Steven Cornish MA'70, an associate dean who became the dean of first-year studies in 2006, left the office over the summer to become the associate dean for curriculum at Bowdoin College. His departure followed that of colleague Robert Shaw, who left in June to become the dean of the school of education at Westminster College in Salt Lake City.
This month, Daniel Gilbert, a research and financial analyst in the dean of the College's office, quit his post to become a financial and administrative manager at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Cornish told The Herald he believed Gilbert had chosen to leave because of the restructuring.
Gilbert could not be reached at the telephone number listed for him on Harvard's Web site.
"There was no recognition or respect given to the good work that was done prior to the restructuring," Cornish said in a phone interview, adding that though the decision to restructure the office "didn't make much sense," deans felt powerless to do anything about it.
The high turnover has put added pressure on the dean of the College's office, which had already lost several deans immediately prior to Bergeron taking office in July 2006. The restructuring has further aggravated the difficulties the office faces by putting most deans in new positions with additional responsibilities and has forced the more experienced deans to shoulder a heavier workload, current and former administrators say.
Cornish's sudden departure followed that of Shaw and of two executive associate deans, Perry Ashley and Jonathan Waage, who were fired in late 2006. Three more deans - associate dean Armando Bengochea, associate dean Joyce Foster MA'92 PhD'97 and assistant dean Sheilah Coleman - left in the months before Bergeron became dean of the College.
Bergeron has not said it was her intention to let go of any of the deans who have left since the beginning of her tenure in July 2006, a few months before she commissioned an external review of the office's organization by her peer administrators at Princeton and Stanford universities.
"I think these things happen," Bergeron said Wednesday of the departures. "I don't think there's much you can say."
But sources told The Herald in February that Ashley and Waage had been fired - an allegation Bergeron has denied - and it now appears that Cornish and Shaw's departures, at the very least, were also caused by Bergeron's decisions, though she may not have intended for them to leave.
"To me it's no mystery why people left," Cornish said. "Their working lives were seriously disrupted by the restructuring." He added that last year, when the restructuring was being discussed, there was "extremely low morale in the office."
Kathryn Spoehr '69, a professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences and a former provost, dean of the faculty and dean of the Graduate School, said that just because some deans were not explicitly asked to leave during the restructuring does not mean that message was not sent.
"If it's not intended that everyone should get up and leave, common sense dictates that they should be given reassurance," she said. "A lot of people got nervous and went out looking for other jobs."
Spoehr said she thinks this unease persists within the office even now. "Some of them who have been there for two or three years are still a little shell-shocked over the exodus," she said.
Questioning the restructuring
In October 2006, Bergeron asked Nancy Malkiel, the dean of the college at Princeton, and John Bravman, the vice provost of undergraduate education at Stanford, to review her office and recommend ways it could be improved. At the time, she had been dean of the College at Brown for just over three months.
"It's good to get a sense of where you stand," Bergeron said Wednesday, adding that she thought it was important to get an outside perspective on her situation as she was beginning her new job. She added that she had already gotten feedback from people on campus, including students, on how they thought the dean of the College's office worked.
"Whenever you're in a new job, people will tell you things," she said.
The general advice of the two consultants, it appears, was to move toward a more hierarchical organization and to consolidate related tasks under individuals and within small working groups, moving away from what Bergeron said was an inefficient "lateral" structure in which many deans performed various, more or less equal, tasks. Both Malkiel and Bravman declined to comment for this article.
As a result, Bergeron announced on Feb. 9 that her office would be restructured. Among the main changes were the hiring of a deputy dean of the College - to whom all deans would report directly - and a change in title for almost all of the academic deans, most of whom were asked to take on new responsibilities and, in some cases, give up others. She also brought in James Valles, a professor of physics, as an associate dean responsible for curriculum, and recruited Maitrayee Bhattacharyya '91 as the assistant dean for diversity programs.
