Making the rounds
Tom Kazee is settling in as Furman's new dean
As a young political science professor at Davidson College in the mid-1980s, Tom Kazee scoffed at the idea of ever being a dean.
Toweling off after a lunchtime faculty volleyball game, he once asked a colleague who had inquired about the dean vacancy at Davidson, “Why in the world would you ever want to be dean?”
In Kazee's mind, deans spent most of their day trouble-shooting and dealing with mundane, if necessary, administrative duties. His life was his students, the classroom and political science. Teaching was hard work, for sure, but extremely gratifying.
However, after Kazee earned tenure in 1984 and was named department chair five years later, he experienced “a kind of gradual change in thinking.”
As chair of the political science department at Davidson, Kazee helped to reshape course offerings and played a major role in developing a study and internship program in Washington, D.C. He hired new faculty that have since become inspiring professors. His voice in university affairs began to grow, and he liked it.
“I was part of a team that was charting a course for the college, that was helping to shape the future,” he says. “I liked participating in that conversation.”
At the urging of several colleagues, he interviewed for and was subsequently offered the dean's job at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn. Davidson and Sewanee were similar in many ways. Both were small, highly selective, private liberal arts colleges located in small towns.
For Kazee, a 1974 graduate of Baldwin-Wallace College who had spent most of his academic career in a liberal arts setting, the University of the South was a nice fit. But life as a full-time administrator required some adjustments. During his first few weeks on the job, Kazee was amazed by the “volume and diversity of issues” with which a dean must cope.
“I soon discovered that I was going to have to learn to process a lot of information quickly,” he says.
The learning curve was short, though, and faculty and other members of the close-knit campus community soon warmed to the new dean and his affable personality. At Sewanee Kazee worked with faculty to create a substantial new First Year Program, a carefully chosen curriculum and co-curriculum designed to help freshmen integrate into college life.
The process, explained Kazee, was at times grueling and frustrating. Afterwards, gathered with colleagues at a local restaurant to celebrate the end of the long project, Kazee knew that he had found his calling.
“There was such a feeling of satisfaction knowing that we had worked together and made some good decisions,” he says.
Kazee and his wife, Sharon, arrived at Furman in early July and have been busy making the rounds, meeting faculty and staff and settling into their new home in Taylors.
Unlike past deans A.V. Huff, David Shi, Ray Roberts, John Crabtree and Frank Bonner, Kazee does not have a long history at Furman. He is, in fact, just emerging from what he jokingly refers to as “authentic ignorance.”
“I'll be looking at things with a fresh pair of eyes,” says Kazee. “I've been doing some talking. But I've done a lot of listening to some very impressive people, too, in an effort to get up to speed.”
Like the folks at Sewanee, we expect the learning curve to be short.
Inside Furman is published monthly during the school year by the Furman University Department of Marketing and Public Relations. For story ideas, e-mail John Roberts, editor.
