Paul Fleming of the Society for the Humanities - Cornell University

Balancing Administrative, Intellectual, and Instructional Work

Being the leader of an HCI requires balancing tasks, relationships, and responsibilities that do not easily overlap. More importantly, directors should strive to set up a work-work balance where they can balance service, administrative and instructional labor and feel intellectual energized. This pursuit of personal balance should also not come at the expense of colleagues’ or staff’s interests.

While it may be difficult, try to block off time for writing and research. More than simply allowing you to continue personal projects, it also signals to staff and colleagues that the position as director is often held alongside other commitments. Having protected time on your visible schedule also provides a model for junior faculty and colleagues anxious about balancing teaching, research, and service.

Another way to balance these efforts is to create structures that allow you to protect your time. For example, a weekly writing group among faculty and student fellows, led by the director, builds collegiality and participation in it.

• Kathleen Woodward, “Work-Work Balance, Metrics, and Resetting the Balance,” PMLA Vol. 127, no. 4 (2012): 994-1000.

Navigating Internal Bureaucracies

The formal and informal pathways of your parent institution is among the most important forms of knowledge you’ll acquire as an HCI director. At many centers, directors are both thought leaders and connectors, with their fingers on the pulse of the humanities and the ways of bringing attention to and getting buy-in from faculty, students, and community projects.

Every institution is set up differently and even those with similar structures can vary operationally by personnel. If you are new to the position of director, reach out to past directors or other similarly positioned faculty and administrators around campus for informal conversations about their experiences starting, conducting, and completing programs. In particular, explore the sources of funding around the institution and how centers can get and maintain funding.

Committees and Boards

The hierarchy of a center very much depends upon its genesis. In some cases, a center is very closely attached to a single individual, often a founding director. In other places, the directorship rotates on a pre-determined schedule. Both models have been successful.

Shared governance of an HCI in the form of a committee or advisory board is common. The Center for the Humanities at Virginia Tech is overseen by two boards: an Advisory Committee and a Stakeholder Committee.

• The Advisory Committee “provides recommendations and guidance for programming, guest speakers, annual themes, and strategies that enhance the center’s reach across disciplinary boundaries of the university.”
• The Stakeholder Committee, “as stipulated by Virginia Tech policy, governs the center, reviews its financial and administrative functions, and receives annual reports from the director as well as internal audit reports.

Since 2014, The Willson Center at the University of Georgia has worked with a Board of Friends that serves a number of functions, including fundraising. At other places, the advisory committee is more limited in scope. At the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, the advisory committee members select fellows and oversee the HRI’s prize competition.

• Advisory Committee – Virginia Tech - https://liberalarts.vt.edu/research-centers/center-for-humanities/advisory-committee.html
• Stakeholder Committee – Virginia Tech - https://liberalarts.vt.edu/res...
• Willson Center Board of Friends – Willson Center for Humanities & Arts - https://willson.uga.edu/about/people/willson-center-board-of-friends/
• Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign - https://www.iprh.illinois.edu/about/advisory-committee

Whether an individual or a larger committee, leadership should improve the functions of the HCI by generating programs, expanding reach, building institutional and extra institutional connections, promoting interdisciplinarity, or taking on administrative tasks. As an example, a board member of the Northeastern Humanities Center proposed a collaborative event series with Harvard's Mahindra Humanities Center on the theme of Composite Bodies.

Dan Kubis (UPittsburgh) at the 2018 CHCI Annual Meeting in Charlottesville, VA

Staff Relations

There is no single correct way to manage a staff. The relationship between an HCI director and their staff depends on the individual competencies, personalities, schedules, and career goals not just of the director, but also of the staff. Whether you are a new or returning director, having open and direct conversations about management is essential to the efficient functioning of your HCI.

Structure

The running of a humanities centers varies considerably across CHCI and there is no structure that works for all members. Indeed, we have found that the structure of administration is determined by both specific needs and the practices (and resources) of a parent institution.

Staff as Experts

A well-run humanities organization recognizes that the staff can provide valuable input on the intellectual work of programming. In many places, staff have advanced degrees in humanities fields and spent years of their life devoted to researching and writing. While they may not necessarily be active researchers, they nonetheless are likely still connected to their fields of study, actively follow new and emerging scholarship, and committed to the advancement of humanistic inquiry. When possible, lean on your staff’s intellectual expertise in building out your programming.

The dual-faced nature of many HCI administrators is an incredibly useful resource for HCIs focused on supporting faculty research projects. At centers where disciplinary excellence functions as the bedrock of all the other impacts and activities, an administrator knowledgeable about faculty projects can identify and connect researchers to appropriate campus resources and opportunities. Here, executive or assistant directors can focus their energies on merging faculty projects with the right campus resources and units to mutually benefit all parties.

Advocating for New Positions

Looking around CHCI, we have found that individual centers evolve and change over time. One common, multi-year trajectory is for an HCI to:

• Emerge from a department;
• Share staff and space with that department;
• Secure its own space;
• Establish independent part-time staff;
• Create student positions;
• Formalize student positions into part- or full-time position;
• Hire full-time staff;
• Expand staff in piecemeal fashion

All of this is to say that the staff structure you start with will not be the staff structure you end up with in a few years’ time. Instead, incorporate staffing changes into your organization’s long-term strategic vision.

• What would a new part-time staff person do at and, more critically, for your center?
• Who is the ideal person for this position? An undergraduate or graduate student? A professional?
• How would transitioning a part-time individual to full-time influence your current and future projects?
• How would a new position expand or intensify your campus and community impacts?
• How would a new full or part-time position make your HCI more stable and self-sufficient?

In advocating for the creation of a new position, you’ll want to outline clearly for administrators the impact of your HCI on the campus and community and how the creation of the new position will lead to long-term stability and enhanced impact. Highlighting for administrators the book projects, faculty awards, affiliated-student accomplishments, staff honors, signature events, and community impacts emerging from your HCI will strengthen your bargaining position. Here again, a regular practice of documentation and archiving is critical. If you are applying for new and expanded funding from a particular division within your institution, lay out clearly how your HCI has contributed to faculty research or course offerings in that division.

In many ways, the success of an HCI depends on its partnerships. In the university setting, many HCIs emerge from faculty and student projects from a specific department (or a few departments) and those individuals function as the main audience for early projects or occupy initial leadership positions. That department may also share staff with the new center. An HCI’s expansion and development depend on relationships with other on-campus units.

Additionally, conduct institutional research on similar centers at your institution or at peer institutions. If it is common practice around your institution to have, for example, a faculty director, associate director, and office manager, make that clear to requests for the position you wish to be created.