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SARAH B.—chair of Spanish and Portuguese at Valley State University—sensed that her department was in serious trouble. The first problem was the junior faculty members. Everybody had thought that they would be the salvation of the department after some “deadwood” retired. They did know their specialities, but some were struggling pitifully in the literature surveys and basic language classes. The students hadn’t lodged any formal protests but were giving three new people miserable ratings on the standardized evaluations. Two of them, who had seemed invincible when hired, were now protesting that teaching, counseling, and committee meetings took all their time and that they couldn’t get any writing done. And they hadn’t.
The senior professors had their troubles, too. Half of Sarah’s faculty members were over fifty-five. One de facto dropout was selling Amway, several others seemed tired of teaching, most had abandoned publishable research, and several were drawn to laudable community causes. Few of the senior people had been abroad in the last fifteen years, and their language was increasingly rusty. Dudley R. kept griping about the strange students he was getting—kids with purple hair, middle-aged homemakers, armed service retirees, racial minorities. The department’s two best scholars had just been tapped for the undergraduate studies office and study-abroad program. Calvin W. and Amelia N., who had always taught the big culture and literature survey classes, were retiring the next year. Jerry D., denied promotion to full professor last year, looked and acted frightfully depressed. The department had good people, but they needed something.
Then there were her “migrant workers,” the many part-time faculty members who taught a class or two and disappeared onto the freeway. Sarah worried about her recent discovery that part-timers were teaching about forty percent of all the classes in the department. She seldom saw them and never knew whether any messages or announcements got to them. They were cheap help, but their student evaluations were all over the map. Sarah worried about their understanding and support of departmental goals and standards (see Leslie).
She remembered talking last week to her neighbor, who worked at a local fast-growing software firm. He said his outfit always spent lots of time and money on development and couldn’t possibly stay competitive without it. He couldn’t understand why any rational institution wouldn’t want to protect its million-dollar-plus investment in each employee’s career salary by instituting a well-crafted development program. He thought it unrealistic to believe people would really keep up with their fields, support departmental goals, and cope with job burnout completely on their own. Sarah had bravely argued that academics were a different breed, the last of the true-grit, self-sufficient individualists, but she had nagging doubts.
We trust that Sarah will soon look for some help at her university. If she were to call the local faculty development office or committee (or Danforth Center, Instructional Development Office, Center for Effective Teaching, Teaching and Learning Center, Teaching Support Office, Center for Curriculum Development, Evaluation and Research, or Assessment Services), she might receive the following basic advice:
Make development your main job. Sarah’s neighbor is right. To be effective, any organization must have an ongoing, self-renewing program of human resource development (Tucker 263). Budgeting, reporting, and assigning teachers to classes are important tasks, but a department is faculty members, and its success depends on their quality.
Remember that development concerns more than teaching. On most campuses, development has been taken to mean only “improvement of teaching,” but a good development program relates to everything the department does—teaching, scholarship, and service—and is broadly conceived to meet the shared goals of the institution, department members, and students. Some experts believe that Total Quality Management—a systematic approach to our constituents, practices, and skills—provides a good framework for designing faculty development (Cornesky, McCool, Byrnes, and Weber 102).
Include yourself. Faculty development will only work if the chair also engages in the process. Faculty development is derived from the intransitive, not the transitive, meaning of develop. It is not a Leninist plot of kto kogo (who does what to whom); it is not the competent reshaping the incompetent; it is instead a cooperative enterprise involving shared goals, mutual growth, and persistent good examples. Our own willingness to change is as crucial to the project as was Jean Valjean’s to his redemption in Les Misérables. Your participation not only lends status to development activities but also demonstrates that everybody should seek to be more effective.
Take charge of the program personally. You can delegate authority for many aspects of it, and you should invite faculty members to take responsibility for their own development, to mentor others, and to foster collegiality, but you must hold yourself accountable for faculty development in your unit. You cannot delegate that to a committee or to a university development office. It must take priority over every other task you undertake as chair.
Ask questions. You could start by asking each faculty member, including the part-timers, questions like these:
“Where would you like to see our department go in the next few years?”
“How do you think you can contribute to the department?”
“What do you see as your career pattern and how does it relate to the needs of the department?”
