Mary Rosalez
AL885/Hart-Davison
Shadowing Project
My oldest son is 21. When he graduated from high school, he got a free ride to college for an engineering degree at a reputable school and, of course, took it. Now, halfway through his senior year, he has decided college is not for him and he is going to drop out and come back home. My son knows how disappointed I am about his decision, but since he has gone to college our relationship has shifted from me as mom and him as son to us as pals. When my kids were young I always parented with the philosophy that my job was to work my way out of a job, to raise my kids so that they no longer needed a mom. I haven’t been 100% successful—I doubt any parent ever is—because sometimes I have to be his mom. But most of the time we are more friends than mother and son. Not now. Suddenly the mother in me is kicking in, my primal urges to ground him and take away his privileges have taken over, and I told him if he is coming home after throwing away a perfectly good scholarship then he’s paying rent and buying his own food. In other words, he’s an adult and I’m not holding his hand through this decision (although I don’t have it in me to make him live on the street). But it’s tough knowing when to be his friend, understand what he’s going through, agree with all his choices, and be on his side no matter what—and when to be his mother, get tough, let him know I’m disappointed with his choices, and tell him if he makes bad choices then I will not clean up after him. I often wish I didn’t have to ever do the mom thing any more, but sometimes there is just no choice.
And it seems to me that being the chair of an academic department is not so different. Most of the time—at least at a small college—the chair is a member of the faculty, a colleague. I imagine, though, that there are times that, as head of the department, this friend and colleague has to shift gears and be something else: the boss. I imagine, though, that most of the time she can be part of the family, work side by side as equals with other members of the department, enjoying the teaching life with a few additional duties added on. At least this is what I see from a faculty perspective. Frankly I’ve never been in a situation where I’ve seen “the boss” come out in either of the two women who are the department chairs where I have taught; they have never been anything to me but a friend. Are there circumstances where this isn’t the case?
I’m aware of many of the duties of the department chair: scheduling, acting as liaison to the provost or dean, going to meetings, planning curriculum—now that I’m actually trying to list them, it seems they are too numerous to mention here. The fact is, one day I plan to be a tenured professor at a small college like the one where I teach, and this means that one day someone is going to tell me that it’s my turn to be department chair and all these tasks will be mine. But what exactly are they? How much added stress is this job? And how do you go about making decisions for an entire department? I wanted to find out what being a department chair was like, especially in ways I couldn’t really observe from the interactions I would normally have as a faculty member. If I’m ever going to be faced with whether or not I want this position, I’ll need to know many things.
I designed my study in several ways. First, I felt it was imperative that I know the people I was going to study: I couldn’t know if they were indeed switching roles, if they were unusually stressed, or if they were any different as chairs if I didn’t know what they were like on a daily basis. So I felt it was important to study someone I had worked with for quite some time. Both the head of the English department at Central Michigan University (CMU) where I got my MA and the head at Alma College where I got my BA are good friends of mine and I have known them both for several years, as my teachers and colleagues, so they were excellent candidates. I also wanted to compare the two roles, since the size of these two schools is considerably different and the chair of CMU’s English department is going to have a very different role than the chair at a school like Alma; it seemed important to me to know some of the differences.
At the institution where I teach—a small, four-year liberal arts college—the head of the department is a tenured member of the faculty, and all tenured faculty take turns in three year increments. The current head of the English department, Dr. Ute Stargardt, has just taken over this fall as chair. In our department, we have eight full-time faculty—five tenured, two up for tenure, and one not on a tenure track (me)—and three part time faculty in the English department. At CMU, on the other hand, there are over sixty faculty in the department, 40 tenure-track and 28 adjunct. The head of the department there, Dr. Marcy Taylor, is now in her second year as chair.
