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in which traditional hierarchies and assumptions arebeing continually challenged effectively describes the situationof higher education now. As she noted about businessthen, we in education are in the midst of an excitingand dangerous era that is a “good time for dreamers andvisionaries” only if they are also “disciplined, frugalpragmatists” (Giants, 17-18). In Kanter’s prescientwords, “the future will belong to those who embrace thepotential of wider opportunities but recognize the realitiesof constrained resources” (Giants, 18).Another condition links business and education.Scholars in both worlds have been decrying the deleteriouseffects of fragmentation and extolling the value ofsystemic solutions and integrated approaches that promoteagility, flexibility, and responsiveness. Peter Sengedescribed the 1990s as the decade of “systems integration.”Writing of creativity in education, psychologistsRobert and Michele Root-Bernstein state that “there is nopoint in teaching a liberal arts and sciences curriculumthat continues to fragment knowledge and creates specialistswho cannot communicate across disciplinarylines. Education must focus on the trunk of the tree ofknowledge, revealing the ways in which the branches,twigs, and leaves all emerge from a common core” (317).Kanter, who emphasizes the importance of adaptablestructures in an era of rapid change, identified the followingfour characteristics of management that are outmodedand unsuited for the game now being played:elaborate hierarchies, slow decision-making processes,in-house rivalries, and risk-averse behavior (Giants, 344).We wonder how many of these four outmoded qualitiesstill characterize the world of public and higher education.Underlying all four of her undesirable qualities isthe assumption that slowness is a liability today, whenswift response to rapidly changing conditions is often arequisite for survival.Kanter and others have argued persuasively that thenew global environment requires not only new structuresthat foster innovation and adaptability but also a newkind of leadership. Writing more than a decade ago,Kanter based her proposal on the belief that business hadentered a new age characterized by global interaction, aninformation-based economy, cultural diversity, and rapidtechnological change. She described this era as “postentrepreneurial”because it requires incorporating entrepreneurship,previously associated with individuals actingindependently to create their own companies, into thelife of the organization. The key characteristic of theentrepreneurial mind is generally considered to be theability to recognize and seize opportunities and then convertthese opportunities to marketable ideas. Kanter suggestedthat businesses need to nurture such people andsuch thinking within their ranks. We need, she declared,the “intrapreneur,” or individual whose entrepreneurialactions take place within and for the company andreceive organizational sanction, resources, and rewards(see Kuratko, 96). Companies, she argued, had to find away to create a marriage between entrepreneurial creativityand corporate discipline, cooperation, and teamwork(Giants, 10-11). We suggest that higher education alsohas joined that era and is bound by its mandates for organizationalchange. Kanter’s analysis proved correct forthe world of commerce. It is time for universities to provideleadership and adopt new structures more suited tothe demands of the post-entrepreneurial world.Deans have begun to play an increasingly complexand pervasive role in this new environment. If we are tofoster intrapreneurship — the process of creating valuableinnovation within an organizational setting — thedean, as the primary liaison between the faculty andeveryone else, is a vital link. This new kind of dean, thedeantrepreneur, is the intrapreneur who understands theintricacies of the university and the world of education.The deantrepreneur knows how to involve faculty indeveloping appropriate and positive responses to the educationalchallenges facing colleges and universitiestoday. The deantrepreneur is a visionary who can raisefunds, realizing that vision without funding is hallucination.We suggest that in many universities, he and shealready exist. Indeed, a review of the history of the deanshipreveals an inexorable evolution of the role fromdean to deantrepreneur.The academic dean, the head of a discipline-specificcollege within a university, has a long and inconsistenthistory. It is a role that has never been standardized andis still evolving. Until the 1930s, the deanship tended tofocus on student concerns. By the mid-1940s, however,the emphasis had shifted from direct supervision of studentsto concern specifically with curricula, faculty, andbudgets. The addition of responsibility for budgets, alongwith increasing responsibility for hiring and promotingfaculty, raised the status of academic deans and signaledtheir evolution into a role more like that of business leaders.This business orientation continued to grow duringthe following decades. To the deans’ other considerableduties were added quasi-legal obligations related togrievance mediation, contract termination, and studentcomplaints. During the past decade, the deanship hasbecome increasingly managerial in nature, particularly aspresidents began shifting such external duties as alumniTranslation Review 15
