Editor’s note: In the “Ask the Chair” series, the author of How to Chair a Department writes about departmental leadership. Read previous columns in the series here.
With this column, the three-year run of “Ask the Chair” comes to an end. My aim here has always been to offer specific suggestions for specific situations facing department heads. But in wrapping things up, I’ve had the opportunity to step back and look at the big-picture principles that guide the work we do in this crucial faculty-leadership position.
What follows might not be the executive summary that ChatGPT would put together but, to me, these seven principles seem like the most important takeaways. It’s been a privilege to engage in these epistolary conversations with Chronicle readers. I hope, at a minimum, to have done no harm. But it’s time to turn to other projects, one of which is a sequel of sorts, The Department Chair’s Companion: Practical Advice for Faculty Leaders, due out in fall 2026.
With apologies to T. E. Lawrence, then, here are my seven pillars of chair wisdom.
Know why you’re doing the job. Some are born to chairing; some have chairing thrust upon them. It’s a rewarding role, yes, but also very demanding, day in and day out, so you’d best know why you’re there. There are all kinds of reasons why you might seek out, or merely agree to accept, the job:
- Some professors (many? most?) agree to chair because “it’s my turn.” Healthy departments have an agreed-upon rotation for leadership roles, and when your number is called, you step up. In such circumstances, you’re doing the job because you’re a good departmental citizen.
- Others become chair because they fear what might happen if they don’t. Fear can be a great motivator (as can the strong encouragement of worried colleagues who don’t like the alternatives).
- Some of us, much to our surprise, get a taste of faculty leadership and discover we just can’t get enough. No one goes to graduate school with the goal of becoming a department chair; but some, having survived grad school, find they have gifts in nonscholarly areas, too. If you’ve benefited from a generous leader (thank you, Frank Day), you may want to pay it back in kind and then realize that you actually like the work.
- Some people want to be chair because they see it as a ticket out of the department and into administration (and perhaps even out of the institution). There’s nothing wrong with that, so long as you don’t prioritize your own aspirations over the good of the department.
Some motivations are more admirable than others. But in the end, what counts are the results and the climate you foster for department members and students.
Put together a support team. It’s lonely at the top — the adage applies even if, in reality, the role of chair isn’t meaningfully atop anything. In becoming a chair, you’ll encounter a firewall between yourself and other professors in the department, albeit a somewhat porous one. In the most extreme cases, being chair means you aren’t fully a part of the faculty or the administration (the relevant song that comes to mind here is by the British band Magazine: “Shot by Both Sides”).
Since the support structures you relied on as a faculty member are no longer reliable or available to you in the same way, as a chair, you need to put together your own team. Think first about the dean to whom you report (while keeping in mind the limits of that relationship, since a dean’s allegiance isn’t fully to you or your department). The dean knows something about the challenges of faculty leadership, and may have resources to offer (including professional coaching).
That said, your greatest resource is going to be other chairs. They know what you’re trying to deal with; they’ve tried things — things that have worked and that haven’t. You can be candid with them about your struggles in a way that might feel uncomfortable with your direct supervisor.
The easiest way to shore up your support system: Get an email list of all the department chairs on the campus or within your college (the dean’s or provost’s office has that info), email them, and invite them to lunch. (I’ve had good luck getting the dean’s office to cover that meal.) I can almost guarantee that after an hour together you’ll want to meet again. If you’d rather start smaller, identify a chair or two in whom you can confide when you need advice or just a listening ear. This work is too hard to do alone — and for obvious reasons, much of it can’t be shared with faculty colleagues in your department.
You can’t punish the slackers, so reward the helpers. I wish I could remember who, during one of my leadership workshops, weighed in with that piece of sage advice, because I’ve been thinking about it ever since. We were talking about the equitable distribution of faculty labor within a department — something I’ve come to think of as a mirage, albeit an aspirational one. Supervisors often use carrots and sticks to motivate folks to do their fair share of the work. But the simple fact is that chairs really have no significant sticks with which to change behavior — and most of us aren’t really big on that kind of discipline, anyway. Better to think about carrots, although those, too, are in short supply.
