Effective Practices
Manage the job of being chair
- Understand your institution’s priorities and how your department fits into the institutional mission, with respect to, e.g., research, teaching, and community priorities.
- Understand and use the institutional resources available to you (e.g., communications, human resources, fundraising), recognizing that you don’t have to do everything yourself.
- Understand the department chair’s distinct roles, such as leader, administrator, facilitator, arbitrator, supervisor, advocate, representative, and visionary. Recognize how your own strengths and limitations (e.g., your comfort level, available time, training, and personal strengths with respect to each role) affect your ability to take on each role.
- Learn from previous chairs what factors have been critical to the advancement of your department, e.g., what types of data need to be tracked (see Part II of the supplement on Template for a Self Study Report for data to track), how to locate information (and who should do so), institutional processes required of the chair, points of contact in institutional offices, approximate timelines for reporting. Develop a list of the top ten things the chair should do to succeed, and pass along this knowledge to your successor.
- Learn about, prioritize, and address critical issues (e.g., low enrollment, student satisfaction and retention, climate, harassment, space concerns, and physics teaching) first. See the sections on Recruiting of Undergraduate Physics Majors, Retention of Undergraduate Physics Majors, Departmental Culture and Climate, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, The Physical Environment: Encouraging Collaboration and Learning, and Supporting Research-Based Teaching in Your Department for details.
- Recognize your role as your department’s representative in interacting with various audiences such as students, faculty, staff, administrators, alumni, external stakeholders, and the community.
- Demonstrate leadership through professional behavior, e.g., by providing timely, courteous, reflective responses to questions and requests. Adopt an accessible and responsive mindset, set a collegial tone, and show that you value the ideas of all department members.
- Set aside interpersonal issues you may have with individuals as you act on your department’s behalf.
- Develop strategies to balance demands of the chair’s role with other professional and personal goals and activities, e.g., set aside protected time such as evenings and weekends, limit when you read and respond to email, negotiate for staff support, reserve time for fitness, vacations, and research.
- Understand budget details as well as space, equipment, and facilities allocation, delegating their oversight as appropriate. (See Manage and advocate for resources below.)
- Understand policies and procedures (with respect to, e.g., ethical conduct, privacy, personnel, equal opportunity, student conduct, union rules, data management, , mandatory reporting, intellectual property, conflict of interest), whom to consult with regard to these issues, and how to respond if violations occur.
- Become familiar with policies and the chair’s role in procedures concerning safety (e.g., building security, laboratory and machine shop safety, hazardous materials) and emergency management, e.g., fire, tornado, and earthquake response.
- Remain mindful that a department’s reputation is built over many years but can be lost quickly due to inappropriate action.
- Do the hard stuff, too; difficult issues can get worse if neglected. Seek help from the dean if you need support or ideas.
- Identify major reports and deadlines with respect to, e.g., annual learning assessments (see the section on How to Assess Student Learning at the Program Level), personnel performance reviews and position requests, budgets, course and program enrollments, course scheduling, departmental review and self-study (see the section on How to Undertake an Undergraduate Program Review), departmental newsletters, annual lectures, student events, and revision of foundational documents (see the sections on How to Create and Use a Strategic Plan and How to Create and Use Foundational Documents).
- Strive for transparency in departmental governance by publicizing and talking openly about the procedures and strategies you use to make decisions.
- Develop a timetable for the above items and their deadlines by engaging faculty and staff in defining their roles and responsibilities, delegating appropriately, and establishing a system of reminders for completion of work.
- Prioritize tasks, taking into account, for example, the importance of developing or maintaining relationships, critical time constraints, and strategic opportunities.
- Gather and use data and information in an ongoing, cyclic manner to support departmental advocacy, , ongoing programmatic improvement, and achievement of strategic milestones.
- Consider creating a comprehensive document that describes department operations and allows stakeholders to review management policies, procedures, priorities, and timelines.
