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LET'S be honest. How many of us have not imagined ourselves at one time or another stamping our memos with the bold designation “ex cathedra,” thus shielding their splendid contents from the scrutiny and petty carping of mortal minds? I say “imagined” because infallible authority is probably the exact opposite of what most department chairs experience in their position. Although we occupy the seat (the Latin for “seat” is cathedra ) of leadership in our departments, we hardly possess that kind of power, either real or symbolic.
In our role as chairs, we are often the emissaries who interpret to our colleagues the revealed truths that we are privileged to hear from on high. Why else, after all, would we have meetings with deans, and deans have meetings with provosts? Our role is therefore frequently that of the exegetes, missionaries, and proselytizers to our faculties. At the same time, we champion our faculties and our departmental programs in addressing the higher authorities, a role that also entails interpreting, preaching, and explaining, as well as attempting to persuade with sophisticated and sometimes convoluted logic. Great responsibility, little power—what position could be more complicated?
Moreover, because we work in universities, everything is open to question, challenge, and rebuttal, and nothing is taken as sacred, let alone as divinely inspired. So we chairs do all our missionary work in a community of professional heretics and blasphemers, a culture of professional doubters, skeptics, pragmatists, and cynics, rather than in a universe of faithful believers. And, of course, we ourselves continue to be blasphemers, cynics, and heretics because of the culture we work in. No wonder higher administrators invariably characterize the chair's job as the most difficult and complex on campus. From experience we know that description to be true, precisely because the dependencies and the variations in the degree and direction of the power or authority of the office are so vexed and so vexing.
Nonetheless, it would be wrong to say that the department chair does not have any power. The chair can have a profound effect on the life of the department and on the department's faculty and students. To do so, however, requires a sometimes fortuitous combination of opportunity, knowledge, and political skill. Rarely have successful chairs modeled themselves after popes. To lead a faculty or to influence a department, the chair has to take the time and trouble to learn and understand more than anyone else in the department does about the department's overall goal or goals. It is the chair's job to keep the larger vision constantly and clearly in everybody's view and continually to motivate, guide, and justify its realization both internally and externally.
Change is something universities increasingly prefer to see as coming about through a deliberate internal agency or process. Change is viewed as the product of the judicious evaluation of actions and their consequences in the light of the institution's mission and tradition. In fact, it might be argued that change is more commonly prompted by independent, entrepreneurial individuals and groups—sometimes faculty members, sometimes departments or programs, sometimes newly arrived or newly appointed administrators. It has been rare that change has been proposed with a more than perfunctory gesture in the direction of an institutional plan or mission when such a document or statement actually exists. More often than not change is opportunistic, and mission statements or strategic plans tend to creep in later or to stretch to accommodate the new directions.
But highly mission-driven campuses are quickly becoming more the rule than the exception, and it thus typically becomes part of the central administration's job constantly to invoke, define, and redefine the institutional mission as faculty members, departments, and divisions propose dozens of disparate projects. Administrators must justify their rejection or negotiate their approval on the basis of some accepted vision for the institution as a whole. Where there is no mission document, the job is both harder and easier. Where there is a mission, it can at least be pointed to as a touchstone for decisions about change. Without one, by contrast, change can be more spontaneous and more responsive to opportunity and creative initiative.
The same process occurs on a smaller scale for department chairs. A few of the proposals or initiatives that come forward from individuals or committees may be as exciting for their potential contribution to the departmental mission as others may be breathtaking in their eccentricity, short-sightedness, and inappropriateness. And what about the exciting and visionary proposals that have little to do with the mission? It is most often the chair's judgment that determines where these initiatives go (if anywhere) and whose ego is either encouraged or damaged in the process.
I've always liked the analogy that compares the work of the department chair to trying to herd a large number of cats. One can easily imagine several dozen felines, each serenely confident in the correctness of his or her own vision, activity, and purpose: some stretched out on the carpet; some sitting still as statues; some licking their paws, eating, or drinking; some sharpening their claws on the furniture; others walking away in various directions; and still others dashing about, chasing, and playing—but none of them noticing what any of the others do, much less heeding the voice of whoever is supposedly in charge. And the department chair—the faithful cat-herder—sometimes does need to get all his or her charges into one large enclosure, or at least to get them all walking in the same direction for a little while.
