A Quickstart Guide to Navigating University Administration

I'm currently participating in the “Professors for the Future” (PFTF) program at UC Davis for the 2013-14 academic year (more about that here). PFTF is a year-long competitive fellowship program designed to recognize and develop the leadership skills of grad students and postdocs - I was selected after a nomination and application process. The program is pretty intense, and involves all these things: 1) biweekly meetings focused on careers and professional development, 2) A discussion seminar course on "Ethics and Professional Integrity", 3) a "Seminar on College Teaching" course, 4) spring and fall program retreats, and 5) individual projects (read about my project here).

At our fall retreat, Jeff Gibeling (our Dean of Graduate Studies) gave us a great rundown on University Administration. This was extremely useful, and helped clarify all those various titles you always hear being thrown around (vice-chancellor, provost, dean, chair, etc.). In short, the structure of any given university can be summed up by this neat little diagram:

The Board (or Regents in the UC system) is at the top of the administrative hierarchy. Board members are not usually academics, but rather entrepreneurs, businessmen, or people who have political connections (here are the UC system board members). They are selected by the governor for 12-year terms, and these appointments are approved by the academic senate.

The President or Chancellor is one step below, representing the administrative head of a university. The name of this position can be confusing - in the UC system, the President is the system-wide administrative head of all the UCs, while the Chancellor is the administrative head of one UC campus. Other universities may have both positions (President and Chancellor) that serve different functions.
The Provost is the Chancellor's second-in-command, and the chief academic officer of the university.

The right-hand side of the above diagram can be considered the "Executive Branch" of a university, encompassing all the Vice Chancellor and Vice/Associate Provost positions. The name and number of these positions varies across universities, and they may or may not be filled by faculty members (it varies according to the job duties of the specific position).

Below the Provost we come to the Colleges, Schools, and Departments. Departments are the most fundamental structure of a university, groups of Departments together form a School or College. [Note that in at UC Davis, a "School" offers only graduate and professional training, while a "College" offers both undergraduate and graduate training.] Each School/College is headed by a Dean, and each Department in the School/College is headed by a Chair (who reports to their respective school/college Dean). Department Chairs are senior (usually tenured) faculty members: they may be promoted to this position from the pool of faculty members in a department, or occasionally brought in as an external hire. Chairs are in charge of organizing committees, managing departmental budgets, managing the tenure review process, and overseeing the hiring new faculty members.

The left-hand side of the above diagram, the Academic (Faculty) Senate, can be considered the "Legislative Branch" of a university. The Senate is the pool of all junior and senior faculty members from different departments, who are organized into lots of different committees (each with its own chair) and act as a governing body. This is where all your academic "service" obligations come in. Apparently UC Davis has about 30 different committees focused on various issues: the Graduate Council, the Undergraduate Council, Research Committee, Tenure and Promotion Committee, Courses Committee, Academic Freedom Committee, and yes, even a "Committee on Committees" (which appoints members and chairs to other committees).

Finally worth pointing out are Graduate Groups - these are specific, interdisciplinary graduate programs that draw faculty members from different departments. The UC Davis Graduate Group in Ecology, as an example, represents 24 different departments on campus!

This is just a quick (and hopefully useful) overview based on the organization of the UC System, and UC Davis in particular. There can be a lot of variability in administrative structure. However, some things are pretty consistent: for example, you'll always find a Vice Chancellor for Research and a Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs.

Diversity and Dissemination in Scientific Conferences

I've been swamped with service obligations these past few months, pretty much single-handedly organizing the SMBE Satellite Meeting on Eukaryotic -Omics at UC Davis (and a joint QIIME workshop) last month, as well as serving on the organizing committee for iEvoBio 2013. Both of these conferences aimed to emphasize interdisciplinary agendas (the SMBE meeting focused on high-throughput sequencing in eukaryotes, and iEvoBio on "big data" approaches in biology). But I'm consistently struck by the fact that interdisciplinary research never feels interdisciplinary enough--you're always wanting to reach a broader audience, connect with more diverse researchers, and spread the message of the conference as far and wide as possible.

