The first public speech of the new Universities Australia (UA) chair Carolyn Evans called on taxpayers to chip in $770 million a year to restructure university course fees.
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Tag: chair
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UA chair seeks $770m for course fee cuts – Campus Review
Professor Carolyn Evans. Picture: Peter Wallis
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Being Chair at a Time of Existential Challenge (opinion)
The past few years have brought a seemingly endless series of existential challenges for colleges and their leaders. Although many of the most recent challenges have been initiated by decision-makers in the nation’s capital, a sense of crisis on college campuses is nothing new. For any number of social, political and economic reasons, leadership in the world of higher education has been hard for some time, and it will probably keep getting harder.
Navigating external crises is especially challenging for midlevel campus leaders, such as department chairs and center directors. Too few of these individuals receive effective leadership training or support. And in moments of crisis, higher education’s collective failure to invest in developing strong leaders is on full display. Beyond the lack of role preparation, the very ambiguity at the heart of midlevel leadership—sandwiched between senior leaders and front-line faculty and students—makes it an inherently tough place to be.
On so many college campuses, department chair service carries limited power, authority, time and resources. As we prepare to begin a new academic year, chairs and directors may already feel exhausted or overwhelmed. In the paragraphs that follow, we offer a few general principles that may help department chairs figure out how to use their often overlooked and undercelebrated positions to support the collective well-being of their faculty, staff and students in what will most certainly be a challenging year ahead.
Accept what you cannot do (legally, morally, procedurally). Serving as a director or chair makes you a campus leader, whether or not you tend to describe yourself in those terms. And as a leader, you bear responsibility for acting in accordance with institutional policies and also for exercising good judgment in your actions and speech.
Chairs should not offer blanket assurances of safety to individuals or guarantees of legal counsel, for example. Instead, the better move might be to connect faculty and staff with identified resources and to let the experts employ their expertise. In moments of budget austerity, midlevel leaders should exercise caution in pledging financial support or informal guarantees of continued employment.
Chairs are empowered to use their full rights as private citizens—to protest, author op-eds and contact their elected representatives—but they should take care not to blur the lines between their personal activism and their official duties and position. You chair a department that includes diverse individuals who likely think and vote differently from one another. And right now, all of them need your full support for both routine and more substantive university matters. Anticipate that faculty, staff and students may look to you to set the ground rules so that all feel welcome, valued and safe in a polarized and scary world.
Exercise creative problem-solving within your domain. In a highly charged moment, chairs should use all the tools in their arsenal, strategically employing action and inaction.
Act by supporting small moments of connection, such as bringing in some baked goods or inviting a colleague who seems particularly overwhelmed to join you on a walk and talk across campus. If a faculty member in your department has lost the support of a federal grant, keep in mind that their entire research program may be in crisis. And if such a colleague is approaching a review for tenure or promotion, you may want to initiate a timely conversation about recalibrating expectations around scholarly productivity.
As for inaction, a crisis is an opportune moment to do no more than is absolutely necessary. Off-campus turmoil demands energy and attention. Do your best to help the department separate things that must be done now from the things that can wait. This may not be the time to request funds for an external speaker. Delay scheduling a faculty retreat to overhaul the long-overdue revision of the capstone class. Use the opening faculty meeting of the year to set some scaled-back, modest goals and enlist your colleagues in a pledge to keep the shared to-do list lean. (We suspect that’ll be an easy sell.)
Prioritize stability management. Ashley Goodall has argued that change, even necessary change, tends to disrupt our ability to find belonging, autonomy and meaning in our professional lives. Goodall offers the term “stability management” to describe what leaders can do for their colleagues on a daily basis, especially when everything is in flux.
Stability management begins by recognizing what works and needs to remain constant, focusing above all on preserving those things. Many faculty members may find comfort in the ordinary work of constructing class schedules, ordering textbooks, applying for travel funds, conducting faculty searches and the like. For some of your colleagues, business as usual may convey the implicit assurance that university life marches ever forward. This doesn’t mean that you should ignore or downplay the severity of a crisis; it just means that you can try to keep it in perspective.
