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 year and a half. I would have thought that I’d be getting the hang of it by now, skiing on the downside of the learning curve. But each time I think I’ve got the work under control, the work changes. New responsibilities are passed down from central administration: admissions, retention, recruitment, expense approval, HR sign-offs, advancement, public relations — it’s just more and more.
Success on the job, or even competence, seems out of reach. What do I do?
Signed,
Dancing As Fast As I Can
Dear Dancing:
Right about now, hundreds of current and former department chairs across the country are nodding — some quite vigorously — as they read your question. In case you were wondering whether you were imagining this, you’re not: The role of the department chair is more and more bureaucratized.
Without, I hope, trivializing what you’re saying, let me try to make this concrete with a recent example on my own campus. As director of a humanities program, I’m responsible for scheduling a yearlong seminar for our fellows (six faculty members and six students). For the past seven years, I’ve gotten that course listed on the campus schedule each semester with a simple email to the registrar’s office — the course has met at the same time, in the same place, with the same instructor for all that time. Easy-peasy.
But my institution has now contracted with a web-based application to handle course scheduling. (Of course it has.) And it’s now my job, instead of someone in the registrar’s office, to work with the software to get the course listed. (Of course it is.) It took me two days, multiple emails, and about 45 minutes to accomplish a task that previously took one email, written in about 5 minutes.
I see a larger dynamic at work here, and I’m sure it’s been written about (anyone who can direct me to that literature, I’ll be grateful). But what I’ve seen over the past 35 years is an inexorable slide of bureaucratic tasks from the central administration down to department chairs.
The day-to-day work of a department chair didn’t always look like this. A couple of years ago, I was chatting with the cultural critic Greil Marcus, who, because he’s a friend, was reading my book, How to Chair a Department. He was a student at Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement who, although he’s done some visiting-faculty gigs over the years, has managed to stay largely free of the university industrial complex. After he’d finished the book, he expressed his surprise that the chair’s role nowadays was so much that of a middle manager. In his time at Berkeley, he said, chairs had much more authority and power than the chair I describe in my book.
And yes, going back decades, chairs arguably did have much more power and autonomy — for better and for worse. When I was in graduate school, one of my professors told me that, as he was finishing his Ph.D., he was called into the department chair’s office and informed where he’d be starting a tenure-track job the next year. He hadn’t applied.
Chairs back then were rainmakers, kingmakers: Decisions weren’t always democratic, and certainly, prejudice of all kinds influenced who was in and who was out in academic circles. Hiring, promotion, and other decisions were driven by personality and intellectual conflicts as well as by racial, gender, and other biases. (With the current attack on DEI principles, one hopes we’re not slipping back into a similar “good old days.”)
Chairs today have nothing like that kind of power — and on balance I have to believe that’s a good thing. But it’s not just increasingly democratic processes that characterize the climate for academic-department heads, but increased bureaucratic tasks. Our institutions have invested in management systems of various kinds that demand a great deal of us, and most certainly weren’t designed with us in mind. The analogy of the electronic medical record comes to mind: Software that was designed to maximize medical billing had, at least initially, the effect of taking providers away from the work they were trained to do.
Likewise, work is being pushed down to department chairs that used to be handled elsewhere in the system. And it’s not just Workday, or Coursedog, or AdminWeb (OK, I made that last one up): It’s plain old analog work, too, like recruiting majors, maintaining contact with alums, making pitches to potential donors. It can be exhausting.
What’s a chair to do if “bureaucrat” wasn’t how you envisioned the job? I see a few solutions, both practical and political.
First the practical. If the demands from above are taking over your work days and leaving you no time for your own teaching and research, you may have to take that case to your bosses. Document how much time these various systems are taking out of your work day. Maybe the magic bullet for you will be release time from your teaching obligations. Another solution might be requesting additional staff support or student workers.
A lone department chair complaining to the dean about the bureaucratic load may face an uphill battle. But if a group of chairs on the campus come together and demand change, they’re much harder to ignore.
Unless all of those management systems are going away (as if!), chairs and other faculty members would be wise to think carefully about how to contain the expansion. Thirty-ish years ago, email began to pose the same kind of threat to professors’ headspace. Not that we’ve entirely solved the problem of email creep, but most of us have come up with ways to corral it. And many of the same strategies can help with this new generation of bureaucratic platforms. Some folks open their email only once or twice a day, for instance. Others delegate categories of email to be dealt with by administrative-support staff.
Not long ago I discovered a small, but for me, significant hack regarding Workday, the primary administrative software to which I am tethered. I was getting email messages, sometimes a dozen times a day, telling me — no, actually, scolding me — that I had uncompleted tasks to attend to. (Like approving a $3 parking charge.) This was exacerbated by the fact that I wear an Apple watch: My wrist was buzzing all day. No doubt because I was publicly grousing about the situation, a colleague pointed out that I could change the settings in Workday to “digest,” so that I get one email each morning. Not my favorite solution but a real improvement.
Perhaps you need to be willing to delegate more. Asking existing staff members in your department to take on new administrative tasks will mean securing for them the training and support they need. Then you’ll have to make sure that their job descriptions and/or classifications are updated to reflect the additional responsibilities, and their salaries are adjusted in proportion.
Delegation need not stop with the staff, of course. If, for instance, you find new requests for your time and attention from student affairs or advancement to be too onerous, maybe there’s a faculty colleague in the department who would be willing to be your delegate as part of their service load. And the more faculty members who experience the bureaucratic creep firsthand, the greater the constituency on the campus who will be willing to press for change.
How do we as department chairs — and really, more broadly as faculty, because this same admin creep is affecting us all to a greater or larger degree — push back?
A lone department chair complaining to the dean about the bureaucratic load may face an uphill battle. But if a group of chairs on the campus come together and demand change, they’re much harder to ignore. For argument’s sake, let’s assume that the administrative tasks that have stupefied academic departments are here to stay. (I’m not convinced that’s true — but turning that tide is probably the topic of another conversation.) What would it take for you to get those tasks completed in your department without distracting you from things that make your work meaningful — leading your faculty colleagues (rather than just managing), creating new programs and improving existing ones, not to mention doing your own teaching and research?
Refusal is not an option. Much as I’d like to, I’m not going to drown Workday in the bathtub. But resistance is not futile. If we accept that there are only so many hours in the workweek (and if we don’t, that’s a whole separate problem), then every hour of administrivia is squeezing out an hour of teaching and/or research — i.e., the things that brought us into the profession and that we can reasonably claim some expertise in. Not to mention, oh I don’t know, genuine, meaningful faculty leadership. It’s time for the Rise of the Resistance, to invoke my kids’ and grandkids’ favorite ride at Disneyland. And we’re much more effective at resisting when we link arms and do it together.
