Against All Odds: Transitioning from Academic Faculty into Administrative Roles While Maintaining Successful Scholarship

This narrative manuscript introduces and describes how we have maintained scholarship identities throughout (and beyond) our transitions from newly tenured academic faculty into program director roles in a school of social work at a private university in the U.S. Here, we present concepts relevant to how scholarship agendas can be maintained—refined, adapted—post-transition into academic leadership positions. Taking inspiration from Helen Sword’s (2017) Behavioral, Artisanal, Social, and Emotional (BASE) writing tool, we present individual vignettes and reflections that illustrate the role that growth has played in being able to move our agendas forward. Our shared experience of doing so “against all odds” offers support to others for whom transitioning to leadership may threaten ongoing scholarly success (or potentially threaten to undo it). We provide several recommendations for weathering transition and creating leader-scholar productivity post-transition.