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: The exact circumstances probably aren’t important, but I find myself — midyear, midsemester — chairing my department for the first time. I’m only recently tenured. Probably I was a bit naïve, but somehow I didn’t see this coming — not just the midsemester part (no one saw that coming) but also that I’d at some point have to chair, and I don’t feel at all prepared. I’ve read your book and I’m grateful for big-picture advice, but I feel like I need some real-time, granular help in dealing with the situations that are arising in my department. Any suggestions? Do you have a hotline?
Signed,
Tag, You’re It
Dear Tag,
Sorry to say I won’t be starting an Ask the Chair hotline any time soon. But you already have access to a local hotline of sorts; you just need to know how best to use it.
In broad strokes, my advice is, if you’ll pardon the pun, that two heads are better than one, and 20 are even more useful. Whether department leaders on your campus are called heads, chairs, or directors, they’re better at their work when they’re not doing it in utter isolation. As a newcomer to the role, you need to find ways to harness the shared experience and wisdom of the chairs in your college, school, or division. Sometimes those channels of communication are ready-made, and sometimes you have to create them yourself.
A case in point: I already had experience in the role when I arrived at my current institution, Pomona College, to chair the English department. But my previous stint as chair was at a very different kind of institution. Not only that, but at Pomona, two of the first things we had to deal with as a department were a faculty hire (yay!) and a departmental self-study and subsequent outside review (boo!). In their different ways, each is pretty high stakes: I didn’t want any missteps.
At my previous institution, my dean had held frequent meetings with department chairs; it was a lot, but then, there was always a lot going on, most of it not great. Still, all those meetings meant that the chairs there knew one another; we had an informal support network in place.
By contrast, the dean who hired me at Pomona did not hold standing meetings for department chairs. I suspect that worked well enough for him — this is a small place, and I’m sure that when he needed to get some intel to or provide it for a department chair, he did it directly. But for me — a newcomer to the institution, if not the role — I had questions.
And I hoped to get some answers by meeting regularly with other department chairs. So I wrote to an administrative assistant in the dean’s office asking for the names and email addresses of all the department chairs. I got the dean to say he’d foot the bill for lunch. (If he hadn’t, a brown-bag lunch would have worked fine.) I found a campus room that would hold the group of us and invited my new chair colleagues to a lunch meeting, soliciting any topics that they’d like the group to discuss. I had my own agenda: What were the local conventions around self-study reports, and did anyone have an example they’d be willing to share? How had other chairs thought about which outside reviewers to recommend to the dean?
In short, my motivation for organizing this meeting was entirely selfish. The dean was a little suspicious at first, and I can understand why. But in spite of his darkest imaginings, we really weren’t gathering behind his back to complain about him. I won’t pretend that never happened; but it probably happened less often than you’d think. Instead, this group of committed, hard-working chairs genuinely just wanted to benefit from one another’s experience, wisdom, and painful bouts of trial and error.
It was a great conversation. Although we didn’t manage to gather every month, these informal meetings became a standing feature during my first term as chair. Other chairs found them valuable enough that after that first session, folks were asking when we could meet again. As for me, I found them invaluable.
Some institutions have formalized that structure within faculty governance: They have a council of chairs with elected leadership, regular meetings, and representation on key governance committees. I’m now convinced that — formally or informally — gathering chairs together without senior leadership and with an agenda of their own(or even no agenda at all), is the single cheapest, most effective way to support department heads in their work.
As chair, you will no doubt have questions that you are only willing to voice when the person to whom you report, who evaluates your performance, isn’t in the room. A chairs-only gathering is a safe space. (Of course, in higher ed’s resource-neutral environment, chairs are not just collaborators but competitors. There are some things I wouldn’t mention even in front of trusted fellow chairs!) Some of your questions might make you look naïve; some of them might put your department in a bad light.
For the simple fact is, every chair needs a confidante or two. And it’s a bad idea to choose them from the ranks of professors within your department. I’m lucky: Both my wife and my youngest daughter are department heads — my wife is at a graduate health-sciences university and my daughter is at a boarding school for high-school girls. While those contexts are quite different from my own college, many of the challenges and dynamics are the same: We regularly reach out to one another for advice or just conversation. My wife is especially helpful with one part of the job that’s always posed a challenge for me: My tendency to want to settle the score with misbehaving colleagues via email.
It’s all pretty predictable by now: I’ll draft a fiery email and wonder, “Should I send that?” I hold off and instead send it to my wife via Gmail (staying off both our institutions’ mail servers), and then text her: “I just sent you something via Gmail: Could you take a look at it when you have a minute?” She’ll read it, and write or text me back, almost invariably with some version of, “Oh heavens no, don’t send that!” The fact that I wanted her to look at it in the first place really tells me everything I needed to know; but after all these years, I still find it helpful to get her take. (And sometimes, albeit rarely, she’ll tell me that I should send it.)
I’m also lucky to share a back fence, and once or twice a month a beer, with the wise former chair of the chemistry department here. He read the manuscript of my book How to Chair a Department, and suggested many helpful changes and additions to make it less parochial; and he’s always a good person with whom to talk through a difficult situation that’s fermenting within my department. Every faculty leader should be so lucky.
Indeed, wouldn’t it be exciting if it were routine for colleges to establish mentoring relationships between chairs, for those who don’t have an already-established network? Perhaps pairing new with experienced chairs?
We effectively did that on a small scale last year at Pomona when, having served as a temporary chair for the theater and dance department for a year, I worked out an arrangement with the dean’s office to stay on for a second year as co-chair with the newly tenured, newly appointed head of the department (which sounds rather like your situation, Tag). It gave the new chair a bit of a soft opening, and I was able to demystify at least some of the role for this new hire. We both finished the year feeling that it had been a success, and I, at least, learned a ton. I’d co-chair again in a heartbeat.
In the end, all of this points to a shortcoming I’ve discussed before: Too few U.S. institutions have any kind of formal professional-development programming in place to help their department chairs “learn the ropes” by any means other than trial and error. Having worked with chairs at various colleges across the country for a couple of years now, I have a sense that this situation might slowly be changing. Surely it should, for the health of our chairs, their departments, and all of our institutions.
In the meantime, Tag, if there’s no formal or informal networking for department heads in place at your institution, or not enough, put together your own buddy system, on whatever scale that makes the most sense for you. Chairing is difficult and often-lonely work — lonely, in part, because your leadership position puts you to some degree structurally at cross purposes to your department colleagues. The work may sometimes be isolating, but that doesn’t mean you have to do it alone; it’s hard to think of a greater waste of human capital than having 50 department chairs in 50 departments, sitting in front of 50 laptops at 50 desks in 50 buildings, each simultaneously solving the same problem by themselves.
Extra credit: I ended last month’s column about how to deal with “service slackers” with a shout-out to Herman Melville’s cryptic 1853 tale of a colleague who wouldn’t do his share of work, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” It’s canny in its description of the problem, but rather short on real advice. The only thing the lawyer who employs Bartleby can think to do in the face of his constant demurrers — “I would prefer not to” — is to move offices and leave Bartleby behind. But it’s a story that gives me, at least, some comfort: It serves as a darkly comic reminder that “quiet quitting” is nothing new, and that “Bartlebying” isn’t unique to academe — even if the conditions we work under make it a particular threat to the shared-service commitment expected of faculty members. Melville’s story is one every department chair should know.