“What can the department, and I, as chair, do to help you to achieve your career goal as well as to help the department to work well?” (McKeachie 2)
This expression of interest in faculty members’ opinions is in itself motivating. If people suggest goals and policies that seem unworkable, do not reject their ideas immediately. Instead, ask the proposer to help work out any problems that you see. Listen carefully and openly; you may want to suggest that they talk to other faculty members about their proposals (McKeachie 2). The very act of including colleagues in the problem-solving process is far more important for long-range development than any given solution.
Emphasize planning. When interviewing faculty members, emphasize plans for the future at least as much as past behavior, especially in problem cases. If you hold annual reviews, ask each faculty member to prepare by writing a plan for the future based on the above questions, in addition to a full report on the past year's activities (Jarvis 21). Set a good example by making departmental planning an important part of your agenda and include your faculty members in the department's planning and goal-setting process. Obviously, departmental goals must be periodically revisited and sometimes broadened to accommodate legitimate faculty interests (Lucas, Strengthening 86–87).
Build confidence. The main responsibility of all teachers or leaders is to build their charges' faith in themselves. It is not enough to hold the bar high and tell professors to jump: even if they want to achieve the goal, they will walk away unless they believe that they can do it. Help faculty members set reasonable goals—such as writing one hour per day or getting usable feedback from students—that you and they believe they can achieve. Inquire about and praise participation in the process toward goals not just achievement of the goals themselves. Seize every opportunity to praise efforts and small successes; encourage other department members to do the same.
Remember that student and peer evaluations of teaching can be devastating and must be handled skillfully (McKeachie 3). Someone in the department should help colleagues understand that every teacher receives some negative comments and that they should consider overall trends. In any case, emphasize their areas of competence, help them select appropriate remedies for problem areas, and encourage them to play to their strengths.
Examine your formal reward system. Development programs congruent with local reward criteria are far more successful than those at odds with them. Rewarding A (publishing) while hoping for B (well-balanced teaching, service, and scholarship) doesn't work any better in academe than it does in industry. See what leeway you have to adjust the criteria for tenure, advancement, and merit pay to reflect the long-term goals of your department. Sometimes this may mean rewarding teaching and service more or rewarding some faculty members for unusual strength in only one area rather than in all three. It may also require broadening the criteria to reward good work in the scholarship of teaching, for example, research and publication in methods of teaching literature, linguistics, or language. Reward collegiality and cooperation. Every chair has to work within college and university guidelines, but just letting your colleagues know you are on their side will help.
Do what you can to make sure that the process, as well as the criteria, actually works for your people. Too many good people are torpedoed by uncaring and sloppy committees even after the criteria are rewritten. Try to arrange for those who share your vision to serve on the promotion and tenure committees at the departmental and college level. This will require not only appointing and lobbying for the right people but also ensuring that the relevant committees are instructed and then actually behave in a way that supports your goals.
Use ALL your incentives. Even if your institution’s reward criteria are not congruent with your developmental goals and you have very little discretionary money available, the usual chair’s complaint of having “no carrots” to offer is nonsense. Every chair can move from merely custodial functions toward “transformational leadership”:
It is simplistic to think that rewards include only economic benefits, and that punishment means only the firing of a faculty member. [. . .] When chairs are respected colleagues, they have the ability to reinforce faculty. [. . .] Being taken seriously by a colleague who appreciates the quality of what an individual is doing is both rewarding and motivating. Moreover, chairs usually have major input into personnel decision making, scheduling of courses, released time, and allocation of resources. (Lucas, “Seize the Moment” 4)
Faculty members do care about monetary rewards, but they care even more about peer appreciation, public recognition, and simple acknowledgment that they are making an important contribution to the welfare of the department and its students.
Annual awards banquets, faculty meetings, bulletin boards, and chance meetings in the hallway all present opportunities for recognition. Brown-bag colloquia or other department gatherings can be good opportunities to invite department members to discuss—even very informally—subjects that interest them and that touch on department goals. These topics can include but should not be limited to traditional scholarly questions: discussion of teaching and administrative issues validates these as also important to the good of the department and worthy of serious thought and effort.
