While on sabbatical, I received a phone call that I didn’t realize would change the course of my professional life. The Dean of Faculty had put out a call for faculty to apply for an Associate Dean position in her office a few months earlier, and here she was on the phone with me, inquiring why I had not submitted any materials for the search. Was she serious? Not that long ago, I sat across from the Dean in her office, declaring, “I don’t want to be nobody’s dean” – intentionally using the double-negative to underscore my distaste at the prospect. I don’t remember what prompted my effusive proclamation, but I do remember that I was a very unhappy department chair, dismayed by my colleagues and campus politics. I was also a disgruntled faculty member who felt the sting of institutional betrayal with each departure of a tenure-track African American woman. One departure, after another, until there were just a handful of us left. While the college celebrated its efforts to recruit increasingly diverse incoming classes of students, it felt like the steady drip of Black women faculty out of the institution went unnoticed. Surely, the Dean must have remembered both my declaration and disappointment. Why would she ask me to consider serving in her office? Clearly, she was joking.
Although she laughed when I reminded her of our conversation during my service as department chair, the Dean was not joking. She was serious and persistent, which made me think deeply about her request that I apply for the Associate Dean role. What she didn’t know was that I was at a crossroads. After my promotion to full professor, I hit a wall. At that point, I had been a tenure-line faculty member for 15 years. I played the academic game and successfully progressed through the ranks, earned tenure, and had now been promoted to full professor. I had two books under my belt, a handful of other publications, a reasonable service record, and a translation of two novels by a Costa Rican writer under review with a publisher. My journey through academia was marked by a series of progressive goals – finish and defend dissertation, get a tenure-track job, finish the book, get tenure, finish the next book, get promoted. I ticked off the boxes, and after promotion, I found there were no more boxes to check.
Teaching no longer felt like it fit, but I also didn’t know what else I could do. I thought about creating a consulting practice to serve as a subcontractor to NGOs, working with Latin American partners to develop intercultural education curricula, but I lacked the insight and a clear pathway to even dream of making this a reality. I was also growing increasingly frustrated with the college and what I experienced as a lack of care and commitment to recruiting and hiring Black women. Almost a decade had gone by, and I did not see a single Black woman hired into a tenure-track position. I was not satisfied with the status quo. In fact, the status quo was killing my morale, and any joy that I had left was hanging by a thread. I also knew I was exhausted from banging my head against the institution, and I was restless to find a new challenge that felt like I was doing something that mattered. At the time, my hesitant, “I will think about it,” was a polite response to the Dean’s request, but deep in my core, I was also asking myself, could a term serving as an Associate Dean help me address both my mid-career malaise and my dissatisfaction with the status quo? Well, if it doesn’t work out, I can always go back to the faculty and figure out my next steps.
With nothing to lose, I entered into the search process – very clueless and very uncertain. However, after interviewing with my colleagues on the search committee, things shifted for me. I decided that if I were offered this Associate Dean position, it would be an opportunity to make a change from the inside. The position’s portfolio would focus on faculty diversity, inclusion, and development. I would have a leading role in shaping the college’s faculty search process and in helping build stronger retention practices. Rather than continue to agitate from the outside, I could make real change from within. Looking back, there was certainly naivete with this sense of optimism, but it was what I needed to stay engaged in higher education and make what I perceived as a real difference for the students, my colleagues, the institution, and my own values and sense of purpose. This would be my “institution building” phase of my career, and a critical moment when fighting through the mid-career malaise I was facing presented me with both an opportunity to shift my career direction and become a catalyst for institutional change.
It was somewhere in that decision that a phrase I first heard in my days as an undergraduate finally made sense: “You can be a thermometer or a thermostat.” When I was a student at Hood College in the late 1980s, I first heard the quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that would later come to define my relationship with higher education and my role in it. The words from Dr. King’s sermon, “Transformed Nonconformist,” didn’t resonate with me when I first heard them as a student. I was, after all, still technically a teenager, but somehow that metaphor became lodged in my subconscious. It really wasn’t until later in my adult life, and after entering higher education administration, that I came to a different understanding and application of Dr. King’s plea for civil and human rights in the United States.