Rituals and relationships also provide stability. If your department has a tradition of festive gatherings to mark the beginning of the academic year, now is the time to approach such gatherings with all the joy you can muster. And if your department is lacking in joyful traditions, well, that might be an opportunity for meaningful and much-needed change.
Defer to campus experts. During the pandemic, campuses mobilized their public health resources in highly visible ways, such as appointing campus physicians and researchers to policymaking task forces. Recent executive orders and policy mandates from the federal government have forced colleges to draw on a new set of experts, including international support personnel, grant managers, lawyers and financial aid counselors.
Rather than chairing high-profile committees, many of these trained professionals may work with impacted individuals in their specific, and often highly technical, unique situations. Many of these sensitive conversations are best conducted away from the limelight.
In other words, if you don’t see these efforts happening in public, extend the charitable assumption that campus resources are being mobilized to support those in need in the ways that make the most sense.
Embrace—don’t fight—the messy in-betweenness of being a department chair. The true art of midlevel leadership hinges on accepting its inherent dualities, limitations and freedoms. Department chairs may not be able to issue broad decrees, but they wield considerable influence over climate and tone. Not all problems are theirs to solve, but they can always offer sympathy and empathy. Instead of issuing top-down edicts, they can provide time and space for others to respectfully think together about hard topics.
In fraught moments, higher ed needs midlevel leaders to lean into their in-betweenness—to serve as translators, mediators and conduits between what on some campuses are warring factions. Send messages up the chain by highlighting the concerns of the most vulnerable members of the department, in case these individuals aren’t already receiving help. Make a point to show up at campus town halls and carefully read emails from central administration so you can keep your faculty informed. When you can, de-escalate hostile exchanges, quash baseless rumors and ensure no one feels overlooked or left out.
Commit to the beauty of your discipline. One of the hardest parts of leading in a crisis is not just navigating external pressures, but withstanding the slow erosion of your own spirit, which can quietly wear down even the most resilient leader. You can’t show up as the best version of your chair self to serve others if you have fallen into despair.
The recent attacks on colleges and universities have cut many of us to the core. There is no point in pretending that most of the work that happens in the academy will solve climate change, save American democracy or right centuries of injustice. Whatever benefits accrue to the world out there as a result of your teaching and scholarship will probably be indirect and difficult to measure.
Nonetheless, an academic leader can gain strength by reflecting on the ways in which their chosen discipline contributes, however indirectly, to the common good. The grunt work you do as department chair also makes it possible for students and faculty to deepen, enrich and expand their understanding of the world. Your work makes it possible for them to come ever closer to fulfilling their dreams.
Their work has meaning and value because, among other things, it embodies curiosity and an openness to new ideas. Your work may sometimes feel like an exercise in keeping the trains running on time, but you might remind yourself that, as long as the academy stays true to its core principles, the trains are heading in a worthwhile direction.
As a new academic year approaches, midlevel leaders are uniquely positioned to be a source of information, prudence, levity, focus and reassurance for the faculty, staff and students in their immediate spheres of influence. There’s plenty that we cannot begin to predict about the year to come, but we are confident that this is a year when students, faculty and staff will look to their most proximate leaders for guidance on how to keep moving forward.
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How to Ensure You’ll Never Be a Chair Again (opinion/humor)
“First rule of leadership: Everything is your fault.”
–from A Bug’s Life
Congratulations! You have been elected or appointed or duped into serving as department chair, the role that everyone says is the hardest job on campus. Maybe that’s what attracted you to the position—you enjoy working days, nights and weekends on thorny issues that rarely have anything to do with creativity, inspiration or intellectualism. Perhaps you dreamed of having a positive impact on mentoring young faculty or garnering more respect and resources for your department from the upper administration.
If you’ve spent more than a month on the job, your grandiose vision of being admired and maybe even beloved by the faculty, staff and students will have crashed on the jagged shores of “What have you done for me today?” reality. It’s time for Plan B. We provide a list of proven techniques to ensure you will never be asked to serve as chair again.
Tip #1: Spend the bulk of your time on strategic planning.
