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: We had just a few weeks remaining in the spring semester; our then-chair had announced in no uncertain terms that he would be finished come July 1. What was less clear was who would replace him. It felt like that old cartoon: Volunteers were asked to take one step forward; I stood still while everyone else took one step back. Tag, I’m it.
That’s fine: It’s my turn, and there are some things I’d like the department to work on. What I wasn’t expecting, though, was the Sturm und Drang around the department’s retreat, tentatively scheduled for the opening of the coming academic year. During my time as a rank faculty member, I’d remained blissfully unaware of the partisan divide in our department over this annual event, and essentially agnostic on the question of retreats myself. But as chair, I now discover that half of my colleagues love and greatly look forward to this gathering — and half (the vocal half) loathe it. They really loathe it.
As I plan for the coming year, it’s staring me in the face, and a tentative date is on the calendar. Any advice? Should I retreat from the oncoming retreat, or is it a practice worth defending?
Signed,
Trick or Retreat
Dear Trick,
Ah, that perennial question: To retreat or not to retreat? I mean on the face of it, what’s not to like? Funny story: When my wife switched from medical practice to university teaching — and despite long experience with my professorial ways — she found many of the traditions of our tribe unfamiliar. So when she first joined the School for Physician Assistant Studies and heard about the fall “SPAS retreat,” she thought: A spa retreat? Mani-pedis and seaweed wraps? How fabulous is that!
The reality was, alas, rather different — though valuable, she would say. Having both organized and attended quite a few retreats in my career, I’ve found they can be extraordinarily valuable — when planned with care. Last year, a reader who was a dean and an outside hire asked for advice on staging a useful retreat for her chairs. Here my focus will be on the departmental retreat, on why it’s despised by some faculty members, and on what chairs can do to bring those folks around to its many benefits (or at least make the retreat a less grating experience for the skeptics).
That said, I’m certainly familiar with the range of reactions you’ve described, Trick. Like many practices adopted from the corporate world, the department retreat still retains, for many colleagues, the stink of bureaucracy and b-school gimmickry. A retreat is the kind of exercise (like, say, strategic planning or accreditation) that academics all thought we’d cleverly avoided by pursuing a faculty career. We’re indoor cats who, against all odds, manage to sustain the fantasy that we’re really outdoor cats: feral. We refuse to be herded.
But professors despise retreats for other, more pragmatic reasons, too. And since a retreat can accomplish some genuinely important work (really!), it’s worth your time as a chair to try to identify and avoid those potential impediments.
They’re badly planned, and poorly run. Most faculty members are busy people used to controlling our own daily schedules (aside from classroom time). Some academics hate a retreat for the same reason they hate department meetings: We resent the sense that someone with an ill-conceived, HR-driven, or dodgy agenda is wasting our time. Even those department members who aren’t especially busy — and don’t expect them to self-identify — would rather waste their own time than have it wasted on their behalf.
On some level, this is a simple matter of respect. If, as department chair, I’m asking (or requiring) my colleagues to come together for an afternoon or a full day to work on department business, it’s incumbent upon me to do everything in my power to put that time to good use.
How much planning time will you need? I don’t have a formula, but we often tell undergraduates that they should expect to spend three or four hours a week studying for every hour of in-class instructional time. Perhaps chairs should be prepared to invest a similar amount of time preparing their department’s annual retreat.
Of course one option is to kill the retreat altogether and hold more frequent, and shorter, meetings throughout the academic year — typically, a department’s faculty meets every week or two, for about an hour. But as you can surely sense already, I don’t see retreats and department meetings as an either-or proposition. I view the two, not as distinct, but as existing on a kind of continuum.
Retreats typically occupy a full day, or the greater portion of one. At my wife’s university, the department’s daylong retreat is followed the next day by a campuswide retreat. Done well, a retreat enables big-picture conversations that the pressure of a one-hour meeting, in the midst of the weekly teaching calendar, just can’t accommodate. A retreat is, in essence, a longer, and more ambitious (or at least more comprehensive) department meeting — minus the minutiae.
What kind of conversations? None of these topics could be dealt with responsibly in an hourlong department meeting but are well-suited for a retreat:
- Preparing for an outside department review, including delegating sections of the self-study report to faculty members.
