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WHEN Dorothy James opened a productive debate in the Spring 1997 issue of the ADFL Bulletin under the title, "Bypassing the Traditional Leadership: Who's Minding the Store?" I understood it as an incentive to address more forthrightly the structures of departmental governance (see also James, "Reply"). James is right in stating that the silent accommodation to many privileges, especially for literary scholars, has to be overcome if foreign language departments want to survive with a common purpose. We must also consider the politics of dealing with deans and administrators and the daily work of running the department that we have to face if we want to make our departments strong and successful. Whether we call it the art of chairing or the craft of chairing or simply departmental governance might be less important than whether or not we single it out as an area of current concern. As such, however, the term governance deserves emphasis since it indicates the particular administrative setup that has become necessary with the multiplication of the chair's duties. It integrates chairing as part of a common effort.
Mindful of the founder of my institution, the University of Pennsylvania, I draw the title of this essay from Benjamin Franklin, arguably a very practical master of trades. I have always been impressed by his technique of using well-known insights into the vicissitudes of life and work and simplifying them in a way that makes them sound both original and commonsensical. I hope to stay in good graces with him by drawing on many worthwhile insights by others without simplifying them too much.
I remember being put in the chair's seat many years ago. I was a younger person among rather older faculty members, who saw me as the happy heir of their wisdom and experience. I had little preparation for the job, but my older colleagues had assured me that most of it was daily routine. Fine with me, I thought. The more routine, the less distraction from my own work. The week before I took over I interviewed the previous chair, André von Gronicka, a scholar of Thomas Mann and Goethe who had a keen knowledge of Russia as well. He would be my mentor, I thought. He had run the department for many years and was now ready to retire. I asked him whether I could go to him for advice. He answered in only one word: "No." That was a shock. I was really left in the lurch.
After this rude awakening and many years later, I can say that I know now what routine is. It is the most problematic aspect of chairing. Why? Because chairs have no partners, no outlets, no recognition. We manage the staff, set up schedules, broker between colleagues, put out fires, and, most important, listen. During a contentious department meeting, listening is an important part of reestablishing colleagiality and moving toward an acceptable solution. Listening and a good command of Robert's Rules of Order help foster authority. Only in the absence of authority do we understand that some measure of it is needed if we want to be effective mediators. Mediating stands at the core of a chair's activities because it treads the fine line between confidential and "public" intervention (and, of course, because it is a constant source of lively stories from the academic battlefield). It sets the tone of the department's routine between the two poles of effectiveness and ineffectiveness. Granted, talking about routine is risky. But, if such talk leads to effective functioning, it should not be dismissed; it's an important part of governance. The routine has not changed, but the reporting about it has. We cannot afford to admit to it in the annual reports. Indeed, it can be frustrating that a modus operandi that takes so much energy is recognized only when it is missing.
A more challenging and less problematic part of chairing, one that carries more weight because it produces partners, outlets, and recognition, is what deans love to call leadership. Either it originates in innovations and projects with which departments improve teaching, research, and organizational or even financial structures or it is prompted by outside demands, especially from deans and administrators. Outside demands point in a similar direction, but they carry the stigma of sanctions. In this area chairing requires a special skill and becomes a craft, insofar as it involves strategizing academic agendas, the management of countervailing powers and factors, the ability to unite a diverse group of colleagues and students toward a common goal, as well as fund-raising and public relations. Within the pragmatics of governance, this is the most desirable, though work-intensive part: engaging the department in a project that allows the current label of "managerial culture in the university" to be applied to our own work, should the scholarly results leave something to be desired. While my distinguished older colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania once had the luxury of considering the mere administration of personnel, resources, and a decent research agenda a success, we are in the process of making the departments themselves into projects, whereby the vocabulary of productivity and product is becoming indispensable for institutional recognition. Moreover, both terms are taking on new meaning.
Being seen as a leader clearly creates more opportunities for funding and improving the department. But it also can have unforeseen consequences if colleagues view so-called leadership as autocracy or personal ambition. The word that the chair is looking for higher office does not benefit the department. No less disconcerting are the risks involved in every major project if word gets around that the work is too controversial, too ambitious, or too costly. Since departmental budgets are usually fixed quantities, projects need outside moneys or special allocations. Being a good fund-raiser has been an important academic qualification in the natural and social sciences for quite some time. It has also begun to intrude into the humanities--that is, I am tempted to say, into the business of the humanities.
