We or They?
By 
But giving the answer reminded me that, not so long ago, it would have been “We”. In its idealized form, a university was a self-governing community, with a well-understood teaching and research mission (which did not require a Mission Statement). All but the most senior management jobs were done by academics taking turns before returning to their real jobs. Administrative staff did essential work, largely independently, but didn’t conceive themselves as part of management.
The reality was inevitably less egalitarian and communitarian than this picture suggests, in all sorts of ways. Senior professors had too much power and inevitably, some of them abused it. And, given the times, lots of bad behaviour was tolerated that would not be now.
For good and ill, this has all been swept away, at least in Australia. Multiple layers of management are filled by people who have either left the academic life behind them or were never part of it. The university in this view, is not a community but a business enterprise, even if its ownership structure is rather opaque.
The reality is that of an ordinary workplace in which, most of the time, the interests of bosses and workers are in conflict (though, as in any workplace, there is a shared interest in the survival of the business). Senior managers see themselves as such and compare themselves to their corporate peers. Administrative job titles are those of the corporate sector (Chief Financial Officer and so on).
We have lost. The administrators have won. The only question now is what islands of the old university remain after the tide sweeps the rest away. The key point here is “The reality is that of an ordinary workplace in which, most of the time, the interests of bosses and workers are in conflict.” The Dean, the Provost, and the President are bosses; they will often incidentally have the same interests as the faculty, but this is only incidental and as a general rule what is good for the bosses will not be good for the workers. Keep that in mind when you’re thinking about relations with your Dean.
Anecdote: Some time ago a person with the term “dean” associated with their name visited my department and expressed willingness to host a workshop that would facilitate faculty completion of our “annual review.” I think all of us were a bit puzzled by this; the annual review is widely acknowledged among faculty to be the least useful thing that we can do in furtherance of completing our job responsibilities. For junior faculty is does not really touch upon tenure; for contingent faculty it is simply stress; for senior faculty it’s a complete waste of time. The annual review does not help with teaching, it does not help with research, it does not help with service, and it does not help with the kinds of administration that are relevant to life in an academic department. It is pure busywork, a metric invented by administrators to make faculty more accountable to administration. The only kind of “workshop” that is useful for faculty to complete their annual review is a workshop that completely obviates the need for an annual review. The idea that we should spend time on a Friday learning how to make our annual review “good” is so alien to any meaningful concept of the purpose of the university that it took us all a moment to comprehend that this is actually what the person offered. No faculty member wants to make their annual review “good,” and no faculty member wants to worry that other faculty are making their annual reviews “good.” The absurdity of the entire enterprise was laid bare, and fortunately we quickly moved on to a discussion of somewhat less useless activities (to describe them as “more useful” would be wrong). But this is truth in the modern academy; filing reports for administrators to half-heartedly read is now a core duty in the profession.
Don’t waste your time getting a Ph.D, folks.