Fireside Friday, May 31, 2024 (Academic Departments)

Fireside this week! I am spinning up to write a Teaching Paradox series on Imperator later this week, but not quite ready to get started yet. I’m also thinking, perhaps before that, of doing a short post or set of posts on the organization of non-state ‘tribal’ societies in pre-Roman western Europe, looking at one set of ways people can organize themselves in the absence of states. Finally, I want to note that I haven’t decided quite yet, but I may end up pulling the trigger on taking a month off of the blog later this year (perhaps August?) to help me hit my goals in getting the book project done; I’ll keep you all informed of that as it goes.

The Academicats (Percy left, Ollie right) bravely keeping watch out of the window in the morning. We put the box there to make it a bit more comfortable for them (they use to stretch out all the way to get high enough to see out the window) and then when it became one of their favorite spots, we added the blanket. Ollie tends to sleep in this spot particularly in the late mornings.

For this week’s musing, I realize that of all of the ‘how does academia work’ explainers I’ve done, one topic I’ve never really dealt with except in passing is the structure of a normal academic department. This is one of those systems that is often invisible to undergraduate students (and is almost never explained) so it seems worth explaining the basics. As always with this explainers, this is particularly about how this works in the United States’ academic system; other countries often have their academia differently structured. Also, by necessity, I am writing this mostly from the perspective of the bottom of the hierarchy looking up, because that’s where I’ve always been.

The first thing to understand is that the structure of academic departments follow from the university’s original structure as a college – as in a body of colleagues – and so academic departments have almost guild-like organization, where there is a core membership which gets to make decisions and then many peripheral members who may or may not be part of the department, but often have little to no role in directing the department.

The core of any academic department are its tenure-track faculty. In American universities, these generally break up into three-and-a-half ranks: assistant professors are pre-tenure professors and in theory the most junior permanent faculty. After about half a decade they can be promoted to associate professor, the first post-tenure rank. An assistant professor denied tenure is effectively fired, whereas by contrast one can stay an associate professor effectively forever. However, by continuing to produce scholarly achievements – different schools will define this differently – associate professors can be promoted to ‘full’ professor. Finally, the ‘half’ rank on the topic are distinguished professors, who will often be the something-something chair of such-and-such; these are essentially full professors with an extra pay-bump.

As you might imagine, a crucial question of department governance is the decision to either promote or not promote at each of these stages. This is done by a ‘tenure committee,’ generally composed of roughly five members, all of whom are tenured, generally all from within the department in question, although in the case of interdisciplinary candidates and such there are sometimes one or two members from other departments. Universities have different rules for composition, but usually a set number of members (often two of five) are to be associate professors and the remainder to be full professors. Frequently, at least one member and the chair of the committee are selected by the Dean of the school in question. Technically, these committees do not make final decisions, but rather merely forward recommendations to the Dean of the school and the trustees or governing board of the university, which make final decisions. In practice, the recommendations of committees almost always hold. Note that departments do not have a single tenure committee, but rather compose a unique committee for each assistant professor going up for tenure.

The rest of the department governance is formed out of these tenure-line faculty, generally speaking. The most important role is department chair, also sometimes called a department head, who leads the department and acts as a bridge between it and upper-level university administration. In theory, the chair is the ‘boss’ of the department, but in practice the position is more administrative: the chair can’t really ‘fire’ anyone, after all – though through that administration it still wields a fair bit of power. That said, good department chairs generally function more like a ‘team captain’ than a boss. Department chairs are generally elected by the tenure-line faculty in the department, with only tenured members (or in some cases, only full professors) being eligible to run; they usually serve for several years. That said, because the job is quite onerous, in a lot of cases, faculty actively try to avoid it. While the department chair handles day-to-day questions of administration, larger decisions are often voted on by the department faculty (which is to say, tenure-line faculty).

On the other hand, a recent trend in university management is for the upper-level university administration to enforce ‘outside hires’ for department chairs, compelling departments to – rather than electing a new chair from within – conduct a full job search to hire an outside candidate. To be frank, it is hard not to conclude that the reason for this is that enforcing these sorts of hires breaks up faculty solidarity and renders departments more compliant to university administration policies. You will thus be unsurprised to learn that I think this is a bad, self-serving policy offered by university administrators which ought to be resisted by the faculty.

In addition to the department chair, the department selects, through various means (sometimes election, but frequently through rotation as these posts are often considered something of an imposition) a set of key department officers. The two most common are a Director of Graduate Studies (DGS, pronounced ‘dee-gee-ess’ – in places with graduate programs, of course) and a Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUGS, pronounced either ‘dee-you-gee-ess’ or simply ‘dugs’). The DUGS’ job is to make sure all of the undergraduate majors are proceeding towards completion and to act as a point-of-contact and advisor for undergraduates. The DGS acts as a sort of advisor-of-last-resort (particularly to field complaints) for graduate students, but also often has the job of assigning graduate teaching assistants and instructors. Both positions involve a lot of paper-work and time consuming administration, but often don’t come with the same extra-pay or course releases as department chair. The DGS is generally a senior faculty member,⁵⁴⁹ but sometimes the DUGS may be more junior. Large departments may also have an additional ‘undergraduate advisor‘ post to split the workload of the DUGS and this latter post is often given to quite junior faculty, including in some cases to teaching-track (permanent, non-tenure line) faculty, which rather speaks to how little most tenure-line faculty want to do it.