A third dimension of departmental governance requires more stamina than chairs often bargain for and can at times become our moment of truth. It usually involves dealing with the outside world, other universities or departments, and individual scholars. For instance, the departmental self-study, if organized well--that is, with a fair distribution of duties--can become a cathartic experience for all. The outside review committee's visit can turn into a litmus test of the chair's ability to present the department both to the dean and to its own members. The potentially explosive encounters of searches and promotions can destroy long-standing departmental colleagiality and delicately maintained hierarchies. Like inheriting money, doing an academic search can bring out the worst in people we think we know and are close to.
Not long ago, I chaired the search for a new colleague. I secured the necessary letters of recommendation and teaching evaluations, the candidate made a successful campus visit, and the personnel committee approved the candidate with only a few votes against. The consent of the dean and the provost seemed imminent, but every step took a long time, making the candidate nervous. I assured the candidate that the case would soon pass the provost's staff conference. May turned into June, and then bingo, one day, at the very last minute, the dean called me up and informed me that the provost had rejected the candidate. I don't want to dwell on this particular case, but the experience of rejection and defeat can make chairing less of an art, an exercise in frustration and embarrassment. Can one prepare for this? I am not sure. The usual advice is to keep the department as much involved as possible so that success and failure are shared, not chaired.
But even worse constellations obtain. Grievance cases have become quite frequent nowadays. Since they usually indicate a breakdown of mediation, they clearly test our abilities as chairs to the utmost. Use all available means to avoid them, and remember to be fair, to adhere painstakingly to the rules, and to document everything in written form. Another difficult constellation--perhaps the worst-case scenario--is receivership. I was drawn into this situation when communication broke down between the members of our Slavic department and the dean. Receivership indicates not a specific legal condition, as is often assumed, but just the installation of a chair from the outside, since the department cannot administer itself effectively. The ultimate challenge, however, is when a department is put on the block. Whoever happens to be chair at this moment shoulders the enormous burden of rallying all possible support from inside and outside for rescuing the department. Professional organizations like the MLA may help, but the most effective support often comes from other departments in the university. Yes, we do have tools that we can use to deal with these situations, even in foreign language departments.
Unpacking the toolbox is a rather comprehensive enterprise, involving both general instruments of good governance and specific devices for the foreign language chair. The usefulness of these tools depends on the size and orientation of the departments and on the structure and educational mission of the institution. This system stands in sharp contrast to the separate organization of smaller units of French, German, Slavic, or East Asian departments, which present the dean with a more fuzzy and peculiar set of governance problems.
As I see it, there are at least eight important tools. One tool clearly outweighs all the differences and differentiations mentioned. It is the single most important instrument for setting the agenda, mediating between colleagues, and exerting leadership. As an instrument in progress, it needs to be unpacked, polished, and adjusted. It is in your own hand. But it has to be monitored. What is it? It is, of course, yourself. You were not born a chair--although I do know a few people who seem to have been--and you must work on being one, again and again. The best advice on how to do this comes from friends who can judge you and are not afraid to tell you what your real strengths and weaknesses are and how to build on them. If your strength is conceptualizing and your weakness effective implementation, create a project committee; if your strength lies in the power of your rhetorical persuasion and your weakness in silent diplomacy, plan for meetings that allow you to sway others publicly. If you tend to lose the interest of colleagues in common governance, learn to become enthusiastic and bestow recognition and awards on them. If you lack experience, familiarize yourself with the broad and helpful literature on the subject of chairing; it will visibly shape your outlook as a professional in your job (see Anderson; Bugliani; Klein and Slick). And nothing impresses teachers more--and we are all teachers--than doing your homework and showing professionalism.
The second most important tool for successful chairing is professionalism. Extend it as much as you can and see to it that the dean supports your department by securing the best business administrator or administrative assistant possible since budget and finances are often the Achilles's heel of our operation. The current wave of administrative consolidation in many universities and colleges, often linking several departments with one efficient business administrator, points in this direction. If such a move does not take away budget authority from the department, financial responsibility bolsters your claim to professionalism. There is hardly a better argument for full support from the administration. I am aware that this advice does not necessarily address the secretarial malaise in which many of us find ourselves. It might be of small consolation that in many organizations, chairs write the important letters themselves. Intra- and interdepartmental correspondence can sidestep many of the secretarial problems, but the constant flood of e-mail tends to keep us in front of the computer.