Many professors—especially the new ones—get more excited over a little unexpected departmental support for a pet project than they do about their annual raises. One young ABD professor at a liberal arts college was deeply touched and remains permanently grateful for a modest grant to help him complete his dissertation. Another professor at a sprawling western university received an unexpected $50 from his chair to help mail out a questionnaire that resulted in his first paper at a national convention. Somehow that small amount means more to this day than all subsequent travel support, promotions, and federal grants. Part-timers are often incredibly grateful to receive evidence that they are professionals—faculty parking stickers, rights to buy into health programs, a desk, a telephone, and so forth.
College and university public awards and newspaper articles about faculty members can be invigorating. Department members will usually find time to nominate each other or write a press release if asked to do so, especially if they know that doing it is important to you and is part of creating a climate of support and collegiality. Those who spend most of their efforts on teaching often feel especially unappreciated. If they are important to the department, make sure that they are nominated (and renominated if necessary) for teaching awards.
Promote collegiality. The most important single factor in faculty development is collegiality, “the pursuit of truth in the company of friends.” Despite many humanists’ tendency to isolate themselves, great scholarship and great teaching are seldom spontaneous, lone efforts but are usually a product of “evocative environments” in a community of scholars (Zuckerman 172). Unfortunately, such collegiality is rare. New faculty members as a rule feel “neglected, isolated, overworked, and deprived of vital support and feedback” (Boice 44). By contrast, the small fraction of faculty members that Robert Boice labels as “quick starters” all managed within the first year to establish regular relationships with colleagues who share their interests (45). A little work on collegiality can help many more to become quick starters.
Effective steps toward building community include involving faculty members in planning, sponsoring mentoring programs, holding group seminars, supporting travel, and inviting speakers to campus. Perhaps the most important step would be a clear signal from you that collegiality is part of everyone’s job description. That does not mean that everyone should spend the day patting one another on the back, but it does mean that they should inquire about each other’s projects, ask and give advice on rough drafts and teaching problems, observe one another’s classes to learn from them, and show up for a reasonable number of departmental gatherings.
Get help. The above advice, although important, provides only an introduction to faculty development. Your local development office or committee should be able to suggest other specific steps and programs. Two excellent books for department chairs are Ann Lucas’s Strengthening Departmental Leadership and Allan Tucker’s Chairing the Academic Department. Since development is most cost-effective for new faculty members, consult works by Estela Bensimon, Kelly Ward, and Karla Sanders; Robert Boice; Donald Jarvis; and Mary Sorcinelli and Ann Austin for suggestions on working with junior faculty members. Bensimon, Ward, and Sanders include convenient checklists for every phase of new faculty development, from “Organizing the Search” to “Explaining Evaluation Procedures.”
Let us hope that our worried chair Sarah B. discovers that faculty development is less a separate set of activities than an overall approach—a continuous commitment to individual improvement for the common good. While her department members’ training as humanists may not particularly encourage cooperative faculty development efforts, Sarah and her colleagues have compelling reasons to engage in the process. Her custodial functions as chair will be less important than her development efforts for the long-term benefit of her department, her colleagues, and herself.
Boice, Robert. The New Faculty Member: Supporting and Fostering Professional Development. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992.
Cornesky, Robert, Sam McCool, Larry Byrnes, and Robert Weber. Implementing Total Quality Management in Higher Education. Madison: Magna, 1991.
Jarvis, Donald K. Junior Faculty Development: A Handbook. New York: MLA, 1991.
Leslie, David W. “Editor’s Notes.” The Growing Use of Part-Time Faculty: Understanding Causes and Effects. New Directions for Higher Education 104. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998. 1–7.
Lucas, Ann F. “Seize the Moment: Don’t Just Change the Department, Transform It.” Department Chair 10.3 (2000): 10–11.
———. Strengthening Departmental Leadership: A Team-Building Guide for Chairs in Colleges and Universities. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994.
McKeachie, Wilbert J. “Tactics and Strategies for Faculty Development.” Department Advisor 2.3 (1987): 1–5.
Sorcinelli, Mary Deane, and Ann Austin, eds. Developing New and Junior Faculty. New Directions for Higher Education 50. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992.
Tucker, Allan. Chairing the Academic Department: Leadership among Peers. 3rd ed. New York: American Council on Education, 1984.
Zuckerman, Harriet. Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States. New York: Free, 1977.
© 2001 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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