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I BEGIN by briefly detailing my views on the chair’s roles and responsibilities. First, a chair must treat each area or division in a department equitably. Second, since departments teach more than just language, the chair has to deal with a variety of curricula and maintain each program on an academically sound footing. To achieve this end, the chair must show sound judgment and be politically just to all members of the department. It is imperative that this fairness be exhibited in budgetary allocations. Decisions must not favor one program over others. Set criteria, whether for tenure, promotion, salary raises, course schedule, or professional development, must be applied to all faculty members, despite the chair’s biases and preferences. Double standards destroy collegiality and are never beneficial.
As for the budget itself, the chair has no control over its size. Yet it is the chair’s responsibility to ensure that the department lives within its means and that funds are spent to best meet the needs of the students and faculty.
Third, chairs, by nature, are neither faculty members nor administrators. They are middle people or representatives of the faculty before the administration. Consequently, besides articulating the department’s mission to outsiders, the chair should be a good negotiator (a pragmatist) who must “know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em,” as the lyrics of that old song advise.
Fourth, communication is essential between the chair and faculty. Scheduling departmental meetings is only one way of reaching that goal. A chair’s door should always be open and faculty members should be encouraged to drop in and to convey their concerns without feeling intrusive. An open-door policy helps keep everyone involved and helps avoid the need to bypass standard operating procedures. In my experience, faculty members who bypass the department’s administration and involve upper administration place the chair in the position of appearing to not support their views or initiatives. If chairs are to represent, they must be informed of faculty members’ will, interests, and efforts. When micromanaging by upper administration occurs, the entire school suffers. I am a strong proponent of an open administrative style.
Last and not least, both chair and faculty members must realize that, other than teaching, the most important job that we do in a department is hiring. All of us strive to hire the best-qualified and most promising candidates possible. However, it is just as important to mentor those assistant professors when they have been hired. Junior faculty members should not be assigned excessive service tasks that tenured faculty members do not wish to do, and their teaching and research should be closely monitored, particularly during the first three years. Good teaching and research should be stressed, not only because it is important at the time of a tenure decision but also because it maintains the instructors’ viability in the profession. Faculty lines that come open or are created should strike a balance between student interest and curricular requirements. Here, as in scholarship evaluation, the chair needs faculty opinion to formulate a procedure to assess needs.
Having been a member of departments of foreign languages or Romance languages throughout my career, I looked forward in 1999 to chairing a department of Hispanic studies. This department encompasses four undergraduate majors (Spanish, Spanish teaching, bilingual and bicultural teaching, and Mexican American studies), and an MA summer program in Spanish. The department has eleven tenure-track faculty members. Soon after my arrival, I discovered that the internal dynamics of the department were significantly different from my previous experiences. However, the external ones, that is, its interaction and relations with the dean’s office, were similar to those that I had witnessed elsewhere.
To what could we attribute this similarity? I believe that one possible answer is that most administrators and faculty members outside languages think that the sole mission of foreign language instructors is to teach language or, more precisely, to teach language skills. Because we teach literature, culture, and film, among other areas (e.g., in my department, Mexican American studies professors teach history, political science, and psychology), it is the chair’s constant responsibility to articulate to the academic community and to the administration what it is that we do and what our needs are. Whether in a modern language department or in a French and Italian department, we do more than just develop language skills. The chair must insist that instructors be trained individuals, not individuals who only happen to speak the target language well. The chair must also keep the ranks of part-time or adjuncts in the unit to a minimum. I return to this topic later.
If the chair has been successful in expressing the wider mission of the department to the administration, it does not mean that the administrators’ outlook will change dramatically. I make this observation because a responsibility of the dean’s office is to manage full-time equivalency (FTE). Unlike other disciplines in the college, enrollment in language classes has to be kept small for reasons that we know too well. This need, in part, explains the predilection of many administrators for lower-level language courses. They know that it is at that level that the highest student demand exists. This reality is the outcome of two factors: general education requirements and, in many institutions, a foreign language requirement. Differences between faculty expectations and those of upper administration are perhaps nowhere more accentuated than on this issue. I realize that much of what I am saying here stems from my own views, views shaped from being a professor of Spanish at public universities, in departments housed in colleges of arts and sciences. Chairs who do not have similar backgrounds may disagree with some of these observations.
As we know, tenure-track faculty members hold doctoral degrees, specialize in a particular area of study, and generally wish to teach upper-level and graduate courses. They love their discipline and hope that their better students will follow in their footsteps. They justifiably feel that one does not earn a doctorate to teach beginning and intermediate skill courses that may be taught by instructors with nonterminal degrees. Their energies and interests are devoted, beyond research, teaching, and service, to increasing the number of majors and graduate students in the department. Also, faculty members, particularly junior faculty members, know that research is crucial. If faculty members need to move, doing so without published research is almost impossible, regardless of how well they did in teaching and service.
