As I watched Evelyn Quan Wang (Michelle Yeoh) battle intimidating foes in Everything Everywhere All at Once, I kept thinking the script writers could easily have changed her profession from laundromat owner to department chair and spawned the same amount of absurdist creativity.
In the Oscar-winning film, the fate of the world hinges upon Evelyn’s ability to navigate the surreality of the multiverse. While the stakes aren’t quite that high in academe, sometimes it feels that way lately for many department chairs. Each day brings more news of demographic shifts, budget cuts, and structural imbalances — not to mention the existential threats du jour (ChatGPT, legislative attacks, student mental-health crises). Before the pandemic, many chairs already felt inundated by endless emails and taxing administrata — and since then, many report that the demands have only gotten worse.
The department-chair position is, as a 2022 trend piece in The Chronicle put it, “the faculty job (almost) no one wants.” For years, many department heads have criticized the lack of preparation they receive for the job. As midlevel managers, they are rarely encouraged or sufficiently prepared to see themselves as leaders capable of initiating and sustaining meaningful change.
Yet department chairs — positioned directly between frontline faculty members and senior administrators — may be our last, best hope to improve our institutions from the inside out. But to do so requires those of us in higher ed to take a lesson from Evelyn and evolve our conceptions of what midlevel leadership can be. (Warning: plot spoilers ahead.)
No. 1: Embrace your role as an academic leader. Department chair is the least glamorous management job in higher education. Many chairs reluctantly or even begrudgingly accept the duties on a temporary basis, agreeing to be a seat warmer, paper pusher, form signer, and occasional referee before returning to the real work of teaching and research. I get it. In Everything Everywhere All at Once, Evelyn’s first instinct in the face of trouble is to lock herself in the broom closet and hope for the uproar to subside (a not-unfamiliar strategy in academe).
But eventually, Evelyn realizes she needs to act. No one else is coming to save her. To make change as a department chair, you must first accept that you are an academic leader with the positional authority to influence your department’s climate, culture, and operations.
A chair’s locus of authority is more far-reaching than many people in the job seem to realize. As chair, you can lead the revision of tenure-and-promotion criteria or the adoption of major teaching innovations in your discipline’s curricula. Department chairs can provide vital support to early-career colleagues and re-energize midcareer professors in need of a boost. The chair alone provides accountability that all faculty searches are managed professionally and equitably. You can also make sure that the work of the department is spread around, so that the same people don’t get left shouldering it all. Chairs are best positioned to act on a lot of small things that can lead to big changes.
No. 2: Leverage the ambiguity of leading from the middle. In the multiverse, Evelyn learns that the rules are not always apparent — if they exist at all. The dirty little secret of being a department chair is that no one tells you what to do or, conversely, what not to do. While there are some hard deadlines and policies to follow, you usually have freedom in how you perform the job (and surprise, it does not have to be the way your predecessor did it).
Learning to see that ambiguity as a benefit opens a world of possibilities that can make the chair’s job far more interesting and rewarding.
Most of what chairs do daily is guided not by policy but practice — uncodified, informal ways of doing business. Practices are ever-evolving. One example is deciding how to dole out conference-travel money from the department’s budget. Ask a dozen chairs, even folks on the same campus, and you’d be astonished to hear the variety of approaches. Some award everyone the same flat amount, others provide greater support for pre-tenure faculty members, and still others set funding based on demonstrated need. All of these approaches are “fair,” but the appropriateness of each depends on the context.
Over time, many departments come to accept the way “we’ve always done it” as the only way it can be done. But for the most part, when you’re the chair, no one is standing over your shoulder telling you what to fix or how to fix it. The path is wide open for you to usher in changes that — while temporarily disruptive — could bring more innovation, fairness, and harmony to departmental life.
No. 3: Invite a higher level of discourse. Since so few department chairs receive intentional training or support upon stepping into the role, it is an easy temptation to do the job as a passive messenger. Just as Evelyn’s mind wanders when the IRS agent (played brilliantly by Jamie Lee Curtis) questions expenses in her pending audit, your faculty colleagues are likely to mentally check out when department meetings become a monologue of deadlines and announcements.
