Perhaps the most difficult transition a person can make, professionally speaking, is from rank and file to management—from being one of the gang to supervising and evaluating it. That's especially true in higher education, where we place such value on collegiality, autonomy, and egalitarianism.
As a new chair, you're probably painfully aware that most of your friends are now former colleagues whom you supervise. To complicate matters, they're actually still your colleagues. And you supervise them. Since you're the chair, they now view you differently, as do students and other administrators. They all expect certain things from you. And there's no way you can meet all of those expectations, especially since some of them conflict.
I don't mean to be overly negative. Chairing a department is a worthwhile way to spend part of your academic career. Two-year colleges need good department chairs in order to function well—or function at all. But if you don't mind, I'll leave the cheerleading (such as it is) for the end of this column. First you need to understand what you're up against.
After observing department chairs for 25 years (some good, some not) and spending 10 years as a department head myself, here's what I've learned.
You need new friends. Of course, you don't have to stop being friendly with your faculty colleagues, and you certainly don't have to stop liking them. But you do have to accept that it's no longer appropriate for you to pal around with particular individuals or groups—going to lunch, socializing outside of work, spending inordinate amounts of time chatting.
That's because those activities will very likely create animosity, distrust, and suspicion among faculty members with whom you do not share a close relationship. You will also open yourself up to charges of favoritism and bias as you complete evaluations, schedule courses, and make committee assignments.
Seek out a new group of friends from among those at roughly your same level on the organizational chart: other department chairs, department heads in nonacademic areas, and program directors. Or socialize with people who are technically below (or above) you on that chart but whose jobs are unconnected to your own, such as counselors and librarians.
The good news, of course, is that even though you are leaving some old friends behind—and may never be as close to them again, even if you return to the faculty after a few years—you stand to make some new friends. You are also forming a support group of people whose work situations are similar to yours and perhaps making connections that will benefit you throughout your career. After all, one of those other chairs might well be dean one day.
Your default mode should be pro-faculty. Even though you may no longer be close friends with members of your department, you now have an even greater responsibility toward them: You are essentially the fire wall between them and vindictive students, angry parents, and crusading administrators.
When I first became chair, I thought my job was to keep faculty members, administrators, and students all happy. I quickly figured out that that was impossible. The chair's real job is to keep faculty members happy without annoying administrators and students too much.
Having just recently left the faculty ranks, your natural loyalties probably lie in that direction. But there's another reason for taking a pro-faculty stance: You're the only administrator who will. Sure, deans can be pro-faculty, to a point, but the nature of their jobs often requires them to take a wider view. I've always believed it's the chair's job to stand up for faculty members, and a chair who is unwilling to do so will not have much success.
That doesn't mean your department members will always be right (although I've found over the years that they usually are, especially in grade disputes). There may be times when you simply have to acknowledge that the faculty member is wrong and take steps to rectify a situation. But initially, at least, when everyone else on the campus is coming down on a faculty member, it's important for you to be on his or her side. That may be the single most important way to build trust in your department.
Which segues neatly into my next point.
Trust is the key. A friend of mine who is a basketball coach says that, in his profession, there's a continuing debate over whether it's more important for players to respect the coach or to like him. I have to admit that when I first became a department chair, I wondered about the same thing.
The answer, I soon learned, is that neither respect nor affection is the most important element in your relationship with faculty members. More important by far is that they trust you.
Trust, in this context, means several things. It means that faculty members believe they can talk to you about anything, that you'll keep those conversations to yourself, and that you won't hold what they say in private against them. A department chair who is a backbiter or a gossip, or who simply divulges sensitive information to other faculty members, is likely to have a very short, miserable, and unsuccessful tenure. (Or to be promoted. It's a toss-up.)
Trust also means that faculty members believe you will do what you say. When you agree to something or promise something or say that you will take care of something, they must be able to take you at your word. And the only way to earn that kind of trust is, over time, to keep your word consistently and live up to your commitments —even when doing so is inconvenient.
Finally, as I mentioned already, trust means that faculty members know you have their backs. Absolutely nothing is more important to department morale than that.
It's a desk job. For me, one of the hardest things about becoming a department chair was giving up so much personal freedom. As a faculty member I had a set schedule—classes, office hours, committee meetings—but those things rarely consumed an entire eight-hour day. And other than that I could pretty much come and go as I pleased.
Department chairs, however, are basically chained to their desks from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., five days a week, 250 days a year, except to attend various and sundry meetings. (You know your job is tedious when you look forward to a committee meeting.)
As chair, you have a lot of paperwork: class schedules, workload reports, adjunct applications, faculty evaluations, crossword puzzles. But the truth is, whether you're actually doing anything or not, you simply need to be sitting at your desk so people can find you when they want to complain. And by people I mean anyone with a gripe, including but not limited to students, faculty members, counselors, custodians, book-store managers, vending-machine operators, department secretaries, public-safety officers, other department heads, and upper-level administrators.
