation session. It is structured, ongoing support during the actual work of the role.
The leaders who navigate academic management effectively share a few characteristics. They have a clear understanding of what they can and cannot do within their institution's policies and applicable law. They know when to act independently and when to escalate. They have someone they can consult when a situation is ambiguous, before it becomes a crisis.
That last point matters more than most institutions acknowledge. Academic leaders make consequential decisions under uncertainty, often in real time, usually without legal or HR expertise in the room. Having access to experienced, on-demand guidance is not a luxury. For many of the situations that end in formal complaints or litigation, it is the variable that determines the outcome.
If your institution has appointed someone to an academic leadership role in the last two years, ask a direct question: what did you give them beyond the title?
If the honest answer is not much, that is worth addressing now, while the situation is still recoverable.