Chairs Can Be the Changemakers Colleges Need

“If you’ve been following the news, you know that our budget situation is dire. We must reduce now or future cuts will be even more devastating. You know your departments better than anyone. Please help us plan for these reductions. If you don’t, then administrators will have to make decisions about the cuts to your departments.”

As a member of our campus chair steering committee, I listened intently to my colleagues’ responses. Most often I heard some version of these comments:

“How dare administration tell us to cut. My department is critical to the fulfillment of our institution’s mission. Can’t they see that?”

“I didn’t sign on as chair so I could be the bad guy. The administration got us into this problem. Let them solve it.”

Looking at the current condition of American higher education, I believe it is fair to say that most faculty and chairs still assume that the central administration handles business while departments handle teaching and research. When it comes to problems of money or enrollments, faculty and chairs typically expect central administrators to fix the problem: to find more money, or, if efficiencies are necessary, to cut from some other part of the institution. What too many faculty and chairs fail to acknowledge, however, is 1) that colleges and universities are businesses, 2) business success is based on the production of goods needed/desired by the market, 3) while administrators manage the institution’s resources, when faced with a budget crisis they are more likely to cut funding than quickly find more money, and 4) it is faculty and department chairs who have the power to develop the products that will attract the students and other resources needed for college survival.

Heeding the Red Flags

The warning signs of significant resource troubles ahead for higher education are there for anyone to see. In 2015, 57 percent of Americans expressed a great deal of confidence in higher education. In 2024, that figure had dropped to 36 percent. A college degree is no longer required for employment at Google, Accenture or IBM. Headlines shout warnings to us—“Wisconsin Regents Vote to Lay Off Dozens of Tenured Faculty,” “Library Faculty Eliminated Amid ‘Fiscal Insanity’ at Western Illinois,” “Report Finds Higher Ed Sector Shrank by 2 percent”—with nearly 100 institutions closed between the 2022–23 and 2023–24 academic years. Yet how many chairs and faculty 1) are paying attention to these signs, and 2) are doing anything about it?

The typical reaction to administrators’ warnings about institutional finances is a lack of interest on the part of faculty who perceive their role to be teachers and scholars. Chairs, meanwhile, often see themselves as temporary place holders. They are not trained for the role of budget manager, they are typically still evaluated by faculty standards, they don’t receive administrator-level pay or status and they are not expected to lead as much as manage until they can pass the chair’s role on to the next part-timer to sit in the big office.

But here’s the problem: While central administration controls the budget and sets major institutional policy, presidents, provosts and deans cannot do the academic work that is higher education’s product. While central administrators can cut the purse strings that fund program and course operations, they cannot develop the courses, majors/minors/certificates or research programs funded by contracts and grants. The means of production—curriculum—are controlled by the faculty.

Only faculty—with assistance from department chairs—can create the academic programs needed by students. Faculty and chairs are also better positioned than administrators to take steps that will increase the efficiency of their department operations. They have a much better sense of the faculty members and programs that are pulling their own weight and those that are not.

Attending to the Business of Academic Departments

These are difficult times for faculty and chairs whose teaching and scholarship are negatively impacted by diminished resources, declining enrollment and the loss of public confidence in the value of higher education. What are chairs and faculty to do? When times are difficult, I sometimes remind myself of the lyrics to one of my favorite Michael Jackson songs, “Man in the Mirror”:

All changemakers should heed this good advice. As business concerns appear to be bigger factors in the decisions made by our college and university leaders, what can faculty and chairs do to further their own interests?

I’ve previously argued that department chairs are key to the future of American higher education. While central administrators can cut budgets, they have far less power to create academic programs that will increase enrollments, do the research that earns grants or develop contracts with constituents who will gladly pay for expert services. The faculty are best positioned to recognize constituent needs and how to satisfy those needs. And while central administration can request, hope for, even beg for operational efficiencies, department chairs and faculty at the operations level are far more knowledgeable about where a dollar is best spent to get the most bang for that buck.

Without chairs, there is no link between central administration and the changemakers in academic departments. Everyone who cares about the future of their departments, colleges and universities needs to pay attention to the business of higher education if they are to adapt to an environment that is increasingly bottom-line. Only the faculty led by department chairs have the power to develop the academic products that will attract the resources needed for their future.

Especially if administrators empower chairs and their faculty with greater decision-making authority, they can better share the responsibility for the business of the institution. As the official link between administration and their faculty, chairs have the authority to set the department’s agenda, to prioritize curricular reforms or in-demand academic programs and to reduce operational costs. To strategically position their departments, chairs should pay attention to information concerning institutional directions and budget and gather and make sense of relevant budget spreadsheets and reports. What can you and your faculty do to impact the formulas used to allocate funds to your department? Chairs and the faculty can demonstrate that their departments are part of the solution. Ask administrators and institutional leaders this question: “What can I do? What can my department do to help you help us?”

In some ways chairs can be more powerful than presidents or chancellors. Chairs can lead faculty to make changes to better serve their students and increase department resources, resulting in a stronger department ready to chart its own future—and maybe save jobs.