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: One of the reasons I was willing to take on the chair’s job when it opened up in my department was that I wanted to make the distribution of service work more equitable. It seemed to me — and I wasn’t the only one — that some members of the department weren’t shouldering their fair share of the load. A year and a half in, I’m not sure I’ve been able to do much as chair to meaningfully redistribute the service burden: The same folks quietly opt out of work they’ve been assigned, or do it so poorly that others are horrified and rush in to fill the void.
How can I try to correct this dynamic?
Signed,
Fair Is Fair
Dear Fair,
You can lead faculty members to service, but you can’t make them do it — or do it well. As I often say, department chair is a position with a good deal of responsibility but not a lot of power. And one of the powers we surely lack is the ability to get a tenured professor to do most anything besides meet their classes and turn in their grades. (Chairs are hardly alone in that: At most institutions, deans and provosts don’t have much real leverage, either.)
Healthy, functioning departments — the foundation of our institutions — rely on the recognition of a shared project, and something like a generosity of spirit. But you rarely see those priorities reflected in faculty training, hiring, or reward systems.
Hence the situation you describe is a sadly familiar dynamic in academic departments. It’s a good illustration of the 80/20 rule (the Pareto Principle), which suggests that for many issues, 80 percent of the consequences come from 20 percent of the causes. It’s a rule with a lot of corollaries. One of them that we discuss often in leadership training for department chairs, and which has some bearing on your question here, Fair, is that 80 percent of a chair’s work seems to be created by just 20 percent of the faculty. Or more specifically, 20 percent of the faculty are doing 80 percent of the department’s service work. That leaves a lot of free riders unaccounted for. Call it the coalition of the unwilling.
I see at least two distinct causes — one of them much easier to diagnose, if not to solve, than the other.
The first, the more obvious, is caused by the prima-donna effect. Academics talk sometimes, either hopefully or disingenuously, about the holy trinity of faculty work — teaching, research, and service. At some institutions, the priority of the first two might be reversed — but service is never first. As our friends on Sesame Street would say, “One of these things is not like the others.” Teaching is a nonnegotiable requirement of most faculty appointments — one of the few job duties which, if ignored completely, can lead to a tenured professor’s termination. To earn tenure at most institutions, you are required to produce research — at least some, in different forms valued by various disciplines, and with consideration given to teaching load. More research is required to be promoted to full professor.
And then there’s service. Service at most four-year institutions is sort of a “pass/fail” requirement for tenure (the exception: community colleges). It’s not hard to pass; and once tenured, any real pressure is off. Service will never get you tenure or promotion, even if its utter absence will jeopardize your case. It will never land you a faculty position at another institution (except possibly, it may help if you are a candidate in a national search for a department chair).
Teaching obligations are relatively constant for most of us. We have the most control over the shape of our professional lives in the balance between service and what faculty members often call “my own work” (which for research-inactive colleagues is code for “me time”). We should not be surprised that service so often loses that coin toss. It’s a two-headed coin.
We all know academics who, whether explicitly or (far more common) implicitly, think their time is too valuable to be sacrificed to service. “I can’t be bothered serving on the curriculum committee, or actually reading the dossiers of our job candidates: The scholarly world waits with bated breath for my next monograph!” (“You, on the other hand, are a second-rate mind: Why don’t you make yourself useful and chair the department?”)
Some faculty members, then, choose to “rob service to pay research” (or sometimes “teaching”), and they do so for entirely logical reasons, given our reward structures. Other faculty members — and we don’t talk about this enough — don’t do much or any service because we actually don’t want them to, and for quite logical reasons, here, too.
I don’t know the particulars of your situation, Fair, so let’s look at a hypothetical example — not focused on an arrogant service-resistant researcher but a more typical case of a faculty member struggling in multiple aspects of the job. Say you’re chairing the department and your colleague, Mark, has seen his course enrollments slipping over the past few years. Part of it is that his field has moved forward, while his teaching has not; part of it is that he radiates a kind of bitterness toward the university that students can smell a mile away. He’s stuck in a vicious cycle: Mark’s sourness alienates potential students, and the resulting low enrollments further embitter him.
