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 had a few small tastes of faculty leadership — I directed a program in my department and now serve as associate chair. Both have made me think I might be interested in taking on the role of chair. And while I don’t hate the place I work now, I’m open to making a move to another campus. What advice do you have for someone going on the job market for a chair’s position? What special considerations should I be mindful of in testing the waters in a national search?
Signed,
Chair-Curious
Dear Chair-Curious,
It’s something of a dark secret in our profession at the moment: The readiest way for a tenured faculty member to change institutions is to apply for a chair’s job in a national search. It doesn’t sound like your primary motivation here is to leave your campus, and that’s great. Regular readers of this column may remember that, a year ago, I strongly discouraged a correspondent from their rather cynical plan to feign interest in chairing in order to move to a more desirable university.
In your case, however, going into a job search with a burgeoning interest in faculty leadership — and seeing a possible change of scenery as an added bonus — strikes me as just the right mindset with which to embark on the process.
The most fundamental thing to keep in mind as an outside candidate for chair: The audience for your application is your prospective faculty peers. Yes, deans appoint chairs; and yes, one hears of cases in which a dean does so without consulting the professors of the department in question. But in the vast majority of cases, faculty members write the ad for the chair’s position, screen the applications, interview the shortlisted candidates and finalists, and make a favorite known to the dean. A dean who hires a different chair against the wishes of the department is looking for trouble. (And heaven help that unwitting hire!)
The sad truth, however, is that most faculty members don’t really know how to identify good leaders. When scholars run the search for a new chair — not that I’d have it any other way — too often, scholarship trumps leadership. We search for a new chair as if we were searching for a new faculty member.
That’s the landscape you’re traversing. In my book on chairing, I wrote about the importance of department leaders maintaining, to the extent possible, their creative or scholarly work. But a national search for a department chair really ought to be conducted according to other priorities, and too often it’s not. If I Ran the Circus (to borrow from Dr. Seuss), things would be different. But in my experience — both as a candidate for chair in a handful of national searches, and as a faculty member helping to bring in an outsider to lead my department — the focus is largely on the scholarly chops of the would-be chairs, not on their leadership skills, experience, or potential.
Sure, professors want to hire a chair who can get the paperwork done on time. But when push comes to shove, we want a good scholar and teacher whom we’d look forward to having coffee with. In short, we want someone who is still active in their field but is willing to do the chair’s work — not someone whose scholarship has taken a back seat to their budding career as a thoughtful faculty leader. In many of our institutions, where teaching and scholarship are carefully assessed, service is more of a ticked box. This, too, is the case in chair searches. If I’m exaggerating, it’s only slightly.
The contrast to a dean’s search might serve to clarify the point I’m trying to make. When we interview candidates for a deanship, the discussions are almost entirely about policy, philosophy, values, experience. Scholarship was a necessary step on the way to their current position, but no one’s so deluded as to think that there will be much scholarship (or creative work) in the new dean’s future. (Saying that, the president of my college somehow managed to publish an impressive new book over the summer: There are exceptions to every generalization.)
When we’re hiring a dean, we know we’re hiring a campus leader, and we comport ourselves accordingly. But department chairs, leading from the middle as we do, are that most challenging of hybrids: half professor, half leader. As a result, in the hiring process, it’s strategic to position yourself as a faculty member when you’re talking with members of the department, and as a leader when you’re meeting with senior administrators. If that sounds hypocritical or disingenuous, it’s merely a preview of the two rather distinct roles you’ll have to play, and the audiences with whom you’ll have to interact, should you get the job.
A few more specific suggestions:
Tailor your application to your academic work. Because your first audience is department faculty members, draft your cover letter and CV as a scholar who enjoys the service work of chairing, rather than as a middle manager who used to produce scholarship or creative work. Your application will most likely have two distinct audiences, faculty and administration, and it’s probably not possible to satisfy both in one letter. But typically the dean won’t even see your cover letter and CV until quite late in the process. More to the point, deans will understand your complicated rhetorical situation better than will most of the department’s faculty members.
Save the leadership theorizing for the dean. Your interview with the dean and/or provost will have a different character than your interactions with department members. Deans and provosts, too, will be hoping to add a vibrant scholar/creator and teacher to the faculty; but at some point in their careers, they heard the siren call of service, and will recognize and appreciate a kindred soul on the same path. With them you can afford to geek out a little about why you find faculty leadership rewarding. Offer some combination of Virginia Woolf’s musing digression “I like women,” from A Room of One’s Own, and Tom Hanks’s “I love the law” speech from Philadelphia, but with “women” and “the law,” respectively, replaced with “chairing.”
Treat your conversation with the dean as “pass/fail.” In most cases you won’t be a viable candidate with the dean unless you’ve won the approval of the department’s faculty. In a national search, barring serious reservations about your candidacy, a dean will accede to the department’s wishes. In other words, in your meetings with the dean, the chair’s job is yours to lose — unless (bad news) you’ve lost it already because the faculty don’t want you.
Is this a troubled department? I’ve suggested before in these pages that the very existence of an outside search for a chair might be a red flag that all is not well in the hiring department and/or the institution. I got some resistance when I wrote that, and certainly some colleges regularly conduct national searches for chairs, absent serious internal strife. But it remains true that most chairs come from the ranks of a department’s existing faculty. So I still think it’s important to be alert to campus politics when you’re a candidate for a chair’s job that was nationally advertised.
What does that mean? Should you try to sniff out the dirt? Cozy up to the department’s gossips? Encourage a little trash talking? Absolutely not. In fact, as an outsider, you will have few means by which to discover the department’s particular problems, much less whether you’d be willing and able to tackle them. My advice to “be alert” means just that: Pay attention to how people in the department talk with each other and with senior administrators. If you’re interested in leading a department, you’re going to have to learn how to read people anyway. This is good practice.
Guard your tenure. At the risk of belaboring the obvious: If you hold tenure at your current institution, “don’t leave home without it.” Any offer of a chair’s position must come with tenure. Some institutions will expect you to go through their tenure process — fair enough, so long as they are able to complete the review and confer tenure before you start. But if it’s possible for you to take a year (or even two) of leave without pay from your current position while you “test drive” the new role and the new institution, take it. Worst-case scenario, if everything goes sideways at the new gig, it’s probably worth eating a little humble pie and crawling back to your previous institution, rather than languishing for years under your mistake.
Academe’s selection process for department heads is imperfect but, more often than not, we do get it right. At my current college, we did a national search for an English department chair a couple of years ago and absolutely hit the jackpot — and I’d like to think that the institution doesn’t rue the day, 16 years ago, when it offered me that same job as an external hire.
As a profession, we would be well served to develop better procedures for selecting department chairs, both in national and internal searches. Until that day, Chair-Curious, your best bet as an outside candidate for chair is to know who your real audience is in each search.