First I sent an email to Dr. Taylor and told her that would like to observe her and interview her and why. I also mentioned a reciprocity agreement, that I would do something for her for her time. She was happy to have me visit and said she had just the idea for a way that I could help her. I then asked her if she could send me any materials she might have that would give me an idea of department goals and aims. I wanted to be able to talk about some of the rationale behind these department goals and use them go guide my questions. She sent me an End of Year Report for 2005-2006 that she had prepared a few months prior, as well as the master syllabi for her English 100, 101, and 201 courses. After reading these documents, I established several questions to guide the interview portion of my shadowing. I did not, however, ask for these documents from the English chair at Alma since, as a member of the department, I already know our department goals and purposes and am familiar with the department structures concerning writing courses. The questions I derived were based on my prior interactions with department chairs, on the documents I received, on faculty meetings I have attended, and on basic office scuttlebutt. My questions for these two women fall into three categories: One, questions concerning various duties of the job; two, questions concerning pressures and personal struggles as chair; and three, programmatic concerns.
Duties of a Department Chair
Mostly my questions in this area come from my own personal interactions with faculty-as-chair. I have witnessed many of their duties first-hand and so didn’t ask about them. What I wondered most about were how they felt about their duties and if there were any I may not be aware of. As it turns out, the answers vary considerably depending on the institution, mostly dependent on the size of the school. At larger institutions like CMU, the size of the department and the number of people that work in that department make even the smallest of jobs take considerably more time, so many of the tasks that a chair of a small college might do herself are handled by others. For example, at Alma College, Dr. Stargardt sends personal cards to all prospective students interested in an English major. It takes her a lot of time, she says, and this sometimes makes her feel like “a glorified secretary for the provost,” but it is part of her job. A department chair at a larger university would have her secretary do a task like this: Dr. Taylor has two full-time secretaries and two or three student assistants. Dr. Stargardt, on the other hand, only has one student come in a few hours a week to do filing. Dr. Taylor said that it is true: she doesn’t do a lot of the organizational things like filing, making appointments, handling budget payouts, etc. These she delegates. Dr. Stargardt doesn’t really delegate much of anything.
It appears, however, that the most dreaded job as department chair—and by both that I spoke to—is scheduling. “Inevitably,” Dr. Taylor said, “faculty are unhappy with the times they were given, the courses they were assigned, or both. It’s incredibly complex,” she said. Considering the fact that she has to schedule over 250 English courses per semester, half of which are freshman composition (which, of course, very few tenured faculty want to teach), I can understand why she says this is the one part of the job she “hates the most.” Dr. Stargardt, while handling a much smaller task, still hates this the most—and for the same reasons: “It’s the only time I have faculty really get upset with me. And it happens every semester.” It is only twice a year, though, Dr. Taylor said. Nothing like the time she spends at meetings.
Meetings are, both chairs agreed, the most time-consuming aspect of the job. Dr. Taylor says there are days where that is all she does: go to meetings. She added that it wasn’t just the meetings themselves, but the meeting follow-up work and the paperwork that results. She said that if you don’t like going to meetings, don’t ever take a job like this. What surprised her, she said, was that before she took the job she thought she would spend more time dealing with student issues, but it turns out not to be the case. She does have five to ten grade grievances a semester and has to deal with a lot of plagiarism, but beyond that her work mostly is not dealing with students.
Apparently this part of the job is very different at a smaller school. Dr. Stargardt said that the best part of her job as chair is dealing with the students, helping them work their way through their majors, helping them with school issues, and talking with them about whatever they feel like discussing. (Alma students have a tendency to stop by a lot to chat). But when it comes to faculty/student issues, they go straight to the provost, even though they should technically be brought to her first. She’s not sure why, but even grade grievances end up there and bypass her office most of the time. She gets a few now and then, but no more than one or two during the entire three years she’s chair (she has been chair before, several times).
Pressures and Personal Struggles
Simply from office talk it is not difficult to know some of the pressures that come with being department chair. I already knew that they get frustrated with the scheduling issue. I get lots of emails during scheduling time asking for someone to be generous and take a class someone else really doesn’t want, asking if we’re willing to take a different room, asking if we wouldn’t mind taking an 8:30 class…inevitably the original schedule goes through several changes before its finalized. Just a guess, but I’ve always figured this would be frustrating. Other areas of pressure, though, aren’t as obvious or public. Fortunately, I got to witness one such occurrence when I visited Dr. Taylor.