Even though my purpose is to talk about change, I don't think that chairing a department—or cat herding—has ever been much different from what we experience in the office today. The professoriat has not changed in such fundamental ways that department chairs will be able to forget about cajoling, encouraging, stroking, admonishing, motivating, feeding, and figuring out rewards while also arbitrating disputes and sometimes—maybe often—being the object of indifference or wrath.
Nevertheless, for the past ten years or so, we have been talking and reading about change in higher education as though it were happening or about to happen at a rate that we have never seen before and with consequences that we are only beginning to grasp. These changes have to do not only with the increasing diversity of students' backgrounds, needs, and goals and with the new ways in which we will have to teach these students but also with the nature of the university and of faculty work. The questions that face us concern what the future holds for our disciplines and our institutions and whether we will lament what is inevitably to be left behind or embrace what lies ahead.
Perhaps the most significant change in the department chair's role has been the evolution from colleague and leader to manager. The conventional notion of the chair's role as primus inter pares is inscribed in the title of a 1981 book by Allan Tucker called Chairing the Academic Department: Leadership among Peers . Compare that with the title Richard Klein and Sam Slick give their 1993 collection of articles: Managing the Foreign Language Department: A Chairperson's Primer . Various business models of organization, reporting, planning, and assessment have to some degree been superimposed on academic institutions whose principles of governance, responsibility and authority are unique. Not only does operational change of this kind demand from us new institutional practices and approaches, it changes the atmosphere in which we work. In fairly overt ways, such practices also change how we see ourselves as professionals. In the most drastic situations, some of us have come to feel that our professional and intellectual integrity, our academic autonomy, and our system of self-governance are misunderstood, undervalued, and under attack.
But political, social, and economic circumstances have often provoked changes far more quickly than we have been able to respond; certainly we have not been able to preface our responses with the kind of broad deliberation we are accustomed to. For example, in the view of most parents and students, a college or university degree has never been more necessary than it is now. At the same time, this increased demand is testing our democratic ideals about access to education as sharply rising costs make the college degree—even at publicly funded campuses—a far more expensive investment than ever before. As LynNell Hancock and John McCormick recently wrote in Newsweek , “While a college education has never been more necessary for the young, it has never seemed more burdensome to the American middle class” (54). And that statement doesn't even contemplate the problems of the increasing numbers of working-class students seeking higher education, often as first-generation college goers holding down jobs or as returning students with adult responsibilities.
Furthermore, our product—the graduate—is being criticized by employers who find degree holders even from the best schools to be lacking necessary computational and communicative skills. Students and their parents insist more and more on looking at outcomes to judge the quality of an education. They measure the financial and other sacrifices they will need to make against the kinds of jobs an education will lead to and the kind of life-long income and security that can be expected. What will be the return on their investment? Personal satisfaction may rank a distant third on some lists.
All this makes supporters of higher education and governing bodies jittery and suspicious: state legislators, boards of trustees, regents, even alumni who contribute their money want to scrutinize institutional operations more closely, and they want more accountability when it comes to how higher education makes its decisions, how it formulates its plans for change, and ultimately how it spends its money and serves the people of the state or nation. And the public is no longer content with faculty members and administrators who offer assurances that they are professionals who know what they are doing. Most people will not tolerate that attitude from their doctors any more, and they are less and less likely to take it from representatives of higher education. They are avid and aggressive researchers when it comes to choosing where to go to school. They are increasingly active in their concern that their money be well spent, even (perhaps especially) when their choices are constrained by the practicalities of finances, work, and family. Stressed taxpayers and voters in many states want higher education to be subject to the same kinds of investigations into efficiency, responsibility, and management as government agencies are.
