Building a Team in a Department in a University--lessons from basketball in Bill Bradley's Values of the Game

For the most part, our colleagues (professors!) may belong to a discipline and be a member of a department, but they are in effect each on their own. And this is the case for senior faculty as well as those who are just beginning. If a new faculty member is fortunate, someone in the department will take them under their wing, sponsoring and mentoring them. [This is not so much a dean providing guidance and help, as craft training that depends on the particular needs of a research area.]  I'm reading a book by Bill Bradley (Values of the Game), where the team is the right unit not any individual player. This begins to make sense for professors, if we think that the reputation and strength of the department is the right unit (and I suspect that for a dean or provost that may well be the case). Of course, you want the strongest players, but you want them to complement each other so that the department is not just the sum of individual strengths. 

For the most part, at least in my limited purview, we hire faculty with comparatively little consideration of their team potential, of their contributions to making their now-new colleagues stronger. It would seem that it is not too hard to decide if an individual is strong enough as a player, although one can only find out if there is good chemistry when the team plays. In analogy, it is not so hard to find out if a probationary faculty member is tenurable, but if you are concerned with the department, although that consideration may well be stated by the dean and chair, it plays a small role. (By the way, I'm not talking about justifying someone who is comparatively weak when they come up for tenure, the dean arguing their contribution to the school is important--}

Whatever Higginbottom and then Soames did (in building up USC's Philosophy Department), they surely started with first rate appointments but they were building a team in Philosophy (under philosophy of language and linguistics, surely in a particular league but with wider implications), even if the "players" did not actually play together much. Law at USC did very well under Marty Levine and Scott Bice, with strong people made stronger by their colleagues. On the other hand there are departments that keep promising to become powerhouses but seem not to be able to achieve take-off, although they might well become stronger.

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