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: Some significant chair business comes up over the summer, yet it can be very difficult to get faculty members to respond to communications sent during the hiatus. Last summer, when I emailed them, my department’s faculty reminded me that they were paid on nine-month contracts. Fortunately, they responded with the information I needed — but I got the message.
As a chair, how do you deal with, or work around, the fact that you’re probably the only member of the department with a 12-month appointment?
Signed,
A Cure for the Summertime Blues?
Dear Summertime Blues,
First, bless you for planting an Eddie Cochran earworm in my head. If I’m hearing you correctly, you’re concerned about how to work with faculty members who remind us, to paraphrase the 1958 hit: “Well, I’m a gonna raise a fuss, I’m a gonna raise a holler / About workin’ all summer without earning half a dollar.”
Is that about right?
It’s a lament I’m quite familiar with — indeed one I tried to express myself, as the summer of 2010 approached, when I wrote “The Shame of the Professor’s Summer Vacation,” for The Awl, a now-defunct culture website. The short version of that essay: Faculty members who are active researchers or creators never really have the summer “off” — it’s just a period when we’re not paid.
For scholars, summers represent what the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are to the retail trade: the time when we move, if barely, from the red into the black for the year’s writing and scholarship. And as someone who has tried to remain productive, I guard that time jealously — no, viciously. So I’m in full sympathy with your faculty colleagues, as perhaps you are as well.
And yet. And yet. You and I are chairs and, as you suggest, we have administrative and planning work to get done over the summer. However, my institution differs from yours: Here, department chairs work on nine-month appointments, just like other faculty members. My college pays chairs a modest monthly stipend to compensate us for, among other things, a small amount of summer work.
When I was appointed chair, my dean told me that I didn’t need to be “around” all summer, only “available.” That seemed like a reasonable compromise to me (although it’s important to note that my institution doesn’t have a summer instructional term). At an institution like yours — where chairs are on 12-month contracts — the summer workload is presumably more significant, and your need for communication with your colleagues more pressing.
Calendar creep is real: Faculty members are feeling it where I teach, as programming demands for new student orientation are crawling earlier and earlier into August. Our nine-month faculty members are on contract from August 16 through May 15; any requests for college service during the three summer months in between are extra-contractual. (These boundaries are typically well enforced on campuses with unionized faculty.) On the other hand, our fall semester typically begins on the Tuesday following Labor Day — this year, September 5.
Sometimes professors do need to be reminded that their contracts include a couple of weeks of work before classes start and they are technically back on the clock (although I’d rather get my dean to deliver that nudge than do it myself).
How to bridge this gap between the “haves” (have summer compensation) and the “have nots”?
Your procrastination habit is not their problem. The first step, as your faculty colleagues gently (?) taught you last summer, is to acknowledge the different expectations under which you and they are working. For a typical professor, an email from the chair during the academic year — even if it’s an unwelcome interruption — is not wholly unexpected. That same email lands rather differently during the summer.
One way to minimize or avoid bothering your faculty colleagues during their summer hiatus is to anticipate what you might need from them before they go off the grid. As I write this, my colleagues are still in the saddle: What if I imagine each of them moving to a Buddhist monastery or a remote desert island for the next three months? What do I need from them before they decamp?
To figure that out, I don’t just need to be on top of my summer to-do list, but well ahead of it. For instance, I have to file an annual “state of the department” report on June 1. By then, my faculty members are gone. What information do I need from them in order to write that report — late on the night of May 30, which is surely when I will do it?
And if I can’t conclude all my business with my faculty colleagues before the summer break, can some of it wait? The dean isn’t going to wait until September 1 for that annual report, but chairs should be sensitive to which of their requests can, in fact, be postponed. I like to keep a pretty empty inbox — but I need to remember that my email preference is not my colleagues’ problem. Professors would be well within their rights to respond to unwelcome summer requests by reciting that most obnoxious of office posters: “Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.” Ouch. And amen.
Show them the money. If your dean and provost are the ones requiring work over the summer, they must be willing either to pay for it or delay it until the academic year. As the department chair, your faculty members (especially the contingent and untenured ones) may look to you to push back on their behalf. If they are off contract yet expected to work for the institution over the summer, they must be compensated for their efforts.
Here at Pomona College, instructors who will be teaching first-year seminars in the fall are expected to participate in a multiple-day workshop that occurs right after commencement — which is to say, right after we’re off for the summer. But participation is optional, and faculty members are paid an honorarium for their attendance.
Sometimes in the summer months, stuff happens. All of the scenarios I’ve entertained to this point might be considered more-or-less business as usual. You know that certain duties, like annual departmental reports, are going to be due every summer. But what about the unexpected, which you’d be foolish not to expect?
What if, for instance, a former student requires a syllabus from a colleague’s course for purposes of transfer credit, and you don’t have access to it? Assuming that the request is time sensitive, you’ll have to reach out to your colleague for an electronic version of the syllabus that can be forwarded with very little trouble.
More problematic would be a grant opportunity — say for curriculum development — with a summer deadline that you only become aware of after the spring semester ends. You need a faculty member’s participation on the grant application. You want to apply to help move your department forward, and it’s a reasonable expectation of your position as chair that you would put in the work. Not so, your colleague.
What to do? If it were me, I’d reach out to faculty members and ask. Just remember, “no” has to be a no-risk, absolutely acceptable response.
If you find someone willing to take on the work, what can you do for that faculty member? Most likely, you don’t have a way to pay them for their work. But it’s certainly worth checking with the dean’s office, especially if it’s an initiative that excites the senior administration. Within the department, you may also have some resources that you can offer the professor, such as new or increased professional-development or travel money, for instance. In an extreme case, in which a significant investment of this faculty colleague’s time would be required and your institution allows you the flexibility, you might even be able to offer a reduced teaching load in an upcoming semester. The point is: Don’t go into these situations empty handed if you can avoid it.
As I kvetched about in that long-ago piece, a college professor’s “summer off” is always something of a fiction. But it’s one well worth fighting to preserve. As chair, you’re paid, in one way or another, to be on call during the summer, like a lifeguard watching from a perch above the surf: Your faculty colleagues are not. Respect their time and expertise by planning in advance for the work you hope to accomplish over the summer — and when interruption can’t be avoided, find a way to compensate them.
