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.

All Stick, No Carrot--How to Judge Scholarship

All stick and no carrot characterizes a common administrative approach to improving the quality of academic programs at state universities. 

There are several problems with the punitive approach to fostering quality scholarship and teaching: the first involves the long term effectiveness of bullying people to work harder—as soon as the pressure is off, they start to relax.  Threats work only as long as they are applied.  Far more effective motivations are ambition, desire and a competitive urge.  Punitive measures dull these forms of inspiration by discouraging independent thinking.

A second problem with the unwavering and strict application of narrow standards is that all shades of nuance are lost in the process of pressing all scholars into the same mold.  For example, the demand that assistant professors publish in flagship journals ignores the often complex relations within academic disciplines.  Cutting edge research is often not published in the mainstream journals.  If you have an assistant professor engaged in truly innovative research, requiring them to publish in flagship journals functions as a brake on their thinking. 

Mainstream journals tend to be quite conservative; they are often the last journals to adopt new ideas, rather than the first.  Institutions are certainly capable of recognizing this tendency.  At the elite coastal universities, it is often taken as a sign of mediocrity, if a scholar publishes in a “flagship” journal. 

Before coming to my current position at a state university, I was taught that you wanted to avoid these journals at all costs because by publishing in them, you showed everyone that you could not do better and that you really had nothing new to say. 

State universities in the middle of the US often look resentfully at Ivy League expectations as just so much snobbery, while the coastal elite see state universities’ mainstream tendencies as sign of plodding backwardness.  What both sides overlook, of course, are the insecurities behind both standards. 

State universities tend to overemphasize bureaucratic standards and procedures because they fundamentally do not have the confidence required decide what constitutes “quality” scholarship.  Is an article really innovative?  State university administrators fundamentally do not trust their faculty to judge; instead they want indicators, such as the ranking of the journal in which an article appears. 

Ivy League universities on the other hand live for the marginal difference between institutions.  They want to always demonstrate that they are better than other institutions, not just their peers, but more importantly they want to keep a long distance between themselves and all other universities in the world.  Thus, they will emphasize innovation over mainstream consensus and conformity. 

The trouble with this approach is that often an argument that seems radically new has only a short lifespan and once a trendy line of reasoning has passed, little remains of the argument and the scholar who made it.  Thus the double insecurity of the Ivy League department: is this young scholar truly innovative and will he/she continue to innovate in the long run. 

Ivy League academics want to know fundamentally whether someone is really and truly brilliant, the indicators that state universities require ultimately matter little in elite departments, in fact, those indicators tend to operate negatively—the more you publish in mainstream journals, the less clever you are.

Peer-reviewed

The reliance on strict rules to evaluate the intellectual quality of academic publications is by no means a unique American phenomenon. With the integration of university degrees across the European Union, professors and researchers are increasingly evaluated in terms of well-defined scales that rate the quality of anything put into print. In Belgium, for example, academic publications are grouped broadly into letter categories (A, B, C) with subdivisions within each.

The first purpose for this standardization is to rate professors within a university, and then, secondly, to compare regional and national systems to each other.

Thus a web site urging students to attend French-speaking universities in Belgium will compare the total number of publications in peer-reviewed journals within the Walloon system to other European Union areas.

Here is an example of the kind of claim used to compare one European region to another:

“Various international surveys show that Belgium is one of the countries that publishes most and whose publications are among the most often cited, with regard to its number of inhabitants and to its gross domestic product. This international visibility is confirmed by numerous publications in renowned scientific journals. In 2003, the European Commission published its “Third Report on science and technology indicators 2003”. This report assesses the quality of publications in the major universities of the EU countries and rates those of Belgian researchers highly.”

http://www.studyinbelgium.be/start.php?lang=en&rub=3

The number of peer-reviewed publications is then compared to the per capita ration of university trained researchers within a regional economy. So if Belgium has a higher density of researchers within the general population, this is interpreted as an indication that the Belgian economy supports growth through universities. The next statistic linked to peer-reviewed publications and density of researchers is the number of new companies started in a region. The more spin-offs and start-ups, the better the integration between universities and the economy must be, for new technology firms are often derived from university research. Hence the famous research belts around universities specialized in technological research.

