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 Facebook or email. Read previous columns here.
Question: I read the spring column on how to keep your scholarly reputation from taking a hit when you become a department head. I agree with you that chairs have more credibility when they continue to excel in teaching and research, but I want to ask the question that logically precedes it: How, when chairing a department, do you keep your scholarship or creative work moving forward? How can I continue to produce work that I can then be annoyed that my dean isn’t publicizing?
Juggling teaching, research, and service is tricky enough. But when service grows into Service, as it does for a chair, how do you keep all of those balls in the air?
Signed,
My Juggling Needs Work
Dear Juggling,
It’s fair to say that most professors who step into the chair’s position have trouble maintaining their scholarly and/or creative production. Indeed, I’m quite confident in asserting that department chairs, as a group, produce less scholarship and creative work than rank-and-file faculty members.
In part, that is a matter of demographics. Often, the academics who take on the chair’s role are in the later stages of their careers. And while the curve varies between disciplines, professional production often tapers off in the second half of a faculty career. (Don’t believe me? I highly recommend the 2022 book, From Strength to Strength: Finding Meaning, Success, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, written by Harvard University professor Arthur C. Brooks. The good news: Second-halfers transition from raw productivity into something like wisdom, which feels like a pretty good consolation prize to me.)
But my gut tells me that even if you controlled for age and rank, you would still find that department chairs produce less scholarship than those peers unburdened by administrative duties. While that’s true in the aggregate, it’s also true that some of us chairs (rather cheekily, I’m using the first-person plural) do manage to keep up — maybe not at the same rate of productivity as earlier in our careers but to a respectable degree.
How? There’s no one-size-fits-all prescription. Just as scholarly productivity looks different in different fields, so the affordances that make it possible vary widely across higher education. But I have found the following four tips helpful in guiding scholar-chairs and creator-chairs.
Know that maintaining your scholarship will make you a better chair. As academics, we use a telling locution to describe the research aspect of our faculty role: We talk about “my work” or “my own work.” Certainly scholarly or creative projects will compete for your time and attention with the work you must do as chair to support your department and its professors, students, staff members, curriculum, programs, and alums. And it’s very unlikely that the chair’s work will bear any fruit for you in the scholarly/creative realm (unless, I suppose, you write a book called How to Chair a Department).
But the converse is true: Your scholarly or creative practice will play an integral role in your job as chair.
Because I continue to write, I’m a better writing mentor for my students. Because I publish work, I have more credibility with, and better ability to evaluate, candidates for faculty positions. Because my work is out in the world, our alums see it, and some are prompted to renew their connections with the mothership (in this case, Pomona); and so on. I’m currently in the home stretch finishing a book on punk, post-punk, and new wave music: Nothing in my nearly two decades’ experience of faculty leadership has helped me write that book (not that I haven’t had to deal with some punks). But when that book is out in the world (fall 2026), I hope it will reconfirm my standing as a writer and cultural commentator, and that’s good, if indirectly, for my students, prospective students, colleagues, and my college.
And of course, one needn’t be an English professor to experience this kind of synergy. Two recent chairs of my college’s political-science department are go-to authorities in their fields (if you pay attention to the news, you’ve seen them). Their very visible scholarly profiles help the department recruit majors, and even prospective students. Both are award-winning teachers. In the chair’s job, their simultaneous immersion in research and teaching gives them finely tuned antennae for important duties of the position, such as hiring and mentoring new faculty members.
The precise payoff will vary by field but the principle is the same: Good scholars and good teachers make good chairs.
Delegate, delegate, delegate. If you lead your department with a savior complex, there will never be enough of you to go around. Now that you’ve given yourself permission to lean into your own work — because you recognize that it makes you a better chair — you can justify recommitting some of your schedule to scholarship or creative work.
Good administrative-staff support can help you do that. But it will be on you, as chair, to guide the department’s staff members on how best they can help. That might mean zealously guarding your schedule, protecting certain blocks of time you’ve set aside for your own work; it will be up to you to communicate the importance of that time to your staff assistants.
Figure out which aspects of the chair’s role you’re willing to hand over to a staff member and which you’d rather do yourself. For example, I find it hard to delegate writing tasks. But I’m essentially allergic to the telephone and always grateful for staff help with phone calls, which are, alas, an essential part of any leadership job.
That doesn’t mean you should offload all the unappealing and unrewarding stuff that you don’t want to do. It does mean assessing the staff skills and making the most of them. Got an Excel wiz on your staff while your spreadsheets only cause confusion? You’re in luck. Be alert to and make wise use of the experience and expertise in your staff.
Negotiate the conditions you need for success. You can do that when you first accept the chair’s position, or when you agree to a second term. Go into those negotiations knowing what is possible and what would be a reach given your institution’s financial and other constraints.
Be specific about what kinds of support would be most useful to help you keep up with your scholarship while leading the department. Do you need a reduced teaching load? Administrative assistance? Work-from-home days? First pick of course assignments and teaching schedule? Relief from summer duties? Accelerated accrual of sabbatical or administrative leave time?
Don’t feel guilty about giving time to your own work. It’s easy to get lost in the administrative weeds very quickly, and lose sight of your own scholarship. But for me, the biggest thing I needed to become and remain a Chair Who Publishes was to give myself permission to be that guy: to realize that it wasn’t just selfish (though surely there’s an element of that) and that being able to invest in “my work” was an important piece of the bigger departmental work.
If you’re not staying connected to the thing that fills up your tank and led you into the profession in the first place — whether it’s research or teaching; for me, it’s writing — you won’t be much good to anybody. And stewing about it and starting to resent the chair’s position is not going to help your colleagues, students, staff members, dean, or your family and friends, for that matter.
Center your scholarly or creative self in your role as chair — and I want to say, “what you need will follow,” but that’s a bit fatuous. You’ll still have to advocate for yourself. But if your institution didn’t need faculty leaders who were accomplished in all aspects of the complex faculty role, it could just hire corporate middle managers. The people in your department deserve better than that.
