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[larryc]

Use this thread to post tips on how to be a truly evil department chair or dean!

[larryc]

-Give adjuncts committee assignments. Require them to attend department meetings. Drop hints that it might open up a full time position for them if they do a good job.

-Side with students against your faculty whenever possible.

-Assign plum offices to your cronies, or to new faculty whom you plan to sexually harass.

[barcrossliar]

Hire your relatives.

[dr_strangelove]

Steal people's ideas without crediting them.

[zharkov]

Threaten remind the faculty that the school is tuition driven, so they better toe the line.

[notaprof]

Tell everyone what they want to hear, even if it directly contradicts what you told the person who just left your office.

[dr_strangelove]

Never say no, even when you know the real answer is no.

Oh, and I guess the corollary: Say no just for fun, even if you could easily say yes.

[onion]

--Lose every single piece of paper that requires your signature for approval.  Especially make sure you lose very important papers with strict deadlines that are enforced by the state, such as reimbursement forms and travel requests.  Then blame the individual faculty member and/or the secretary.

--Never, ever communicate information from the Dean's office to the faculty.  Act surprised when faculty become angry that you did not discuss the way the Dean changed departmental by-laws without our permission, or the T&P guidelines without consulting our departmental T&P committee.

--Only give raises to your friends and cronies and blame the rest of the faculty for being "a disappointment."

--Use the entire departmental travel budget for the year to send yourself somewhere lovely that has nothing to do with your research and stay for an exceedingly long period of time.  Make sure that trip coincides with a moment when faculty will be seeking your signature on forms.

[aandsdean]

Make up ad-hoc processes as you go along, rather than following the clear procedures in the faculty handbook.

Favor your own discipline and openly express your lack of interest in other disciplines.

Put off making hard decisions until...never.

Sell out your faculty and staff whenever you get a chance.  In budget hearings, be known to have said, "Oh, they don't need raises, they're not that good."

Schedule meetings at impossible times and be sure to punish people for not coming.

Let your personal distaste or friendship for people outweigh what you know is right in merit and t&p decisions.

[hrvatski18]

Disappear.   A lot.

Hire a dragon of a department secretary and tell her never to let anyone near you, ever.   

[much_metta]

Larry--best thread ever!

Way more ways than I can think of, but try these:

1.  Hold out the carrot of significantly larger raises than average (i.e., close to half the cost of inflation) if "merited."  Make chairs and faculty go through elaborate annual evaluations to determine "fair" merit raises, then ignore all of that information and assign raise amounts yourself.  Make sure the way you do it is completely opaque, full of cronyism, and impossible to appeal.  Be absolutely certain to exacerbate existing problems with salary compression and never forget to make sure your least favorite faculty are actually inverted.  When faculty point out that this will ensure the best performers will leave for greener pastures, say, "Good riddance."

2.  Take personal offense any time a faculty member speaks up for the rights of adjuncts, fellow TT faculty, and especially students, taking it as a disrespectful challenge to your authority, not the behavior of a responsible university citizen.  Hold grudges about this forever. 

3.  Override students into closed classes without faculty approval or notification.  When that becomes too much paperwork, just increase the cap on the class.  Be sure to ignore the seating capacity of the room, the pedagogical consequences of tripling a cap, or the inequity between faculty teaching assignments it creates.  This can be especially effective if you have more than one section of the class taught by different faculty members, but you do it only to one of them.

4.  Make sure that when departmental bullies go after new faculty, you support the bullies.  When they make accusations about new faculty, put those accusations as fact into the new faculty's annual evaluations without even speaking to new faculty about it first.  Treat all accusations as fact, all protestations and objections as lies, especially when the accused has hard evidence. 

5.  Do anything students want, especially if it puts them in conflict with faculty, and above all, never contact the faculty about it before making a decision that will affect them.  Student missed a final?  No problem, they can take it whenever they want.  Student unhappy with a grade (because they never turned in any work)?  No problem, give them the grade they want.  Student caught being academically dishonest?  No problem, brush it under the rug with no consequences. 

6.  Deliberately misunderstand the work faculty do on committees.  Undervalue their work there.  Grossly underestimate the time and work involved.  Perpetuate the myth that faculty get professional development money for serving on those committees and use it as an excuse not to let them have any departmental development money.  Be sure to blame them for not doing enough professional development, especially since you say they are "paid" to do it. 

7.  Do everything you can to let the rules and regulations of a university get in the way of faculty needs.  Look only for ways to use the rules to obfuscate faculty, never for ways to work around the rules.  Try to make faculty so frustrated, they just give up. 

Like I said, more ways than I can think of...

[ursula]

4.  Make sure that when departmental bullies go after new faculty, you support the bullies.  When they make accusations about new faculty, put those accusations as fact into the new faculty's annual evaluations without even speaking to new faculty about it first.  Treat all accusations as fact, all protestations and objections as lies, especially when the accused has hard evidence. 

I see you've met my dean -- who does not limit this support to the bullying of new faculty, but includes the bullying of whoever is targeted by the faction flavour of the month.

[prof_mom]

Spend more money than your budget allows for a few years. Use it for things the department does not really need. When the Dean tells you to pay the money back, take the money away from faculty raises and eliminate an adjunct. Make the faculty enroll more students to compensate for the classes the adjunct will not be teaching.

[madhatter]

1. Pretend you're the university president. Ignore all policies and requests that don't come out of your own office. Act outraged when the real university president discovers this and responds by shafting your department.

2. Hire a ridiculous number of your own graduates as faculty. When Institutional Research publishes a report showing that your department has something like 200% of the average "incestuous" hires, deny that this is a problem to the president's face. Due to item #1, the president is already pissed at you, so this strategy should shower benefits on the few remaining quality faculty left in your department.

[geonerd]

Use departmental funds to pay for your SO's plane ticket to tag along to a meeting in exotic city, even though SO is not an employee of your institution and will not attend the meeting because they are not in that field.

Spend all the leftover lab fees on yourself. Don't tell anyone there was money leftover.

Ram through a curriculum change that makes your obscure, irrelevant, and generally hated class a required core course.