Note: In the “Ask the Chair” series, the author of How to Chair a Department answers your questions about departmental leadership. Send your queries via Twitter, Facebook, or email. Read previous columns here.
Question: I’ve been in my current position for almost 20 years, earning tenure and promotion to full professor along the way. The institution has never been an ideal fit for me, but recent changes in its focus and direction have made it feel even less well suited for the kind of work I want to be doing. However, senior faculty positions in my field (in every field?) are scarcer than hen’s teeth.
Something you wrote in your latest column (“Should You Lead a Department on the Brink?”) has got me thinking. You mentioned that experience leading a department could be leveraged to find a new chair’s job at another institution. What advice would you give to someone considering applying for the chair’s position for purely selfish reasons — as a way to get out of Dodge? To this point I’ve done my best to dodge (see what I did there?) the assignment: I didn’t get a Ph.D. to become a bureaucrat. But the possibility of using the chair’s position as a springboard to move onward and upward might just tip the scales for me. Your thoughts?
Signed,
I Might Just Be That Mercenary
Dear Mercenary,
Well, I’ve got to admire your honesty, if not your intent. Department chairs get used to being treated as something less than full colleagues; and you and I don’t know one another, so I don’t take it personally. But — sending a letter that asks, in effect, “Kevin, should I take on a role I view as beneath me in order to move to a better university that is a more appropriate fit for my gifts? A role that you’ve taken seriously for 15 years, and about which you write a monthly column?” That’s next level, my friend.
But I’m here for it. My advice on whether you should become chair:
- Short answer: No.
- Long answer: Hell no.
Let’s break this down. You’ve described your motivations as selfish. That’s hardly unprecedented in academe. Unless your Ph.D. is in something like public health, early-childhood education, or caring for widows and orphans, your decision to pursue a doctorate was, to some degree, selfish. I spent seven years in a Ph.D. program presuming on the forbearance of a long-suffering spouse and four children. So I’m not here to cast stones.
But, assuming you do the job responsibly, “selfish chair” is an oxymoron.
Good chairs choose unselfishly to put their own agendas on the back (or at least side) burner in order to support the selfish (wholly appropriate, wholly professional) aspirations of their colleagues. Ordinarily, the demands of the role, and the truly lousy compensation attached to it (a largely symbolic stipend and/or a reduced teaching load that doesn’t nearly compensate for the administrative time spent), are enough to eliminate the unremittingly selfish from the pool of would-be chairs.
Sure, if you’re somehow able to survive in the role with that attitude — long enough (two or three years, at least) to turn it into a credential you can leverage — you might succeed in parlaying it into a similarly unattractive role at a more attractive institution. But once there, you couldn’t just abandon the chair’s job. You would be stuck in the saddle for at least a term (three years at most institutions); some deans require a commitment for two full terms, given the institutional resources that are expended on a national search.
So you’re looking at serving in a role you believe you’ll dislike for somewhere between the next five and 10 years. Are you having second thoughts about this scheme yet?
If not, let’s take it a step further. Best-case scenario: You step up and chair for two years at your current institution. In your third year, you apply for a couple of chair positions at appealing institutions, and land one of them. Once you move, you are starting in a new department with new colleagues — but not as a colleague who built relationships in the department over many years. You are The Chair — a stranger.
When you move into the chair’s position after years in a department, you will be treated differently than when you were “just” a faculty member. Unless you do the job horribly and run roughshod over people, though, you can reintegrate when your term is up and be reincorporated into the faculty.
Coming to the department as an outside chair, you’ll never have that chance: The department will know you almost entirely as an administrator, and your position within the faculty may forever be anomalous. It’s not that the awkwardness of the situation can’t be overcome. I’ve twice moved to new institutions as chair, and in one of those departments — fortunately, the one I’m still in today — I did manage to become a colleague after having been the “boss.” In the other, I never really did.
Added to that, if you serve your time as chair at a new institution as instrumentally as you intend to serve your current department, the faculty members in your new departmental home will likely reject you — not just for structural reasons but personal ones. They did a national search to bring in a leader who would help them, and instead were stuck with you, someone whose goal was only to serve your own career. They’d have every reason to resent and rebuff you.
A word in closing. I have absolutely no data to back this up, but my strong belief is that those who take on these important leadership roles selfishly and cynically end up bearing rotten fruit. They’re not good at the job, and consequently are not attractive to those seeking to fill other positions. I have concerns (which I’ve written about in my book, How to Chair a Department) that when we do national searches for chairs, we don’t always know what we’re looking for in a leader or how to find it. But we usually can tell when candidates are just using the role (and in so doing, using their departmental colleagues) to leverage a better position. And most often, the universe does not reward them with the position they seek.
So to reiterate, my advice is: Please don’t. Better for you and for your current and future departments to move to a position you actually want.
