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’m in the final year of my second consecutive term as chair, and it’s time for a break (and a sabbatical). Weirdly, though, none of my colleagues are clamoring to fill the seat I’ll be vacating in about six months.
My question, then, is about succession planning. What can/should a chair do in order to guarantee the “peaceful transfer of power” within the department? Is it really my job to find my replacement — and more urgently, if I fail, does that mean I don’t get to step down?
Signed,
Take My Chair — Please!
Dear TMCP,
Tone is easy to misconstrue in texts, emails, and other brief forms of written communication. I want, for all the world, to believe that your closing question is tongue-in-cheek. On the off-chance that it’s not, let’s make it very clear for the record: You are absolutely not stuck serving as chair until someone else steps up.
No one should chair in perpetuity. And if professors believe that taking the chair’s position will mean they have to keep it until they can persuade someone else to step in, it will be even harder to find willing candidates. It’s not your responsibility to identify your department’s next leader — that’s your dean’s job. If no one in your department wants to be chair, the dean will have to run a national search or appoint someone from another program on the campus. Either way, it’s not your problem.
At most institutions, deans don’t have to intervene like that (and we should be glad that they don’t). A department chair usually serves “at the pleasure of the dean.” But typically, the department runs an internal selection process, votes on a leader, and presents its choice to the dean (or presents two options, when the department is split in its recommendation).
The department makes its recommendation, and the dean makes the appointment. But only a foolhardy dean would overrule the will of the department, unless there are serious misgivings about its choice. I worked under one dean who, in a contested election for department chair, required faculty members to email their “votes” to him directly — and then told us whom we had selected. That’s one way, I suppose, for a dean to go through the motions of listening to the department and then just doing what he or she wants.
But let’s back up a bit. Your question, the first one at least, is: What is the chair’s responsibility in preparing faculty colleagues to be future leaders of the department — and how is that preparation best accomplished?
Before holding forth, I need to confess that most of what I know about succession planning comes from having done it really, really badly in the past. I’ve moved twice to new institutions to take a department chair’s job (evidence, right there, that chair succession was an issue at both places). In the first instance, I couldn’t get out of the role quick enough, and really never gave a thought to who would take over when I stepped down. In contrast, I served as chair of the English department at my current institution for a long term and found the work to be so fulfilling — in part, because I had such talented and generous colleagues — that once again I never gave much thought to who would take over as chair when I was finished. I just assumed that someone else would be eager to steer this beautiful ship.
This will sound like a humblebrag answer to that evergreen interview question, “What’s your greatest weakness?” But as English chair, I now believe that I shouldered too much of the department’s work and responsibilities, with unforeseen consequences down the road. For if you seem to set an impossible standard for the job, no one will want it when you’re done. If you complain about the job to your colleagues, no one will want it. If everyone sees you keeping ridiculous hours, no one will want it. And when, after a decade, I stepped down as chair — no one wanted it.
If I had it to do all over again, I would approach the chair’s gig very differently. While I still think that my desire to shoulder the bulk of the department’s work was well motivated, it did nothing to develop a good leadership pipeline in the faculty ranks — quite the opposite.
The following advice probably won’t help the questioner much since TMCP is approaching the exit. But it may help other chairs groom colleagues to step up more willingly when the chair’s duty calls.
Share the load. It’s important for a chair to delegate responsibilities so that others gain leadership experience, as well as to normalize the role of service in faculty life. Some of that work is internal to the department, and yours to delegate — assigning people to draft portions of the self-study or the annual report to the dean’s office; asking colleagues to lead tenure, promotion, and reappointment reviews; organizing events for students.
And such tasks shouldn’t be given to just senior professors. We typically seek to relieve junior academics of undue service burdens so that they can pour themselves into their research or creative work. But at the end of the day, successful faculty members have to be able to “walk and chew gum” — serve their own scholarly interests and those of their students and the institution — at the same time. Departmental service is a relatively low-stakes place to start learning that tricky, career-long balancing act.
Communicate the joys (yes, I said joys) of service. Looking back at that previous post, I also wish that I had done a better job of communicating the opportunities of departmental leadership, and not just its burdens. Anyone who has heard me on the topic — in my book, in these columns, in my workshops — knows that I love the work of chairing. Why was that love not the least bit contagious?
Perhaps because leaning into the chair’s role suggests that you are a kind of second-class scholarly citizen. Those who can, publish — and those who can’t, chair, right? If I once felt that way, I certainly no longer do. At this point, at least, I’m willing to say that chairing is probably what I do best, and I don’t care who knows it. But it has taken me many years to fully own that identity.
Encourage your colleagues to gain experience as faculty leaders. As chair, you may (depending on your institution’s processes) have the opportunity to nominate colleagues for meaningful campuswide committee assignments, or suggest that they nominate themselves. Service in such broad roles brings the added benefit of having other people in the department who are tuned into larger campus conversations taking place outside the department, who can help you provide your colleagues with a wider context for some of the work the department is trying to do.
Are there campus conversations and training programs that you can make available? Some institutions (for instance, the Five College Consortium and Central Washington University, which I’ve visited recently, and Yale University, where I’ll host a workshop next month) have well-thought-out programs for faculty leadership development in place, and you might recommend a colleague for participation.
What about within your field’s association? I’m lucky to have come up through a discipline that has an incredibly valuable professional-development program for chairs, the Association of Departments of English’s summer seminars. Similar support exists in many other fields. And of course right here, The Chronicle’s own Strategic Leadership Program for Department Chairs provides a rich and convenient online opportunity for professional development.
Make sure promising leaders in your department are aware of such programs. Sometimes people just need someone to recognize their potential and point the way forward.
There’s more to say here, but we’ll save it for another occasion. For now, suffice it to say that great chairs are made, not born — and great chairs make it their business to help prepare the next generation of departmental leadership.