Why?
Because you-know-what flows downhill. If you make the rookie mistake of actually looking at the organizational chart, you may subscribe to the popular misconception that, although deans and vice presidents are clearly above you, faculty members are below you. In other words, you're in the middle—hence the term "middle management."
That view is not entirely accurate. You are in the middle, but only in the sense of being between a proverbial rock and a hard place. Otherwise you are not really below deans and above faculty members, but rather below both of them. Students, too. Imagine those three groups as the sides of a triangular-shaped basin. You are the drain.
OK, I'm exaggerating, but the fact remains that administrators will blame you for what faculty members do, faculty members will blame you for what administrators do, and students will blame you for everything. The trick is to figure out which complaints are valid and which ones you can actually do something about. Then deal with those, and basically ignore the rest. With a little wisdom, a little hard work, and a lot of luck, you'll solve enough real problems that the petty or imaginary ones will fade into the background.
No doubt you're thinking that the picture I've presented of chairing a department is pretty bleak, and that maybe you've made a mistake accepting the job.
Maybe you did, but not necessarily. As I said at the outset, being a department chair can be a tremendously rewarding experience. In fact, when it comes to making a difference in people's lives every day, you really can't beat it. Because, in the end, that's what a department chair really is: someone who makes it possible for other people to accomplish their goals—for teachers to teach, students to study, administrators to, uh, administer.
Being a department head is not easy, and it's not always fun, but somebody needs to do it. And right at this moment, maybe it's good that it's you.
Comments
1. connorka - October 20, 2009 at 05:35 am
Excellent Rob. It was always clear that I was below everyone, but the view from the drain really captured the essence of the job. I also agree that the job is indeed very rewarding. Helping others succeed was great fun. I have to confess that being a former head is pretty cool too, especially since a good person took over.
Ken Connor (RPI)
2. snwiedmann - October 20, 2009 at 07:44 am
This is an excellent piece. I especially appreciate your emphasis on the importance of trust. I have worked under a number of departmental chairs -- a few very good and a couple who were real horrors. In both, the key issue was always trust. But this is not true only in the case of department chairs. If all faculty members could trust all administrators, academe would be a much-improved place.
3. v8573254 - October 20, 2009 at 09:13 am
You have such a clear, pleasant way of saying difficult things.
4. 12025109 - October 20, 2009 at 11:04 am
Great tips Rob! I wish I had had this advice for the two times, when I have been in a Chair role. Keeping a distance (getting new friends) is definitely a good idea. I found this easier to do in a big department with 21 faculty and professionals than in a small department 3 faculty.
5. portnoy - October 20, 2009 at 12:52 pm
Spoken as a true faculty member - one who serves for awhile and returns to the faculty ranks - exactly the problem - because these department chairs know they are returning to the faculty ranks in the near future they are often unwilling to take necessary administrative/management stands that are not pro-faculty - all too often some middle ground is proposed rather than possibly offend a fellow faculty member. A view from the Administrative side of the triangle.
6. 11161415 - October 20, 2009 at 04:21 pm
Some good points, but we should remember that the demands of being chair at different kinds of institutions--community colleges, liberal arts colleges, and large research institutions--can be very different. I am chair of a small department (six people) and still teach 4 courses/year, so I have in no way "left" the faculty. And I am by no means expected to be at my desk 9-5. Nor would I consider for a moment adopting the rather impoverished view of friendship advocated here. My friends in the department are just as close now as they ever were, even when we have to navigate awkward things like annual evaluations, etc. We trade off being chair every 3 years, so it's understood that this is something we all do eventually.
7. greeneyeshade - October 20, 2009 at 05:27 pm
Umm, 11161415, and you promise the evaluations are not of the "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" variety?
I liked the general thrust of this view, it does capture the essence of any good group leader, academic or not. With respect to administrators though, it goes a bit too far in the direction of an "us-them" mentality.
I would advise instead that a chair become friends with administrators who feel strongly that an administrator's role is to serve the academic side of the house. Not all are like that, but ask more experienced chairs who those people are. For many, serving in higher ed is a vocation they take seriously, at the expense of better paying jobs in industry.
Chairs are not accountants or finance experts or trained human resource people--so they need to rely on such experts when needed. Still, when it comes to finances, a chair is in a critical "internal control" position--a person upon whom the whole system relies as a check and balance for faculty or staff who have OPM problems; i.e., the carefree spending of Other People's Money.