The problem arises when these indicators are used in a reverse manner so that they become rules for hiring and firing faculty, for structuring universities, for evaluating students. These indicators may show that a university is operating successfully, but they may not at all be the reason for its success. Requiring that researchers publish in peer-reviewed journals is in a sense pushing the indicator, i.e., trying to artificially increase the numbers that once were a neutral sign of educational accomplishment. If researchers used to publish only half their articles in peer-reviewed journals, and the rest as book chapters, conference proceedings, and editorial-board journals, they will not have necessarily increased their intellectual productivity by now publishing 75% of their work in peer-reviewed journals. They may well be accomplishing as much as they did before, they are just changing the media they use to publish.

Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that peer-review actually produces innovative research. In fact one could argue it produces more mainstream conclusions that are less likely to disturb existing norms. The really radical approach to a research question may well appear in a small journal catering to a select group of readers, rather than in the official institutional journal.

Quality indicators run the risk of stifling exactly that which they are measuring when they become mandatory rules, for they tend to produce conformity

So to return to the Belgian example above, Belgium has a high rate of highly rated, peer-review publications, which is used to claim that Belgium has a better university system than other parts of Europe. However, the same statistic is also an indication that Belgium is much stricter in policing its academics and that it more aggressively enforces rules requiring faculty to publish in peer-reviewed journals.

While there is no question that Belgium has excellent universities, and we should all be so privileged as to teach there, the question remains whether the Belgian universities are truly better than those in other regions, where a faculty member’s curriculum vitae might not be so strictly evaluated. Is it possible that British or Dutch universities are also excellent, they just don’t worry as much about indicators as much as the Belgians do?

At every level of the university system, from the classroom to the EU-wide comparison, a grading system has to distinguish between those students who follow instructions carefully and those who have really smart ideas. Relying on indicators and then enforcing them is very much like having homework written out neatly and turned in on time –this is very important, to be sure. Still, the indicators to the extent that they are mandatory are likely to become indictors of how well the administrative apparatus operates, rather than signs that the ideas on the page are clever.

Given that as teachers and administrators we are all interested in having students learn more than punctuality and proper form, we should be clear that measuring indicators does not foster creative intelligence, it might just do the opposite.

Assisting Asssitants

The job market has been such that universities have, for some time now gotten, a much higher quality pool of incoming faculty than would have been the case twenty years ago. We have had time to watched some of these people go through the acclimatization process of leaving their high-grade graduate programs to settle into mainstream universities.

We all know that the decisions about who gets to teach at primo universities and who ends up somewhere else are not so finely tuned. There are a fair number of high quality, brand new scholars who land at universities that really are not used to having such hot house flowers on their faculty. What becomes of these delicate researchers and writers in the tussle of tenure and administrative review? What becomes of their great promise? Why do some cruise on to publish lots of fine books and articles, while others stick to their one track?

University administrations would love to know how to separate the long term producers from those who settle into a comfortable routine after tenure. I am definitely not here to conjure some answer to this perennial question. There are lots of people out there making such judgments. Universities have an enormous array of reviews and evaluations to pick the wheat from the chafe.

And while the pressure of a deadline has a wonderful effect concentrating the mind on finishing a manuscript, more needs to said about how the review process creates a conformity that undermines its own goal of fostering faculty productivity.

Review processes very often insist that faculty publish in one kind of journal rather than another. For example, there is the concept of a mainstream flag ship journal, one that represents the best scholarship in a given field. For some universities, it is important that their faculty demonstrate their scholarly prowess by publishing in these journals. At other universities, publishing in mainstream journals is a sign of mediocrity, that a scholar is not really cutting edge.

But the rule varies from one discipline to another, from one scholar to another. The problem is when university administrations make broad rules in favor of one over the other, without considering the character of each contribution, i.e. when the quality of an article is judged by the journal in which appears. For young faculty this problem is heightened because very often they went to a graduate school where one rule applied and then they end up teaching at a university where the opposite rule governs tenure decisions.

Add to this-- the general unwillingness of bureaucracies to allow for flexibility. Every educational institution I have ever attended has governed its internal decisions with the presumption that its rules are the only true and correct ones. There is a long list of German departments in this country who all believe they are the best. The University of Michigan has no trouble thumbing its nose at the University of Chicago. And while UC Riverside may understand that it is not in the same league as Princeton, it will insist that its junior faculty follow the California state conventions for demonstrating scholarly excellence, never mind what they told you back east.