If you can’t make certain faculty colleagues do their share, or do it well once they’ve nominally agreed to participate, to whom is that labor then falling? And how can you thank the reliable folks for picking up the slack? The range of possible carrots varies by institution:
- Offer better teaching schedules to those with heavy service loads.
- If your department has a discretionary budget, use some of it to support their professional-development needs.
- Pay a modest honorarium for time-consuming tasks — if, for instance, someone takes on a lot of extra advisees or thesis students.
Ask your dean to partner with you to give this otherwise-invisible labor more recognition and/or some modest compensation. Our system has created an ecosystem in which it’s very difficult for anyone, up to and including a provost, to bring meaningful pressure on a tenured professor. Try shifting the paradigm to better reward those whose work makes our communities possible.
Create the department that you want to merge back into. What are you trying to achieve as department chair? How do you want the place to look and feel when your term ends and you opt to return to the faculty full time?
The answers to those questions will vary from chair to chair. Maybe you want to create a new major or minor, increase department enrollments, or add new faculty expertise in hot new subfields. You might want to find ways to better support faculty research. Perhaps you simply hope to recruit some exceptionally strong hires. Or maybe your department has been through a crisis and your main goal is to slowly and quietly rebuild collegiality.
If your term as chair is successful, how will the resulting department be different from when you took over?
Have a plan for how you’ll deal with truly bad behavior. I’m talking about the serious cases of bullying, financial impropriety, or harassment — the personality types who, by their words and actions, can turn a department culture toxic. First, you need to isolate the miscreant:
A bully without a victim isn’t a bully. That might mean imposing a strict protocol for speaking during meetings. It might mean — depending on what your local traditions will allow — letting certain professors know that their attendance isn’t required at certain meetings. As chair you can’t go so far as to disenfranchise anyone, of course. But sometimes the chronic curmudgeon is happy to be relieved of the burden of attending department meetings, as much as everyone else is pleased to see that person absent. A chair I know who was hired in a national search told me that his first official act on taking over was to ban certain senior professors from spending unsupervised time with job candidates. He’d just been one; he knew what they were like.
You also have to put yourself in the shoes of the most vulnerable in your department and think about what they need. If you’re serving as department chair, I certainly hope that you have tenure, and thus, don’t feel existentially threatened by a senior faculty bully. But look around the meeting room: Does everyone share that privilege? How can you reassure the most vulnerable that the protections of academic freedom and departmental membership belong to them, too, and not just to the loudest voice in the group?
Live vicariously through your colleagues’ accomplishments. To suggest that your scholarly or creative work won’t take a hit during your years as chair would be dishonest. It will; there are only so many hours in the day. If the chair gets release time from teaching, that’s great (and only fair), but it’s also just a Band-Aid. Compromises in your work will have to be made once you take on the department’s work.
A wise chair learns to celebrate their colleagues’ achievements as their own. Part of that is literally celebrating: Become the cheerleader for your department, and make sure the dean and the provost know about your faculty’s publications and honors. Throw a party for department members with new books coming out. Get the news of research grants and conference presentations out to the campus PR office.
Try to find ways to keep your own work moving forward, even if that’s at a slower pace. For advice on that front, read my previous column on “How Do I Stay Productive in My Field?” Supporting the career aspirations of your colleagues shouldn’t mean putting all of your own on hold.
Model being kind and respectful. If that advice seems a bit soft and corny, well guilty as charged — nothing is more important, or more necessary, in this era of external attacks and internal friction. As a chair, you may become a lightning rod for departmental discontent. You will learn a lot about your colleagues, often much more than you ever wanted to know.
But the best chairs see the job as an act of service. As my book editor teasingly put it, “chairing is caring.” Saccharine — but true, I think. In the immortal words of Bill in his excellent adventure with Ted: “Be excellent to each other.”
