Sofa So Good

This is my response to Ken's Point number 3 -- regarding chairs.

So we don’t have chairs. Is this a big deal? Yes and no! Yes, because it really is a good thing that we don’t have multiple chairs of departments who have the ability to parcel out resources and give differential pay to people. I remember one situation I faced at another institution where the chair of the department determined what pay one received when one was hired. I learned, much to my consternation and resentment (at the time), that I was hired at a salary lower than someone hired after me with fewer qualifications. It didn’t make me feel good about the place, and if that becomes the mode of operation throughout an institution it is not a recipe for creating good feeling! So it is a big deal that we haven’t created this kind of college with strong departments and autonomous chairs.

But wait! Such situations prevail largely at the big universities where there are departments (e.g., of history, language, and literature) that are sizeable indeed. Each one of the departments might be roughly a third as large as a school at Stockton. So one might suggest that our schools with their deans are comparable to departments with chairs elsewhere.

So a number of points come to mind. If we moved from coordinators to chairs, it might only mean a change in nomenclature – one that makes us more comprehensible to outsiders – rather something more significant. Having a chair or six of seven people would mean that the person was still someone with limited power. Not much to worry about there – a pretty pathetic fiefdom even on its best day! Each program would still probably rotate their chairs in the same way that they rotate coordinators. The latter are elected and so one could have someone securing support and maintaining this position, but one doesn’t because the rewards are not great. This probably wouldn’t change with chairs being created.

Also, we are a union shop. Salaries are pretty much decided by external forces and all kinds of procedures are put in place that even a dean sometimes has less power and possibly less prestige than a chair of a large university department. This wouldn’t change with the advent of chairs – whether or not someone brought a Napoleon complex or some other megalomaniacal inclination to the position.

All that said, I think keeping coordinators is a good thing, because it does speak to the uniqueness of the college. We are made up of schools and these schools do bring into connection different programs, which if they were called departments headed by chairs might be more inclined to become increasingly discipline centered. I think for many years as a member of the history program I would have gone along with such a move and would have wanted to create a very strong history department; but now I think some strength to that program results from it being nestled in a school of arts and humanities, and that its members teach general studies, and so forth. There is a liberation in this for members of the program, one that gives them an institutional endorsement of difference and innovation that other historians do not experience at other universities.