Heads Of Departments Play A Critical Role In Academic Life

The position of academic department head is one of the most critical in a university, standing as it does between the faculty and upper-level administrators. It's a difficult and time-consuming job, and perhaps more challenging in the life sciences than in other academic departments. Faculty and administrators agree that a good department head can significantly enhance academic life for both students and faculty, while an incompetent one can make life miserable for everyone. CALL FOR INPUT: Florida Institute of Technology's Gary Wells stresses the importance of discussions with faculty when making department decisions. "When you look at the whole infrastructure of the university, the most important administrator is the department head," argues Gary N. Wells, professor and head of the department of biological sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. "We're at the operations level. We have a joke around here: Whenever a vice president has a new idea, a department head's going to have extra work." Many, although certainly not all, departments make a terminological distinction between a department head and a department chairperson. A head tends to have a great deal of central authority, while more democratic departments tend to elect a chairperson. "As a department head . . . I don't ever have to take a vote," explains Wells. "If I want to do it, I can do it. If I don't want to do it, I don't have to do it. At least in my case I think it makes for a much stronger department." LONGEVITY ISSUES: Tennessee's John Conway notes that long-term plans for a department can suffer without stable leadership. John B. Conway, professor and head of the department of mathematics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, defines the terms similarly in his book On Being a Department Head: A Personal View (Providence, R.I., American Mathematical Society, 1996). However, he writes that "the fundamental rule" is, "the head who acts more like a chair and the chair who acts more like a head will be more successful than one who tries to live in a pure state." Indeed, Wells notes, "I can say that I have complete autonomy, but I do not. It's best that I go along most of the times with what the department wants. And it's not wise at all to do things without bringing them up for full discussion with the faculty." Working in a department with a malevolent or incompetent head can be hellish, says one researcher, speaking on condition of anonymity. Of one such head this researcher recalls, "He was incredibly Byzantine and far removed from people in the department. He made emphatic personal decisions and didn't always communicate them to the people who needed to know. When a decision had to be made, he snapped to judgment. He didn't get input from anyone else. He was inflexible. . . . There was the pyramid: There is the professor, and everybody is close to nonpersons. He actively promoted competition within the department. This led to some fairly unpleasant situations, including some industrial sabotage [such as unplugged freezers and stolen equipment], and that was accepted by him and was not discouraged." Additionally, this department head insisted that his name be placed on every paper that emerged from the department. He seemed to regard the department as a vehicle for his personal aggrandizement, recalls the anonymous researcher, who left shortly before the head retired. "Too great a degree of self-interest could be something which could lead to failures in a department head," agrees Martin H. Flax, who recently retired after 27 years as chairman of the department of pathology at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston. "It's important for the people in the department to feel that you aren't using them." Carol Shoshkes Reiss, a professor of biology at New York University (NYU), says that a good department head must have certain characteristics: "First of all, the ability to analyze what the issues are [and] to be able to make decisions based on the facts. To involve members of the department in decision-making, or at least give them the appearance of being involved. And being consistent in the application of decisions once they've been made." Reiss is particularly happy with the current chairman of NYU's department of biology, Philip Furmanski. "He cuts to the chase. He doesn't get bogged down in nonsense. He's able to analyze what the problems are and how to solve those problems. The turnaround time for almost anything going across his desk is short, so that things don't get lost. The only defect-if you can call it a defect-that I see is that he doesn't delegate that much. He does it all by himself." The duties of a department head are complex, and range from the mundane, such as making sure that someone is keeping paper in the photocopy machine, to the sublime, such as making critical decisions on faculty recruitment, tenure, and promotion. MORE TRAINING: Department heads are provided with "very little support for the range of things we expect them to do," states Illinois' C.K. Gunsalus. Department heads in the life sciences have special challenges. "They have a layer of regulatory compliance and technology transfer interests that is not as widely shared as promotion and tenure or recruitment and retention," explains C.K. Gunsalus, associate provost at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. "There's probably no other department on our campus that would have the same type of [paperwork] because as a life-science department we have the full range of things: animals, plants, radiation, controlled substances, trapping licenses, pesticide licenses," explains Sandra D. Michael, professor and chairwoman of the department of biological sciences at Binghamton University (State University of New York). On top of that, "recruitment and retention issues have a special twist for people in the life sciences because of the incredible start-up costs" involved in setting up a new laboratory, notes Gunsalus. In his book, Conway writes that it is through recruiting that a head really makes his or her mark. A recruitment decision can affect the department for 30 years or more. On the other hand, while recruiting may be significant, it's not necessarily difficult. "There are so many great people out there looking for a job, all you have to do is advertise a job and go through a process of interviewing them and bringing them in, and any idiot can do that," comments Wells. "Recruiting faculty is one of the easiest jobs you have. "The professional development of the faculty is what I would like to think is the most important job," he continues, "but in actuality it's probably budget management. You get a fixed amount of money, and you have to do absolutely the most with it." One of the department head's most difficult jobs is managing his or her time. Conway says he spends 25 to 30 hours a week on his administrative duties. Michael spends at least 60 percent of a 55- to 60-hour week chairing the department. Wells says it takes 95 percent of his time. "It's very difficult to be a department chair, to teach, and to try to operate a fully functioning lab with a federal grant," laments Michael. "Something has to give, and what gives is personal time. There's an academic joke that applies equally well to a department chair, and that is, 'If you can't get research done in the 24 hours we give you, do it on your own time.'" "I spent more and more time dealing with everybody s problems, and less and less time with my graduate students," Wells recalls of his first years as head. "I found myself not being able