elations and fundraising in part to the academic deans.Deans are now expected, in the words of a recent study,to take on administrative identities commonly associatedwith corporate business managers. These include “figurehead,leader, liaison, monitor, disseminator, spokesperson,entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator,and negotiator ” (Wolverton, 7-8).The lists of duties assigned to deans by universityhandbooks and the criteria by which they are evaluatedreflect the growing complexity of the position.Advertisements for academic deans today reveal andreflect this evolution. The position now inevitablyrequires a capacity that has been described as “the maintenanceof balance between the various external andinternal demands” on universities (Wolverton, 7). Thechanged nature of the deanship has even reached thepress. Consider the lead paragraph of an article thatappeared in the Cavalier Daily from the University ofVirginia on April 8, 1997: “University officials searchingfor two new important dean positions are beginning torealize the perfect recipe for a successful dean: a blendof academic background, mixed with leadership abilitiesand an essential dash of salesmanship ” (italics ours). Ofcourse, deans have always had to sell. They represent theagenda of the university to their faculty and persuade theuniversity to provide requisite resources for the researchand instruction needs of their College. Today’s deans,however, increasingly have to take on a new kind of selling— the activities of fund-raising and friend-raisingpreviously reserved for presidents and developmentoffices. This combination of friend- and fund-raising hasbecome an essential component of deaning. As the LawSchool Dean at Virginia succinctly declared in the samearticle: “There’s a big difference today versus twentyyears ago º [The dean’s role] now encompasses not onlyfund raising but [also] keeping faculty and students competitiveand being accountable to the public.” Observingthat the dean’s job often rides on his or her fund-raisingrecord, Ralph Lowenstein, dean emeritus of the Collegeof Journalism and Communications at the University ofFlorida, has stated, “deans are really graded on theirfund-raising ability. That wasn’t as true 18 years agowhen I became a dean. But today, fund raising is anabsolute necessity” (quoted in Mercer, 1).In sum, the new obligations of fund-raising, friendraising,and serving as a public ambassador have notmerely added components to the already full plate of thedean, they have transformed the position. In the new academicworld, the dean stands surrounded and buffeted bychanges, often changes mandated in response to the pressurescited earlier. The dean works to meet the challengesto institutional and curricular traditions with facultymembers who may not be overly fond of change.We posit a new model of the deanship: the deantrepreneur,who can function in the university much as theideal manager described by Kanter operates in the corporateworld. Kanter’s approach to success in the “globalOlympics” involves three essential strategies: (1) reshapethe organization to promote synergies; (2) createalliances within the organization and with external organizations;and (3) foster the development of “newstreams,”the new ideas and products that complementand extend the mainstream of the past (Giants, 344).The implementation of these strategies requires botheffective leadership and structural reorganization. Thefour characteristics of outmoded management that werecited earlier will hinder progress and could even cost victory.They must be replaced by the following integratedfabric of organizational characteristics: streamlined hierarchies,expeditious decision-making, and a collegialatmosphere that supports reasoned risk-taking (Giants,344-351). The deantrepreneur must acquire the skills andreceive training akin to that of his or her corporate counterpartto help bring about this environment in academicinstitutions.What are the skills needed to serve effectively as adean in the post-entrepreneurial academic world of the21st century? We would argue that the position of deanhas evolved, and the deanship now requires individualsadept at results-oriented communication with faculty,with potential supporters, and with the greater community.The dean must become a deantrepreneur and in thatrole must increasingly engage in activities related totranslation.We observe that academic administrators engage inactivity that can best be described as cross-cultural communicationa good deal of the time and that they canimprove their effectiveness when they engage in theseinteractions in the spirit of translation. Clearly, the deannow must communicate with a greater array of constituenciesthan ever before. Once relatively secure, or atleast insecure within generally familiar surroundings, thedean’s professional communication occurred primarilywith other academics: the president and provost on oneside, the faculty and students on the other. Now, deansfind themselves explaining academic policies to membersof the community and the business world who oftenare uneasy with intellectual, scientific, and artistic developmentsthat seem to threaten “traditional” Americanvalues. Frequently, they must seek funding from these16 Translation Review
Page 2: TRANSLATION REVIEWNo. 66, 2003TABLE
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