When I first went to observe Dr. Taylor, she told me as soon as I got there that she had a meeting with a faculty member and she wasn’t sure if he would want me present when they met. He showed up shortly and said he thought it would be a good meeting for me to observe and he didn’t mind if I stayed. They were discussing a student grade grievance that had been an issue for quite some time. Apparently the student (female) and the professor (male) got along fine most of the semester until she received a grade she felt she didn’t deserve, at which point she filed a grievance for the grade and then added on charges of harassment. At the point of this particular meeting, the student advisory committee had determined that there were no grounds for harassment and the grade was the only thing to be concerned with. The hour-long meeting ended with the understanding that the professor was not going to change the grade and if the student continued to pursue the grievance, he was more than happy to provide anything necessary to substantiate the grade he had given.
As Dr. Taylor talked over the grade-grievance matter with the professor, I noticed that she was working very hard to stay neutral, to be an advocate for both the student and the professor, and to stay focused on the issue of the grade and not let the harassment issue get in the way. She referred several times to school policies and institutional recourses, never letting herself side with either the professor or the student. Because I know both Dr. Taylor and the professor with whom she was speaking, I happen to know that the two of them have been friends and colleagues for a long time, nearly twenty years. Yet at this particular moment, Dr. Taylor was not his friend but his boss, despite the highly emotional issue and the fact that the professor was obviously very upset by the whole thing. I frankly was very impressed. I was also very glad that I got to witness first-hand the role-switching necessary for Dr. Taylor’s job. When I asked Dr. Stargardt about problems of this nature, she said that they just don’t exist since the provost handles this type of matter.
The other matter that was important to me was teaching time. Dr. Taylor still teaches, but only one course per semester. She really misses it, she says, and there are days when she wishes that was all she had to do. Dealing with students in class is nothing compared to dealing with all the bureaucracy, the red tape, and oftentimes the faculty themselves. Dr. Stargardt, however, still teaches three courses per semester like the rest of us. There just is no need, she said, for her not to. The chair before her only taught one course per semester, but he is also assistant to the provost—and still only teaches one class per semester.
Programmatic Concerns
Most of my questions in this area came from either the documents that Dr. Taylor sent me, or from departmental and programmatic concerns I’m already aware of but wanted to discuss and get their perspectives on. I approached the issue by framing the questions in terms of changes: what changes they had made, were in the process of making, and would like to make in the future. Dr. Taylor said that because the past chair had been there for nine years, a lot of issues had been “spoken policy” and she made sure to get these things written into official policies. She also has updated their department goals—thus the resulting End-of-Year Report—and updated the curriculum to meet changing needs of students. “Going through this process was very bureaucratic,” she said, grimacing. She also has updated all the master syllabi, updated the filing system (much of which was not digitized), updated the majors, and electronically updated all the chair’s personal files, which had been kept unalphabetized in a drawer for years. I’m assuming, too, that she left out many smaller things.
Yet more needs to be changed, she said. One thing she would like to do deals directly with our reciprocity agreement. Currently, when students transfer from Alma College to CMU, if they have taken English 101 at Alma their credit transfers to CMU as credit for 201 rather than 101. This, she finds, is problematic for several reasons, but the important issue is that she isn’t sure that Alma’s 101 is equivalent to CMU’s 201. We discussed the differences between Alma’s and CMU’s 101, and since I have taught 101 at both institutions, I am very aware of these differences. For one, CMU’s 201 is predominantly a research course and 101 varies greatly in what the students write, everything from personal narratives to literature analyses. Yet 101 at Alma is the only required writing course for all students, so it always contains a research component. This is likely the reason that Alma’s 101 credit in the past was considered the equivalent of 201 at CMU. Dr. Taylor would like to see if this is still the case, if what happens at Alma gives these students the same writing background they would get at CMU. I told her that personally I don’t think that there is any way that one semester of writing is the equivalent of two semesters regardless of content. She agreed, but said she would like to see our master syllabus. We don’t have one. So I have agreed to collect syllabi from all the faculty who currently teach 101 so that she can look at them and determine whether or not this transfer credit should be changed.
Another aspect of CMU that Dr. Taylor would like to change deals with the programs they offer in English. As of now, she is working on developing a Ph.D. program for English Education, which is projected to be completed by 2009. She would also like to make some changes to the English undergraduate degree, which currently offers an emphasis in either literature or creative writing. She would like to see an emphasis in nonfiction writing as well. She is also concerned about the tenured/adjunct faculty ratio and knows it needs to change; realistically, though, she says it isn’t going to happen any time soon, even though it is one of their goals.
