Beggar, Psychologist, Mediator, Maid: the Thankless Job of a Chairman

Positions that were once prized are now seen as powerless and paperwork-laden

By ROBIN WILSON

When Kevin J. H. Dettmar told a professor his courses would attract more students if he were a more compassionate teacher, he thought he was only doing his job as chair of the English department at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. But the comment so enraged the professor that he threatened to file a grievance accusing Mr. Dettmar of slander.

Both a dean and a mediator eventually got involved. By the time the dispute ended, Mr. Dettmar had deflected a request that he submit to a lie-detector test, but not before agreeing to destroy all records related to the episode.

The battle last spring left Mr. Dettmar so shaken that he plans to step down when his three-year term as chair is up next year. Meanwhile, the professor who threatened a grievance is still teaching the same courses, and "students still don't want to take the stuff," comments Mr. Dettmar, who didn't want to identify the man.

Chairmen -- most of them are still male -- used to be thought of as stately faculty members who set the tone for a department, and watched others fall into line. There are still success stories, and departments that credit their leaders with bringing in good people or inspiring those already on board.

But more frequently chairmen complain about being picked on by people inside and outside the department, and about how much time they devote to pushing paper.

Chairmen and chairwomen spend remarkably little time on scholarly ideas, including their own. Their days are consumed by dealing with recalcitrant faculty members, fighting for resources, shuffling an incredible amount of paperwork, and coping with an ever-expanding array of personal problems that professors and staff members bring to the office.

"The Dilbert dreck work of running a department has exploded," says Michael Berube, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who was a finalist to head the department at Duke University two years ago. The position went to Maureen Quilligan, a scholar of Renaissance literature. Next academic year, Mr. Berube will be joining Pennsylvania State University's English department.

Department heads do have some influence. They frequently decide who gets extra resources, including money for computers and research equipment. Although they can't decide whom a department hires, chairmen can put together a search committee and tell its members what kind of person to look for. If the chairman doesn't agree with the committee's choice, he may not be able to veto it, but he can be less than enthusiastic when making the candidate an offer.

Still, academic chairmen lack the power of middle managers in the corporate world. Although they are responsible to administrators for their department's bottom line, they can't force their faculty members to do anything. They can't fire them either, unless their behavior is egregious. It's no wonder, then, that deans have trouble filling chairmanships and that scholars who've watched others crash and burn in the job avoid it at all costs.

"Being chair means the end of your research for that period, and the possibility that you may do the job so badly that everybody -- rightly -- hates you," says one political scientist. "The only reason I would take the position is if they told me who else might take it if I didn't."

Academic chairmen walk a fine line between administration and faculty. They are typically elected by professors in a department, but they serve at the pleasure of the president. Increasingly, their task is to carry out the administration's orders without offending faculty members.

"The chair's role is to guide the department in the direction the administration wants it to go in, while being careful not to force anything on the faculty or they will react very strongly," says Harvey E. Rich, a professor of sociology at California State University's Northridge campus. He served as chairman of his department for nearly seven years until stepping down in August 1999.

Most chairmen and women still come from within a department's senior ranks, although deans who want to heal a fractious department or have ambitious plans for changing it often hire someone from outside to do the job. Moving to head a department at another university is one way for tenured professors these days to move up and make more money, particularly if they aren't academic stars. As one scholar cracks: "Them who get outside offers, do; them who can't, chair."

Department chairmen at Big 10 universities make out well, earning at least $100,000 a year in the humanities, for example, or about $25,000 more than senior professors. They also teach fewer courses and can earn a semester's leave after a few years' service.

In science and engineering, department heads at major research universities typically earn a stipend that amounts to between 10 percent and 15 percent of their salaries. But that may not make them the highest paid in their departments -- scholarly stars often earn more.

At lower-tier institutions the job is less attractive. Chairmen and chairwomen typically earn only a few thousand dollars more than teaching faculty members.