to spend day-to-day time that was necessary to keep up with the literature. And over about four years I found myself behind in the literature, behind in keeping track of my graduate students, and relying more and more on colleagues to look after them, and it wasn't fair to anybody. So, unfortunately, I've had to let my research lab go fallow." Fortunately, there are some compensations. A faculty member usually gets at least a modest raise when assuming the position as department head, although in his book Conway cautions that too big a raise may come at the cost of faculty resentment. On the other hand, writes Conway, the faculty is likely to feel that it has gotten its money's worth if the head renders "good service for the dollar." Different departments set different terms of office for their heads. Some heads serve indefinite terms, some serve for five-year renewable terms, and in some departments the position rotates among the faculty every two or three years. "I think the advantage of long tenure is that it . . . encourages further stability on the part of people in the department," notes Flax. However, "the nuisance of getting rid of such a person, I suspect, is not very insignificant. So I think it makes some sense to have a finite duration and then the opportunity to be renewed as many times as it would seem reasonable." "I think a longer than three-year period-maybe five years with a renewable term-is better than having someone who's in there for life," maintains Reiss. "If they're really effective and successful, they're going to be reappointed after five years. And if they're burnt out and they've burnt bridges, after five years new blood needs to come in." Flax notes another advantage to the department of bringing in new blood: "When a new chair comes in, they can negotiate some new facilities, perhaps some new staff members, if they have some ideas about what direction they might want to go." A department head who has served for many years will not enjoy this sort of honeymoon period, when the university administration is more inclined to be forthcoming with funds. But it's possible to bring in new blood too often. "[A term of] three years or less just seems to me to preclude your making long-term plans," observes Conway. "Most things you try to do you don't see the results of for quite a while. It just takes time to get things implemented, and if you leave too soon it's not inconceivable to me that whatever nice plans you put into motion might all of a sudden stop being pushed along and might never come to fruition." Rotation schemes may be particularly problematic. "You could get really ineffective people in there, and it might be hard to pick up the pieces afterward," remarks Reiss. "I know many people who are barely competent to run their own laboratories, let alone run a department." "These rotating heads with short terms are almost guaranteed to maintain the status quo," adds Conway. Photo: Adam Seligman MAINTAINING STATUS QUO: Recently appointed chairman Daniel Lynch has no desire to make major changes in the biology department at Williams College. But when things are going well, there's an advantage to maintaining the status quo. Daniel V. Lynch, recently appointed chairman of the department of biology at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., jokes that the reason he took the job is that "I got the short straw." He plans to serve for only two or three years, and has no great desire to make major changes. "The department right now is doing very well in terms of its position in the college. We've had a big growth in enrollment. . . . We have a lot of new faculty that are good and energetic and have good research programs going. My hopes right now are that we can maintain this level of interest and activity and keep riding this wave as long as we can." As to how long one should remain a department head, given an indefinite term, mathematician Conway derived a somewhat facetious formula. "A good friend of mine who had been a department head told me that you acquire an enemy a year. And I thought that was funny until I sat back and I started counting, and I found it was correct!" From this he reasoned that one could calculate the maximum length of one's term by taking the total number of faculty members in the department and dividing by three. "If more than a third of the faculty consider themselves enemies or are considered by you as your enemy," writes Conway, "it's probably time to return to the ranks." Few universities provide formal training for department heads, and most scientists learn the job on the job or by observation. "Department heads are the front line for almost everything the university does, and yet we provide them very little support for the range of things we expect them to do, most of which they have no training or background for," Gunsalus notes. In response to such concerns, her institution established a monthly seminar series for department heads as well as a two-day retreat and orientation session for new heads. Gunsalus coordinates both programs. The orientation session focuses on "how to know if you have a problem you need help for, and also who the resources are on campus," Gunsalus explains. "We make sure we do introductions, and they get to see the faces of people they'll need to call for help in various situations. We don't do, 'subparagraph 3, line 18, clause 4 of the manual.' What we do is we say, 'Here are the major resources, here are the point people for the problems that might arise, here is the big picture about your role in the university.' We [also] do a session on taking care of yourself, which is thinking about maintaining a professional and personal life amidst the demands that can eat you up." For information on obtaining On Being a Department Head: A Personal View by John B. Conway, contact the American Mathematical Society at P.O. Box 6248, Providence, R.I. 02904-6248; (800) 321-4267. Fax: (401) 331-3842. E-mail: cust-serv@ams.org. The well-attended monthly seminar series, to which 120 deans, department heads, and administrators are invited, includes such topics as managing staff employees, dealing with difficult people, and the legal issues that affect department heads. "Assembling a promotion and tenure dossier is one of the primary and very heavy obligations of a unit head, and we routinely get one of our largest turnouts for that seminar," Gunsalus remarks. Few department heads in search of training go to the lengths that Martin Flax did. In 1978, after being on the job at Tufts for eight years, Flax took a year off to accept a Sloan Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned an MBA. "Pathology is . . . a multimillion-dollar business," he explains, "and I don't think anyone in their right mind would consider having as a leader of such a business someone who has no business skills. . . . There's sort of a mystique about things like finance and other management areas, but there's nothing mysterious about it once you understand it. How to read a balance sheet, how to do finance, those things became much more simple to me and I could really relate very comfortably to the administrators who deal with these subjects. So they gave me more respect as a consequence of that." "I think the most important thing is that there's not one right way to do this," Gunsalus concludes. "There are as many ways to succeed in being a department head as there are personal styles." Robert Finn, a freelance science writer based in Long Beach, Calif., can be reached online at finn@nasw.org.

Heads Of Departments Play A Critical Role In Academic Life

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