As associate chairwoman of her English department, Bridget M. Keegan always dreaded the task of devising the teaching schedule. Senior colleagues, she recalls, bullied her with their demands, which she might have been able to ignore, had she been tenured herself.
Ms. Keegan represents a growing phenomenon in academe: untenured faculty members serving in leadership positions in their departments. Although no one keeps track of the number of untenured chairmen, their ranks seem to be increasing, academics say, even though many professors think the idea is a bad one.
To be a chairman without tenure, critics say, is committing professional suicide since you would be in charge of -- and could therefore possibly alienate -- the very people who would vote on your tenure. Thomas F. Miller, chairman of the history department at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire, reflected the prevailing sentiment when asked if he would have accepted his chairmanship without tenure: "There's no earthly way."
Some departments have had no choice but to tap the untenured ranks for leaders. They've lost senior scholars to retirements but budget constraints have prevented many departments from replacing the retirees -- thus shrinking the pool of potential department heads.
"We never would have seen this 25 years ago," says Irene W.D. Hecht, senior associate with the American Council on Education. "If you saw it, you would say, 'Oh my God, what's the matter with that department?'"
At most major research universities and elite liberal-arts colleges, the chairman is still usually a senior professor, Ms. Hecht says. But at small private colleges and teaching-oriented public institutions -- where the demands of the job have grown from just voting on tenure and doling out raises to reporting on graduation and faculty productivity rates -- some full professors are no longer interested in the job. Sometimes, departments resort to finding leaders among the junior faculty when the senior ranks are riven by old feuds. In other cases, a department may have only a small coterie of senior scholars, all of whom have taken turns at the chairmanship. Ms. Hecht says they may feel "we've done this grind 14 times, we've had it."
That's how Perry A. Tompkins landed in the chairman's seat at Samford University, in Birmingham, Ala. An associate professor of physics, Mr. Tompkins became chairman of the physics department in August and goes up for tenure this academic year. His department has already voted in his favor, and his case is now headed through administrative channels.
When his predecessor tired of the position after nine years, and the other full professor in the department had no interest in the job, Mr. Tompkins volunteered "for the fun of it," he says. "We've got a really great department," made up of three full-time professors and a few adjuncts. "Everyone is pretty much friends with everyone else."
As chairman, he is paid an extra $3,000 annually to decide raises and devise the teaching schedule, among other duties. He would also get to vote on tenure cases, but no others are coming before the department this year.
Besides Mr. Tompkins, tenureless chairmen can be found at a wide range of institutions. Davis R. Robinson, an assistant professor of theater, is chairman of the theater department at Bowdoin College. Although a spokeswoman for Bowdoin says it does not normally ask untenured professors to serve as department heads, it does on rare occasions when no tenured professors are available to serve, which happens most often in small departments.
Other untenured chairmen include Charles W. Clark, an associate professor and chairman of the history department at the State University of West Georgia; Jeffrey T. Kenney, an associate professor and chairman of the religious-studies department at Depauw University; Steve Schlough, an associate professor and chairman of the communications, education, and training department at the University of Wisconsin-Stout; and John Omachonu, an associate professor and chairman of the communications department at William Paterson University. Eight of Elon University's 23 department chairmen are also untenured.
Being an untenured chairman, Mr. Tompkins acknowledges, is not always easy. "A lot of times I have to look at a decision I make, whether or not this is going to have an effect" on my getting tenure, he says. For example, his department recently bought a $9,000 light source (he says it was mostly his decision) that turned out to be the wrong purchase. "I'm going to be the one to try to reduce our losses and get this piece of equipment sold on the secondary market so we can get some money back," he says.
Still, Mr. Tompkins says, he was not worried that his colleagues would hold bad decisions against him in considering his tenure case. "Not this department," he says. "We just don't work that way."
While Mr. Tompkins has had a smooth relationship with his department, many tenured professors who are department heads said they would never have put themselves in such a position untenured.
The chairman's position is one of the most "touchy" on campus, says Mr. Miller, head of the history department at Wisconsin's Eau Claire campus. "You're always between somebody and somebody else," he says. "On the one hand, you're a representative of the faculty. At the same time you're in some way or other the boss of the people in the department," which means chairmen may find themselves in the awkward position of making decisions that they find necessary but that their colleagues oppose.
Having an untenured department head, Mr. Miller believes, would compromise the tenure process. It would be "very hard for tenured faculty of a department to separate their evaluation of a chair's performance as a scholar and teacher from their feelings about him or her as chair."
Dean R. Snow, a professor and chairman of the anthropology department at Pennsylvania State University's main campus, also would advise against being an untenured chairman. He recalls the difficulties he had serving as chairman at the State University of New York at Albany when he was a tenured professor but only at the associate-professor rank. "I was dealing with full professors who wanted me to do their collective bidding on any issue," he says.
Mr. Snow says he "would not want to be in an institution where we have untenured assistant or associate professors trying to run departments," he says. "You don't want to have someone running a department that doesn't really understand the people reporting to him or her. You've got to be a real academic with professional credentials."
The trend toward appointing untenured department heads seems particularly common in professional schools. Kanata A. Jackson, an assistant professor of management and chairwoman of the management department at Hampton University, says she does not expect her department to hold her administrative decisions against her when she comes up for tenure in two years because "the requirements for tenure are cut and dried," she says. "You either have them or you don't. It's not as political as people want to make it."
She says she had no qualms about coming into the job without tenure because she spent 15 years in the corporate world. Before coming to Hampton, where she is in her fifth year, Ms. Jackson was a management consultant with Rockwell International. "Those same skills and ethics and sense of integrity, you carry that with you," she says. Not having tenure, she adds, has not diminished her ability to manage her department.
If an untenured leader did run into trouble, she says, "the problem would not be because the chair doesn't have tenure. The problem would be the chair not having good management skills."
Ms. Keegan begs to differ. Her stint as an untenured associate chairwoman of English at Creighton University in 1998-99 left her feeling vulnerable to the whims of senior colleagues as she tried to set the teaching schedule. "People would make what I felt to be unreasonable demands about times and classes they wanted to teach," she says. "I felt sometimes rather bullied by that."
So she stepped down after only a year in the position, for which she was paid an extra $1,400, because she felt it was "too much pressure" on a junior faculty member.
Her stint as associate chairwoman did not prevent her from getting tenure. She is now a tenured associate professor at Creighton and also happens to be chairwoman of her department. But unlike most of Creighton's larger departments that have associate heads who can help with the administrative duties, Ms. Keegan does not have an assistant. That's because "the only folks who would be interested in it are untenured right now," and "I just don't even want to put them in that position," she says.
Some administrators see advantages in placing the untenured into what has traditionally been a tenured role. Bringing in a highly motivated junior scholar as a leader can energize a department. "They bring a fresh perspective to the department and an enthusiasm you might not get from tenured faculty or more senior faculty," says Sandra D. Haynes, interim associate dean of the school of professional studies at the Metropolitan State College of Denver. Her school has a handful of untenured department heads. "We get new energy, new blood, new ideas," from the arrangement. The untenured professors benefit by being able to hone their management skills immediately rather than waiting until they've earned tenure.
Still, she acknowledges the potential for disaster. "Institutions have to make sure that the climate is able to accept an untenured chair ... and make sure the untenured chair is protected from possible political repercussions that might come from tenured faculty who might feel slighted if they are not asked to serve as chair," Ms. Haynes says. "The institution has to be really willing to back the individual to serve as an untenured chair."
