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 hope this isn’t an unwelcome sentiment to share here, since I know you tend to be upbeat about the opportunity to lead a department. But I hate being chair. Just hate it. Much of your advice seems to be based on a chair’s finding purpose in the work; I’ve tried — really tried — and it’s just not happening for me. I’m more exhausted, and resentful, by the day.
So what do I do? I’m in the second year of a nominal three-year term. Is it legit for me to talk to the dean and announce that I’m opting out of that final year? Are there repercussions I ought to be thinking about?
Signed,
Trying to Grin and Bear It
Dear TGBI,
You’re not wrong: I am the Pollyanna of department chairs. I was the “almost” in The Chronicle’s 2022 story about chairing, “The Faculty Job (Almost) No One Wants.” It’s not that I don’t recognize the frustration you express — I do. Almost 25 years ago, I nearly quit before my first term as chair was up.
I didn’t. But I think it’s a legitimate option to consider. None of us is properly supported or compensated for taking on this very demanding role — one that, for the vast majority of academics, couldn’t be further from the interests and aptitudes that sent us to grad school.
So let’s walk through this logically, TGBI. I don’t know all the details of your appointment or your institutional culture, and some of those variables will affect the way you weigh your options. But what follows is a minimal checklist that every chair in your shoes should consider in making such a major decision.
How much will your departure disrupt the department’s functioning? Choosing to leave before your term is up will certainly have downstream effects. You may have junior faculty members whose tenure process you were expected to oversee, as well as nontenure-track instructors up for contract renewal, or associate professors preparing to go up for promotion. A lack of continuity in department leadership would likely concern at least some of those folks.
On the other hand, if sound review processes are in place, there should be ample documentation of their accomplishments. At any rate, their fate should not rest in the hands of the chair alone. And if it does, the department has bigger problems than your premature departure from the chair’s job.
Will this damage your relationships with faculty peers? Some colleagues may react very poorly, at least at first, to your resignation. One of them might be your replacement, who will end up in the job sooner than they had counted on. If your department has a healthy tradition of rotating the chair’s role, other faculty members may resent your opting out of what they see as a shared responsibility. And at the back of your mind, you might worry that your voice in departmental decision-making will (for a time) be somewhat discounted, given your unwillingness (which may be understood as an inability) to play the role of Decider in Chief.
What about the loss of the chair’s stipend and/or course-release time? Let’s get real: Money and perks are a consideration here. Granted, most chairs get only a small stipend or a slightly lightened teaching load. In a quarter-century of doing this work, I’ve never spoken to a chair who thought they came out ahead on that front. But it’s fair to say, most chairs welcome the temporary salary increase and/or the reduction in teaching load that are granted to free up time for the work of department leadership. If you resign, of course, both of those will go away. I’ve known chairs who stayed in the role long after the thrill was gone because, for instance, they had a child in college and tuition to pay, or were trying to maximize their potential retirement income. No judgment, but such factors are real.
It’s possible, too, depending on your institution’s salary practices, that your resignation could have an impact on your future faculty salary. How? Well for instance, by resigning abruptly, you could make your dean’s job more difficult. And the dean may well remember that when it comes time to assign future raises.
Will quitting early disqualify you for future leadership positions? That probably isn’t a consideration for you, TGBI: You don’t seem to be hankering to move into the dean’s suite. I mention it only because, for some chairs, that is a real concern. In that first chair’s job that I almost quit so long ago, a wise senior professor talked me down from the ledge. She saw potential and knew that if I quit, it might well be the last leadership opportunity I would get. A caution for some of us, at least, to keep in mind in these situations.
What if you have no obvious successors? As I noted in a previous column, it’s not your job to identify your replacement as chair. That task falls to the department’s faculty as a whole in conversation with the dean. If you as chair have no obvious successor, that doesn’t mean you can’t quit — just as it didn’t mean that you had to take on the role when it became available. A good colleague would worry about this, but ultimately, it’s not your problem, or at least not yours alone.
You may well be able to answer those questions to your own satisfaction. But many of us find it helpful to process this kind of thing with a confidant. My cheapest, most useful piece of advice for chairs, and the one that I give most often, is: Find time to talk with other chairs. I’m lucky in that both my spouse and my youngest daughter are department chairs (although I know that’s not everyone’s definition of “luck”). For me, it’s very helpful to be able to process the challenges of the role with experienced chairs whom I trust.
More broadly, every department leader should have at least one other chair (past or current; within the department or outside of it) with whom you can talk in confidence about the difficulties of the job. As the old saying goes, two heads are better than one.
If one or more of those considerations make a premature resignation seem like a bad idea, TGBI, then perhaps you’ll simply grin and bear it for the next couple of years. And if that’s the case, the question becomes, what can you do to “accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative,” as the old song goes? How can you shape (or reshape) the job so that it’s at least bearable?
- Delegate, delegate, delegate. I had a recent conversation with a dean who offered this smart advice: If you delegate tasks, you create followers; but if you delegate authority, you create leaders. If you’re really just killing time until you don’t have to do the chair’s work any longer, you may not be interested in building the leadership pipeline in your department. But if you are, why not use these months to delegate both some of the tasks and the authority of the chair to young colleagues who might be chair someday. You could also delegate some of this work to staff members (and even, when appropriate, to students) who are looking to build their résumés for future leadership roles. (I am not suggesting you dump your work on them unwillingly; only if they see this as an opportunity for them.)
- Set reasonable but firm boundaries. If the responsibilities of the job seem overwhelming, draw some appropriate lines around the work so that it does not consume you. Those limits may be about time and space (“I’m not answering email after 6 p.m., or on the weekends”). They may be affective (“I’m not going to be drawn into long-standing personal squabbles that don’t involve me”). I worry that too much of the advice (including my own, at times) offered to department chairs makes people feel like they have to be Superchair. There is wisdom in recognizing when it’s OK to be just a good-enough chair.
- You must meet your department’s needs, but you don’t have to exceed them. Remember that in the words of Ecclesiastes, as channeled by the Byrds, that “To everything (Turn, turn, turn) / There is a season (Turn, turn, turn) / And a time to every purpose under heaven.” There are seasons in the life of a department, and some are more demanding of its chair than others. Sometimes a steady hand at the wheel — even an unenthusiastic, unwilling one — is all that’s really needed to keep a steady ship on course. Maybe that’s a task you can make your peace with.