"Faculty members see the time chairs spend in their jobs and the little additional salary they get and feel it's not worth it," says Deryl R. Leaming, dean of the College of Mass Communication at Middle Tennessee State University. "I've had to beg faculty members to take the job."

Despite the importance of the role, few universities offer job training for chairmen. That can be a big problem. After all, most people choose an academic career because they love research and teaching, not because they're good at managing people and making difficult decisions. Add to that the fact that professors are notoriously difficult employees, and you've got yourself a job description out of Dante (as adapted by David Lodge).

"Faculty are brought up to be completely autonomous," says Ed Lazowska, chairman of the computer science and engineering department at the University of Washington. "There's no consensus. It's: I'm smarter than you are, I'm bigger than you are, I have a higher citation index than you do." Professors, he says, "pick the job because they get to do whatever they damn well please. So, how do you forge these people into a team?"

However important teamwork might be, the job of a department head is less like a coach than a cross between a hall monitor and a suicide-hotline staffer. One chairman refers to his caretaking tasks as "the dirty underbelly" of managing his department. From drug-addicted staff members to lecherous professors, department heads see it all. Says Dennis Baron, head of the English department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: "You learn a lot more about your colleagues than you ever wanted to know."

There's the head of a history department who considered lending money to a professor when creditors came calling, until the chairman learned that the same crisis had come up several times before. There's also the chairman of English at a big-name university who learned that an administrative assistant was stealing petty cash and computers to finance a cocaine habit. The chairman worked with campus police to get the staff member into rehab.

Then there's the chairman who discovered that one of his professors had served liquor at his home to underage female students before trying to kiss one. The professor eventually apologized to the student, who had filed a complaint. But the chairman, who says the professor's inappropriate behavior was legendary, persuaded him to take early retirement last spring.

Five years ago, Mr. Leaming, the dean at Middle Tennessee State, was director of Marshall University's School of Journalism -- a position he says was akin to being chairman of the journalism department.

One day, he was summoned to a class where a student with a knife was threatening to commit suicide. Mr. Leaming eventually talked the student into seeing a counselor, but not before the student bit him.

"Every time I think I've dealt with every kind of problem imaginable, a new one pops up," says Mr. Leaming, who also remembers asking a minister to help a faculty member overcome a drinking problem.

Mr. Leaming didn't include these stories in his book, Academic Leadership: A Practical Guide to Chairing the Department (Anker Publishing, 1998). But he is working on a new book due out this fall about coping with troubled professors.

Beyond acting as psychotherapists, financial advisers, and drug-abuse counselors, academic chairmen must be prepared to fight to protect their resources and make tough decisions about which faculty members deserve more support. Sometimes chairmen end up earning enemies along the way.

The chairman of the German department at one prestigious university successfully battled a plan this year to reassign a graduate-student lounge and some classroom space to African-American studies. "You have to constantly be on guard that the dean is not taking anything away," says the chairman, who asked to remain anonymous.

Douglas S. Kurtz was faced with his biggest challenge as chairman of the mathematics department at New Mexico State University when the former dean of engineering wanted his own departments to take over the teaching of calculus a few years ago. The move was a major threat to the mathematics department, which would have lost students and possibly professors had the dean been successful. Mr. Kurtz, whose term as chairman expired in 1998, eventually won out. But he recalls: "I lost quite a lot of sleep."

Kristin Bowman-James lost more than that. Faculty members voted not to renew her term as chairwoman of chemistry at the University of Kansas last year after she made a series of decisions that angered older professors in the department. Ms. Bowman-James concentrated on hiring female professors and on making junior scholars happy.

The number of women in the department had doubled to six since she took over in 1995, and Ms. Bowman-James persuaded administrators to spend $1.5-million on laboratory and research support to hold on to two young stars who were being courted by other institutions.