What do we look like to others? We've all heard more than enough about scandal books like Profscam (Sykes). But many of us as faculty members have inherited or developed a uniquely independent vision of the way we work and contribute to the profession. In an age of increased specialization, we may feel that our first loyalty is to our discipline and to our areas of specialization for teaching and research—that is, to our continued intellectual development in and our contribution to our scholarly field. Sometimes as a profession we look and behave a lot more like freely contracted experts than like employees of or participants in an organization. Perhaps, as William Bergquist suggests in his book The Four Cultures of Academe , this behavior is a defense against a response to the increasing bureaucratization and professionalization taking place at complex institutions (132). In the “collegial culture,” the oldest of the cultures Bergquist discusses, the university typically provides its faculty with physical facilities and a support structure for their work, recruits and maintains a cohort of “customers” or “clients” (we used to call them students), and even guarantees life-long employment to faculty members after an initial period of evaluation. For their part, the faculty members provide teaching services in their areas of expertise and, to varying degrees, take some active role in determining and enforcing the institution's rules and structures. Faculty members also enjoy the use of the university's facilities for conducting research and in turn seek outside funds to defray the costs of running those facilities. The details and limits of these relationships are sometimes determined by a negotiated contract.
As a model for the delivery of education, the collegial culture's way of doing things is not likely to be well understood by the public or to generate much public sympathy. Unfortunately, as students and their families judge the availability and quality of higher education, they are likely to know little about faculty members' professional values, much less about how faculty members really spend their time. The public sees faculty members as full-time employees of the university and, in public institutions, of the state as well. And the public increasingly is demanding that the educational product meets its expectations, no matter what the prevailing campus culture might be. Thus faculty members who value independence and professional freedom uncomfortably find themselves to be the objects of ever-increasing and sometimes hostile scrutiny.
Universities and colleges that have a collegial culture are also experiencing the growing influence of what Bergquist calls the “managerial culture,” which is defined by “a quest for competent administrators, faculty members, and students who respect and work within a formal, hierarchical structure.” According to Bergquist, “This structure in turn encourages clarity of communication, specificity of roles and outcomes, and careful delegation of responsibilities. The goal of leadership is attained when a competent person fills a clearly specified role” (83). Contrast this model of leadership with the general and somewhat vague notions about charisma and leadership by example that are more likely to be found in colleges and universities that emphasize the collegial perspective or what Bergquist calls the “developmental” perspective (83). 1
Bergquist goes on to observe that when the managerial culture makes significant inroads in a predominantly collegial institution, a clash can occur along some tricky fault lines. In the collegial culture, faculty members are for the most part indifferent to the activities of administrators and staff members who oversee the general welfare of students, alumni and external relations, and the physical plant. It's just fine if the managerial culture takes over those parts of the enterprise. But faculty members are highly resistant to allowing managers (we used to call them administrators) to usurp areas of traditional faculty prerogative such as determining the university's overall mission and making decisions concerning curriculum, academic and support personnel, and the promotion and maintenance of research.
This discussion of the changing atmosphere in which we are working is not at all unrelated to the role of a department chair in the 1990s and beyond. In fact, one problem department chairs face is how to establish and maintain a set of values that encourages and rewards professional success in the larger context of our disciplines and yet encourages a sense of commitment to and active support of the day-to-day needs and responsibilities of the department and even of the institution in general. As the pressures for accountability and demonstrated quality increase, so will the need to have most, if not all, faculty members more effectively and more extensively involved in the life of the department than ever before. In an era of job shortages and temporary employment, these issues will become increasingly important, especially as meeting students' needs and requirements becomes a more prominent element of institutional missions and of professional expectations for faculty members. Chairs will increasingly have to struggle with the conflict between the impossibility of filling all staffing requirements with tenured or tenure-track faculty members and the need for a solid commitment to quality from faculty members who may be only temporarily and fractionally associated with the department. How are these non-tenure-track faculty members to be integrated into the departmental culture so as to ensure the quality and coherence of their contribution to programmatic goals? As department chairs, we will likely preside over dramatic changes in the focus and expectations of academic careers and the process is likely to be stressful, if not tumultuous. It already is.
Another major area of change I have hinted at is the emerging role of the chair as manager. The insinuation of managerial culture into collegiate culture is a phenomenon of the past decade or so (Bergquist 66–69). With it have come planning documents and institutional, divisional, and departmental mission statements that specify goals and objectives and ways of evaluating their attainment. Responses to this trend have ranged from indifference to hostility in institutions and units with traditions of faculty independence and of collegial governance that protects that independence.