In addition to those standard department officers, you may see others. Large departments often have an ‘assistant’ or ‘associate’ chair who shares duties with the department chair. Departments with an active honors program typically have a faculty member who directs the honors program. The same is often true for departments that have attached centers or programs they run. You also see departments with a departmental officer in charge of diversity, equity and inclusion.⁵⁵⁰ My PhD department also had a ‘director of graduate placement’ whose job was to prepare graduate students for the academic job market, though my sense is that this isn’t typical.⁵⁵¹

So you have the core of the department: an elected chair along with several department officers, including a DGS and DUGS, who handle the day-to-day operation of the department, in line with policy either handed down from the college or decided upon by the department (tenured) faculty collectively. So who else is in a department?

The first thing to note is department staff, the full-time administrators who handle the logistics of the department: scheduling courses, processing HR paperwork, booking rooms, accounting and so on. Smaller departments will often have only one of these (termed a ‘department manager’ or ‘business manager’) but in larger departments that department manager will have staff. Typically the first role split off is ‘student services’ which may in turn in very large departments be subdivided into a ‘graduate coordinator’ and an ‘undergraduate coordinator,’ staff who handle course-scheduling, major and graduation requirements, student questions and complaints and all the related paperwork. If you are a student learn who this is in your department, because departmental staff can be incredibly helpful in navigating the bureaucracy of the university. Also, the people who work in student services tend to do so because they like students, so they usually want to be helpful. Be nice to them – indeed, ‘be nice to all of the staff’ is probably the single best advice I could give to any student or faculty member.

In very large departments, you may also see ‘accounting’ split off as a separate role (at this point, the department manager is primarily doing management and HR). I’ve also seen departments where the chair has a dedicated administrative assistant or the staff collectively do (or both). Staff usually also includes a squad of ‘work studies‘ – undergraduates doing part-time work for the university to help defray the costs of their education. Work studies are thus undergraduates, but may do a lot of the less specialized work (copies, printing, manpower for event hosting, sorting, collating and so on). As a rule, staff do not have a de jure role in department governance, and instead carry out policy decided on by the faculty and chair. In practice, only a very foolish chair would not consult their staff on such decisions, since the staff will almost always have much deeper insight into the technical and administrative challenges plans may pose.

In addition to staff, we have non-tenure-line faculty, be they permanent non-tenure-line (‘teaching track’) faculty or non-permanent (‘adjunct’) faculty. By and large, these teachers are excluded from the governance of the department; they are not typically consulted about such decisions (unlike staff) and to be frank are often not even informed of such decisions. I don’t want to turn this post into one more discussion of the plight of the adjunct, but I will say that generally I have found that most departments largely exclude their adjunct instructors from the collegiality of the department, often to an almost baroque degree. This is bad, both from an ethical standpoint, but also for the department and its students and also for the faculty writ large, in the former case because it is harder for an adjunct barely integrated into a department to provide a gateway for enthusiastic students to become majors and in the latter case because it is impossible to build labor-solidarity in a field if two-thirds of it are treated as academic serfs.

More fully integrated are a department’s graduate students, if it has any, though the graduate student role in department governance is typically as observers rather than participants. Often, for instance, you might have a single graduate student on faculty committees acting as an observer. It is not unheard of, for instance, for there to be a graduate student member on hiring committees, though of course if they have a vote, they are often expected to defer to the faculty members and do so. A major distinction among the graduate students are funded vs. unfunded students. Many graduate programs admit graduate students with funding, where the graduate student acts as a research, lab or teaching assistant in exchange for tuition remission and a stipend; in this case such students are, in practice, employees of the department (albeit very junior ones), as much as students. The departments I have been in all tended to express some form of the moral vision that graduate students were ‘junior colleagues’ and thus ought to be involved in the department; it is striking how this attitude does not extend to adjuncts. Departments with large graduate programs often have some sort of association for the graduate students, with its own elected officers, which speaks for the graduate students collectively.

Then, of course, you have the undergraduate students, in particular the department’s majors (that is, students majoring in one of the department’s subjects). Like graduate students, majors tend to be viewed very much as part of the department community, though obviously they have no role in governance. As noted above, most departments will have departmental officers (the DUGS, etc.) whose role is to help shepherd undergraduate majors through the department. Departments, especially in the humanities, are also keenly aware that their continued existence depends on maintaining a certain number of majors⁵⁵² and so undergraduate majors matter quite a bit.

