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’ve been chairing my department for a couple of years now. I like the role: I like the people I work with and I enjoy working with students. But recently our beloved dean announced her departure and, so far, the search for a replacement hasn’t yielded a great pool. The interim dean is thinking of applying for the permanent position; she is a decent person but very different from most of our faculty members in both experience (in industry) and outlook (more efficiency oriented than the touchy-feely type we’ve become accustomed to with our last two deans).
Some faculty colleagues have asked me to consider applying for the deanship. It’s flattering, and I do think I could do it well, and I worry that the interim dean might not. There is a possibility that things would change substantially (and not for the better) with her in the permanent post. But all other things being equal, I’d prefer to keep chairing my department.
So my question (finally) is: What is my responsibility to my department? Should I apply for a position I’m not sure I want if it would help my department? As the permanent dean, I think I could preserve the internal culture better than the interim appointee would; but the tasks of the position (lots of reports, hiring) are not things I am excited about doing. What advice can you give me?
Signed,
Taking One for the Team?
Dear T.O.T.,
If I’m reading correctly between the lines, you’re my kind of chair. You find supporting your colleagues and students rewarding: You actually enjoy the chair’s job. I note, too, that you describe your recently departed dean as “beloved.” Rarely does that adjective modify that noun. It sounds like you’ve been lucky to be part of something pretty special, and that specialness is now in jeopardy.
The question you come to in your last paragraph is a pointed and poignant one: What is my responsibility to my department? It is, of course, not one I can answer for you.
Decades ago, an early mentor of mine, consoling me on having been passed over for a departmental administrative position, quoted W.B. Yeats wildly out of context: “Never give all the heart.” Yeats meant: to a lover. But my mentor meant: to an institution. It’s incapable of responding in kind, and you’ll just get used and/or hurt. My mentor was telling me to be wary of loving something that can’t love you back.
The way you frame your question is interesting in itself — not “What do I owe my institution?” but “What do I owe my department?” In “Eveline,” a James Joyce short story that I teach often (and talk about probably too much), a young woman is faced with the choice between eloping with a romantic stranger or staying behind to fulfill a promise she made to her dying mother to care for her siblings and her abusive father. (Oh, and her suitor may well be a cad, which certainly complicates the picture.) As she’s trying to make her decision, she offers up two prayers in rapid succession. The first is reasonable enough for a praying person — that God would “direct” her. But the second effectively answers the question before it’s properly been asked: She asks God “to show her what was her duty.” And … game over. One has no duty to elope with a lover. She stays behind.
What you and Eveline have in common: Sometimes the questions we ask are as important as, and circumscribe, the answers we get. Should this potential career shift really be about your department? Shouldn’t it be about you? If we were discussing this over coffee, I’d want to pose a few other questions: What are your gifts? What in your work brings you joy? What is your responsibility to yourself?
From the little you’ve told me, it sounds as if you think your gifts are best used in service of faculty members and students. In a typical dean’s role, you will still be supporting professors, albeit usually a larger group of them (but including your department colleagues). Depending on the size of your institution, however, your direct work with students would almost certainly diminish, and you would probably no longer be doing any classroom teaching. It sounds like you would experience that second part as a real loss.
On the other hand, when it comes to supporting the faculty, as dean you could be in a position to do that with better resources, and to do it for a larger group of colleagues. And supporting faculty members in their work is of course supporting teaching, albeit indirectly. Could you live with that trade-off? No longer advocating for your department’s professors, but for all the college’s faculty; no longer for your program’s students, but for all students; no longer for your staff, but for all staff?
At the same time, as dean, you’d surely have a larger role in hiring and program building. It sounds like you are not particularly excited about the nuts-and-bolts details of that work. But you wouldn’t be doing it alone as chairs do. As dean, you would have staff support, which might allow you to focus on the “big picture” thinking that you seem to find rewarding without getting buried in administrivia.
And let’s not beat around the bush: With a deanship comes a title, a lot of prestige, and a bigger paycheck. I suppose only the vulgar actually talk about such things in polite circles, but let’s not pretend they aren’t important personal factors. Only you will know how important they are to you. More than a few colleagues have become chair or dean primarily for the extra money and been great in the role.
In my own career, I’ve been a finalist three times for a dean’s position and offered the job once. Thankfully (from the perspective of 2024) circumstances made it impossible for me to accept the deanship I was offered, and I was passed over for the other two. I say thankfully because I can’t imagine work more rewarding than what I’m doing today, and the dean’s path would have been a distraction. In retrospect, I needed the universe to protect me from making an unfortunate decision.
And maybe you do as well. Not to be too English professor about all this, but it’s possible that the metaphor you chose for your pen name may help you come to a decision. “Taking one for the team” comes from the world of baseball — in particular, it’s the suggestion to a batter (entirely illegal, but never mind) that they go up to the plate and intentionally get hit by a pitch in order to get to first base. These days that probably means taking a 95-mph fastball, hopefully into a bit of the ol’ anatomy that’s got some meat on it.
In your analogy, the ball would seem to be the different responsibilities and stresses associated with the dean’s role. Or is the ball the acting dean? But who’s the team? Would taking a pitch in the keister help your department? Your college? Then, too, in baseball it’s only a poor hitter who’s ever asked to make this sacrifice.
In the end, T.O.T., I think it comes down to something like this: If the key thing you value about being a department chair is that the position allows you to still do some teaching and one-on-one student mentoring, then you should feel comfortable graciously declining your colleagues’ suggestion. Your responsibility both to your department and to your institution, I would argue — and to yourself — is to stay where you are and continue to do that work well.
That said, if teaching and mentoring really were the primary source of your job satisfaction, you probably wouldn’t have become a chair in the first place.
Ultimately, I think you’re asking the wrong question. You bring a bundle of gifts, experiences, and enthusiasms to your current role. What is your responsibility to them? On which spot of your institution’s organizational chart will you feel you have the most opportunity to be challenged, to grow, to contribute? Just because you would be good at a new role doesn’t mean it’s right for you. And maybe it’s someone else’s turn to take one for the team.