- Having a long-range discussion of hiring priorities for the next five or 10 years.
- Reviewing the department’s major(s) and minor(s) and planning to revise the requirements, class offerings, and course staffing.
- Working with a consultant to promote practices that support diversity, equity, and inclusion in the department’s faculty, staff, students, curricula, and other programming.
But a retreat has a couple of other features that can make it tricky to pull off successfully and risk antagonizing some professors.
The dates you choose will always inconvenience somebody. You mentioned, Trick, that your start-of-year retreat is already on the department calendar, but you didn’t mention when. There are a few different strategies for scheduling a department retreat — and each of them will make someone in your department angry.
For many chairs, the goal is to have some agenda-setting conversations at the beginning of a new academic year, which is why the last week of the summer recess is a common time to hold a retreat. And for good reason: No one is teaching. But that’s exactly why some professors will resent the late-summer timing: “I’m coming in early from summer break? For what?”
Faculty attitudes will differ on this from campus to campus, often related to the nature, and the dates, of nine- or 10-month faculty contracts. If it’s your sense that your department’s tradition, or current temperament, will let you get away with a retreat on the Friday before classes start, that’s the clear winner.
If not — and I’ve chaired departments that would have called for my ouster if I’d suggested such a thing — the only alternative is to schedule the retreat for a block of time during the new semester. Perhaps there’s a weekday on which no one in your department is teaching? Most of us think of weekdays as “work days” even if we wouldn’t otherwise have to be on the campus, so the ask seems more reasonable. Just be sure to get it on everyone’s calendar with a good deal of lead time.
The only other possibility is a weekend retreat. The advantage is no one’s teaching. But you risk making everyone unhappy (rather than just a few folks) by committing a precious Saturday to department business.
Besides finding the right timing, there are a handful of things that you should keep in mind as you plan a retreat:
- A change of venue makes a big difference: Leave the campus. It doesn’t have to be far away; it might even be your home, or the home of one of your colleagues. But a casual vibe, and unfamiliar surroundings, can help you achieve some fresh thinking.
- Break big blocks of time into flexible, modular units. Weekly or biweekly department meetings tend to be one amorphous hour. Use the longer stretch of a retreat to create opportunities for small-group conversations, generous breaks, and mealtimes.
- What about ice breakers? Go there at your peril, I say. If some faculty members are suspicious that a retreat is a bit too touchy-feely, you’ll certainly lose them entirely during a “trust fall,” a “marshmallow challenge,” or a scavenger hunt.
- Don’t waste the opportunity on “business as usual.” A retreat requires a significant commitment of department time and resources. It’s a big container for engaging the really big questions facing your department that never seem to get a proper airing during a regular hourlong meeting. Make sure that your retreat topics are aspirational and inspirational, encouraging your colleagues to dream big. But also make sure the subjects are ones that your colleagues actually want to discuss.
- Share the facilitation and leadership. No one wants to listen to you running an eight-hour meeting. Have some of your faculty members participate in the planning and lead portions of the day’s conversation. For some kinds of professional-development topics, bringing in an outside facilitator may be productive. (I’ve been brought in to lead a number of department-chair retreats organized by college deans, for instance.)
- Finally, don’t forget the follow up. Just as department meetings need someone taking minutes and keeping track of next steps, you’ll need to make sure that the creative ideas generated during the retreat are captured and not allowed to die at the retreat center. At the conclusion of a great retreat, you may feel that you’ve accomplished a great deal — and in one sense, you have (much of it interpersonal and hard to capture in writing). But in another sense, most of what you’ve done is to commit to doing things in the months ahead — create an ad hoc committee on the major, build a LinkedIn page for alums, get an estimate for refurbishing the student lounge. As chair, it’s your job to turn those plans into realities, which will help convince your colleagues that attending the next retreat is worth their time.
If some of your colleagues hate retreats, Trick, probably they’ve been the victims of some lousy ones: No one can blame them for their cynicism. But with good planning and the collaboration of key colleagues, you can ensure that their next retreat experience will be a positive one, and start to undo some of the past damage. Even if your department can’t afford mani-pedis for everyone.