Lately I've been reflecting on many issues I've encountered related to conference organization, diversity, and dissemination. Some things I've been asking myself lately as a conference organizer:

How do we balance out gender ratios and recruit female speakers? 

Female scientists represent a much smaller pool compared to their male counterparts. Scientists in general are over committed, and in my experience its been much harder to secure female speakers because they're fewer in number. For iEvoBio 2013, we decided early on that since we have an all-female organizing committee, we wanted all female keynote speakers (a nod to all the publicity about gender issues in science lately). We approached many different people on the iEvoBio speaker shortlist before finding our keynote speakers. In the end, the iEvoBio committee volunteered me (!) to speak because time was ticking and we just could not secure a second woman speaker. Senior women appear particularly trickly to nail down - we started sending out speaker requests back in Autumn 2012, a full eight months (!) before the event was happening, but still no dice. For the SMBE meeting, I had also started with an initial gender-balanced and career-stage balanced list, but as time went on this list became increasingly male-biased. So even if meeting organizers are committed to promoting gender diversity, you're grappling with many external factors that inherently seem to work against you.

How do we increase diversity at meetings? 

Increasing diversity encompasses a lot of things: ensuring a spectrum of career stages, balanced gender diversity, and participation from underrepresented groups. It has seemed much easier to ensure diversity of career stages (e.g. via travel awards for grad students and postdocs) than to ensure diversity in regard to gender and underrepresented groups. We had even advertised dedicated diversity awards for the SMBE meeting (travel awards targeting females and participants from underrepresented groups), but in the end we had a very small pool of applicants for these awards. I'm sure this is an advertising problem (I doubt I reached faculty at primarily undergrad institutes, or faculty at places like Historically Black Colleges), and a function of the gender/ethnicity ration amongst scientists, but overall I was left desperately searching for effective ways to increase diversity.

How do we advertise conferences? 

This is particularly a concern for interdisciplinary conferences (how do you recruit participants from disparate disciplines, when particularly when the organizers themselves are outside those target disciplines?) and newly established events (how do you get people to attend when new or one-off meetings aren't already marked on anyone's calendar). I really struggled with advertising the SMBE meeting, which fit both of these criteria. I sent out countless e-mail notifications to colleages and listservs, Tweeted meeting announcements, and blogged about the event. I've begged other people in my professional network to do the same. There's so many different channels but I never know what the right channels are--and there is often no way to gather data on what advertising strategies worked and what didn't. For advertising events, I often feel like I'm flailing around and hoping that people bite. How do you ensure that the information reaches the right eyes?

How do we minimize the administrative burden, particularly when scientist organizers have little/no admin support? 

After being buried by the administrating burden of the SMBE meeting, I've been mentally repeating that "I'm never organizing another conference ever again". I'm enthusiastic about meetings--I always learn a great deal from my peers and leave scientific events feeling inspired and motivated. I'm also perpetually optimistic that organizational and service activities won't be much of a time suck at all, as long as I gradually stay on top of things. However, I grossly underestimated the administrative duties for the SMBE meeting at UC Davis--travel reimbursements, room booking, alcohol permits, website updates, writing the program, sending e-mails, and collating abstracts--these all consumed my life in the weeks leading up to the meeting (and I was lucky to have help from our lab's admin support person). I worried about the meeting not running smoothly or the materials looking "thrown together" and having an unprofessional air, since I was doing all these organizational duties in my "spare" time outside of research. Perhaps running a meeting is easier for faculty members vs. postdocs (faculty may have admin staff of their own, but certainly grad students/postdocs who can share the organizing duties), but organizing even a small conference fundamentally requires a lot of admin duties regardless of the type of the event.

I don't have  answers to any of the above questions - only observations and thoughts based on my own experiences. I'd love to hear comments and suggestions from the community - please discuss!