Associate dean Karen Krahulik, for example, whose responsibilities once included sophomore studies, academic honesty and study away in the U.S. programs, is now the associate dean for upperclass studies. Associate deans Linda Dunleavy and Andrew Simmons, whose primary responsibilities include fellowships and health career advising, respectively, now also share responsibility for pre-law advising, a job once done by Ashley.
Kathleen McSharry, an associate dean whose focus has been on substance abuse issues, now also has responsibility for overseeing the University's writing requirement and for grief and bereavement counseling, among other things.
"In terms of my own professional development, I wanted change," McSharry said. "I wanted a new assignment." But she added, "Sometimes people aren't as happy with their reassignments."
Cornish questioned the need to restructure the office at all, saying it was not necessary because the office already worked well.
"All the evidence, I think, pointed in the opposite direction," he said of Bergeron's decision to make changes. "There's a good deal of evidence that a lot of things were done well."
Survey responses indicated that Brown students had better advising in their first year, for example, than they did at peer schools, Cornish said.
Once it became clear that Bergeron would go ahead with her plan despite the opposition of other deans, people started to think about leaving, he said.
"I think everybody gave Dean Bergeron a 'honeymoon' period. So it wasn't until January, February when we had a clear idea of what she wanted to do, and people starting making decisions," he said.
Sheila Blumstein, professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences and a former dean of the College and interim president, said she wasn't sure the restructuring was well-advised and that Bergeron may have benefited from knowing some of the history of the office.
"Change for the sake of change is not always better," she said. "There's always the risk of trying to re-invent the wheel."
"That's not saying you're not open to change," she added. "But knowing history can help you to not make the same mistakes that have been made before."
Blumstein said the dean of the College's office did not work the same way now that it did years before that and that she has seen that change is possible without drastic turnover.
"I'm not sure that everyone who left needed to have left," she said.
Spoehr said the loss of so many deans could be problematic.
"All the people who knew anything left," she said.
She added that the manner in which Ashley was dismissed last year had upset many professors and that this had put Bergeron at a "disadvantage" in convincing faculty that the restructuring of her office was necessary.
"It hurts her credibility," she said.
Bergeron said she thought the restructuring was "going well so far," saying that there was "a lot of communication among the deans about projects we're doing together."
Bergeron also argued that "many things would have had to have been re-thought anyway" around the time she became dean of the College because the implementation of Banner changed the way business was handled in the office.
McSharry said she thought some improvements were beginning to reveal themselves in the restructured office.
"It's beginning to make sense to me," she said.
Overworked and understaffed
The dean of the College's office is within weeks of making a hire to fill the last vacant position in the restructured office, an associate dean for first-year and sophomore studies that Bergeron said would be announced in early November. By the spring semester, the office technically will be fully staffed, though the total number of deans will be a few less than it was before the restructuring. But even though a complete set of deans will be on hand, the office may not be running at full capacity right away.
At the moment, the office is struggling to keep up with business as usual, and many deans, especially McSharry and associate dean for science education David Targan, have had to work longer hours, deans say.
"We're still a bit understaffed," McSharry said. "Sometimes it feels like a bit much, but for the most part I'm happy to do it."
Targan did not respond to an e-mail request for an interview.
But a bigger problem than understaffing might be simply that so many people are trying to tackle so many new responsibilities all at once. Much of the nature of the deans' work, current and former deans say, is collaborative in nature, and requires discussion of policies and protocols.
Cornish said he thought it would take new deans or deans acting in a new capacity "at least one academic year" to fully adjust, saying it is important to have "a full cycle" of the academic year to understand the complete ins and outs of a given responsibility.
"If that knowledge is lost," he added, "people have to begin again."
"With a number of people leaving at the same time as you're undergoing a restructuring," he said, "I think it's bound to have an effect on how the office delivers its service, especially towards students." Longer delays should be expected this year in actions coming out of the dean's office, he said.
All of the assistant and associate deans now report to a new deputy dean of the College, Stephen Lassonde, rather than to Bergeron herself. Lassonde, in his first semester at Brown since being recruited from Yale University, is himself wearing more than one hat, acting as the dean for first-year and sophomore studies this semester until the new associate dean is hired to fill the vacancy.
