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 Twitter, Facebook, or email. Read previous columns here.
Question: A few faculty members in my department like to copy everyone in the department on emails directed to me, the chair. I’m not sure what the intention is of including the entire department in an email to the chair on matters that, at times, do not involve all of the faculty.
Should I consider this habit of theirs a form of transparency or toxicity? What can chairs do when this happens repeatedly?
Signed,
Lost at CC:
Dear CC: Writer,
(Sorry, I couldn’t resist responding to a pun with one of my own — a nod to Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels.)
I’ll confess that I’m prone to overreading (perhaps an occupational hazard for an English professor), and your letter is tantalizingly short on details, which makes me want to read between the lines. Your phrasing suggests that (a) this mass-email habit is not an unusual occurrence, and (b) more than one of your faculty colleagues participates. So I suspect, as you do, that we have a problem here.
Rather than a case of inadvertent “reply all,” this sounds like we’re talking about a passive-aggressive pattern in which emails that are drafted and sent to you as the primary decision maker and recipient are, for some reason, copied to a whole host of others in the department.
Folks who engage in such a practice do so for one of two reasons (though perhaps there are others I’m not thinking of).
The first — irritating at times, but the less harmful of the two — is akin to what some call “virtue signaling.” Say, for instance, “Professor Smith” is writing to let you know that the article he’s been working on for two years has been accepted for publication. Rather than letting the chair alone know — perhaps because Smith is not confident that you’ll do his bragging for him, as he thinks you should — this professor has not-so-stealthily looped in everyone else in the department on the news. It’s the sort of thing that, as chair, you may laugh and roll your eyes at privately, but then you can easily let it go.
Reason No. 2 is more troubling because it borders, I would say, on a kind of soft bullying. In this case, our hypothetical Professor Smith sends a departmentwide email that says something like: “Hey Chair, Where are the CVs for our visiting job candidates that you promised to send?” This time, Smith is none too subtly letting you know that he thinks you’ve screwed up — and wants everyone else to know, too.
I have felt bullied in this way by a colleague who wasn’t happy about a decision I’d made, and let me know in a blistering email. Which they also sent to every member of the department. And the vice president for academic affairs. And the college president.
My immediate reaction — because I’m a human being, not a monster — was humiliation. As I scraped myself up off the floor, though, I realized that my colleague was the one who should be embarrassed, not me, and that the other recipients of the email would read the situation that way, too. (The notes I received shortly after from colleagues — private emails, copied to no one — confirmed that.)
If you believe that your colleagues’ reply-all behavior has this purpose — that the emails are less about trying to solve problems, and more about undermining your leadership — it probably isn’t going to do any good to speak to them about it individually. They’re trolling you, and all you would do by raising the issue is play into their hands.
It would be tempting, or at least I would be tempted, to fight fire with fire. You could use “reply all” to write something like, “I’m waiting on the final CV but expect it to arrive later today, when I’ll send them all out. Is there some reason this went to the whole department?” But probably best to resist that approach too, as it’s rarely a good idea to bully (or in this case, attempt to humiliate) a bully.
I’m going to suggest a more-politic variation on that strategy. When I received that email that went out to seemingly everyone in my college’s org chart, I wasn’t the only one who was annoyed — I learned that my dean was, too. I wish I’d had the presence of mind to ask her to deal with the situation in a reply-all email, or to just send a private note to let the original emailer know that airing such a petty complaint to an audience of innocent and unwilling bystanders was inappropriate and unwelcome. This is just one of the many situations in which it’s invaluable to have cultivated a mutually supportive relationship with your dean. If I had called out my colleague’s email myself, I might have sounded just as peevish as my antagonist. But if the dean calls it out, it’s clear that the issue isn’t merely a personal slight but uncollegial and unprofessional behavior that will not be tolerated. It’s a much cleaner solution all around.
In your situation, the cc-prone professors seem to be limiting the reach of their emails to the department. So I wouldn’t turn to the dean on this one (at least not yet, and only if things get ugly). Instead, you could speak — and I do mean in person, not via email — with one of your colleagues. Talk with a senior professor whom you trust and whom you know supports you. This person may even have commented on this behavior to you already. So ask this colleague to intervene, and reply all, the next time this happens. Something like: “I think you mistakenly cc’d us all on this one. The only person this needs to go to is the chair, right?” (No doubt other members of the department will appreciate having their inboxes a little less cluttered with irrelevant emails.)
Finally, once the current kerfuffle quiets down, I’d suggest that you think about adding some language regarding email etiquette to your departmental bylaws. In looking for some good models, crack researcher that I am, I Googled “email etiquette .edu” — and all of the top results are campus websites instructing students on proper email etiquette for communicating with their instructors.
Professor, heal thyself! What are some appropriate guidelines for how faculty members should communicate with one another via email? I’ve essentially been describing a departmental rule here: Don’t use “cc:” as a device to harass or embarrass the recipient. (Put that way, it sounds so obvious!) Another possible guideline: Don’t forward an email to a third party without the original sender’s knowledge.
What guidelines do you, or does your department, follow to keep email communication healthy? I’d love to hear them.