Administrators largely understand this reality—after all, they too were faculty members once. However, as administrators, they serve at the pleasure of higher-ups and are held accountable for the proverbial bottom line. Whether they remain in the institution or go elsewhere, they are evaluated on their administrative record, not on their scholarly one. Thus, one of their professional goals is, as previously said, to place the largest number of students that the fire marshal will allow in a classroom (this practice shows good management skills). Because academic requirements ensure a high demand for lower-level language courses, deans are likely to favor these classes. At certain institutions, this favoritism may be reinforced by chairs who, in order to be able to offer smaller upper-level courses, allow their superiors to raise the caps in the lower-level ones. Faculty members and chairs usually view lower-level courses as a necessary evil. (One could argue that—at least in Spanish—the beginning level is often remedial.)
What aggravates this situation is that at some universities, colleges are allowed to keep revenue raised by courses that exceed the average three-semester credits. At a university where I taught, it was alleged that the dean was financing travel in his home department from funds generated by the extra hour (beginning language courses were four credit hours).
Another possible reason why course priorities and class enrollments are viewed differently by faculty members and administrators is that, although the latter do not teach, it is they who make administrative decisions. Faculty members and chairs do teach and have direct contact with students, but they are not trained to participate in governance and decision making. (Both as graduate students and as faculty members, we are generally excluded from budgetary and managerial decisions in our own departments.) Even today, choosing department chairs based on their specialty and list of publications rather than on their administrative experience and ability is common. Thus, the dean’s office generally makes most decisions, decisions that often affect professors and students. Take, for example, enrollment management. What this policy means is that a nonteaching administrator adds or closes courses according to strict numerical information or to a personal vision for the department. Such decisions can alter the department’s mission or reputation within the institution.
In Failing the Future, Annette Kolodny, a former dean of arts and sciences at the University of Arizona, addresses this mutual ignorance among the ranks of university personnel. She sees it resulting in a deep rift between the faculty and administration and also confusion about what is best for programs and students. She proposes that a certain leveling occur between faculty and administration by which faculty members and graduate students make important contributions to university governance.
How may this happen? Kolodny describes a system of shared governance in which new faculty members are oriented not only to the classroom but also to a series of informal seminars that “explain to new hires how things work at this institution”; she also suggests that “universities temporarily [. . .] lighten the teaching loads or committee assignments of new hires” (193) for this new faculty orientation and for participation in governance. This participation model need not be limited to new hires but could be extended to all faculty members. The goal would be to put into practice those decisions made by faculty members in cooperative settings: “Nothing will more profoundly alienate staff, faculty, and students than the perception that their time and energies have been wasted” (197). An addition to Kolodny’s suggestion is that administrators also be reoriented. Keeping administrators out of the classroom is unjust to all in the institution. It makes sense, therefore, to level the decision-making structure of universities by requiring administrators to teach regularly.
With this leveling, administrators would become reacquainted with their disciplines. In spite of the provincialism of departments, particularly of foreign language departments, it is important that all university decision makers maintain connections to a discipline—any discipline—so as to keep in touch with what it is that brings faculty members and students to postsecondary education in the first place. This would mean not only keeping administrators in the classroom but also providing release time for research and writing. Universities could pay for balanced teaching and administration loads by increasing the administrative responsibilities of faculty members. This balance could be achieved by assigning instructors partial release time for these shared responsibilities. Paying the price for administrative release time would then be mutually beneficial. The result would be truly shared governance, much greater faculty understanding of the working of universities, and renewed academic understanding by administrators (Hinds 2).
Returning to differences between faculty members and administrators, the mentioned demand created by lower-level language courses for instructors is frequently met by adjuncts or term faculty members who, holding no terminal degrees, are hired on a year-to-year basis. Tenure-track faculty members generally view them as inferiors, a perception that these part-time colleagues resent. Because of the short-term nature of their contracts, many adjuncts feel that they must forgo rigor and continuity if they are to get the high student evaluations that will maximize their chances of a contract renewal; this is why part-time instructors, although meeting a critical need, generally do little to build up concentration areas. Unscrupulous chairs and colleagues may also exploit the adjuncts’ job insecurity for political purposes. Administrators, however, like them because they are low-cost, high-yield commodities whom they may dismiss without wrangle at the end of the academic year.
A possible solution to this situation is not to do away with language requirements but to create intensive language programs on campus or, better yet, abroad, for those students who are genuinely interested in learning. Recruitment of talented graduate students helps in two ways: it increases and strengthens the graduate program and provides a teaching pool that has no professional ambitions or expectations in the institution (I realize that, unless the graduate program is for teachers, a period of training is necessary for classroom teaching). If the department has no graduate program or if a need for adjuncts remains, then these adjuncts should be given a nonrenewable, long-term contract after a one- or two-year probationary period.
Another point of contention between language faculty members and administrators, particularly administrators with scientific backgrounds, is the area of research. Most of us view humanistic research as an integral part of what we do. It has little if any practical application. It exists to stimulate us intellectually and to broaden knowledge. With few exceptions, it is done individually and it is deemed more meritorious that way. Such individualism runs counter to the sciences where results often, if not always, have utilitarian applications and where project research is the norm.
