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TWENTY-FOUR years ago I left graduate school to take my first teaching position, at a small college in Michigan that was so new the sidewalks were still not all in place. They had decided to wait until the paths worn through the grass gave a clear indication of where the students actually walked and then to turn the paths into sidewalks. The college had a kind of pioneering, pragmatic, and definitely youthful spirit. Even the “they” who had made the sidewalk decision were not one or two higher administrators but members of the faculty government that had been established by the college's energetic and idealistic president. That fall in 1970, seventeen newly minted professors arrived on campus, most somewhat self-conscious about using the title. Dr. and all eager to do what college professors do. To my surprise I found that, in keeping with the trailblazing spirit of the new college, I had not only been hired to establish the Russian program—I had been appointed chair of the college's eight-member foreign language department.
It was in just this way that my life in academia, like the college's sidewalks, took shape on this campus, and I have been a foreign language department administrator ever since. Over the years there have been many changes in the profession and new paths for foreign language and literature faculty members and chairs to follow, but much of what I learned in those early years remains valid today.
In 1970 I had very little administrative experience to draw on. I had been an undergraduate and a graduate student. I had seen department chairs in action and had heard faculty members and students make positive and negative comments about them. But somewhat like the Wizard of Oz, these chairs had for the most part seemed to be somewhere out of sight, in complete and quiet control of things, pulling various levers at a master switch-board that caused faculty members to act.
What I immediately discovered, however, was that as department chair, I was not outside the action but in the thick of it. Nearly every faculty member (some old enough to be my parents, with perhaps even a decade to spare) was suddenly coming to me with problems, requests, complaints, suggestions, or excuses. And of course not only faculty members but students were coming to me for counseling or with problems, complaints about faculty members, or special requests. I was sought out, and my opinions and responses were expected. I discovered a bittersweet sense of onerous popularity, accompanied by an unfamiliar feeling of stress that comes with responsibility. I was experiencing a difficulty we as department chairs know only too well: in addition to the big ideas we must develop to built our programs, beyond the required reports, grants, and tactical jockeying we must do to keep our departments on track, in favor with our deans, and competitive with other departments, we have to deal with real people—their lives, their problems, and their expectations that we can and should make things better for them.
This problem, of course, is the human factor in sociopolitical systems that Mikhail Gorbachev and others before him referred to. In a real way, losing sight of this factor played a prominent role in Gorbachev's downfall, and giving the human factor its due often proves one of the most difficult challenges for new and old chairs alike. There are, however, two sides to this coin. On the one side, we should never forget that we must interact on a personal, human level with faculty members every day. This may sound pedantic or obvious, but we chairs can easily find ourselves swamped by paperwork and myriad concerns and ultimately unable to give time or attention to faculty members, who need the personal contact if they are to feel that they work with us rather than for us—a feeling that is essential for a positive departmental atmosphere. I have seen more than one chair ousted by faculty members who resented a condescending attitude or public displays of bad temper thoughtlessly directed at a member of the department.
On the other side of the coin, however, there is a need to balance college and departmental administrative needs against those of faculty members. What is good for the department or the college can often be detrimental to a colleague; your role in the outcome can be pivotal, and it is crucial that chairs recognize the nature of their role and their place in the process.
Chairs are always aware that university administrators and deans work above them in the hierarchy and are separated from daily contact with the faculty. As I watched D-Day film footage of World War II bombing runs recently, it occurred to me that this kind of separation is not unlike that which makes it possible for the pilot and crew of a bomber to see buildings and other objectives as impersonal targets: they don't immediately see the carnage and don't have to deal with the aftermath or give assistance to the wounded. And those in the plane know it's a question of priorities: it is their job, their duty to endanger or destroy the few in the interests of protecting the many whose future depends on them.
One can easily draw parallels between this life-and-death wartime situation and that in which deans and departments chairs find themselves at promotion and reappointment time each year. Chairs are at ground zero when the bombs fall. We are only too aware of the people in the building. We are there with them. We see them nearly every day; we have firsthand knowledge about their families, their health, their problems, their aspirations, their concerns. We also may have hired them and shared in the belief that they would be good department members. We feel a commitment to the choice we made, and we feel a responsibility for their future. In short, more likely than not, we know too much about our faculty members and often become too personally involved with them to be truly efficient, pragmatic administrators who make “the hard decisions,” as higher administrators are wont to say. It is we who see the effect of action on our faculty members, and naturally few of us relish dealing with negative outcomes. But it is because we are so close and so involved that our role is so crucial.