- Engage department faculty, the dean, and chairs of other departments for their feedback on and implementation of your management plan.
- Consider developing a “Plan B” for difficult issues or critical events (e.g., budget cuts, space allocation, enrollment shortfalls), engaging others in developing potential responses.
- Recognize that sometimes you may need to step in to address a problem immediately, while at other times it may be more appropriate to wait for or encourage others to address problems.
- Focus on addressing departmental problems and facilitating solutions, regardless of the source of the problem.
- Prepare for crises (e.g., medical emergencies, loss of power, natural disasters, violence on campus) by identifying how information flows to and from the department, creating and maintaining a plan for maintaining continuity of departmental operations (including, e.g., communication strategies, points of contact, contact information, roles; this is often called a “business continuity plan”), and disseminating this plan to department members and other appropriate offices, e.g., the dean, physical plant.
- Consider addressing or championing a signature issue during your tenure as chair that advances strategic goals identified by your department.
- Share responsibilities of the position by delegating authority and/or assigning department tasks and activities to, e.g., a curriculum committee; the director of undergraduate studies; an equity, diversity, and inclusion committee. Provide these groups and individuals the opportunity to complete assignments without micromanagement.
- Develop leadership by rotating less experienced faculty and staff members into positions of responsibility and mentoring them. Identify faculty members who could succeed you as chair and prepare them for the position by discussing chair duties and responsibilities and the issues the department is facing, and by assigning them leadership roles in the department.
- Identify specific strengths that individuals within the department have, and use these to inform how you delegate responsibility for leading departmental initiatives or their components.
- Use annual reviews of faculty and staff to compliment positive actions, address inaction, and ensure that everyone in your department is progressing toward their agreed-upon goals, documenting issues when they arise.
- Recognize that you are not responsible for solving every problem, seek guidance on when and how to intervene, and rely on appropriate institutional procedures when needed.
- Accept responsibility for your mistakes and learn from them through discussions with a trusted colleague.
- Understand your department’s history and the context in which past policies and decisions were made, particularly regarding contentious issues, to inform current and future policies and decisions.
- Make decisions by consensus whenever possible, allowing extra time to arrive at outcomes when issues are complex or contentious.
- Ensure that decisions on contentious issues are made when people with differing views are present or can contribute to conversations.
- Consider how decisions impact equity, diversity, and inclusion of students, faculty, and staff.
- Include student and staff input and feedback in decisions, whenever appropriate.
- Develop, share, and use policies and procedures that ensure progress even when consensus cannot be reached, e.g., bylaws, rules akin to those in Robert’s Rules of Order, formal agreements on how major decisions are made. Apply such policies and procedures equitably.
- Ensure that department members with differing views are given time to express and discuss their perspectives in situations when consensus is not possible, and set timelines for when decisions will be finalized. Once a decision is made, revisit only if new information becomes available.
- Be aware of the potential for conflicts of interest (e.g., in hiring, committee membership, resource allocation, or promotion) and employ strategies for mitigating them (e.g., transparency or recusal).
- Recognize that you will not be able to support all requests and that you may need to make unpopular decisions. Identify your reasons for making such decisions and proactively develop arguments to respond to potential concerns.
- Recognize that there may be disagreement about difficult decisions. Listen to criticism but don’t take it personally.
- Consider the potential benefits of serving as chair for multiple terms: broader institutional memory, knowledge of practices and procedures, efficient administration of ongoing processes, developed relationships across your institution and beyond, deeper understanding of strengths of department members, ability to sustain initiatives.
- Consider potential drawbacks of serving as chair for multiple terms: burnout, loss of research productivity, loss of connection to students through teaching and advising, reduced chance to develop leadership within your department, falling into a routine where you don’t pay attention to potential departmental improvements, fewer new perspectives to guide your department into new areas, unhealthy power dynamics.