How are we as department leaders to respond to these pressures, as well as to what seems to be the increasing commodification of higher education—the talk of “products” and “consumers” in the university environment and the use of cost-per-unit ratios and other efficiency measures to inform decisions about the distribution of resources? The concept of “value added” has even been invoked to describe and calibrate whatever it is that happens to students between matriculation and graduation. What more do students know after four or five years, and what more can they do?
Higher education is now seen as an industry, and a high-priced one at that, elaborating raw materials into what should be marketable products. And according to Newsweek , American higher education, “weaned on a rich diet of pubic adoration and an apparently endless supply of customers,…has mushroomed from a $7 billion to a $200 billion (per year) industry since the 1950's” (Hancock and McCormick 59, 61). Since 1990, Newsweek asserts in a companion article, “the costs for going to a private university or college have risen by 95%; in the case of the publics (usually with legislative restraints on increases), it's still 82%.” The article concludes “that parents and students … have never been more obsessed by the market value of a blue-chip college degree. To its critics, American higher education has never seemed more bloated and out of control [read ‘poorly managed’]—and to some, at least, it is a system that is losing sight of both its educational mission and its historically lofty ideals” (Morganthau and Nyyar 54).
The enterprise of outcomes assessment promises to take up lots of our time, and it will entail much more than evaluating teaching through the usual measures of student satisfaction and peer reports and portfolios. We will also need to demonstrate the substance and quality of student learning in evaluating institutional distinction and mission fulfillment. Methods for this kind of assessment are only now being examined and tested, and they will not be the same for every academic discipline. Their development and use will be time-consuming and their implementation is frequently being added to chair responsibilities and faculty workloads, sometimes with little or no adjustment of expectations in other areas, such as research. Many faculty members simply don't want to adjust their priorities, and some in mid-career feet that they have already experienced increased emphasis on research or on teaching, depending on the type of institution they are working at. The definition of faculty workload and the distribution and evaluation of faculty responsibilities will be critical areas of departmental business in the near future, if they are not already. And all these issues will be examined in the cold, hard context of cost in an environment of new student populations and of static or barely increasing levels of funding. 2
So what should department chairs do to prosper in these challenging times? One answer that springs to mind immediately is simply not to continue in the job. This remark is not so facetious as it may seem. The average term for a department chair these days is less than five years—a problem, in my opinion, for developing the kind of leadership that is likely to be needed to meet all these challenges. But increasingly, I think, deans are looking for chairs who can help departments navigate uncharted waters at the turn of the century. Deans are also looking for chairs who can provide definitive leadership regarding university mission and goals and who demonstrate aptitude for and interest in the job. Successful departmental administration will be less and less the work of individuals who quickly step in and step out, much as one might take on an important but temporary committee assignment.
As the going gets rougher and the future becomes more uncertain, those of us in leadership roles must take an expansive rather than a defensive and a purely reactionary stance. One thing I am convinced will help in this regard has to do with the very way we approach our job as chairs. A lot has been written in recent years as the result of research into university culture and structure, and more is being written all the time about various areas of administration, from the department chairship to the presidency. We need continually to seek out and read the best things that are being written. We need to study books such as The Departmental Chair: New Roles, Responsibilities, and Challenges (Seagren, Creswell, and Wheeler) and Managing the Foreign Language Department (Klein and Slick). And there is Ann Bugliani's Chairing the Foreign Language and Literature Department , a recent special issue of ADFL Bulletin . We need to let our colleagues know what we are finding out and to engage them in discussion; we need to seek out their opinions and responses to what is being written about our present and our future. Maybe ADFL needs to review selectively such books and resources in its Bulletin as a way of stimulating discussion.