8. acad301 - October 21, 2009 at 06:42 am
Chairs:
1. You have one single job - that is, to try to keep your faculty from leaving and make them happy. Rob is absolutely correct. In many disciplines, there is so little incentive to remain as in the academia that you've got to convince them its the best place for them to be. Especially the good ones.
2. You need to shield them from pettiness at the administration and college level (if you are a department). Universities and many of the staff that work at universities have a civil service approach to their professions which leads them to abuse power, paradoxically, by operating within the exact phrases used in policy. Leadership is being able to recognize the ridiculous and say "enough".
3. You always have to be willing to at least listen and consider their concerns. Everything is open to at least a conversation, even if you don't give that faculty what he wants.
4. Be a leader, don't be a pushover. The administration and students have different goals than the faculty and will often ask for ridiculous things. Your job is to step out and say "that's ridiculous" and stick to your guns. A large proportion of academia lies in the absurd, probably because many people you deal with are big babies. Don't get sucked into that world; its a very deep black hole.
5. It is only *sometimes* a democracy. Sometimes you have to make an executive decision and not get everyone's input on every single little thing.
6. Read a few things on leadership other than this story or this comment. Leadership is not something people are born with; like any other skill, it is learned and there are trends that lead to success.
7. And above all, try not to be an @$$. Now that you are chair, you are not at the "top" of the faculty, you are working "for" the faculty. Your sole job is to facilitate their work, to make them happy, to try and wield as much of the university's budget in your department's favor. Especially in the situation when competition for faculty is high.
Good luck!
9. kiwicreate - October 21, 2009 at 11:26 am
I've applied for a permanent department chair position with one course/semester teaching load. Thanks for the article: it helps me go into it with "eyes wide open." It also makes me appreciate certain elements of this particular position that belie some of the negatives in the article!
10. mothergrogan - October 21, 2009 at 12:15 pm
This is all good advice. For my part, I would say that the positives far outweigh the negatives, at least if one has a decent department to work with. Department chair is the one position in the university that allows one to continue to be a scholar and also to exercise responsibility at the institutional level (plus the extra salary and course reduction are nice). Going further "up" the administrative ladder is in most ways a step down, since one is forced to trade scholarship (and its attendant perks in terms of national and international reputation and networking) for drafting policy papers, ajudicating petty conflicts, and that sort of thing.
Speaking frankly, based on my 20+ years as a faculty member: since the majority of faculty members are always going to be psychologically at the very least introverted and often autistic-spectrum, a person with just the normal allotment of social skills and empathy can do great things in this role, as long as s/he is aware of the situation.
A final caveat: it is almost always a mistake for someone to take this on if they have not attained the rank of full professor. Even though you can continue scholarly productivity, it will be at a reduced rate, which will be read negatively by the t&p committee and even your own faculty (despite the fact that they are the ones filling up your days). Additionally, you will get some of the more unscrupulous of your faculty trying to cut deals in exchange for their support for promotion.
11. dnewton137 - October 21, 2009 at 06:06 pm
Let me add an important point to the cheerleading with a true story. I once became chancellor of an institution which was founded in the sixties. Twenty years later I observed that the academic departments were of widely varying quality. Some were mediocre, and others were excellent and well on the way to national distinction. I asked a faculty friend why this variation. He replied by noting that all of the original department chairs had been appointed at the same time. He then asserted that the present quality of the department was directly correlated with the quality of its founding department head twenty years before.
I have other evidence for an assertion. In my own field (physics) I know two departments that are among the nation's leaders. Each was led for many years by a single extraordinary chair who built a leading department from next to nothing.
My assertion is that, among the many administrative positions that contribute to institutional excellence, departmental chairs are probably the most important. So, for those of you considering service as a departmental chair, pause to consider that your department's and your university's quality and reputation depend strongly on your performance.
12. rclariana - October 21, 2009 at 11:09 pm
well, sometimes you are stuck with what you have for a long time; but certainly the most critical decisions, if you are shooting for disticntion long term, is who you hire (and don't hire).
13. rclariana - October 21, 2009 at 11:12 pm
sorry about the grammar is/are and spelling of 'distinction' above, the system submitted without the usual second chance to edit
14. ggreenridley - October 22, 2009 at 07:47 pm
I really enjoyed the article. I have been in the academy for over 30 years and the population from which chairs are being appointed today are more management types than faculty leaders. I am not sure the notion that we are in this together is still there. Trust is an issue on all sides. Even with the problem I see, I believe if the opportunity is there, one should take it. It is a growth experience and if you find out it is not for you, you can return to a faculty position being wiser (I hope).
15. superdude - October 26, 2009 at 02:35 pm
Great article. I've been a department head for precisely 4 months, so this was very helpful.
16. robjenkins - October 29, 2009 at 05:39 pm
I'm glad, Superdude. Thanks for your comment.