- Assist the succeeding chair by identifying important information (e.g., deadlines, data, archived material), important relationships, unresolved issues, and challenges they may face, while being careful to not pass along biases resulting from your interactions with individuals or experiences you had as chair.
Communicate effectively
- Recognize the differences in communicating with different audiences (e.g., faculty, staff, administration, donors, current and prospective students, alumni, campus offices) and tailor your message appropriately, e.g., recognize when to use a more familiar versus a more professional tone.
- Create concise talking points that convey information appropriate for the intended audience, while ensuring that clear outcomes and deadlines are communicated.
- Present issues with a positive or neutral viewpoint and an appreciation for all perspectives.
- Discuss frequency of communications with departmental audiences; strike a balance between too infrequent and too frequent.
- Consider creating a departmental calendar or schedule for important communications regarding, e.g., departmental meetings, committee meetings, administrative and reporting deadlines, and alumni events.
- Develop a social media strategy for communicating with various constituencies (e.g., students, alumni, and friends of your department), including a plan for who is responsible for maintaining and monitoring websites and social media accounts.
- Develop and periodically revisit a shared understanding of which types of decisions are made by department leaders or by your department as a whole, and the processes used for making such decisions.
- Build consensus by using collaborative communication, eliciting views, assuming positive intent, hearing all voices, giving appropriate credit to individual contributions, and using .
- Be mindful of power imbalances and other circumstances that may limit the extent to which some people feel free to voice an opinion.
- Ensure that you gather information representing all perspectives before making decisions.
- Pause in extended discussions or debates to summarize the issues and positions and possible paths forward.
- When making non-consensus decisions, ensure that those in the minority feel their voices have been heard and respected. Avoid using your position to justify decisions.
- Build confidence in your ability to act rationally rather than emotionally when making decisions by having clear justifications based on strategic goals, the departmental mission, data, and agreed-upon processes.
- Assume confidential arrangements will be revealed over time and ensure that they do not contain elements that would be harmful if publicly known.
- Ensure that you have a clear reason for having a meeting, structure the meeting in accordance with its goal(s), and invite the appropriate people to facilitate and/or contribute to the discussion.
- Provide agendas with clear goals in advance. Maximize discussions and minimize presentations.
- Begin and end meetings on time.
- Establish clear guidelines for how meetings are conducted and decisions are documented, to ensure that discourse is respectful and all voices have the opportunity to be heard. For example, call on people in order of reversed seniority, ensure that accurate notes are taken and distributed, and establish a commonly agreed-upon procedure for recognizing and intervening when discourse becomes disrespectful.
- End meetings with clarity on expected outcomes or action items, identifying who will be responsible and the mechanism and timeline for follow-up.
- Ensure that accurate meeting minutes are available to all in a timely fashion, being careful to consider how to document sensitive or confidential topics. Include topics discussed, major points of view, decisions made, duties assigned, and next steps, but avoid transcripts of who said what.
- Create a regular meeting schedule to establish expectations of thoughtful discourse and deliberate progress while respecting department members’ time.
- Form subcommittees to address issues that do not require the participation of the entire department or to develop strategies and proposals for moving forward after initial discussions. Ensure that accurate minutes of the subcommittee meetings are available to all.
- Consider taking the last few minutes of a meeting to discuss potential agenda items for the next meeting.
- Request agenda items from department members prior to setting the next meeting’s agenda.
- Have, know, and use written processes to manage conflicts and difficult situations, e.g., job performance issues, complaints, and interpersonal conflicts.
- Be familiar with and know when and how to engage with institutional processes for managing difficult situations, e.g., through your ombudsperson or equal opportunity office.
- Acknowledge concerns quickly, identify and develop consensus on underlying facts, address concerns directly, and update relevant parties as appropriate if the situation cannot be resolved immediately.
- Allow sufficient time to reflect when responding to challenging emails and conversations, being careful to accurately represent various perspectives.