In theory, I don’t think this structure is necessarily bad: it is actually rather fitting for a workplace team that is essentially a body of experts all working more or less independently. The obvious problem, however, is that this structure is not designed for a department with large numbers of non-tenure-track faculty. Having a significant chunk of the teaching faculty essentially excluded from department governance (and also paid less and kept precarious) breaks the fundamental strength of this organizational model. Alas, that is what is being done to our departments, to the disadvantage of professors, adjuncts and students all alike.

On to recommendations!

On a strategy and foreign policy note, I thought this latest Net Assessment podcast over at War on the Rockson the nature of a US strategy of competition with China was useful and thought provoking. The Net Assessment group tends to be a lot more sharply critical of administration policy (as true of this one as the previous administration) than I might be, given the constraints, but I think that criticism has value in forcing us to think in the big picture – what are we doing here? – beyond this or that crisis or smaller-scale decision. For what it is worth, I favor an approach of what I might call ‘managed competition,’ where the key goal is avoiding an open conflict without surrendering the positions of key US allies in the Pacific, indefinitely if necessary.

Also over at War on the Rocks, Yaniv Voller writes on the likely role of hamulas or clans in the organization of post-war Gaza. I’ve been working on non-state systems of organization in pre-Roman Gaul and Spain (which are larger scale ‘tribal,’ rather than clan-based) so the assessment of modern systems of non-state organization is interesting to me. It’s a useful reminder that in much of the world, state institutions are weak or non-existent and non-state institutions fill that gap. For my own part, however, I question the capability of non-state institutions to sustain a population as large as Gaza in the long-term; there’s a reason urbanization and states tend to go together.

We also just got another edition of Pasts Imperfect, which is well worth your time, especially for both for the interesting discussion of eclipse prediction in the ancient world by Philip Thibodeau and the forward-looking glance at John Ma’s soon to appear new book on the Greek polis: Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity. That book comes out next month and I confess I am giddy with excitement to read it.

For this week’s book recommendation, I am going to fudge my normal price limits and be honest with you that the book in question is expensive (around $80 US right now, so this might be one to get from the library), so with that caveat in advance, I’m going to recommend John Landers, The Field and the Forge: Population, Production and Power in the Pre-Industrial West (2003). I fudge my price rule because this is one of those books that, once recommended to me (at the start of my dissertation work), became foundational to my own thinking about the past. Essentially, Landers sets out to trace the creation of state and military power from their fundamental energy inputs. He thus begins with the two sources of energy available to pre-industrial societies: agriculture (the field) and burning fuel for heat (the forge), though of course the end-point of his analysis is the battlefield and the forge as a producer of military assets.

Landers opens (after his introduction, largely a matter of definitions) with a brief demographic primer, setting the ground for his main focus, which is how energy moves in these pre-industrial societies. As he notes, the vast majority of energy pre-industrial societies could use was ‘organic’ in nature, that is it was either grown in fields or produced from felled trees being burned as wood fuel. This ‘organic economy’ was the foundation of everything else and was typified by low productivity, which in turn conditions everything else. Once produced, energy – in the form of people, food, wood and so on – moves through a society not in terms of physical space but ‘demographic space,’ which is to say through the network of roads, trade relationships, shipping lanes and political channels: a human-created and ever-shifting terrain laid over the physical space.

That foundation laid, Landers moves to discuss military technology before getting on to his third part on state power and control. I should note that Landers’ examples and thinking here effectively begin with Roman Europe and run through the early modern period, but the early modern period is the focus. He does not stray much outside of Europe (as the title implies, though he does spend a fair amount of attention on the Byzantine Empire) but he also doesn’t dig into the pre-Roman period much. Landers’ story is essentially a story about states. His concern here is in how states harness the products of that organic economy in order to produce state power. Finally, Landers turns to the impacts of this system on military activity itself, on the way armies are raised, fed and supplied and how states manage those processes. The fundamental assumption behind the analysis, of course, is that while there are clear differences by era and system, the basic foundation of the organic economy changes only very slowly through this entire period (c. 150BC-1700AD is about how I’d define his range) meaning that all of these states and systems are built on the same basis.

I won’t bury the caveats: this is not a particularly easy book to read, though it is also not teeth-clenchingly hard. Landers can be quite clear and direct when dealing with concrete realities, but when he has to define abstract terms (like ‘demographic space’) sometimes struggles to do so very clearly. It’s not academic language that gets in the way, but the complexity of concepts. Still, this can be quite a dense book. Landers also assumes you already have a broad familiarity with with European history in the period; his examples are not generally given a lot of context. That said, if you are willing to accept that his examples show what he says, you can generally keep moving without becoming lost. If you want to look them up, he provides ample footnotes and the modern internet makes checking to find out what on earth an Emperor Maurice is relatively easy. But what I think will make this book valuable to some of you is twofold: first, it represents in some sense a graduation from one of our previous recommendations, P. Crone’s Pre-industrial Societies, with greater detail and granularity, and second because it draws the connection between production in the organic economy and military power much more clearly. Alas, that it is so expensive!