Recently I spent a couple of days at one of the Council of Independent Colleges’ Department and Division Chair Workshops in Indianapolis. The CIC hosts these professional-development workshops for (mostly new) department, program, and division chairs to help them network, be more effective and, frankly, to give them evidence that they are not alone in their professional challenges.
These workshops consist of a variety of sessions of interest to chairs, including developing and supporting adjunct faculty, working with institutional budgets, managing hiring and evaluation processes to maximize outcomes and minimize legal risk, and dealing with difficult colleagues. Each session is facilitated by an experienced senior administrator (that was why I was there) or an appropriately qualified attorney or other professional.
One of the things that the chairs in attendance noted was that few of them received any formal training whatever from their home institutions before becoming chair. My experience as a new chair at my first institution, and again at the much larger, public institution where I then moved, was similar. In the first instance, I’d been on the faculty for six years, our institutional practices were reasonably simple, and our chairs had very little power or authority, so it didn’t take long to get up to speed.
In the second instance, though, where I was new to a larger institution, having some more specific orientation and professional development would have been welcome. In fact, only in my final year there did I attend the Kansas State Annual Academic Chairpersons’ Conference, in Orlando, which, due to its wealth of information, insight and collegiality, left me wishing that I had attended it earlier. Even though I soon went off to become a dean, this program helped to give me a foundation for that new position.
What struck me in Indianapolis was how exponentially more complex chairing has become in the last academic generation. Assessment, alone, has added large burdens and time challenges to the role of chair. Legal matters have become more vexed and contentious, and the rules, regulations, and laws governing all aspects of college and university operations have become increasingly complex. Unfortunately for chairs, they sit at the nexus of a faculty life that retains a fierce commitment to many powerful and often excellent traditions, and a bureaucratic culture that either does not respect or, in some cases, simply is not compatible with these traditions. A lot of this incompatibility comes from outside the higher-education community, and much as we might like to thwart it, it’s not really possible to do so.
Thus, savvy chairs will know how to manage the gap between faculty and bureaucracy to maximize opportunities for their faculty to thrive in new conditions. To do that, chairs need to understand the legal imperatives, regulatory strictures, and financial realities under which their institutions operate. Even at a small institution (and most CIC colleges and universities are small), it’s no longer possible to be an effective chair without some degree of specialized administrative knowledge.
Many faculty members don’t like this situation, but it’s the reality. Programs like the CIC workshops and the K-State conference provide excellent opportunities to learn many of the key aspects of the job, so if you’re thinking about moving into a chair position, I strongly recommend you negotiate attendance to one or more of these programs when you accept the job.
