Responsibilites of the Department Chair

Chairpersons of academic departments in the School of Arts and Sciences are appointed by the President for a specified period of time, upon the recommendation of the Dean of Arts and Sciences. The Dean's recommendation regarding each appointment is to be forwarded to the President through the Provost, after full consideration of any nominations and comments received from members of that department. Reappointments to this position are possible.

Chairpersons of academic departments are vitally important in guaranteeing and enhancing the quality of teaching, scholarship, and service in the School of Arts and Sciences. They are responsible to the Dean for the normal operations of their respective departments; they are expected to represent their departments in the School's Academic Council and in the University Senate; and they are to keep their departments informed of the actions of these bodies.

Responsibilities

Besides the general duties outlined above, the major responsibilities of chairpersons in the School of Arts and Sciences include:

• promoting the attainment of department, school, and university goals;
  
  
• scheduling departmental courses and assigning instructors to these courses in cooperation with the Dean's Office;
  
  
• monitoring course registrations and making appropriate adjustments in course schedules and instructor assignments in cooperation with the Dean's Office;
  
  
• insuring the timely development, approval, offering, and review of appropriate courses and programs at the undergraduate and (if pertinent) the graduate levels of study;
  
  
• facilitating the assignment of faculty to undeclared student advising, assuring the quality of academic advising for departmental majors and minors, and expediting the handling of drop/add and transfer-credit requests;
  
  
• preparing budgetary requests, overseeing the maintenance of facilities and equipment, and governing the use of other departmental resources;
  
  
• making arrangements for and/or hosting lecturers, visiting professors, and events, or seeing that such arrangements and hosting are handled in an appropriate manner;
  
  
• seeing that the department's social relations and activities among faculty, students, and staff contribute toward the achievement of the academic objectives of the department, school, and university;
  
  
• conducting annual reviews of faculty and staff, and attending in this and other ways to the recognition and development of departmental faculty and staff, especially in relation to their teaching, scholarship, and service responsibilities;
  
  
• directing approved personnel searches at the departmental level in cooperation with the Dean's Office;
  
  
• preparing cases and making recommendations regarding the employment, promotion, and te of departmental faculty and staff;
  
  
• leading the department's planning and assessment efforts; and
  
  
• submitting the department's annual report.

Timetable of Responsibilities

The regular ongoing responsibilities of chairpersons are fulfilled day to day throughout the entire year. However, some responsibilities are periodic rather than continuous. Specifics will vary from department to department and from year to year, but a general timeline of such periodic responsibilities (using illustrative dates from one particular year) would include:

• July 1 - Part-time faculty request forms due to the relevant Associate Dean
  
  
• August 23 - New faculty orientation
  
  
• September 2 - Requests for sabbaticals (with chairperson endorsements) due to the Dean
  
  
• September 15 - Released-time requests, part-time faculty needs, and class schedules due to the relevant Associate Dean
  
  
• October 3 - Budget requests due to the Dean
  
  
• October 10 - Tenure portfolios due to the Dean
  
  
• October 21 - Personnel forms and chair evaluations due to the Dean
  
  
• November 1 - Promotion portfolios due to the Dean
  
  
• November 18 - Part-time request forms due to the relevant Associate Dean
  
  
• January 31 - Released-time requests, part-time faculty needs, and class schedules due to the relevant Associate Dean
  
  
• April 25 - Annual departmental report, departmental presentation/publication list, and any midcourse pretenure portfolios due to the Dean

Training and Development

Each chairperson in the School of Arts and Sciences will typically learn the particular responsibilities of office from former and current chairpersons, will have ready access to the Dean and Associate Deans, and will be encouraged to request from them any necessary information or desired forms of support. Materials on chairing departments and providing academic leadership will be available in the Teaching Center, and the Dean will announce off-campus conferences and workshops that promise to be useful for individual chairpersons. To the fullest extent possible, the Dean will support participation by chairpersons in such conferences and workshops, with an understanding that those who attend will share materials and provide a brief report to their Academic Council colleagues upon their return. The Dean may also arrange on-campus training opportunities from time to time, and will listen sympathetically to suggestions about such opportunities. Finally, chairpersons may request discussion and advice at Academic Council meetings on any matters pertaining to the fulfillment of their responsibilities.

Support and Recognition

In fulfilling their responsibilities as directors of academic programs and leaders of the faculty, chairpersons have the support provided by their own departmental budgets and the right to request additional resources, through the Office of the Dean, whenever such support promises to make a crucial difference with regard to program quality or faculty development. Such additional support may be made available, at the discretion of the Dean, either to insure a margin of excellence for the department as a whole or to provide timely assistance to one of its faculty.

In recognition of the amount of time it takes to fulfill the responsibilities of the chair, chairpersons will typically have a lighter teaching load than other full-time faculty in their department. For most, this will mean a teaching load equivalent to two three-credit courses (rather than three) in each of the regular annual semesters. However, since some departments are much larger and more difficult to govern than others, further recognition and support will be given in exceptional cases in the form of additional release time. Though no single formula will work in all cases, a general criterion for the consideration of additional release time will be the presence of more than ten full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty in a department. In addition, the number and type of adjunct faculty and/or majors and minors and the varying responsibilities associated with them will be factored into the equation. In any case, when an additional unit of release time is granted, it can be assigned (at the discretion of the chairperson and dean) either to the chairperson or to a second faculty member who will be given a set of duties commensurate with such release time, and who might be designated an assistant chairperson. In the even rarer case in which a department has more than twenty full-time faculty or a disproportionately onerous amount of administrative business, yet another unit of release time per year may be requested and/or granted. On the principle that all faculty at the University of Richmond, including chairpersons in the School of Arts and Sciences, are teachers first and foremost, the chairperson and dean should consider again whether this additional unit of release time might be awarded to someone (such as an assistant chairperson) whose administrative duties would be increased correspondingly, so that the chairperson would continue to have both time and energy to maintain an active teaching schedule.

Also in recognition of the time it takes to fulfill the responsibilities of the chair, it seems appropriate that the University's Committee on Committees, the Arts and Sciences Nominating Committee, and the President, Provost, and Dean should try not to appoint Arts and Sciences chairpersons to major school and university committees, and even more, not to appoint them as chairpersons of special ad hoc committees.

Chairpersons will be recognized and rewarded for the quality of their service to their department and to the School of Arts and Sciences. This quality will be assessed by their departmental colleagues in the second year of every three-year term, using the form and procedure approved by the faculty of the School of Arts and Sciences. This formal evaluation as well as annual performance evaluations will provide the principal means by which the Dean will be able to attend, in the annual review process, to the unique contributions of each individual chairperson.

As a final sign of recognition, the Dean of Arts and Sciences intends to request the means of providing annual summer stipends as part of the overall compensation package for chairpersons in the School of Arts and Sciences.

Endorsed by the Arts & Sciences Academic Council - 12/5/95