More globally, we need to search out the best research being done on higher education so that we can learn about ourselves and about what works and what doesn't work in academic settings. I would recommend for starters one of the books I've quoted, Bergquist's The Four Cultures of Academe . Ernest Boyer and Martin Kaplan's Educating for Survival and Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered will provoke national discussions for many years to come, and two recent books stand in provocative contrast to each other—James S. Fairweather's Faculty Work and Public Trust: Restoring the Value of Teaching and Public Service in American Academic Life and Burton R. Clark's Places of Inquiry: Research and Advanced Education in Modem Universities . I would also recommend that chairs consider joining a national higher education organization whose focus goes beyond a particular academic field, such as the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) or the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), and make a habit of reading at least one broadly focused journal such as Change and the AAHE bulletins, or Academe . And, of course, chairs should consider the current and past issues of ADFL Bulletin for more specific insights into the particular concerns of foreign language departments. It may also be useful to drop in on or even participate in one of the many electronic mailing lists and online discussion groups sponsored by these organizations. There are many ways to become engaged at this level of the profession, and a broad perspective will be an important part of departmental leadership during the coming years.
Finally, chairs should try at least once every two years or so to attend a national or regional conference or workshop sponsored by a higher education research organization such as those I have mentioned. These events provide an opportunity to break out of the day-to-day administrative routine and to find out what is being discussed and planned in the broader field of higher education and educational administration. It is also useful to take advantage of similar on-campus opportunities and to participate regularly in the ADFL Summer Seminars. These experiences are almost always eye-opening and exciting, and they produce ideas useful in many particular institutional situations. Chairs cannot expect to embrace all the innovative ideas they discover this way, but they will be able to discuss and if necessary to challenge these ideas in conversations with departmental colleagues and with administrators. We owe it to ourselves and to our colleagues to understand all that we can about change so that we can be effective leaders in these unstable and challenging times. Our own education must not stop; if anything, it ought to expand. And one of our new areas of concentration might as well be ourselves and our professional culture. The more thoroughly we understand our institutional environment, the better we will be able to respond to and deal with the pressures for change both from within and from outside our institutions. Perhaps we will even find ourselves in more active roles as agents of change in our departments and universities. In any event I think that it would be accurate to say that the one constant factor in our professional lives for the next decade or so will be the evaluation and implementation of change in some of the most essential facets of our work as teachers, scholars, and administrators.
The author is Professor of Spanish and Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Science at Miami University, Oxford. This article is based on his presentation at ADFL Summer Seminar West, 6–8 June 1996, in San Diego, California.
1 Bergquist characterizes “developmental culture” as depending on rationality and advocating a “deliberate mode of planning and development that retains faculty authority and a democratic spirit. …” In a developmental culture, faculty members are asked to examine their own assumptions about teaching and learning, students' needs, and so forth, in order that they can better make decisions and plan programs” (93).
2 For a particularly provocative discussion of the fast-emerging faculty work issues and of new approaches to configuring teaching in terms of student and faculty time, see Plater.
Bergquist, William H. The Four Cultures of the Academy . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992.
Boyer, Ernest. Scholarship Reconsidered . Princeton: Carnegie Foundation, 1990.
Boyer, Ernest, and Martin Kaplan. Educating for Survival . New Rochelle: Change Magazine, 1997.
Bugliani, Ann, ed. Chairing the Foreign Language and Literature Department . Special issue of ADFL Bulletin 25.3 (1994): 1–129.
Clark, Burton R. Places of Inquiry: Research and Advanced Education in Modern Universities . Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.
Fairweather, James S. Faculty Work and Public Trust: Restoring the Value of Teaching and Public Service in American Academic Life . Boston: Allyn, 1996.
Hancock, LynNell, and John McCormick. “What to Chop?” Newsweek 29 Apr. 1996: 59–66.
Klein, Richard B., and Sam L. Slick, eds. Managing the Foreign Language Department: A Chairperson's Primer . Valdosta: Southern Conf. on Language Teaching, 1993.
Morganthau, Tom, and Seema Nyyar. “The Scary Cost of College.” Newsweek 29 Apr. 1996: 52–56.
Plater, William M. “Future Work: Faculty Time in the Twenty-First Century.” Change May-June 1995: 22–33.
Seagren, Alan T., John W. Creswell, and Daniel W. Wheeler. The Department Chair: New Roles, Responsibilities, and Challenges . ASHE-ERIC Higher Educ. Report 1. Washington: George Washington U School of Educ. and Human Development, 1993.
Sykes, Charles J. Profscam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education . Washington: Regnery Gateway, 1988.
Tucker, Allan. Chairing the Academic Department: Leadership among Peers . Washington: Amer. Council on Educ., 1981.
© 1997 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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