I am pulling these examples out of thin air, there are no hidden stories behind them, I am not thinking of anyone in particularly as I write this summary of 20 years experience. I may be totally unfair to the individual institutions but the tendency is common enough,

Still, I have heard department heads of big, Midwestern universities declare that they would never let their best students apply to an Ivy League graduate program, because “they don’t have a comprehensive curriculum there.” Similarly, I have seen Ivy League professors quietly pass over State university PhDs because they don’t come from "truly innovative programs."

OK, so we all know academia is full of picky jealousy.

The trouble arises for junior faculty who have not yet mastered the different standards. And the real problem is that in the long run, the pressure to switch from one standard of scholarship turns clever thinkers into conformists. If you were trained to find the hottest new trend in art coming out of Europe, you are going to have a hard time publishing in a flagship journal. Likewise, if you think like a social scientist about journals, you French colleagues may smile in disbelief.

While the Ivy League can readily afford to toss away excellent scholars, because there is always another wave of brilliance rolling in, other universities might pause to consider the varieties of scholarly accomplishment, to bend a little more.

Writing Excess

The curse of minimalism and the free market is that so very often students deliver their homework just in time with only the most basic answers. They often write just what an assignment requires, rather than going beyond the bare bones expectations to show what additional knowledge they have. There are many reasons for this minimalist habit. and yes, of course, we can’t forget sloth and laziness. There are a great number of tasks I finish too late and just barely, but there is also a general pervasive cultural sense nowadays that when it comes to intellectual questions—too much is something to avoid. Write clearly about one idea—a simplicity that makes simple. My professor in grad school, Sander Gilman, would often point out that if you set a minimum, it quickly becomes the maximum. If you lay out a basic administrative standard, most people will perform only up to that requirement, rather than exceeding it.

When writing, why give just one explanation, when you can come up with eight?

There is a point where the drive for efficiency turns into laziness, where having completed only what is required, does not result in more high quality work in other subjects, but instead just a great empty lull.

In a different cultural moment, in a different historical period, we would strive to overwhelm a question with answers. We would layer one possible explanation on top of another, give theories that blend into each other, cite book after book rather than just the one canonical work that everyone has read. The love of the esoteric, the curiosity to explore trivial and unknown subjects has been wiped out by the demand that intellectuals produce efficiently and often.

Michel Foucault once called his relentless research into the buried manuscripts, documents, Berichte and diaries of sexuality and madness a “feverish laziness.”—an ironic phrase for such a prolific scholar. His style of baroque distraction requires loads of free research time, patience, a personal secretary (he had one), extra years where no major books appear, and a general sense that the minimal answer is unsatisfactory. It also includes an academic will to power to smother a research question, to upend the familiar by shoving forgotten and irrelevant information to the fore. It means giving far more information than anyone ever expected.

So this is the paradox: ordinary students can give back the answer on the test that comes from the textbook, extra ordinary students write much more, but to do so they have to get lost in other books--i.e. waste time doing more than the class requires. Similarly, regular academics can crank out articles for the c.v., but let's have more lunatics who waste their time reading irrelevant tomes.

Tenure improves teaching, for those who have it

In reading this very eloquent account of how tenure helps professors become better, more expansive teachers http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2010/08/tenure-and-teaching.html

I was struck with how few faculty actually have the opportunities described in this piece.

Tenure allows teachers, first of all, to read far beyond their specialization and to thereby develop complex connections between historical periods and texts. Only with tenure does it feel safe to devote the long stretches of time it takes to read and understand Hegel or Descartes in detail. When you are struggling to justify yourself every other semester to the administrative apparatus, you would never dare take up the challenge of a new field. I could never have explored Renaissance architecture before having tenure. Only when you believe you have the time, can you stop and think.

But this ability to calmly ponder is become more and more an exclusive luxury. Far too many colleagues are worried about their next review to undertake a new research project that might not generate an article for a year or three. Even with tenure, I constantly feel the pressure of "What have you done lately?" It is far more oppressive for the rest of academia than it is for us senior fellows. You need quite a thick skin, or the protective haze of professorial forgetfulness, to shield yourself from the many intrusions on your research.

That having been said, check out the "I cite" link above.