But she got into trouble when she asked a long-time member of the department to teach more courses because his own research program had stalled. He balked and ended up retiring. She had similar clashes with other established faculty members. They all had a say when it came to deciding whether she should continue as chairwoman.

In its evaluation of her, a faculty committee said it found people believed Ms. Bowman-James was "autocratic" and "confrontational." Her dean, though, wrote a letter to the department praising Ms. Bowman-James for being a "persistent advocate" of junior professors.

"When you come into the chairmanship from an academic viewpoint having taught and done research, it's really like going into a whole different profession," says Ms. Bowman-James. "You come in very naively, and the learning curve is steep."

One would guess that handling such personality clashes would come easily to someone who races dragsters in her spare time. On the contrary, says Ms. Bowman-James, chairing is more difficult than dragging -- and certainly not as much fun.

What most chairmen eventually do learn is that the job is as much about managing paper as it is about managing people. Chairmen don't necessarily need to be great scholars. "They need to be administratively tenacious workhorses," says Seyla Benhabib, a professor of government at Harvard University.

Mounting policies and procedures have turned academic chairmen into princes of paperwork. The amount of red tape involved in faculty recruitment, promotion, and tenure cases has reached staggering proportions, chairmen say. They must ensure that their departments do not discriminate against anyone, lest they expose their universities to lawsuits. While being fair is a good thing, it has made life more difficult for chairmen, says Ms. Benhabib, who is moving to Yale University next year as a professor of political science and philosophy. "The more rigorous your procedures are, the more accountable you are, the more gender equitable and inclusive you are, the more you end up in this bureaucratic morass which becomes overwhelming," she says.

As universities are pressured by legislators to prove they are satisfying their customers, chairmen have also become responsible for measuring the value of what they do. That translates into filing report after report -- from departmental strategic plans to "outcomes assessments" of courses and research programs. The tasks can be mind-boggling, particularly at universities with many layers of bureaucracy.

Much of the busy work goes unnoticed -- unless chairmen mess up. Comments James C. Cobb, who runs the history department at the University of Georgia: "People are not going to come in and congratulate you on writing a good memo."

Although the pitfalls of being chairman are many, some people manage to make it work and get out alive. The secret, they say, is to set priorities, ignore the rest, and keep colleagues on your side. "The job isn't figuring out what the right thing is and then doing it," explains Mr. Lazowska, chairman of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. "It's helping people figure out what the right thing to do is and helping them believe it was their idea."

Mr. Lazowksa says he's loved being chairman: "It's completely fun." He rattles off a list of his department's biggest accomplishments: It graduated a Rhodes Scholar last year, it's raising $40-million for a new building, and it's given birth to 10 companies in the past four years. Still, Mr. Lazowska's clearly ready to move on to the next phase of his academic career. His Web site has a countdown that clicks off the seconds until his term as chairman expires in June.

Mr. Lazowska may have adapted to being chairman, but Patrick J. Maney was born to it. This is his third year of a four-year term as head of the history department at the University of South Carolina at Columbia. He spent three years after graduate school working as an aide to a Wisconsin state senator, and that experience has come in handy. "A lot of being chair is finding out what you have to do and what you don't have to do," he says. "A lot of what comes across my desk is stuff that can be quickly thrown into the wastebasket."

At South Carolina, Mr. Maney has set a new agenda, helping to raise $450,000 for the department and hire 11 new faculty members. Most importantly, he's stayed above the fray. "He is very comfortable making cases, being aggressive, and showing why something needs to happen," says Lawrence B. Glickman, an associate professor of history at South Carolina. "He's also a hallway schmoozer of the first order."

Mr. Maney says that's important for faculty morale. "You've got to make sure people are included and that nobody's off in the corner," he says. "One or two people can poison the whole department."

Or, at the least, they can make a chairman miserable. For a while last year, three faculty members weren't speaking to Mr. Dettmar, the chairman of English at Southern Illinois. Now one has started again, but another professor has stopped.

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