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: Chairs are called on to fill many roles — I think sometimes of the boilerplate disclaimer included in many job descriptions: “other duties as assigned.” One of the duties I hadn’t expected was the need to support my department through times of loss. We’ve all just come through a global pandemic, which of course left a lot of loss, of lots of different kinds, in its wake.
In my own department we’ve just had to deal with the death of a faculty member, unrelated to Covid. Any advice on how to guide a department through loss?
Signed,
Leading While Grieving
Dear Grieving,
I hope it won’t come across as trite if I begin by expressing my sympathy for your loss. We don’t know one another (not that I’m aware), and I don’t know exactly what your department has been through. I also don’t know whether you’re aware of my own experience with this challenge as a department chair, which could lie behind your decision to write.
Ultimately, however, dealing with the death of faculty members is the common lot of departments and their leaders, and the odds are good that someone who has chaired for a long time will have been through it.
Your letter took me back to a number of relevant experiences. Although I was the nominal leader of my department during these losses, I can’t be the judge of how much real leadership I provided. But each left a lasting mark — on my department, on me, and on how I think about this work that we do. After some time sitting with those memories, and trying to listen to the lessons they had to offer, I’m left with these thoughts.
Any faculty members on the job for more than a couple of years have probably experienced the loss of a retired or emeritus colleague, whether in their own department or elsewhere on the campus. Often, depending on the personal relationships in place, a member of the deceased’s family will contact the department chair, who must then communicate the news to other faculty members and to the dean’s office.
The precise nature of that communication will depend on how connected the retiree had remained to the life of the department. At my small college, a memorial service is usually held on the campus, coordinated through the dean’s office in partnership with the home department. As chair, I would be the liaison with the family, ascertaining and conveying their wishes about things like scheduling, music, flowers, speakers, reception. In the best of cases, it’s an opportunity for the campus community to honor the colleague’s contributions to the institution and to celebrate a successful career.
Things are much different, however, when a thriving career is cut short.
I was the newly recruited chair of Pomona College’s English department when David Foster Wallace, the noted American novelist and a member of our faculty, passed away in the fall of 2008; his unexpected death was international news. (Out of respect, I hesitated to even name him here; but given the amount of public attention that his death received, it seemed odd to leave readers guessing.)
Because I’d hardly had the chance to get to know David, I wasn’t personally shaken by his death in the way that students and faculty colleagues were on the campus. I experienced his passing as a great loss — but as a lost possible future, rather than a relationship cut short. That distance, in turn, made it easier for me in my role as chair to serve as the point-person for the grief work that followed.
Shock and dismay flooded over the professors and students who knew David well, although the faculty members, for various reasons, were perhaps better prepared emotionally for the news. It fell to the faculty members, then, to do what we might to care for the grieving students. When I learned the news I first called my closest colleague in the department and asked her to share the grim assignment of calling the department’s other faculty members. Because of David’s stature in the literary world, we realized that news of his death would soon appear on the evening news — and no one wanted our students to learn of it that way.
We hastily organized a meeting with our students for that afternoon, a Saturday — something that’s possible on a small, residential campus. As a newcomer to the institution, I was in awe of how the human machine at the college’s heart quickly moved into action. The registrar sent me a list of all the current students who had studied with David, and their email addresses; I wrote to all our majors and those who had taken classes with him, explaining that we had very important and time-sensitive information to share and asking them to come to the department’s multipurpose room at 3 p.m. — and to tell others who might miss the email.
The dean of students arranged for members of her staff to be in the room across the hall for anyone who might need grief counseling. With the exception of one person who was traveling, all my faculty colleagues came back to the campus to be with our students. I was the one to make the announcement because I was only rattled, not completely in bits. It’s a day I will never forget.
The grieving wasn’t finished in an afternoon, of course, although I won’t describe the next weeks and months in detail. The work we did as a department and as an institution, the work that I did as chair, is certainly nothing I’d signed up for. And yet it didn’t take me long to realize that I’d been handed a set of responsibilities that felt almost sacred.
Unfortunately, in my years as chair, I have had other experiences with faculty deaths. Caring for the memory of a colleague, and for those bereft by that professor’s death, is difficult and exhausting, yet can be deeply rewarding.
The next departmental death followed much too soon on the heels of the first — again untimely, a 35-year-old faculty member with chronic health problems who didn’t live to see her tenure review. I was quite close to this colleague: She was hired in the first faculty search I oversaw as chair.
And in this case, the death was the opposite of sudden: We in the department watched, aghast, as it played out in cruel real time that felt like slow motion. I dealt with my sorrow in the only ways I knew: by advocating for her health-care needs against a sometimes heartless system; by bringing meals, most of them prepared by my daughter who has a heart as big as the sky; by stepping in to teach her classes when she was too sick to do so herself.
I would do or give almost anything to have prevented either of those tragedies; I also know that my department came together like never before or since in the face of such suffering.
Perhaps that, then, is what I hold onto as I think back on both of those painful chapters: Leading through loss — just as is true of good chairing, period — means being sensitive to the needs around you and stepping up to meet them. Depending on the circumstances, you as chair might:
- Ask students, once they’ve had a chance to absorb the news, what kind of tribute to their mentor they would find meaningful. In one case in my department, we took a couple of students out to buy votive candles, and they organized an opportunity for people to share remembrances one night around a campus fountain. If a formal on-campus memorial is held, invite one or two students, current or alumni, to speak on the program.
- Maintain open lines of communication with any family members who want to be involved in planning any memorial activities. With the consent of the family, memorial funds are sometimes established and managed by the institution, to support student scholarships, faculty research, and other meaningful projects.
- Create an opportunity for alumni to share their tributes. The department might, for instance, build a memorial page on the departmental web site and invite current and former students to contribute.
- Coordinate with the administration to ensure that local newspapers, professional organizations, etc., are informed of the death.
Institutions have protocols in place to deal with faculty deaths, and those are important. At my college the dean would send an email to faculty members and students; a memorial service would be held on the campus; an appropriate faculty member would be asked to deliver a “memorial minute” at a faculty meeting.
But the intensity of faculty relationships — with other professors, with staff members, with students and alums — means that no standardized institutional blueprint for grief and mourning is going to suffice. You’ll need to find a way to put your own pain aside, at least temporarily, so that you can help your community to mourn. And heal.