Strategic plans are the most important work you will do as chair; we all know these documents are constantly referred to. I have mine on laminated cards that I hand out to prospective donors and students and frequently read during coffee breaks.
When writing these documents, create “word salads”— the more pseudo-intellectual the better. Consistent sprinkling of terms like “revolutionary,” “intellectual” and “equity” will strengthen the document. Violate George Orwell’s writing rules by always using a long word where a short one will do and using jargon in place of everyday English equivalents (e.g., “With courageous attention to principles of equity and fairness, we will innovatively co-create a multi-trans-disciplinary minor that relentlessly centers student success while concurrently providing a revenue stream to be utilized for upgrading the office furniture.”)
Form subcommittees to do this work and make sure they meet over the summer—particularly if your faculty are on nine-month appointments. Task subcommittee members with creating these documents from scratch. Don’t spend time locating prior versions or drafting a potential plan as a starting point.
Tell the subcommittees you are happy to meet with them when they need your input. Then decline every invitation to do so. Having them guess what you want as a final product will create lively conversation and allow them to bond over your obtuse directions.
Tip #2: Run faculty meetings from hell.
Use faculty meetings as an opportunity to read out newsy updates that could easily have been emailed. Or, even better, email each of these items individually AND read them out loud in faculty meetings. Remember that your faculty are not busy with their own research, teaching and service.
When sensitive issues are on the agenda, make your position crystal clear and stress its superiority to any other strategy before calling for a vote. Then respond to questions from faculty according to how hard they’ve worked to curry favor with you. The faculty will soon learn that the meetings go much more smoothly without the distraction of other viewpoints or lively debate.
Lastly, have faculty vote publicly on these decisions by simply raising their hands. Pre-tenure faculty will feel just as comfortable as full professors in sharing their votes. Similar comfort levels will be felt by those of differing races/ethnicities, cultural backgrounds and genders. If you as chair feel that a decision is straightforward, so will they.
Tip #3: Avoid meeting with faculty to review their research trajectory.
An annual report from each faculty member will provide more than enough information, saving you time from meeting with each of your faculty members in person. Pre-tenure faculty who are heading off in multiple, diverse directions to obtain funding, or who are giving up on grants after a first rejection, should face the consequences they deserve. We’ve all suffered through that time period, and so should they.
In that spirit, avoid arranging for and supporting mentoring teams for new faculty. Or, if you have already assigned a new faculty member their mentor, assume that the pair is meeting regularly. New faculty will always feel comfortable reaching out to their busy, senior mentors whenever they have questions.
Tip #4: Be an expert in everything.
Departments are complex organizations and chairing them involves overseeing a swarm of areas including finances/budget, human resources, curriculum, teaching assignments, graduate student issues, computing support, etc. Wear as many hats as possible and be the expert on all of these topics. Do not delegate to staff, graduate program directors or associate chairs who may have expertise in these areas.
Tip #5: Assign faculty as much service as possible.
Faculty members are always trying to get away with less work—therefore, make a one-size-fits-all rule for assigning service and stick with it. In this spirit, confuse “equity” with “equality” and cut off any reference to diversity, equity and inclusion as social justice with the phrase, “you know, DEIJ, yadda yadda yadda.”
Don’t count mentoring other faculty as service. In fact, don’t count any useful, impactful or innovative service if it happened outside one of your official committees. If it really was a clever idea, you would have already thought of it.
When faculty ask for a break from a busy committee to focus on a major grant proposal or to develop a new course, remind them that when you were a faculty member, you were able to do both tasks while also serving as the business officer, graduate program director and teaching daily yoga classes for emeritus faculty.
Tip #6: Be the dean’s messenger.
You, as chair, are essentially the mouthpiece of the dean and the upper administration. Therefore, focus the bulk of your time on top-down initiatives. Do not canvass your faculty to see what they need for their own growth and success. And, if you instead take the rash step of creating a department-driven plan, be sure to enlist the dean’s advice on every step you take. Take care to assign the bulk of planning work to unproductive faculty who have taught the same course in the same way for 15 years and last received a major research grant before the year 2000.