Third, communication within the department is crucial for successful governance. We know that people usually do not like meetings and are hard to bring together. Still, you have to ensure communication, which is why you should have a functioning executive committee, especially in larger departments. In large departments of Romance languages or in inclusive modern language departments, a committee of three or four representatives of the diverse constituencies helps ensure effective chairing without compromising departmental democracy. The committee can prepare personnel actions and clarify many issues for the general department meeting. Small departments may not need executive committees, which sounds more convenient but often is not at all because you have to mediate more, face-to-face, in time-consuming private meetings.
The fourth tool is building a direct line of communication to the dean or administration. As many strategies as there are to do this, the most important one is to engage in it early in the chair's tenure. Again, personnel actions especially benefit from this contact. Program building and reforming, preferably with an application for an outside grant, can function as an icebreaker. Advisers speak of educating the dean as crucial for the good fortunes of foreign language departments. This is absolutely true. Yet this tool can function only if you also give the dean an opportunity to engage in your own education. Deans who invest in you are less likely to let you sink, as long as you do not appear weak.
Building good communication with the students does not need much explanation. And yet the organization of an effective undergraduate advisory board should be mentioned as the fifth tool. While teaching evaluations can be used to improve the performance of individual faculty members and teaching assistants, a regular discussion of curriculum and instructional goals with students helps the overall performance of the department. Equally important in graduate departments is the active involvement of a graduate council and its representative, who might be invited to department meetings (except those that deal with personnel matters). In these and other issues a good contact with other language departments is of great help. Organizing seminars in second language acquisition and language pedagogy is hardly efficient without this collaboration.
The sixth tool is building strong relations with the community, which includes school boards, teachers' organizations, offices of foundations and nongovernmental organizations, state humanities councils, the business community, and also--most important--ethnic communities or organizations. Showing the dean strong community support--for instance, its willingness to endow prizes for superior work in foreign languages--can help keep language instruction going despite low enrollments in less frequently taught languages.
The seventh tool is having active links to professional organizations, such as ADFL and the MLA, as well as to AATF, AATG, ATTSP, AATSEEL, and ACTFL. Chairs of small departments with a rather weak lobby in university administrations and state legislatures especially need a reliable network of information and professional advice and advancement. These organizations serve well as references and even better when you can mention that you have a function that gives you particular insights. The claim that a department provides the best available instruction in the language, literature, and culture of another country needs to be constantly substantiated; even the discussion of the newest technology benefits from the connection to one of these organizations. What used to come from the invisible network of the discipline nowadays needs a visible lobby, an easy-to-distinguish national organization with credible links to our everyday work.
We have, of course, learned to make a case for the usefulness of foreign languages and have, as ADFL just did, distributed brochures that cause readers to drop whatever they have in their hands and attend a course in the foreign language. Such strategies will remain, as long as they relate to computer literacy, the staple of our efforts toward meaningful public relations. These are the bread-and-butter issues of our daily communication with students who have only a vague notion of why they should go beyond the two-year foreign language requirement and invest time and effort in third- and fourth-year language study. And since these utilitarian bread-and-butter issues of departments have lost their anchor in the traditional liberal arts agenda, we have to rely more on the professional discipline and its journals, debates, and training seminars to substantiate our claim within higher education.
Finally, the most obvious but also most effusive tool is the foreign country and culture. After all, our work provides the most decisive instruments for mastering encounters with France, Japan, Germany, Russia, Latin America, China, and other cultures. The current demand for internationalizing or globalizing the university, much exploited as a fund-raising issue, puts a price on our expertise. We ourselves have raised funds in this enterprise. These funds comprise informational contacts, professional networks, translation projects, official visits, work-study opportunities, junior-year-abroad programs, and services for foreign scholars and institutions that support our institution's mission but also oblige the other country. They should be considered by our institutions as quantifiable assets. Beware of thinking that these activities are just the domain of the international office. Without the academic input of your teaching, research, and advising, the international office has no chance for survival. Whenever students and deans, trustees and parents decide that this engagement with the other country and culture is worth the academic and financial investment, we should make sure that we are credited for our input. And when intercultural and multicultural endeavors are being contemplated, we should make sure that they are not reduced to the usual monolingual approach in English departments but rather planned and implemented with our explicit expertise.