There are many factors at work in our relationships with faculty members. Since few of us have had anything approaching actual training as administrators, we may turn to guides like the excellent ADFL publication Chairing the Foreign Language and Literature Department (Bugliani), Managing the Foreign Language Department: A Chairperson's Primer (Slick and Klein), or The Academic Chairperson's Handbook (Cresswell et al.) for advice from seasoned foreign language and literature chairs. For the most part, however, we draw on our own experience. This experience may come from having witnessed the successes and failures of chairs while we were faculty members, but it is also natural to apply the wealth of lessons and strategies we have learned in our family relationships.
It is almost inevitable that our experience as parents and spouses, daughters and sons will influence us in dealing with the situations that confront us as chairs. We may base our judgments, approaches, and decisions on values that were established and important in our own homes. I certainly did so when I began chairing in 1970, and these principles remain important influences in maintaining the genuine, sympathetic human relationships that develop in a department “family,” along with all the squabbles, competition, cliques, and similar phenomena with which chairs are all too familiar.
To a certain extent, many values and strategies transfer quite logically and effectively from home to department. But it is easy to depend too much on the family model. Our families will always be our families. With family comes the need to protect and defend, to create relationships based on blood ties, love, dependability, support, forgiveness, and trust. But family members are seldom banished from the family unit for underachieving, or on the grounds that they refused or neglected to participate in family activities, or for relating poorly to others. Departments operate differently and the difference is important.
If you chair a department, your success depends to a great degree on earning and maintaining the support of your faculty members and your dean. This situation is different, however, from that in your family, where such support comes naturally, even if you don't deserve it. It is important and expected that members of your family like you, and it is understood that you will protect and defend one another. It is all too easy to transfer this concept to your department, to want your faculty members' esteem, and to feel a responsibility for protecting them. But if your decisions and your relationships with faculty members are determined simply by the desire to be linked, you will undermine your role as chair.
As chair, you must establish a blend of positive interaction (an administrative euphemism that approximates the word esteem but makes the relationship more formal) and respect. Wherever you sacrifice respect to build a positive relationship, you risk weakening your effectiveness. And unlike a parent, who can burst out in anger or show weakness and still maintain his or her position in the family, you can lose support in your department almost immediately through such displays. But you can also weaken this support by defending all faculty members equally as you would family and (remember the bomber pilot) by failing to put the interests of the many over those of an individual in your department whom you might feel obligated to defend as family rather than as a scholar, a teacher, or a colleague—even though you are convinced that the faculty member has not lived up to the department's criteria.
In sum, a department chair can and should be aware of the human factor. The foreign language and literature department may seem more like a mini United Nations than a family, but it is composed of persons whose daily lives and careers are an integral part of your life and responsibility. One day you will probably rejoin your colleagues and find yourself under the leadership of a new chair, who in these lean budgetary times very likely may come from your own department. If you bear this possibility in mind, you will see that a commitment to “do unto others” is a wise choice for any chair. And if you have maintained the respect of your faculty through your actions, your transition will be comfortable. While you are the chair, your challenge is to give proper attention to the human factor without compromising your responsibility to be a department builder and protector of the many. Sooner or later, this dual concern will inform some of your most painful and difficult decisions. That, unfortunately, is part of every chair's job.
The author is Professor of Russian and Chair of the Department of Language and Foreign Studies at American University. This article is based on his presentation at ADFL Seminar East, 23-25 June 1994, in Albany, New York.
Bugliani, Ann, ed. Chairing the Foreign Language and Literature Department . Spec. issue of ADFL Bulletin 25.3 (1994): 1-128.
Cresswell, John, et al. The Academic Chairperson's Handbook . Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990.
Slick, Sam L., and Richard B. Klein, eds. Managing the Foreign Language Department: A Chairperson's Primer . Valdosta: Southern Conf. on Lang. Teaching, 1993.
© 1995 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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