A call from the dean’s office has become a beginning-of-semester ritual for you as the department chair: “Mark’s upper-division course only has seven students enrolled.” The university has enrollment minima; Mark’s class is threatened with cancellation. Your problem, as chair, is that there’s precious little else you can do with Mark. You could always assign him to teach first-year courses; in my discipline, English, that would mean teaching composition. If he’s a gifted and enthusiastic teacher of that material, fantastic — but he’s probably not. And he’s sure to see his reassignment to a mandatory gen-ed course, and the cancellation of his senior elective, as judgment or punishment.
Give Mark more students to advise, then? Put him in charge of senior thesis projects? Fill up his schedule with various kinds of service assignments? Usually the Marks of any department do a poor job in those roles, too, possibly even alienating the students we’re trying to attract and retain. It’s important to offer every faculty member the opportunity to engage in meaningful department and campus service, of course; no one can be blamed for failing to serve if they’ve never been given the chance. In Mark’s case, on the other hand, you’ve offered him service work and have seen the results.
Faced with a handful of bad choices — one might think that termination was one of those, but I’ve never known of a case in which that “nuclear option” was exercised — the dean chooses to let Mark’s under-enrolled section run: Better that he should teach just seven students than none at all. And as a result, he’s now doing significantly less teaching and service work than your other colleagues in the department. Mark’s bad behavior (or just bad attitude) has won him a cush assignment. Squeaky wheel: Here’s your grease.
So there’s the problem in a couple of its forms, invoked in loving detail. What about solutions?
Get some advice from your predecessor. Have you discussed this issue with the previous head of your department, or with other chairs on your campus? I suspect that creating a more-equitable service culture was on their wish list, too. Ask your fellow chairs:
- What general advice would they offer? You might discover, for instance, that because of bad personal history, any assignment that pairs Professor X with Professor Y is headed into rough waters. (For better and worse, chairs come to know things about their colleagues that no one would ever have suspected.)
- What, if anything, helped to turn around a service-resistant professor? Some faculty members have come to resent their institution but retain an affection for their department, its students, some of their colleagues, and perhaps even you, the chair. Maybe, while you’re thinking globally, you could ask them to act locally?
- What third rail did these former chairs touch that you ought to avoid? Perhaps faculty members have had bad experiences serving on certain campuswide committees in the past. You’ll want to think carefully about who your department’s best diplomats are, and who would be willing to take on such an assignment.
Accept that “fit” is a consideration in handing out service duties. Certain committee assignments are on an unforgiving clock, meeting at a set time and frequency that some faculty members simply cannot accommodate in their schedules. A committee that meets at 4 p.m., for example, is a bigger challenge for faculty members with school-aged children or a significant commute than it is for those of us who live in an “empty nest” and within a stone’s throw of the campus. When someone in your department turns aside a request for their service, keep in mind that “I can’t” is different from “I won’t.”
Fit is also a factor for the Marks of your department. You should be leery of putting a Mark into student-facing (or even human-facing) service assignment. But the department and the institution have other work that needs to be done. Can he do the necessary background research for the upcoming department self-study — perhaps even draft the study itself? Or serve on the university’s human-subjects committee or institutional-review board?
Interpersonal difficulties aside, what are the strengths and passions that brought Mark to the institution in the first place? Is there a low-stakes setting in which to try to re-engage him in those interests? Of course he would still have to show up to the meetings, and participate meaningfully. All you can do is try to match an unhappy or disgruntled faculty member to a task where they can do the most good and the least damage. And then hope that if they don’t do the work, you don’t get stuck doing it yourself.
How do you motivate the divas and the slackers? In a recent workshop I ran for department chairs, someone made the point that sanctions aren’t terribly effective in motivating the kind of generous contribution to service work that we want (nor does a chair really have many penalties at hand). But perhaps, rather than “sticks,” we have some “carrots”?
If chairs aren’t able to invoke consequences for a dereliction of service duty, might we at least find ways to recognize and reward the extra work taken on by the 20 percent? Think of the various kinds of department resources you control, broadly construed: course assignments and class schedules; office space and equipment; possibly research and/or professional-development funds. Are there creative ways for you to ensure that 80 percent of those perks flow to the 20 percent who keep the department running?
I suspect that many chairs and other hard-working faculty members resent the colleagues who don’t do their share of service. There’s much more to be said on this topic, so I’m going to return to it next month by taking us through a story. Here’s an optional homework assignment: Read Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” If you do, I think you’ll see why I’ve suggested it. I’m going to tuck into it next month, because it’s some kind of parable for department service work and those who “would prefer not to.”