Dr. Stargardt has not been chair long enough to really have made any significant changes yet. One thing, though, that she’d like to see happen is better overseeing of the part-time faculty, and it’s on the agenda for our meeting next week. As things stand now, they hire these part-timers one class at a time, often people they don’t know, and send them in to teach a class. No one ever observes them or keeps track of what they do in the classroom except for having them turn in a syllabus at the beginning of the semester. “Then often these people want me to write letters of recommendation for them, and I have nothing to say,” she said. So she’d like to implement some kind of observation schedule, which we’ll discuss at the next meeting. This was the only change she had in mind at the moment.
I asked Dr. Stargardt, then, about Alma’s writing program—actually a lack thereof—whether or not she felt that English majors were taught to write well enough and got enough experience with only 101 and the writing they had to do in other literature courses, and whether or not she felt any need for change. “I trust my faculty,” she said, “to make sure our students are getting plenty of good writing experience, good critical writing, thinking analyzing. I’m sure our English majors can write very well.” We discussed how all the English courses at Alma involve a lot of writing and she said she feels confident that they are getting good writing experience. Then I asked her if she felt students who were not English majors yet, prospective students and prospective English majors, would feel convinced that this would be the case if they wanted to do something different with an English degree besides teach or study literature. I asked her too if she felt any pressure to compete or keep up with larger institutions who have quite comprehensive writing programs, offered more writing classes, and many of which have nonfiction writing concentrations for majors. She said she was concerned about this and that many students had come to talk about being English majors but wanted to go into journalism or editing, for example, and didn’t want all the literature courses so never became English majors. We ended our conversation there since she had a student she needed to meet with, but about ten minutes later she came to my office and asked me if I would bring up the issue of possibly including more writing courses at Alma at the next department meeting. “I’d be happy to,” I said. More than happy to, actually, since that was exactly what I was hoping for.
My other programmatic question was about CMU’s placement of basic writers: how is it approached and do you feel it is adequate? Have you changed your approach to this issue ever, and do you see it changing in the future? I was actually surprised by Dr. Taylor’s answer. She explained that all incoming freshman at CMU are given a score based on a mathematical combination of their ACT-English score and their high school GPA. Based on this score, students are either placed in 100, advised and choose 100 or 101, or are placed in 101. Then during the first week of school, all students write a “diagnostic” exam, a summary and response to the same reading, and if needed some shuffling occurs. Oddly enough, Dr. Taylor said, the original scores are pretty accurate and we seldom have to move anyone.
Of course, none of this surprised me since I taught there. What did surprise me, however, was what she said next when I asked her who taught 100, since I knew it wasn’t the graduate assistants. Her answer: these students are taught by select professors, full-time tenured faculty who are trained specifically to teach these students. They are only taught in labs, the faculty get first priority in everything, and they even have their own director. “We’ve made a commitment,” she said,” to these students and want to make sure that they are taught by the best.” What about international students? I asked. Are students who don’t speak English as their first language put in 100 as well? Again a surprise: no, they are all in the ELI program (English Language Institute) where they receive special help by those trained to teach these students. But I had a few students in my classes that were ESL students, I said. This happens, Dr. Taylor explained, when they score exceptionally high on their TOFEL exams.
My question about this issue came from my experiences at Alma, where they worry, fret, and quibble over what to do with beginning writers; it is something they would like to change every year. I didn’t discuss it with Dr. Stargardt, though, because I’m the one who teaches our beginning writers and am part of this process. But the issue is not simple. First, we have no program for ESL students, so they end up in the same group as beginning writers. Second, we have so few students who would fit into this category—only enough to fill two classes once per year (30)—that the kind of treatment they get at CMU isn’t feasible. Third, the diagnostic idea is what they have been trying to implement at Alma, but because of the small numbers, Alma can’t put all students in 101 first and then move them out, so the diagnostic has to happen before school starts. So they administer it during what we call “pre-term.” Strangely enough, many of the students with low scores don’t show up to take the diagnostic and just assume they’ll be in 100 anyway.
So This Means What?