- Settle divisive issues with conversations, not by email.
- Visit colleagues in their offices, particularly for challenging conversations, rather than always meeting in your office.
- Establish a timeline with all parties for making a decision, when negotiations are extended.
- Document interactions, discussions, and decisions concerning sensitive issues.
- Promote an inclusive culture by recognizing and respecting cultural differences in how people interact, across, e.g., gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, and discipline.
- Begin discussions about a department member’s performance concerns promptly when issues arise, well in advance of any formal review process. Identify issues and track progress in formal review documents.
- Reflect on people’s perspectives and experiences, and enter discussions without a predetermined result in mind.
- Recognize when difficult problems could be solved by negotiation rather than a decision. Identify alternative solutions that leave everyone feeling that they have gained in the interchange.
- Consider what someone has to gain, especially when you are confronted with an individual who seems unwilling to compromise, and consider using this to entice them into negotiation.
- Establish an expectation that faculty and staff are more likely to be successful in addressing a problem if they bring a proposed solution to the conversation, and that such an approach may better illuminate underlying issues.
- Discuss challenging situations with colleagues or your supervisor to better understand your role and possible biases. Be careful not to limit conversations to those who share your perspective (e.g., the chair of a related department) and be mindful of confidentiality in dealing with personnel concerns.
- Enter negotiations, particularly with administrators, with an understanding of others’ perspectives, a clear rationale for your position, and conditions that will allow you to either compromise on your request or leave the negotiation at least temporarily unresolved.
- Learn conflict management and de-escalation skills, e.g., through training offered by your institution.
Develop relationships within and beyond your department
- Understand institutional issues and the challenges upper-level administrators are facing (e.g., financial challenges, time-to-degree criticisms, equity and inclusion considerations), to determine how your department can contribute to advancing the institution’s vision and/or initiatives, e.g., student success initiatives.
- Learn about your institution’s overall budget and budget model, how allocation of funding within this budget has changed over time, and national and institutional pressures on institutional and departmental budgets. Consider serving on your institution’s budget committee or asking the dean to review how budgets are constructed.
- Develop departmental strategic plans and initiatives, while being mindful of institutional priorities and budgetary realities. See the section on How to Create and Use a Strategic Plan.
- Support institutional needs, e.g., service on committees, courses for non-majors, efforts, and collaboration with non-academic department offices in areas such as public engagement, fundraising, recruiting, and retention.
- Actively represent your department’s interests at the institutional level (at, e.g., chairs’ meetings, faculty senate meetings) while presenting your department in a balanced context, weighing the needs of your department with those of your institution.
- Be concise in requests and responses, following up all meetings with a written summary of your understanding of decisions, actions, and timeline, sent to the administrator with whom you met.
- Ask respectfully for needed resources, appreciating that resources are limited. (See Manage and advocate for resources below.)
- Know lines of communication used at your institution, e.g., know the appropriate people who handle specific issues; be cautious not to “go around” people; know the best time of day to send messages.
- Set a positive tone for future interactions by informing appropriate offices and people of key successes of faculty, staff, students, and alumni.
- Communicate with administrators and offices beyond the dean and provost (e.g., alumni relations, admissions, fundraising) to ensure that they understand department offerings and needs.
- Come to the dean with problems and issues that impact the success and reputation of the department and its members. Understand that not every problem rises to this level.
- Provide financially viable and data-driven solutions to challenges faced by your department.
- Invite the dean to department meetings and functions on an occasional and targeted basis.
- Provide prompt, concise feedback to requests.
- Schedule regular meetings with the dean to keep them apprised of department successes and challenges.
- Provide the dean with advance notice of significant challenges, issues, and opportunities, e.g., a forthcoming announcement of a funded grant proposal or personnel issues.
- Meet outside of formal meetings to discuss successes and challenges, share ideas, and seek advice and information.
- Bring other chairs with you when presenting to members of the administration solutions that cross departmental lines.