Lastly, encourage faculty to get to know the dean and other members of the upper administration. Then savagely punish them for any communication that does not go directly through you.
Tip #7: Be an intrepid decision maker.
When a decision from the chair is called for, don’t solicit thoughts from your faculty first. It looks stronger if you make your decision in isolation. Similarly, when faculty members ask you for things, say “no” to every request to show that you are strong and decisive. Or, say “yes” to the random “hallway ask” instead of considering that, if one faculty member has a need, so may another.
Frequently remind your faculty that you are “data-driven” and demand that any request, no matter how minuscule, come with several pages of rationale that delineates costs to the penny, identifies exact sources of each dollar, and includes a comprehensive, multi-method analysis of return on investment. Then make a decision based on whether you are in a good or bad mood and whether the faculty request comes from one of your “favorites.”
Tip #8: Respond immediately to student complaints about faculty.
When you receive a complaint about a faculty member from a student, take action against that faculty member immediately. Remember that students are totally objective; there cannot be another side to the story. Let the associate dean handle things with the faculty member directly—or even better, the dean. Disregard the department bylaws that the faculty worked so hard to develop. Decisive action is better than adhering to agreed-upon guidelines. Don’t fulfill your role as the faculty member’s primary supervisor, certainly not one who has their best interests at heart.
Tip #9: Let everyone know how busy and important you are.
Say things like, “I remember when I was just a faculty member; it was so much easier than being chair.” Or, even better, “The previous chair did it wrong; back at my old school, we did it better.”
Always refer to the dean, provost and the president by their first names. Then, if the faculty do the same, tell them they are being disrespectful.
Tip #10: Have no life and put your research on hold.
It’s crazy to think that you can keep your own lab going. Instead, spend the bulk of your time responding to emails. You’ll feel proud of your alacrity in immediately responding to the latest requests from the upper administration. Don’t carve out dedicated “meet with the chair coffee hours,” nor dedicated time to progress in your own work. You’ll easily pick up where you left off with your own research after your chair-hood!
Finally, and most importantly, although you will never again be asked to serve as chair, you will be eminently qualified to be a dean. Prepare yourself now to be aggressively headhunted for open positions!
Disclaimer: Any resemblance to specific chairs, present or past, is purely coincidental. No chairs were harmed in the making of this product.
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Podcast: OfS chair, employment, skills
This week on the podcast Nottingham Trent VC Edward Peck has been confirmed as the government’s candidate for Chair of OfS. But what does his focus on “quality improvement” and engagement with governing bodies mean for the regulator’s approach—and how will his skepticism of government bailouts impact struggling institutions?
Meanwhile, as the Employment Rights Bill sees significant amendments, we unpack what proposed changes to zero-hours contracts and industrial action rules could mean for universities and students. And with the policy spotlight shifting from “knowledge” to “skills,” we’re asking—where do universities fit into the UK’s economic vision?
With Brooke Storer-Church, CEO at GuildHE, Neil Mackenzie, CEO at Leeds Beckett Students’ Union, David Kernohan, Deputy Editor at Wonkhe and hosted by Jim Dickinson, Associate Editor at Wonkhe.
Read more
Edward Peck’s performance at the Education Committee
How R&D creates new skills and can jump start the economy
Policy change can help manage the demand for graduate knowledge and skills
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22 ideas for department chair merit badges (opinion)
A running joke with my department chairs, when I was a dean, involved the awarding of merit badges for the accomplishment of a particularly thorny task that the outside world (outside of academia, that is) would not otherwise have known about. Generals rising in the ranks of the military accumulate ribbons. Why shouldn’t there be a similar accumulation of ceremonial badges for accomplishments on the way up the academic leadership ladder?
The granting of ribbons or merit badges will be ever more important in the AI era, in which leaders cannot simply speak about something but rather demonstrate and present the knowledge physically. As the Boy Scouts Merit Badge Hub states, “If it says ‘show or demonstrate,’ that is what you must do. Just telling about it isn’t enough. The same thing holds true for such words as ‘make,’ ‘list,’ ’in the field,’ and ‘collect,’ ‘identify,’ and ‘label.’”