The current transformations of the American academy are not particularly beneficial to foreign languages. More often than not, business communities and business schools seem to take a more active interest in foreign languages than do academic administrators who are concerned about enrollments. We know that this interest is often driven merely by the needs of accreditation and short-term remedial instruction agendas. It is all the more advisable to measure the engagement with the foreign country in not only intellectual and academic but also economic terms as an asset to the university. This understanding, though not yet fully established, already indicates the new constellation in which foreign language departments can maintain a place in higher education. While in former decades the foreign culture, most explicitly French, German, Italian, and Spanish, constituted an important part of the educational canon in the American college, after Latin had reigned supreme in the nineteenth century, today's departments cannot rely on this tradition anymore. It no longer translates into unquestioned support.
Though we might be glad that the cold war has been over for more than a decade, we realize that this is also the period in which the debates about the legitimacy of foreign, especially European, language and area studies have taken a different, more critical turn. Under the protectorate of the United States as the Western superpower, the European share in American education found its expression in the support of these departments, including those who taught the enemy's language--German, Japanese, Italian, and later Russian. It is, however, in my estimation not just the end of the cold war that brought about the reduction in support. The reprivatization of the university has also changed the terms of the trade. Reprivatization drains funds away from the teaching of all languages, not just Russian or the less commonly taught languages. The transatlantic cultural formation framed an important part of the publicly supported curriculum, usually connected with Western civilization (Geyer). The reprivatized university tends to define its goals according to the needs of academic and commercial pressure groups. As long as the university had an explicit public responsibility for providing pertinent information on the world outside the United States, foreign language department chairs did not have to negotiate intensely for adequate funding of departmental study and research projects. With the end of the cold war this responsibility was lost, its political lobbying forces in the state houses dissipated. Yet another aspect has made our work more difficult: modern European languages and culture--the traditional staple of a liberal arts education--fell precipitously into disfavor with students and their parents in the first half of the 1990s. If French loses what used to be a central position in the liberal arts canon, the task of the chair appears in an entirely different light.
In this new world of supply versus demand, relevance versus accountability, chairing a foreign language department increasingly depends on the chair's ability to portray professionalism in instruction, administration, and self-preservation. As scholarship--which for a long time meant producing a paper, an article, a book, or a review or two--is repackaged and recycled as a project, teaching "degenerates" into a project, and even the department gradually assumes the role of a project coordinator. It is hardly surprising, then, that the function of governance is changing toward management. Also changing are the arguments that are being used to legitimize our work in language and literature.
On closer look, the current research boom in language pedagogy and second language acquisition might not just be understood as an intensification of scientific professionalism. I still have some doubts whether the results of that research really change the classroom performance of the majority of good teachers. But I have no doubts that the broad dissemination and discussion of this scientific outpouring has become the contemporary form of legitimizing foreign language instruction. While in previous decades foreign language departments drew legitimacy from the respect and recognition that the foreign culture enjoyed within the American educational canon, today's departments rely on the respect that the professionalism of their teaching methodologies project. It might even be a peculiarly American way of legitimizing foreign language instruction at the university while other societies pay little attention to academic boosterism and derive enough support and enthusiasm from the genuine interest in the other language.
While I am confident that Benjamin Franklin would agree with my toolbox metaphor, I don't know what he would say about these general shifts in our understanding and administering of foreign languages and literatures. I suspect that he would wonder whether the new approach helps students learn the foreign tongue better. Surely he would not respond with a jeremiad of cultural demise but rather would wonder why we embellish our enterprise with so much more paperwork to justify and professionalize our work. This approach might strike him as being far from simplification. In this respect, we really have moved beyond his pragmatic views of dealing with the French, the Germans, and the Indians.
Bugliani, Ann, ed. Chairing the Foreign Language and Literature Department. Spec. issue of ADFL Bulletin 25.3 (1994): 1-129. [Show Article].
"Forum: Response to Dorothy James, 'Bypassing the Traditional Leadership: Who's Minding the Store?'" ADFL Bulletin 29.2 (1998): 38-76[Show Article]; 29.3 (1998): 46-63. [Show Article].
Geyer, Michael. "Multiculturalism and the Politics of General Education." Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 499-533.
James, Dorothy. "Bypassing the Traditional Leadership: Who's Minding the Store?" ADFL Bulletin 28.3 (1997): 5-11. [Show Article]
------. "Reply from Dorothy James." ADFL Bulletin 29.3 (1998): 64-68. [Show Article]
Klein, Richard B., and Sam L. Slick, eds. Managing the Foreign Language Department: A Chairperson's Primer. Valdosta: Southern Conf. on Lang. Teaching, 1993.
© 2000 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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