But a change-minded chair might circulate those informational items in an email and reserve the meeting time for substantive discussions on topics like:
- Ways to manage students’ increasing mental-health needs
- New attendance and late-work policies in the post-pandemic classroom
- Strategies to protect research-and-writing time during a busy semester
- Promising scholarly trends from your discipline and how to weave them into your courses
Creating time and space for open-ended, exploratory conversations might lead your department in new, interesting, and even surprising directions. To spark higher-level thinking in faculty meetings, you need to start asking better questions and encouraging people to get out of the weeds when things get too tactical. While there are certainly bureaucratic aspects to being a department chair, it is fundamentally a leadership role, not a bureaucratic one.
No. 4: No one said to do it all yourself or all at once. Just keeping up with the weekly email load can be enough to reduce most department chairs to a state of bleary-eyed submission, leaving little mental energy to tackle the big things, like making curricular changes to better prepare the department’s graduates for careers, dealing with the pernicious effects of implicit bias in hiring, or, say, fending off a massive bagel hole capable of consuming all life as we know it.
You don’t have to have all the answers. Effective department leaders know the importance of coalition-building and low-stakes pilot projects. As a chair, you are uniquely capable of dispelling the myth that your department needs to achieve consensus before you act. Instead, do your part to engage the willing, give them the resources they need, and have their backs if others challenge their right to experiment.
Sometimes the best thing you can do is advocate modest and sustainable change. You might need to curb an eager colleague’s (or your own) grand plans, reminding people that it’s often better to take one step in the right direction rather than stand still in a place you know is wrong or risk burnout by taking on too much, too fast. Instead, start small. Win over some hearts and minds. Keep going when you hit an obstacle.
Most meaningful change doesn’t just happen: Eventually, as chair, you will have to spend some departmental money or make a consequential decision. But the entire endeavor need not fall solely on your shoulders. While it would probably make for a far less successful film, there is a lot of wisdom in the mantra, Try something modest and learn from it.
No. 5: Turn to your fellow chairs. The unfortunate truth of being a midlevel leader is that you can be sandwiched between people who will break your heart. Being a department chair is inherently lonely, but perhaps most so when you have to run damage control for a misbehaving faculty colleague or when your appeals for senior leadership to act are ignored. So where can you find the help when you’ve been forsaken by those above and below you in the chain of command?
In the film, Evelyn looks to her side, realizing that her long-overlooked husband, Waymond, is, in fact, her greatest partner, uniquely capable of saving her from herself.
Chairs should do the same. Your fellow department heads will get what you are going through: They have felt how you are feeling. Better than any formal orientation, another chair can help you become proficient in the nuts and bolts of the job — teaching you to read a campus financial report or understanding your obligations at each step of a tenure review. Fellow chairs can help you artfully maneuver the trickiest dilemmas of midlevel leadership, such as keeping up with email, dealing with a bully, or deciding whether or not to act on a personnel matter. Your fellow chairs can broaden your view and identify options you might not have considered.
Keep an open mind. Sometimes the freshest ideas come from talking to the chair of a department with disciplinary norms and culture very different from your own. Strengthening the bonds between chairs can not only make this thankless job feel a bit easier, but it can help improve the climate by identifying a better solution you had yet to consider.
In Everything Everywhere All at Once, a permutation of Evelyn’s husband tells her, “You underestimate how the smallest decisions can compound into significant differences over a lifetime.” The same is true for department chairs and their institutions. Rubber-stamping the status quo is only going to perpetuate systems and climates that too many of us know to be flawed and exclusionary.
While we sit around and wait for someone else to make sweeping solutions that solve all of higher ed’s grand challenges, department chairs are best able to do the critically important, grass-roots work of shifting the daily conditions of faculty members, staff colleagues, and students. Why not embrace the chance to make your department better?