For example: Consider details of just two of the 12 areas Scouts must master to earn the Boy Scout Bird Study Merit Badge:
Demonstrate that you know how to use a bird field guide. Show your counselor that you are able to understand a range map by locating in the book and pointing out the wintering range, the breeding range, and/or the year-round range of one species of each of the following types of birds:
- Seabird
- Plover
- Falcon or hawk
- Warbler or vireo
- Sparrow
Observe and be able to identify at least 20 species of wild birds. Prepare a field notebook, making a separate entry for each species, and record the following information from your field observations and other references.
- Note the date and time.
- Note the location and habitat.
- Describe the bird’s main feeding habitat and list two types of food that the bird is likely to eat.
- Note whether the bird is a migrant or a summer, winter, or year-round resident of your area.
When scouts earn a Bird Study merit badge, you will know they know what they’re talking about and feel comfortable with those scouts running a birding outing. You will feel confident putting matters in their hands.
Wouldn’t this approach be helpful for showing department chair expertise as well?
The Basic Badges: Survival Skills for New Chairs
I propose the list below as standard merit badges any department chair should be working toward. Following the Bird Study merit badge model, the specific tasks involved in earning the first badge are listed in detail. Follow this model and logic if you decide to document and award any or all of these badges at your institution.
Meeting Management Merit Badge (for mastering the art of running efficient faculty meetings while maintaining collegiality and reaching actual decisions)
- Show that you are familiar with the terms used to describe meetings by doing the following:
- Sketch or trace a meeting room and then label 15 different aspects of a meeting.
- Draw up a meeting agenda and label six types of agenda items.
- Demonstrate that you know how to properly follow an agenda, use the AV equipment in the room and use the hybrid camera, plus monitor for virtual attendees:
- Explain what the Roman numerals mean on an agenda.
- Show how to present a PowerPoint to both present and virtual members.
- Show how to see, in a timely manner, when a virtual hand is up.
- Describe how to bring a latecomer up to speed on an agenda item already discussed.
- Demonstrate that you know how to use Robert’s Rules of Order. Show your dean that you are able to understand each chapter in the book, pointing out the debate rules, the tabling-a-motion rules and the majority requirements for each of the following types of votes:
- Motion to accept minutes.
- Motion to object.
- Motion to suspend consideration of an item.
- Motion to call the question.
- Motion to take up matter previously tabled.
- Procedure to select a second when everyone’s hand is up.
- Observe and be able to identify at least 20 types of meetings. Prepare a field notebook, making a separate entry for each species of meeting, and record the following information from your field observations and other references:
- Note the date and time.
- Note the location and room capacity.
- Describe each attendee’s main feeding habitat and list two types of food that the attendees are likely to eat.
- Note whether the attendee is a tenure-line professor, career-line or part-time/adjunct resident of your department.
- Successfully defuse at least three of these common meeting scenarios:
- The Filibuster Professor who “just has a quick comment” that turns into a 20-minute monologue.
- The Side Conversation Insurgents who start their own parallel meeting.
- The “Actually …” Interrupter who must correct every minor detail.
- The Passive-Aggressive Email Sender who “just wants to follow up on some concerns.”
Do you not feel comfortable with any department chair who has earned a Meeting Management merit badge running a meeting? Following are some additional basic badges that one can earn for adept engagement in the everyday and more occasional department chair work.
