This is the season when many an academic department is naming a new figurehead for the next academic year. If you’re one of the rookie managers, you are finding a real dearth of advice on how to do the job. Your institution may guide new chairs in the process of tenure and promotion, or on faculty hiring. And you might get some gentle schooling on annual reviews and the salary matrix, or lessons in “leadership.” But you won’t get much in the way of a philosophical introduction to the work, broadly conceived, of the department chair.
Here, then, is a top 10 “to do” list for those who are about to take the hot seat.
1. Get help. By that, I mean find at least one mentor. There are about three people out there who will recognize in this itemized list a lot of the advice they once gave me. I owe them everything. You need to find people to trust, people with experience, and people who can troubleshoot—inside and outside of your campus. They are worth their weight in gold.
2. Take care of the faculty. Watch over all of them—from the adjunct you hired to teach one section of “Intro” to the endowed professor who won’t get out of bed before 11 a.m. This task often requires extraordinary, heroic self-sublimation and self-negation because most people won’t be happy with your work. Nevertheless, you have to fight for your people. Say “yes” to every request for leave, to every email about a letter of recommendation, to every solicitation of help or advice. Learn to apologize. Respond to salary inequities directly and vigorously with the dean. Send internal and external opportunities to others in your department, no matter their rank or position. And don’t play favorites. If all of that means you are constantly juggling course schedules and committee staffing, then so be it. If it means you are short-handed for a particular class, then recognize that the slack is yours to pick up. Teach it yourself. I have never once been able to take the reduced course load contractually owed to me as an academic administrator.
3. You also have to mind the students. They need to finish on time, and without hiccups. They will inundate you with requests for recommendation letters, and you must meet the demand. But there’s even more to it than that. If you have new hires in the classroom, you need to watch them teach or make sure they get watched. You need to effectively communicate to faculty members the reporting structures for classroom micro-aggressions, for sexual harassment, for whatever. You need to have your door open—and you need to let everyone know that they can stop by, call, text, or Facebook you at a moment’s notice. You need to be globally, extraordinarily accessible. Be a good listener. And know, precisely, what must be done whenever something terrible happens.
4. You have to watch out for the staff, too. Staff members in your department will demand guidance from you, but they also consistently need to be learning new things and gaining new skills. Ask them what their career goals are—and help them achieve those goals, even if that means they will leave the department eventually. If they need new computers, or new office chairs, and you have the means, get them the best. Make sure they get holiday gifts. And, if they perform well, they should be nominated for staff awards.
5. Continue to write and do your research. That is superimportant. Often (for reasons that have nothing to do with administrative skills), chairs with active research agendas can say things—and do things—on campus that are important for their departments. In a broader campus context, they can make stronger claims for faculty research needs, offer more robust defenses of tenure and promotion cases, and receive more “respect” from the higher-ups than a chair who is not so active in research. So whatever kind of work you do, keep at it. Apply for grants and fellowships. Take a semester off, if that’s allowed, to move things along. Present papers and write essays. Make time for thinking.
6. Recognize that you are not a dean. Sure, you get to attend regular meetings with people who wear suits and ties, but your job is to: (1) listen and communicate the direction of the university to your department; (2) highlight strategic opportunities that you see as a result of those meetings; and (3) mediate between the interests of your faculty and those of your administration. There will be moments of extraordinary disconnect between your department and the administration. And in those moments you will have to take your department’s side because you are the public guardian of its very specific set of interests. Don’t think of the job as a steppingstone to some deanship, either. You cannot be a decent chair if you are angling for a deanship. Work the job you have and do it well. The qualities of a good chair are not, in the end, the same things that make great deans.
7. Do everything in the light. Don’t make secret deals, and don’t insist that everything run through you. If your faculty members sidestep you to talk to deans about a pet project, don’t sweat it; celebrate it. Be transparent—and provide lots of signpost, explaining your actions to everyone in the department. Again, heroic, unending self-sublimation and self-negation is what the job requires.
8. You have no favorites. Not in the department, anyway. Not until you leave the job. On the one hand, this is about fairness. You’ll want to work exclusively with people you really, really like, but you just can’t do that. You also need to spread the work out evenly. A lot of stuff needs to happen in departments—the quotidian needs of committees, and assessment, and course review—and everyone needs to shoulder a part of that load. I also, though, want to gesture here to the existential dilemma of the chair—as both a person and an authoritative job description. Some people will want stuff from you, and others will always think you are much more powerful than you know to be true. Stories about you will be constructed, debated, and circulated. Friendships will, at times, become awkward. That’s natural. Only after you give up the job will you really know how people feel about you. So don’t worry about it now.
9. Identify potential next chairs—even if you don’t like them. Give those people meaningful administrative opportunities. You can’t do the job forever. You shouldn’t do the job forever, even if it is financially enticing. Someone else has to do it. And they need experience doing things that parallel the juggling act you’re performing each and every day.
10. Leave things better than you found them. That includes infrastructure (things like buildings, offices, and technology) and superstructure (like degree details, website paratext, and promotional lit). It includes things as concrete as faculty governance and things as opaque as department mood and reputation. It also includes all of those people (faculty, staff, and students) who need support for their development and who want—and deserve—a chair who is a facilitator and a caretaker of the things that they care about. But recognize, too, that you won’t get it all done and budget (or lack thereof) may be a factor.
These 10 points are all equally important, but it doesn’t follow that you can do them all equally well. Some days, weeks, and months, you’ll be better at some than at others. One of the greatest challenges of the position is learning to recognize which one of these things is needed at just the right moment. But even when you’re at your best and it feels like everything is swinging in tempo, you’ll still screw things up. Or make the wrong decision. Trying and failing, and sharing what you’ve learned along the way, is a part of the job.
Oh, and one final thing: Take better care of yourself. At my old job, I ran marathons and mini-marathons. Eventually that had to stop. So two summers ago, right before I started my second stint as chair, I gave up my alarm clock, to ensure that I got sleep. Do whatever you need to do to keep sane and healthy.