Because of their nature, large, well-funded research grants abound in the sciences. Not only are they more common and thus more easily obtained; they also usually bring quite large benefits to the institution from the percentage the institution charges the grant agency. Far fewer and more competitive funding opportunities are available in the humanities. It ought not be surprising that administrators, even those with backgrounds in the liberal arts, drool at the thought of what is commonly called “funded research.”
To demonstrate how this disparity creates discord between members of the language faculty and administrators I present a hypothetical situation. A professor of German finished a book on nineteenth-century Austrian drama with the help of a term sabbatical and a modest, in-house research award. A colleague in the sciences was primarily responsible for obtaining a $200,000 research grant from a federal agency wishing to know whether a rabid dog’s bite is stronger than that of a healthy dog.
There is no doubt that both outcomes are a contribution to their respective fields. At year’s end, while comparing research output in her college, the dean acknowledges both professors but is also keenly aware of the financial disparity: the book’s publication cost the institution approximately $35,000; the dog research brought in about the same amount in indirect costs alone. It does not require a think tank to figure out which department she will be more predisposed to favor. But now try to explain to the professor of German, who spent countless hours researching, writing, and getting his book published by a prestigious press, that the fact, now established by a group of science colleagues, that there is no discernible difference between the bites of the two dogs is more important than his own scholarly observations. Surely this is the conclusion he reaches on comparing his department’s budget with that of his counterpart’s, to say nothing of their individual salaries.
Such differences go beyond departmental budgets and salaries. As Richard D. Lambert, the founder and former director of the National Foreign Language Center, so keenly observes:
As is fitting in research universities, a major amount of the faculty’s attention is focused on research. The quality of this research is, of course, of major importance to both the faculty member and the department’s standing in the field, and presumably it informs teaching, particularly at the graduate level. [. . .] Accordingly, to the extent that such research is externally funded, it tends to take the form of individual fellowships. A decrease in the availability of such funding is a blow to the productivity of the language faculty. However, the effect of the fellowship drought tends to be felt by individuals and not departments. [. . .] With respect to research, in other words, the department is not the relevant unit. Hence, a decline in the quantity and quality of research does not disturb the standing of language departments on their campuses. The damage tends to run in the other direction. The downsizing of staff resulting from shrinking enrollments threatens the ability of departments to maintain a full research complement, one covering all the important genres, time periods, and currently important themes. And unfortunately, since research foci and methods tend to be age specific, the research profile of a department can become quickly skewed. (88)
No solution to this dilemma comes to mind. Because postsecondary institutions are being administered as though they were businesses, less and less recognition will be given to nonfunded research. Also, we must ask ourselves how, in those disciplines where student enrollments are low, tenure lines can be justified, let alone research foci? An administrator’s decision to prop up these disciplines or fields with the healthy enrollment figures of others will meet with deep resentment, particularly from those instructors whose classes are “bursting at the seams” with students. Few things anger an academic more than the perception of working harder than other colleagues for similar remuneration.
I conclude with one other topic that divides faculty and administration: the use of technology in the classroom. Department chairs are constantly aware of the pressure that we are under to get faculty members to embrace technology in the classroom. Yet, whereas electronic advances such as computer-assisted learning and satellite programming have undoubtedly eased and improved second language acquisition, no data exist documenting that technology has supplanted good teaching and positive student-teacher interaction. What, therefore, is at the heart of this constant preoccupation or obsession by our supervisors? How can we explain what to many of us seems like “the tail wagging the dog”? A possible answer is not entirely an altruistic one. (Let us remember that, if administrators are under pressure to maximize class enrollments, their primary motive may not always be pedagogically sound.) Behind their push for more classroom technology may lie the intent, as the professoriat suspects, of gradually displacing instructors with taped lectures and software, with what Kolodny appropriately calls “the professor in a can.” Although she challenges us to become informed about state-of-the-art instruction and to adapt it to our specific classroom needs, she challenges institutions to support our initiatives with incentives and support. Her challenge to policymakers and the general public is straightforward: “resist the impulse to force colleges and universities into substituting the kind of rote training that technology can cheaply supply for the more expensive education that teaches thinking and analytic skills, values and an understanding of complex relationships, which the learned professor in the classroom can facilitate” (35–36).
I realize that the divergences included in this article are hardly comprehensive. Also, I am aware that, throughout this article, a slight antiadministration slant may be perceived. Nothing is further from the truth. It is true, however, that trustees, legislators, and the public at large frequently place university administrators in adversarial, even untenable, positions. These groups are constantly demanding accountability and that more be done with less. College administrators thus face no choice but to run their institutions like corporations, which means that their top priority is meeting the expectations of stockholders (trustees and legislators) and of consumers (parents and students). While this capitalist model works for industry, I am convinced that it is undermining the raison d’être of higher education. Herein lies the subject of a future article.
Kolodny, Annette. Failing the Future: A Dean Looks at Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century. Durham: Duke UP, 1998.
Lambert, Richard D. “The Winds of Change in Foreign Language Instruction.” Language Policy and Pedagogy: Essays in Honor of A. Ronald Walton. Ed. Lambert and Elana Shohamy. Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2000.
© 2002 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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