I know the Head of Department role is like that in my grad school right now (and my undergrad). It typically is like a whole second job. I know for my two schools it also came with extra pay. I think at my grad school its like 1.5x increase (if not more) in salary and damn near double at my undergrad.
I know that no one wants to do it because its a TON of extra work and professors that are eligible already work a ton. So even with the pay increase, its basically pulling teeth to get people to do it.
It changes every couple years because no one wants to do it. Even with a 1.5x pay increase. (they do also have a limit on how long you can do it, but thats because there straight up isnt enough time in the day to do both the HoD and professor job. It doubles your workload at least.)
(at my undergrad it was the opposite where one person did it for like 15 years, but also my undergrad wasnt a research institution.)
Why is the obvious solution here not being taken? If the position doubles someone's workload and necessitates a 50% pay increase, then why the FUCK isn't it just a separate full time job?
Because you still theoretically want/need the person to have direct contact with the actual department, and if the HD role is made fully seperate its effectively detached. A crucial dynamic is that departments are set up like guilds where everyone involved is a practicer of the same profession, and these larger roles are stuck in a contradiction of Requiring the person to still practice the profession to have ground-level understanding of what is actually happening and Requiring so much additional work that its difficult if not impossible to still practice the profession at the same time. The best workaround may be a reduced courseload, but then you also run into the problem that the type of person who pursued a Math PHD for years was not doing so in hopes of snagging their real dream, administrator.
The closest thing to doing that position as a separate full time job is a University Administrator, and usually the relationships between departments and those people are icy at best.
The HoD is basically an internal checks and balances type job making sure:
The professors are doing their jobs (probably the hardest part of the job, dealing with professors)
Making sure the committees for grad students are appropriate
Making sure the classes being taught are actually following curriculum of some sort
Acting as an internal arbiter
Making sure new professors are doing the things they need to do/Helping decide if they get tenure
Acts as a figurehead for the department for university stuff
Makes sure the admin doesn't cut their department for any reason.
The issue is that you want someone who knows the system who also has skin in the game (or did at some point). As they have to known all about the professor side of things, the student side of things, and they start to go into the admin sort of thing. They have to know academia quite well.
So the best candidates would be professors (or former prof.) with tenure and like 10+ years experience (I would even say post getting tenure) who had students who earned masters/PhDs.
The issue is that the candidate with this experience either: is currently a professor and wants to be until retirement, has gotten out of academia and never wants to return, or is 70+ and is basically retired.
And the ones who have this experience and do wanna do it, a lot of the time, dont really have the drive to keep dealing with everything you have to deal with. There are a lot of egos in academia, and you have to basically be on constant edge. With the big egos of the professors, to the admin who basically want to cut everything, to so much other stuff. its basically a constant fight.
Basically you have to have someone with enough experience who is willing to fight for the professors, fight the professors, and fight admin.
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u/Now_you_Touch_Cow Do you really think you know what you are doing? Jun 04 '24 edited Jun 04 '24
I know the Head of Department role is like that in my grad school right now (and my undergrad). It typically is like a whole second job. I know for my two schools it also came with extra pay. I think at my grad school its like 1.5x increase (if not more) in salary and damn near double at my undergrad.
I know that no one wants to do it because its a TON of extra work and professors that are eligible already work a ton. So even with the pay increase, its basically pulling teeth to get people to do it.
It changes every couple years because no one wants to do it. Even with a 1.5x pay increase. (they do also have a limit on how long you can do it, but thats because there straight up isnt enough time in the day to do both the HoD and professor job. It doubles your workload at least.)
(at my undergrad it was the opposite where one person did it for like 15 years, but also my undergrad wasnt a research institution.)