Last April, in a campus-wide email by President Safa Zaki, it was announced that Senior Vice President and Dean for Academic Affairs Jen Scanlon is stepping down from her role as a college administrator at the end of this academic year.

Scanlon first joined the administrative side of the College as interim dean for academic affairs starting the summer of 2015. She returned to the administration before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, serving as the official Senior Vice President and Dean for Academic Affairs for the past six years. Prior to these roles, Scanlon has been a professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin since 2002.

As this academic year comes to a close, Scanlon is entering the final days of her administrative role, after which, she will be taking a sabbatical year. She plans to return to teaching at Bowdoin in the fall of 2027.

Scanlon notes that her time as a faculty member is what initially inspired her to take on her administrative role.

“I was in faculty meetings, and I would hear all kinds of things, and think about faculty priorities and what this place should be like,” Scanlon said. “[I] fe[lt] like, if I stepped into the administration, that I could help usher in some of the things that faculty talked about and valued.”

Scanlon’s time in administration was also defined by the unique circumstances of the pandemic in which she stepped into the role.

“[Covid] was a very intense period. We figured out a model that some people liked and other people didn’t like but we it all worked out in the end, but it was a very, very intense start to this role,” Scanlon said. “You know, everybody teaching remotely, faculty meetings being held online, all of our meetings being held online. So it was kind of a baptism of fire.”

One of Scanlon’s priorities in her work as Senior Vice President and Dean for Academic Affairs was the continued effort towards the model of shared governance between faculty and administration.

“I really believe that faculty can be the best spokespeople for higher ed and that at this moment, [though] it’s been this way for a while, with all [its] challenges to higher education, we really need faculty to feel fulfilled in the model, to help build it, to share governance in it,” Scalon said.

One of Scanlon’s efforts to contribute toward this was the implementation of two faculty development programs. According to Scanlon, these programs are aimed to help faculty see them selves as integral parts of the College as well as learn more about the administrative ongoings of the institution. One of the programs is for faculty in their second year on the tenure track and the second is for faculty in the year after they receive tenure.

“It’s easy to just sort of think about the work that you do and not have a bigger sense of the institution,” Scanlon said. “So I feel like those are two contributions I’ve made that contribute to better governance. I think if faculty better understand what a college is, what inclusive excellence is, how we all work together, then they’ll both be better spokespeople and we’ll have better governance all together.”

For Scanlon, stepping into this administrative role also meant expanding her purview of who she was representing. She noted having a different perspective as a faculty member before taking on more leadership.

“An area for growth for anybody who steps into a leadership role is learning what it means to represent many constituencies. When I was a faculty member, I think I had a decent institutional vantage point, but when you enter into a role like this, it expands so much,” Scanlon said.

Along with a change in perspective, Scanlon noted some tensions she faced in her transition.

“There are tensions for any faculty member who steps into a role like this, because you’re wearing both hats,” Scanlon said. “I’ve never stopped being a faculty member, but I know things, I’ve learned things, I have greater responsibilities and so I have more to balance.”

Despite having to balance these responsibilities, Scanlon expressed gratitude for her time in the administration, having worked toward the goal of greater inclusive excellence in teaching.

“[We’re] continuously becoming more of a place where our curriculum and our faculty are representing greater and greater diversity of points of view, of cutting edge practices and disciplines of greater and greater interdisciplinarity,” Scanlon said. “[I] feel that’s been a super strong partnership that I’ve been engaged in with the faculty and my time in this role. And I’m very grateful for that.”