46 ORGANIZING ACADEMIC COLLEGES: A GUIDE FOR DEANS attractive to prospective candidates as both division (academic) and functional skills and knowledge are needed. Administrative fellows are an increasingly popular method for bringing faculty expertise into the dean’s office. A dean places faculty into administrative roles on a part-time or contingent basis rather than relying entirely on full-time administrators. These administrative fellows (also called faculty fellows and faculty administrative fellows) often are assigned to lead or manage a project, task force, or other specific function for the college. Arizona State University, for instance, uses a faculty fellow to lead residential learning communities. At Oklahoma State the administrative fellow leads the col- lege’s community engagement efforts. At Virginia Tech, administrative fellows over- see specific research initiatives for the college. Deploying administrative fellows can have powerful benefits. First, administrative fellows gain insight into how college-level administration works, which is excellent pro- fessional development for those on track for department chair or associate dean. As these positions frequently rotate, the fellows return to faculty generally as strong advo- cates for the function or task force they were overseeing. This practice can generate buy- in for initiatives that faculty might tend to resist (e.g., assessment of learning outcomes). Some colleges allow administrative fellows to participate in leadership meetings for the dean’s office, and faculty view such moves as improvements in shared gover- nance. Indeed, as projects and reporting requirements in the dean’s office proliferate, the dean can add additional full-time administrators, or add multiple administrative fellows with these benefits—with faculty generally favoring the latter. A few notes of caution regarding administrative fellows: As the people appointed into these positions often have limited administrative experience, their progress on the area for which they are responsible may be lower compared to the progress a longer-service administrator might make. As with any administrative position, the effort that can be placed into the function is boundless. Assistant professors on the tenure track are poor choices for these positions because their research and/or teach- ing could be derailed. These appointments also require regular mentoring. Given the fresh perspective they bring to the office, others in the office seem quite happy to mentor administrative fellows. Titles for and Background of Decanal Faculty Our review of college websites revealed which titles are paired with which functions (Table 3.3). Most often titles are listed as “associate dean for [function]” or “assistant dean for [function]”. Sometimes no additional qualifier appears in their title (their title being simply “assistant dean” or “associate dean”), making it difficult to discern their role in the office. Clearly, no universal classification of these titles exists among Arts & Sciences de- canal staff, or within other colleges at universities (checking business, education, and