These encounters revealed several important things to me. First of all, the role-switching seems to be something that does happen, but not often. As Dr. Taylor talked over the grade-grievance matter with the flustered professor, she certainly had to switch roles and be the boss when she was discussing this issue. Any hint of her being on his side would not only have been unprofessional but would have jeopardized the whole process, which needs fair and neutral judgment. I envisioned what this meeting with Dr. Taylor and her colleague would have been like had she been wearing the “friend hat,” and it would have been very different; I’ve been in grade-grievance conversations with colleagues often, and we always are on one another’s side—or at least act as though we are. It seemed, too, that because she was so professional and neutral, the professor was very respectful of her and didn’t try to use his extra years or his gender to push his ways on her. I felt, as I was watching this meeting, that being in this position and being female could be exceptionally difficult if you are not capable of switching roles. This would imply as well that you cannot wear both hats, be both friend and boss, when it comes to an issue like this. How could she treat the student fairly if she is, underneath, on the side of the faculty? So it was clear that the chair of the department has to shed one role and take on the other in order to do some of the tasks of this job.
But what was also clear was that most of the job on a day-to-day basis does not require this role switching. It sounds as if scheduling classes probably does, at least at times, but other duties don’t require the chair to be anything different than a friend and colleague. I was very relieved to find out that the chair of an English department at a small school doesn’t have to deal with faculty/student problems much at all. I was also relieved to find that at a small college, the chair’s time is still mostly spent teaching. Dr. Stargardt still teaches three courses per semester, as do all of us. Dr. Taylor, on the other hand, only teaches one course per semester at an institution where most faculty teach three or four. Her role as chair takes up most of her time. So while I wouldn’t mind the duties of the chair, I certainly wouldn’t want to give up teaching for it, which makes my desire to teach at a small school even stronger.
From what I witnessed—and from what I have experienced as a faculty member at Alma—the role of the chair at a small school rarely if ever has to switch hats and become boss, doesn’t have any overwhelming duties, and is able to enjoy its benefits without sacrificing her teaching. From my interview with Dr. Stargardt, it seems there is little behind the scenes that I was unaware of. If faculty/student issues are taken to the provost, this would eliminate her having to be a student advocate any more than she would normally be as a teacher. And if the only real grievance is scheduling—and there are only eight of us—it doesn’t seem that this would require much more than a little diplomacy. I thought back, too, to other times she’s dealt with faculty issues—tenure, hiring of new faculty, office space, academic advising issues, etc.—and I don’t ever recall her, or the department chair before her, ever having to shift gears the way Dr. Taylor did. So it seems that the larger your department and the more numerous your duties, the more likely it is you’ll have to shift into boss mode. It seems that that entire nature of the job as department chair is very dependent on the size of your department, in every aspect from delegating small chores to the massive undertaking of scheduling classes. If this were drawn out in a chart, I can easily see the department size and the chair duties and time correlating strongly.
So, happily, Alma College will at least be considering making some changes in their writing offerings, and CMU is already working on it. As for the world of chairing an English department, it becomes an important part of academic life to keep in mind when determining the type of institution where we’d like to teach. A large institution like CMU has heavy teaching loads and never requires faculty to be chair (they are actually elected), while a small institution like Alma requires both teaching and occasional administrative duties, but they are minimal in comparison to the larger schools. Any person considering an institution would want to keep (at least) these administrative duties in mind.
I don’t ever want my teaching to be my respite, the one small conciliation I get (because I schedule it for myself!) because I have too many other duties. I don’t want teaching to be like visiting Mom and Dad’s on Thanksgiving: I ask if I can help, and I peel potatoes or make sure the Cool Whip gets thawed, but never do I have to run things, keep my ducks (or should I say turkeys) lined up, delegate. I, for once, am not in charge. Which is the way it will always be for me as the mother of five kids. Because my mom has never really worked her way out of a job—so when we’re all there, she’s mom once again. And I can imagine that, just as in the duties of a department chair, the larger your family, the more time you’ll spend as the “boss.” So if I do end up at a small liberal arts school like Alma, chances are good that my fears of having to “be the mom” won’t be realized. I’ll be able to stay friend and colleague, at least most of the time. Now if I could just get my son to stay in school…