The Dean: On Duty: An Experience in Education

What is a Dean of Students? What does he do when he is "on duty?" What do teenagers do when the adults are not looking? How important are education and parenting? This book offers some insights and perhaps even some answers.

The Dean: On Duty explores a number of important issues that students, parents and schools confront on a regular basis. The anecdotes reflect real people and real issues, and though each person or incident is unique the broader implications for society in general bubble to the surface throughout the book. This is not an in depth study of homophobia, ethnicity, politics or philosophy, but those are among the broad issues that emerge throughout the book, often with their own chapter headings but not exclusive to those chapters. This is a personal story, not the result of research or planning.

"I live on campus at a boarding/day school of teenagers in grades 9-12, with an additional day population in the 7th and 8th grades that has a separate administrator. Even though only a small portion of the American population has contact with or knowledge of these institutions, what I have to say has broad enough implications that there will be useful nuggets for many people: parents, students, school personnel, former students. Much of what I do say is anecdotal, personal. I am not a social scientist. I do not have the broad data to make solid conclusions about education or parenting.

I am a student of history, a teacher of history; however, I am not an historian. I have no PH.D. I have taught US History, including the Advanced Placement class, European History, Ancient History, Geography, American Government, electives on Hitler and Nazi Germany for nearly 30 years, Russian History, and, more recently Western Philosophy. I have taught 7th through 12th graders, although only juniors and seniors with a smattering of sophomores for the last ten years. I have coached soccer, basketball, golf and baseball. I have lived in boys´ dorms, a girls´ dorm, in my own mortgaged house, and in school housing. I have taken school trips to Outward Bound programs, Germany and the USSR.

In short, I have some experience and some experiences.
After 33 years as a teacher, 9 1/2 as a Dean of Students, I am on a bit of a break. I have a sabbatical during the 2nd half of the 2001-02 year, and it is the first year after 32 consecutive years in the classroom that I am not teaching. I decided that I would discipline myself to try to write enough for a book during my sabbatical."

"I have been in schools for more than 50 consecutive years. Most of what I have to say is about the last ten and where all of us are right now."

While the job of being a Dean of Students is indeed a serious one, the ability to remain personally stable and successful requires empathy, patience and certainly a sense of humor. While there are no rollicking escapades described in the book, there are indeed some amusing, although sometimes, poignant moments as well. The author attempts to demonstrate his personal style as a Dean with that hint of humor as he goes along.

"Dean is a four-letter word. While it is not always clear what the term means, my title at the school is Dean of Students. We also have a Dean of Faculty and an Academic Dean.

One of the earliest definitions of Dean was a senior member of a monastery overseeing ten monks. Fortunately, that does not apply to me.

It is also a definition of a senior member of a male group (female version: doyen), It is in my case a side effect of constancy with one employer.

As Dean of Students, I am essentially in charge of discipline, another of those elements of the definition of Dean. Dean of Discipline. Dean of Dress. Dean of Issues Other People Want to Avoid. That sounds too much like a march to martyrdom, and martyrdom is not my goal.

In fact, I really like my job. Most people do not understand how anyone could be or want to be a dean in a school of teenagers, and the turnover rate in most schools is rapid."

While the stories and analysis are from the Dean´s perspective, the role of educators and parents in the process of shepherding teenagers through those tendentious, sometimes tumultuous, years of growth also is prominent. As he quotes from John Donne´s essay, "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main". Parents cannot send their sons and daughters off to school and in exasperation say, "Fix it." The behaviors and attitudes were formulated many years earlier, in that period of time when a person´s roots were established. Schools and the people that work in them are more responsible for helping the teenagers develop the wings they will need to leave the nest and become the adults we all would like them to be.

"And yet we cannot entirely predict the outcome of the child we created, who will turn first into an adolescent and then into an adult.

I constantly remind myself that I am not perfect, and by extension that my children will not be perfect. I can only hope that my good faith in trying to be a good parent will result in an outcome that will make me happy and proud. As I learned once-and have often repeated in meetings with parents-our job as parents is to give our children roots and wings. If we have grounded them well in the fundamentals of decency, of humaneness, of empathy, then those roots will enable the adult to flourish. But at some, perhaps painful, point we have to allow them to fly from the nest, to experience their own freedom and self-ness. They will take their roots with them, replant them in their own space and time, and start the regeneration of the human process. This is a biological imperative, even if it does not always come to fruition to individuals.
As the Dean, or parent, in a school of several hundred adolescents, I cannot plant roots in the students who matriculate. That has already been done. As we are wont to say in school, the acorn does not fall far from the oak. Often I feel I am working hardest with the oak-the parent who cannot believe the child could do such a thing (when a situation has occurred that has put the student at risk of suspension or dismissal). I am not a family therapist or a psychologist. But I am increasingly aware when one of those professionals and experts needs to be part of the solution. Fixing roots of an unhealthy plant is a difficult task. They are not visible, they have been unhealthy for a long time, and simply trimming the above ground limbs will not fix the plant."

One of the first experiences as Dean involved a student leaving the first weekend without telling anyone, getting on a plane, flying 3000 miles to his home, and surprising his parents. The parents received a phone call from the Dean concerned about the missing boy within an hour after he had arrived home. The boy knew he had made a mistake and he and his parents agreed he would return the next day. That situation was resolved happily for everyone. Other situations did not fare as well
"Finally in his second year, as a senior, he achieved what I now think he really wanted-to be at home. Sadly, that was not what his father wanted. The only way he could get home was to be sent home by the school. That would happen only if he committed an offense worthy of at least suspension. So he blatantly committed such an act, and he made sure he got caught. He bought a bottle of vodka, drank enough to be noticed, admitted he drank, gave up the bottle of vodka, and knew he had to go home.
The father almost would not take him. We had to threaten legal action because he was the parent and we were not. Eventually, the situation was resolved and the boy went home, graduating from