Budget Detective Merit Badge (for successfully tracking down and reallocating mysterious fund transfers and finding hidden resources)
Schedule Tetris Merit Badge (for fitting 47 course sections into 32 available time slots while satisfying everyone’s preferences)
Diplomatic Relations Merit Badge (for mediating between feuding faculty members without taking sides or losing sanity)
Paperwork Expedition Merit Badge (for successfully navigating a minor curriculum change through six committees and three levels of administration)
Assessment Survival Merit Badge (for completing a program review cycle without uttering the phrase “this is meaningless”)
Email Endurance Merit Badge (for maintaining inbox zero while receiving 200-plus daily messages during registration week)
Faculty Development Sherpa Merit Badge (for successfully guiding junior faculty through the tenure process wilderness)
Student Crisis Navigation Merit Badge (for handling everything from grade appeals to mental health emergencies with grace—and documentation)
Accreditation Archive Merit Badge (for creating and maintaining the sacred assessment documents for the next site visit)
Interdepartmental Peace Treaty Merit Badge (for negotiating shared resources and cross-listed courses without starting a turf war)
Conference Room Warrior Merit Badge (for surviving 50 consecutive hours of committee meetings in a single semester while maintaining consciousness)
The Advanced Badges
As department chairs move toward the “seasoned category,” akin to Eagle Scouts’ level of capability, these are the advanced merit badges department chairs should be moving toward:
Everyone Remained Seated Merit Badge (for successfully hosting a controversial speaker event where the Q&A didn’t require campus police, no one stormed out, everyone actually asked questions instead of making speeches, and the dean didn’t have to issue a statement the next day)
Viewpoint Diversity Navigator Merit Badge (for successfully resolving ideological tensions between the “universities are too woke” faculty member and the “universities aren’t woke enough” faculty member, while keeping both the university counsel office and the campus newspaper uninterested in your department)
Social Media Firefighter Merit Badge (for managing department communications after a faculty member’s tweet goes viral, while upholding both academic freedom and institutional reputation)
Soft Landing Merit Badge (for compassionately guiding a struggling graduate student toward alternative career paths while avoiding lawsuits, maintaining departmental reputation for mentoring, preventing faculty infighting about “standards” and ensuring the student leaves with dignity and future options intact)
Side Hustle Tackler Merit Badge (for successfully filling out outside employment forms for a professor simultaneously consulting for Google, running a resale textbook start-up and offering expert testimony, while ensuring university compliance, managing jealous colleagues and preventing the local newspaper from running a “professors don’t work” exposé)
Advanced Curriculum Shepherding Merit Badge (for successfully shepherding an interdisciplinary, multimodal, study abroad–required curriculum through 17 different committees without having it transformed into “just add one elective to the existing major”)
Bonus points for maintaining revolutionary elements like “required internships,” “community-engaged capstone” and “two semesters abroad” through final approval, while fielding questions like “but how will student athletes do this?” and “what exactly do you mean by ‘transdisciplinary’?” and “have you checked with Risk Management?” and “will this impact our parking situation?”
Fresh Blood Without Bloodshed Merit Badge (for successfully integrating an outside chair into a department that has been “led” by the same three faculty trading the position since 1987; includes surviving the “but that’s not how we do it” phase, the “well, in my day as chair” phase and the “I’ll just CC the dean on this email to help you understand our culture better” phase)
Special recognition for preventing the emeritus faculty from creating a shadow government in the department’s second-floor conference room.
The King Has Voluntarily Left the Building Merit Badge (For masterfully orchestrating the graceful exit of a chair who has held the position since before email existed, memorized every bylaw and has an office containing 27 years of irreplaceable paper files organized in a system only they understand; successfully convince them that spending more time on research is a promotion, not a demotion, while ensuring they actually hand over the department credit card and graduate student admissions spreadsheet before leaving)
Bonus points if the outgoing chair willingly shares the password to the department’s social media accounts and reveals where they’ve been hiding the good coffee maker.
The “Reply All” Survivor Merit Badge (for maintaining composure during the dreaded accidental reply-all chain that encompasses the entire college)
And, finally (drum roll) the Ultimate Achievement: The Phoenix Chair Merit Badge (for successfully completing a term as chair and willingly agreeing to serve again)
This highest honor requires:
- Completing all previous merit badges
- Still believing in the mission of higher education
- Retaining enough optimism to sign up for another term
Note: This badge has only been awarded twice in recorded higher education history.
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Tesla chair to lead research and development review
Robyn Denholm has been chair of Tesla since 2018. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen/Courier Mail
A Strategic Examination of Research and Development review is to evaluate how to maximise Australia’s existing research and development (R&D) spend, and convince industry to adopt innovation.
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