- Build alliances with other departments to share programmatic efforts such as events, cross-departmental grant proposals, opportunities for collaboration, curriculum development, internships, career readiness programming, and social organizations for students, and to share resources such as electronics and machine shops.
- Plan course schedules with sensitivity to conflicts with required classes in other departments or campus events.
- Make physics and physicists an integral part of the liberal arts and science curriculum, by, e.g., offering courses satisfying requirements for general education, offering first-year seminars, and/or providing mentoring for students doing capstone experiences in other departments.
- Build and maintain relationships with all of your colleagues, so they can provide a sounding board for new ideas or a safe space to discuss issues. While it may be appropriate to offer to meet privately and/or informally to discuss potential ideas or sensitive topics, extend these offers to all department members, not just your friends.
- Demonstrate your interest in faculty and staff input concerning departmental functions by incorporating their feedback and contributions into actions or explaining why this is not possible.
- Treat adjuncts, instructors, and non-tenure-track faculty as valued members of the department and include them in discussions, decisions, and social activities. See the section on Supporting Research-Based Teaching in Your Department for guidance on how to support and value instructional staff in a variety of roles.
- Solicit informal input from many people before department meetings, to help you frame discussions and learn about new issues.
- Make time for informal conversations (i.e., “walking diplomacy”) with faculty and staff, to learn about issues they face and potentially identify easy ways to help, e.g., low-cost or low-effort solutions.
- Engage according to their interests and strengths (e.g., teaching, service, promoting student success) while providing professional development in areas where they can strengthen their professional skills.
- Use the broader perspective you gain as chair of the work others are doing to identify synergies that others may not see and connect potential collaborators to pursue larger synergistic projects or to promote cross-disciplinary opportunities, e.g., connect computational physicists with computational chemists or biologists to engage in a joint effort.
- Apply policies consistently, while recognizing that sometimes the context and needs of individuals require exceptions.
- Respect the time of others when scheduling and keeping appointments.
- Identify ways for faculty and staff to contribute to departmental governance.
- Build relationships with faculty and staff through personalized acts of kindness.
- Create positive and supportive personal relationships throughout your department, by, e.g., having coffee, sharing informal lunches, and/or discussing non-work interests or concerns.
- Include all voices when developing the departmental vision, goals, and strategic actions.
- Inclusively identify and recruit faculty and other for positions of responsibility on strategic initiatives.
- Consider equity when distributing workload and assignments (e.g., committee assignments, advising, mentoring) while ensuring work is accomplished and shared. If a department member is not performing adequately, provide motivation by creating incentives, withholding support, or initiating personnel actions when goals are not accomplished, rather than incentivizing poor performance by not assigning work.
- Recognize that different people may require different approaches when collaboratively creating a policy, procedure, or other product. For example, depending on the situation, it may be more productive to present a prepared draft, convene a committee to create a draft, or facilitate a discussion prior to developing a draft.
- Consider using retreats or more intensive gatherings to focus on professional skills development or to address more complex issues.
- Construct committees or task groups with specific charges, transparent reporting requirements, and clearly identified timelines.
- Give department members who are often asked to bring specific underrepresented viewpoints (e.g., those from ) a choice in their committee assignments, to maximize their impact on departmental decision making. Be mindful that such members often carry disproportionate service burdens, including service outside the department or institution.
- Ensure that critical committees include diverse perspectives, including with respect to experience (e.g., tenured and pre-tenure faculty, full- and part-time instructors, and adjuncts) and demographics.
- Consider adding an undergraduate or graduate student representative to committees, taking care to shield sensitive information when appropriate.
- Provide faculty members equitable opportunities to serve on or be nominated for various committees, ensuring that committee opportunities rotate among faculty.
- Publish committee assignments and service responsibilities to promote transparency and fairness.
- Make yourself accessible to students who have requests related to issues under your direct purview by clearly publishing times you are available and communicating to students the role you can play in addressing their issues.