Shortly after his installation as a young pastor in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954, he shared this metaphor: “I’m sure many of you here had the experience of dealing with thermometers and thermostats. The thermometer merely records the temperature. It is seventy or eighty degrees; it registers that, and that is all. On the other hand, the thermostat changes the temperature” (“Transformed Nonconformist,” 1954). His plea for more transformed nonconformists would evolve over time, but the core message was to encourage Americans to resist being “thermometers,” conforming to the misguided ways of groupthink, conventional wisdom, and the status quo. Instead, he encouraged his listeners to be “thermostats,” who he also described as “transformed nonconformists.” These change agents would think, act, and live differently. Instead of succumbing to the ways of the conforming majority, they dare to take a different, unpopular path rather than adhere to the status quo.
In higher education, Dr. King’s metaphor is even more necessary today, especially as financial and political pressures on colleges and universities continue to mount. As I write this, academic leaders and faculty across the US are facing a barrage of intrusive demands by federal and state governments that impugn institutional missions and values in an effort to coerce colleges and universities to capitulate to policies, funding mandates, and political interests that serve white supremacy, transphobia, misogyny, and authoritarianism. And sometimes the call comes from inside the house, with the internal pressure from colleagues, campus organizations, boards, presidents, donors, and the institutional culture itself. These current issues create a genuine crossroads for higher education leaders who came into the work because they wanted to build thriving campus cultures and be the catalyst for change. These same leaders who came in as transformed nonconformists are now faced with the prospect not only of holding the status quo, but of actually rolling it back to another time when higher ed was less inclusive, less accessible, and less representative of the nation and the globe. This is the time when leaders may be asking themselves – you may be asking yourself – the hard questions about how and whether to continue to serve when campuses still need thermostats, change-makers, and transformed nonconformists to lead the way.
If you’re reading this, you are probably already grappling with the tension between leading change that speaks to your own values and being asked to alter messaging, programming, services, and goals — essentially the erosion of the work you were called to do. This is not the time to be a thermometer. Those of us who characterize ourselves as deeply dissatisfied with the status quo know that the decision to be a thermostat in higher education right now requires a series of daily calculations, weighing options, choices, and consequences on whether, when, and how to move forward with creating campus cultures that support a broad array of individuals, communities, and needs. That calculus shows up in the meetings where you choose to be extra vigilant with your words, in the decisions about what to defend and what to let go, and in the middle of the night as you lie awake and wonder if the work still has a place for someone like you.
I don’t pretend to have the answer. What I do know is the daily exercise of measuring your own values against the demands of an institution and watching the widening gap between the community building, innovative work you thought you were going to do and what the current moment is actually requiring of you. That gap is real, and it is also exhausting. After being in leadership and stepping away from it, and walking alongside clients and colleagues who are still in the work, I now have a different vantage point that I was not always able to see from inside the pressure cooker. Even in the midst of exhaustion and uncertainty, what I see is change-makers and thermostat leaders who keep on, keeping on. They keep doing it, not because the resistance has let up, but because that’s what thermostats do. They keep doing their job, even when the temperature becomes more difficult to change.
In all of this, there is still joy to be found in this work. Side-by-side, holding hands with exhaustion, is joy. The joy of being able to hire a new faculty member who changes the composition and the conversation of a department. The joy of a student who proudly walks across the stage at graduation with the support of an entire campus “village.” The joy of opening a new program that had been a long time coming. These moments are not small, and they do not emerge out of nothing. They are the evidence that thermostat leadership works, that the temperature can be changed, and that the work is worth doing. We still need change-makers and transformed nonconformists in higher education, especially now, especially at this moment when the stakes are this high and the pressure to conform to what passes as the status quo has never been greater.
This is why I created this blog, “The Thermostat” – not as a space for easy answers because I don’t have them, but as a place where faculty, administrators, and leaders at every level can find honest conversation, reflection, and insight about the work of leading change in higher education. I draw on my years as a faculty member, humanities scholar, and senior leader, as well as my current practice working with leaders and their institutions as a coach, facilitator, and mediator, to offer an insider/outsider perspective. In the posts ahead, we will take on the hardest questions facing higher education right now — conflict, change, loss, and the courage it takes to lead with your values intact when everything around you is pushing back.
If you are already a change-making thermostat on your campus, you are welcome here. If you are exhausted and wondering whether it’s still worth it, you are especially welcome here. And if you are not sure where you stand, start by asking yourself one question: Am I conforming to the conditions around me, knowing they are not serving my community well, or am I committed to changing them?
