About five years ago, I was at a lunch for my institutional cohort (tenured faculty who had been appointed to full professor for more than three years or so). We were there to talk informally about the professional life-cycle of faculty at our college and across academia. That meant everybody there knew each other moderately well. At my table, it turned out we were all either serving as department chair or had served as chair in the past (a few were on their second appointment to department chair). So being chair became the main subject of our conversation.
I will never forget what one colleague said: “After being chair, I felt worse about myself, worse about my colleagues and worse about my institution. I’m recovering from that now, but mostly by forgetting what I learned.” I think all of us at the table felt that spoke for us too.
Outside of academia, people assume that being a department chair is a coveted promotion, a sign of professional success. When an academic announces on their Facebook feed that they have begun a term as department chair, friends and family cheer and congratulate. The academics in the feed say nothing or they say the kinds of things that you say when someone announces that they’ve broken both their legs or their dog has died.
Yes, there are cases of people who want to be chairs and agree to be chairs-for-life, more or less. When I was in graduate school, the man who was department chair had been chair for a good while and I think remained so for years to come. This was always somewhat rare. Occasionally it was one route for an ambitious faculty member who was aiming to move into administrative leadership or to accumulate institutional debts for some later goal (say, founding an internal institute or working with a donor to create a new institutional program)—this has generally been confined to the handful of wealthy private research universities that see leadership in those terms and are prepared to reward it. I think it’s become even more rare as the job of department chair has become more harrowing at most institutions.
What makes it harrowing? The familiar take on this within academia is that chair is a position with a lot of responsibility and extremely little authority. What are those responsibilities, though? Formally, at many institutions, the chair represents their department in governance deliberations and to administrative leadership. If leadership has a task or a request that applies to departments, the chair represents it to the faculty of a department and is responsible to see it done. If a department or an individual faculty member has a concern or a grievance with leadership (or another department), the chair is the person charged to try and get attention or relief. If there is serious conflict in a department, the chair is generally imagined to be the person who is supposed to resolve that conflict, whether it is between individuals or factions. If a department member needs administrative permission for a project or course, or is otherwise stalled somewhere in an administrative bureaucracy, the chair is often asked to facilitate a resolution. In theory, the chair should be aware of serious concerns raised about the work of a department faculty member and is at least sometimes the person who is asked to speak with faculty who are having professional issues.
The chair is generally the person expected to answer to student questions about the department, to listen to student concerns about department policy, about pedagogy or grades, and is often named as the entry point for more serious complaints about harassment, abuse or grievances (though increasingly those go through a Title IX office, an HR office, or direct to academic administration at a higher level than the chair). The chair explains, or should explain, institutional processes to new (and sometimes long-serving faculty).
Frequently, the chair is the person directly responsible for coordinating hiring and tenure and promotion evaluations, though larger departments will typically appoint search chairs and a substantial amount of the work of both activities is shared in well-functioning departments. A chair definitely plays a role in making sure this work is done fairly and professionally; if it goes wrong, the chair is the first place to look for an explanation.
The chair is the outward face of the department, speaking at ceremonial occasions on its behalf, talking to publics or reporters if there are questions or interest in the department, announcing awards to students, welcoming people to receptions or events.
Most of that has been consistent for the past three or four decades, though my impression is that prior to the 1990s, the range of variation in how seriously people took the role was pretty huge. Since that time, I think at most institutions, the relative diligence of most people serving as chairs has intensified.
The other thing that’s intensified is that the work of institutional compliance (both with statutory obligations and with ostensibly voluntary activities like assessment) has led chairs to be involved in more and more bureaucratic procedures and more and more forms of data collection and provision.
Whether or not a department chair is compensated in any way for all that work varies hugely. At some institutions, even wealthy ones, the chair is typically given a course release or two without additional pay, essentially replacing one form of labor with another. At others, there’s some additional pay or some form of deferred compensation like guaranteed internal support for a future research leave. At some institutions where the tenured faculty may be very small relative to contingent faculty, there may be no reward at all beyond tenure itself—e.g., the tenured faculty are essentially expected to perform administrative work of this kind for their entire careers.
Non-academics can probably see in this summary what justifies the “lots of responsibility, no authority” description.
In working with administrative leadership, the chair has no standing beyond being a petitioner in possession of relatively limited information. They’re often not a part of any further deliberation on their requests, not “in the room where it happens”. If a chair is called to a meeting about a conflict between a student and one of their department faculty, the chair may not be given important information that deans have about that student, about the precipitating incident or issue, or even about their colleague. If a chair is called to a meeting about budgetary issues that affect their department (perhaps specific to a funding request, perhaps an institution-wide budgetary crisis), the chair will generally be given only the narrow and specific information that administrative leadership is willing to share and frequently is listening passively to a decision that has already been made.