"We were all surprised," Lassonde said when asked how he felt when he learned that he would be acting as dean for first-year and sophomore studies for his first semester, a necessity created by Cornish's unexpected departure. He added, though, that everyone had adapted well to their new assignments.
"People are taking on responsibilities, and they're doing it happily," he said.
Many deans are working longer hours, Lassonde said, but are taking the changes in stride.
"We're stretched, but I think people like having new roles as well," he said.
But he emphasized that these same people are eager to get back to focusing on their own jobs.
"Let's just say they're looking forward to when we have everyone in place," he said.
"I'm looking forward to thinking about taking a more distant look," he added, saying he had spent most of his time so far handling his responsibilities for first-year and sophomore studies. "I haven't really thought that much about what I'm doing in the future."
He agreed that with institutional memory somewhat sparse, it is not as easy to find answers to complicated questions.
"I think we have to work harder to knit together that kind of collective knowledge," he said.
"I'm not there yet, but we're getting there," he added.
Spoehr questioned the decision to ask Lassonde, the second-highest ranking dean, to handle first-year and sophomore studies.
"I think he'll be a good dean," she said, "if they ever let him do the job he was hired for instead of the job that he's had to fill in for because there was nobody else there."
"You wouldn't want to hire a vice president for computers and then have him write the e-mail code," she added. "That's not how organizations work."
Spoehr said the effects of the overworked dean of the College's office can be felt even right now. She said she thought sophomore advising was "taking a hit this year" because of the turnover and that pre-law advising should be monitored since Ashley, who specialized in that task, is gone. Learning disabilities, once handled by Shaw, recognized as an expert, might not see the same attention, she said.
Even more of a problem, she argued, is that the deans do not seem to have time to create anything new. She mentioned Undergraduate Teaching and Research Assistantships as an example of a program that owes its success to former deans' collaboration.
"Things like that get started when deans have time to think creatively," Spoehr said. She said it might be a year or two before the current deans have that luxury.
But Blumstein said it is too early to know what effects the busy office would have on student services.
"I don't know that we're going to know right now what's falling through the cracks, if anything is falling through the cracks," she said.
She said that these effects might be more obvious toward the end of the semester, in the decisions of the Committee on Academic Standing, for example. Whether the deans have the time to talk to students who are in academic hot water and get the complete story can make all the difference to a student's future at Brown, she said.
"All of them are overworked," Spoehr said of the deans.
Moving up or moving out?
The deans who chose to leave the dean of the College's office in the past year expressed concern for the future of the office. But Cornish said it's also worth considering the future of the deans who left.
"The spin that Bergeron has put on this," he said, "is that we've all moved on to bigger jobs."
But he argued this was not necessarily true and said he was not sure that the new jobs taken by the former deans were equivalent to the ones they left at Brown. This contradicts Bergeron's depiction of the departures as purely positive events unrelated to the restructuring, he said.
Shaw, the dean of the school of education at Westminster College, declined to be interviewed for this article, but he wrote in an e-mail to The Herald that "while it's true that several veteran deans left the (dean of the College's office) in the past couple of years, a number of experienced deans remain."
"I'm confident that they can handle the demands of the office," he added.
Waage, who remains at Brown as a professor of biology, also declined to be interviewed, "largely because I want to protect what is left of my colleagues in the (dean of the College's office)," he wrote in an e-mail.
"A lot of damage has been done and at a particularly poor time," he wrote, adding, "What happened and why it happened are still not all that clear and I am not alone among the faculty in being both upset about things that were done and worried about the consequences."
Ashley, now an executive associate dean in the University's human resources department, declined to comment.
For her part, Bergeron may not plan to deal as much with staffing issues now that the restructuring is complete.
One of the reasons the deputy dean of the College position was created, Lassonde said, was "so she didn't have to deal as much with personnel issues."
Blumstein, for one, is trying to be optimistic about Bergeron's office.
"My hope and expectation is that with good new hires," she said, "the system will stabilize."
"I have to hope for that and expect that," she said.
