The Dean as Soul-Keeper

Many years ago, I became a leader by accident, or at least that’s how it felt at the time. One day I was a researcher focused on my work, the next I was responsible for an entire institution and all the people in it. The title came with an office, administrative duties, budget meetings, strategic planning documents. All the apparatus of institutional leadership.

What it didn’t come with—what nobody told me I’d need—was the recognition that I’d just become responsible for other people’s souls.

That sounds grandiose, I know. Melodramatic. But I mean it literally, or as literally as philosophy allows. When you lead an academic institution, you’re not managing resources or administering programs. You’re holding space for the development of human beings who’ve dedicated their lives to thinking, teaching, creating knowledge. You’re responsible for whether they flourish or wither. Whether they grow or calcify. Whether they remain alive to their work or slowly die inside while going through the motions.

You’re the keeper of souls. And if you don’t understand that, you’ll fail at the job no matter how efficiently you manage the budget.

The Bureaucrat’s Temptation

The easiest thing to do as an academic leader is to become a bureaucrat. Focus on the measurable: publications, grants, student numbers, rankings. Create systems, enforce procedures, demand accountability. Treat faculty as resources to be optimized, students as products to be processed, the institution as a machine to be managed.

This approach has the advantage of clarity. You know what success looks like. You can demonstrate your effectiveness with metrics. You can defend your decisions with data. And you can avoid the uncomfortable, messy, unmeasurable work of actually caring about the people you lead.

I tried this initially. Went to meetings, reviewed reports, made decisions based on strategic priorities and resource allocation. Felt like I was doing something important because I was always busy, always addressing urgent matters, always moving the institution forward according to whatever metrics mattered that year.

But I noticed something. Faculty would come to my office to discuss their research, their teaching, their struggles with difficult students or uncooperative colleagues. And I’d listen, nod, offer practical advice about time management or conflict resolution, then steer the conversation back to whatever administrative matter needed addressing.

I was solving problems. But I wasn’t seeing people.

One afternoon a senior colleague—someone I respected enormously—came to tell me he’d decided to leave the university. Better offer elsewhere, more resources, higher profile. All the rational reasons. But as he talked, I realized I’d never really asked him why he stayed, what kept him engaged with his work, what he needed to flourish here. I’d treated him as a constant—someone reliably productive who didn’t need attention.

He left. And I understood I’d failed him, not as an administrator but as something more fundamental. I’d been his leader but I hadn’t been his keeper. I’d maintained the institutional relationship but missed the human one entirely.

The Mirror Recognition

Something shifted after that. I started paying different attention to the people I led.

And I noticed something strange: when I really looked at them—not at their productivity or their problems but at them as people struggling to do meaningful work in difficult circumstances—I saw myself. Not literally, but essentially. The same doubts I had about whether my work mattered. The same exhaustion from institutional demands. The same hunger for recognition and fear of mediocrity. The same moments of inspiration that made everything worthwhile and moments of despair when nothing seemed to matter.

We were mirrors of each other. Their struggles were my struggles. Their aspirations were my aspirations. Their dignity was my dignity.

This wasn’t empathy exactly, though empathy was part of it. It was more like recognition—the kind of recognition that happens when you see someone not as other but as another version of yourself, working through the same fundamental human problems in a different context.

Once I saw this, I couldn’t unsee it. Every interaction became charged with this recognition. When a junior faculty member came to discuss their teaching struggles, I wasn’t just hearing about their problems—I was encountering my own doubts about whether I’m effective in the classroom, whether students really learn what I’m trying to teach, whether my approach matters. When someone presented their research anxieties, I was facing my own fear that my work isn’t significant, that I’m not contributing anything truly original, that years of effort might amount to very little.

And here’s what became clear: I couldn’t help them develop without developing myself. I couldn’t address their doubts without addressing my own. I couldn’t support their flourishing while I was stagnating. Their growth and my growth were inseparable because we were fundamentally engaged in the same project—trying to live meaningful lives through intellectual work in an institution that often seemed indifferent to meaning.

The Development That Goes Both Ways

Traditional leadership models treat development as something leaders provide to those they lead. The leader, already developed, helps others reach their potential. The relationship is asymmetric—wisdom flows downward, development is a gift the leader gives.

But that’s not how it actually works, or at least not how it works when it works well.

Every time I help a colleague work through a problem with their research, I’m working through my own methodological questions. Every time I support someone struggling with teaching, I’m confronting my own pedagogical limitations. Every time I help someone navigate institutional politics, I’m clarifying my own understanding of how power operates and how to use it ethically.

Their development is my development. We’re growing together, through each other.

I remember working with a brilliant young researcher who was paralyzed by perfectionism. She couldn’t publish because nothing ever felt finished, good enough, worthy of being put out into the world. We spent months discussing this—not as leader and faculty member but as two people grappling with the same fundamental question: When is work good enough? How do you balance striving for excellence with accepting limitation? How do you maintain standards without being destroyed by them?

I thought I was helping her. And I was—she eventually published, started gaining recognition, found her rhythm. But she was helping me just as much. Through her struggle, I was forced to examine my own relationship to perfectionism, my own tendency to delay and revise indefinitely, my own difficulty accepting that done is sometimes better than perfect.

She developed. I developed. The boundary between helper and helped dissolved into something more like mutual recognition and shared struggle.

This is what leadership in an academic context actually requires: recognition that you’re not above the people you lead, that you’re not already developed while they’re still developing, that you’re all engaged in the same difficult work of trying to think clearly, teach well, create knowledge, and live meaningful lives while navigating institutional constraints and personal limitations.

The leader who understands this becomes something other than a bureaucrat or even a leader in the traditional sense. They become what I can only call a soul-keeper—someone who holds space for mutual development, who sees their own growth as inseparable from the growth of those they serve.

The Bond That Forms

When you lead this way—when you see your faculty as mirrors of yourself, when you recognize your development and theirs as a shared project—something changes in the institutional culture.

Trust develops. Not the transactional trust of “I trust you to do your job,” but deeper trust, the kind that only comes from genuine mutual recognition. People start bringing you not just their professional problems but their existential ones. The struggles with meaning, with purpose, with whether this work matters, with how to balance amb