In working with colleagues who may either need help, constructive advice, or genuine admonishment for unprofessional behavior, the chair only has whatever emotional and political skills they happen to have as a person already. They have virtually nothing else structural. Most of that work is regarded as confidential, so finding a peer (another chair, perhaps) to get counsel from is a very delicate matter and more than a few chairs simply end up being isolated. Generally administrative leadership further up the food chain doesn’t want to hear about it, both because that’s the chair’s job so do it and because if they hear about it, they may have to act on something that doesn’t need that level of attention. Colleagues often expect the chair to do something and often blame the chair for whatever happens, sometimes justly so and sometimes not.
Over time, a chair learns things that they either didn’t know or didn’t want to know about the people they work with, and not just in their department. A chair more or less has to be at least slightly engaged in snooping into the affairs of other departments because otherwise they have no idea whether the way their own department is being treated is fair or consistent and they have no idea whether the culture of their own department is normal, unusually dysfunctional or so high-functioning that it should be treated as a beautiful wildflower in a volcanic hellscape, to be protected at all costs.
Is there a better way to do all this work? It seems hard to think of how to maintain strong traditions of faculty governance without some form of representational leadership that arises out of the main administrative units of the faculty. At the least, I can’t think of a way to do without chairs unless we also mean to do without conventional departmental structures.
There are some potential sources of relief for the weight of the job. Not giving chairs more authority in the conventional hierarchical sense, but giving them more of a presence at all stages of administrative decision-making that will affect their workload, and making that presence not merely the announcement of decisions already reached and conclusions already made. Some form of transparent tracking of the resolution of requests, complaints and concerns would also help: there is nothing more painful for everyone than a meeting taken to discuss an issue which then evaporates into nothing until another meeting that has to be taken to discuss the same issue ab initio.
I think many people I know well at Swarthmore and elsewhere who’ve served as chairs would just appreciate most of all some form of permission to discuss what they’re struggling with and burdened by with either other chairs or trusted senior figures. The trust part is crucial: there’s no point to an invitation to unburden yourself if you know that what you say is going to immediately get back to the people you’re feeling burdened by. In a conventionally hierarchical workplace, you have to keep your confidences because of a fear that people above you will punish you if they hear your truths and if you’re an ethical person because of a worry that people below you will feel afraid if you confess that the people you supervise are kind of bugging you. In an academic department where most or all faculty are tenure-track, the effacement of those kinds of hierarchy (which does not efface differentials in power) you keep your silence because you have to work with some people for two or three decades and it’s better to suffer that with passive-aggressive deniability than it is to have that work take place in conditions of overt breach and unrestrained hostility.
Or maybe not. Maybe that’s the change that would make a change: people just plain drawing lines in the sand with one another. Not as bosses and underlings, not as supervisors and supervised, but just as peers. Maybe the burden of being a chair—and sometimes of being chaired—is primarily a product of sublimation, an unholy blend of WASP paternalism, performative civility, and the Newspeak of neoliberal managerial culture. Maybe it would do everybody good to let it all out, and think of other intersubjective models for being responsible to and responsible for the work of peers in community.
Image credit: Photo by Renè Müller on Unsplash
Great summary of the challenges of chairing a department. The responsibilities do far outweigh the chair's authority, but the chair does have considerable influence when it comes to setting priorities and getting things done. One of my colleagues at another university did a really smart thing in their first few months as chair, calling in each faculty member individually and asking for the one thing that wasn't working for them that they'd like to see changed. I wish I had had the imagination to do that when I was chair.
It's a great piece which pulled together a cat's cradle of regrets both personal and instututional from my past. The institution within which I spent most of my working life was dominated for decades by departmental chairs whose tenure was not time limited. Younger faculty growled about "the Barons". Departmental success around the pigs' troughs hung upon the character- and national and international reputation of its Baron. Baronial wings were clipped by the impositioin of a term-limit but extensions were frequent. Eventually in pursuit of economy "conventional departments" were fused. This in my opinion was a disaster. Not only did disciplines lose the integrity imposed in large measure by their discrete and relevant literatures but they also lost the sense of being corporate, of comprising teams. While those teams squabbled, one of the distinctive roles of the old chairs was that of constructive arbitration and the success of that often hung on intimate knowledge of the specific casus belli and of the combatants. The reform promised greater democracy but instead delivered a somewhat soul-less shapelessness from which I was sadly happy to escape. In brief, good chairs are creative sculptors and reliable triibunes. I'll bet anything that Professor Burke pulled that off wonderfully well.