Heads versus Chairs

What is the difference between department heads and chairs?  Most people are unfamiliar with the distinction and it is only if you have lived under both systems that you even recognize the difference, to say nothing of understanding it.  For the past 12 years I have tried to explain it to myself and friends; I would not want to pretend that I understand all its mysteries even now.  The short answer is that department heads have a great deal more administrative power because they are actually serving the dean, not the faculty.  A department head can, for example, veto the faculty’s decisions about tenure; the head can make appointments without consulting members of the department; the head has sole responsibility for the budget—seems like a great deal more than what department chairs have, but really the system is more complicated. 

Department heads rarely use these powers because they serve at the behest of the dean; they are very rarely people with an independent agenda.  Department heads rarely revamp the department according to their own vision.  The few heads who have tried this around here were summarily fired by the dean—it really was shocking to see.

Chairs work with the assumption that their tenure will last only three years, so they generally do not undertake radical changes because they know that one of their colleague’s will rotate in to replace them.  That is how the argument in favor of the chair system runs, but the reality is also often different.  Department chairs are quite capable of forcing their agenda or resentments onto colleagues.  Reason does not rule in all corners of the university and we have all seen departments with rotating chairs who bash each other. 

When this bashing occurs, in either system, it rarely directly impacts the senior colleagues; usually it is the grad students or junior faculty who become the surrogate targets in a dysfunctional department.

Department heads because they serve under the dean and because they have so much control tend to be mild-mannered administrators, more interested in balance and procedure than in pushing a big vision for their departments. –this is the point in my essay where I start sounding like an eighteenth-century German intellectual discussing monarchy as a form of government—I hereby swear that my department head is an eminently reasonable fellow, and that I am only discussing the system.

The trickiest problems arise when department heads use their bureaucratic power to slowly and subtly favor or disfavor someone.  We have seen here at Penn State how very important the small administrative decisions can become in pushing or covering up behavior.  So the most dangerous department heads are those who use procedures to consistently undermine someone, say an assistant professor working on a book.  By a string of little decisions that only occasionally rise to the level of injustice, a department head can eliminate a colleague without ever having to use the veto power at his disposal.

Within a system of department heads, the only absolute power is the dean and the wise head acknowledges this reality.  With a department chair, decision making power is distributed more diffusely among the faculty.  An effective chair needs to build consensus among colleagues, in order to develop a broadly agreed-upon policy.  This requires great skills as a democratic politician, and admittedly most professors are not Bill Clinton, and so department chairs usually do not undertake sweeping programs. They advance the general consensus which sometimes can look a lot like stasis;  a really successful chair has get everyone motivated on the basis of an intellectual agenda that appeals to the scholarly interests of the faculty.

Digital Lounge

Flew last week to Madison for a gathering of administrators in Big-Ten German departments, where, aside from exchanging professional information and pleasantries, I made two realizations.  Both were surprises in their own way.  The first came about by accident—as I was flying the many legs from my university to Madison, I happened to sit at an airport gate next to three graduate students on their way to Madison for a conference called NAVSA.  I had never heard of this organization; I could not even spell it, but they were talking loudly in this airport lounge about their papers and who all they were going to see.  Most importantly they were complaining about what it was like to be a graduate student, and since I never get hear graduate students speaking that way anymore, I decided to eavesdrop.  This meant simply sitting there with a zombie look on my face, because these three women were speaking so loudly that the whole lounge was taking in what they were saying.  I simply pretended to be a burnt out, middle aged, pudgy businessman staring blankly off into space—a convincing disguise, and one I could naturally pull off.

            So what did these three young graduate students reveal—well, first that graduate students complain about pretty much the same things we all did.  Dissertation chapters, finishing conference papers, should I go to this other conference, getting a job—nothing surprising there.  But then the conversation took a turn, and these three women started unburdening their souls about---digital humanities.

            What shocked me the most, was that they spoke about digital humanities without the slightest worry about defining what the heck was.  Tenured professors hem and haw as if no one really knows what digital humanities is, and then they all laugh out loud together, nervously.  These graduate students talked about it as if it were just their TA assignment.  Two of them had paying jobs in digital humanities.  One of them apparently had landed some nice post-doc in the field, another was working in some help desk capacity. She complained at length and in detail, as only a grad student can, about clueless, old professors who call her help desk with the simplest problems, one after the other, asking the same stuff—and all she wants to do is yell at them “Read the FAQs page!”  This made me cringe appropriately.  But she continued, “They need someone to hold their hands.  Can’t they read.  I mean they are trained in reading and critical thinking. Can’t they read the help page and figure it out for themselves.  I have to answer the same questions over and over again. I want to shout at them, but I don’t.”  Well in fact, she had just done that, because as I slowly turned to look up, I noticed that the airport lounge was filled with several obvious academics, all of whom had assumed the same blasé attitude while listening in.

            What was most obvious from their continued dialogue was that they all studied software programs as if they were foreign languages.  They knew how to build websites, run complex searches through corpuses of data, and generally treated the entire field of website design as just another part of writing a PhD thesis.  Digital humanities was nothing more than another self-evident part of their training, one that came with the usual institutional complexities.  So while I am a hopeless old professor who has taken seminars on web site design, but who has a better chance in holding a lecture in Latin than posting his own page, the lesson is that graduate students will learn and carry out these tasks directly because everyone they know is doing the same thing.