- Consider establishing a small, rotating student advisory group to enhance two-way communications with students.
- Ensure that you treat students fairly and compassionately when working to resolve their issues. Strike a balance between consistency and consideration of extenuating circumstances.
- Understand majors’ and non-majors’ experiences and perspectives on issues by getting to know these students and listening carefully to their concerns.
- Establish a climate of respect for students’ educational advancement, rather than one based on preconceived notions of success. For example, encourage the creation of curricular pathways that support students with a range of career goals, prior preparation, and entry points into the major.
- Identify resources (e.g., money, space, faculty and staff time) to support student groups, e.g., chapters, student chapters of national organizations for students of color, local clubs for women or students of color in physics, study groups, and other student social networks.
- Consult the section on Retention of Undergraduate Physics Majors for further examples of how to support student success.
- Acknowledge and show respect for staff contributions, and establish an expectation that faculty, students, and staff within your department will do the same.
- Review and evaluate staff roles, responsibilities, and performance, taking into account feedback from faculty and staff.
- Help staff understand their roles and how their contributions help advance your department’s vision, mission, and broader recognition, through, e.g., inclusion in departmental retreat discussions, grant proposals, and newsletters.
- Ensure access to, and set expectations for, appropriate professional development for staff. Understand how your human resources office can assist the supervision and professional development of staff, through, e.g., training, resources, and mentoring.
- Write constructive, honest performance reviews of departmental staff, in collaboration with your human resources office, to recognize achievements and address issues before they become problematic.
- Seek input from staff (through, e.g., regular listening sessions) to learn about their experiences and get their perspectives on departmental operations and climate.
- Consider appointing staff to department or institution committees to recognize their expertise and help broaden their experience and job satisfaction.
- Build and maintain relationships with alumni who can support your department in financial and other ways, by inviting them to campus events, placing them on advisory panels, and engaging them with newsletters or social media.
- Connect with campus offices (e.g., your internship, career services, and development or fundraising offices) to facilitate connections with companies, foundations, and donors.
- Create and cultivate an external advisory council. (See Consider using an advisory council below.)
- Use meetings of the external advisory council to connect its members with faculty, staff, students, campus administrators, and appropriate campus offices, e.g., your development or fundraising office.
Foster an equitable and inclusive culture and climate
- Model the behavior you ask others to adopt, including maintaining an aspirational attitude concerning personal and departmental excellence, focusing on the needs of students and their success, employing effective instructional and mentoring practices, meeting deadlines, fostering collaborative relationships, calling out inappropriate behavior or language, and maintaining and your own mental and physical well-being.
- Familiarize your faculty and staff with institutional expectations, policies, and procedures concerning equity and inclusion, including knowing when and how to seek support or make reports when incidents of bias and harassment occur.
- Participate in institution-provided training to develop a richer understanding of ways to support equity, diversity, and inclusion. Encourage colleagues to join you.
- Be visibly present at initiatives you and/or your institution are promoting, such as colloquia, student events, workshops, and campus functions.
- Communicate to students, faculty, and staff that you can support them in addressing issues. Understand the potential legal limitations of your role, e.g., as a mandatory reporter.
- Value the experience and expertise of your faculty and staff, as well as your own, recognizing that feelings of inadequacy may be the result of the .
- Act promptly to address incidents of bias and harassment. Discuss with campus officials and with those affected possible responses, which could involve holding appropriately inclusive discussions, talking publicly about the incident, and strategizing responses such as taking disciplinary actions, instituting policy changes, and identifying support networks. Ensure that responses are sensitive to the concerns of those who have been adversely affected. Avoid minimizing responses to incidents.
- See the section on Departmental Culture and Climate for guidance on how to create, nurture, and expect a culture in which everyone is welcome, included, and supported.
- Create a welcoming work environment by being accessible; using inclusive language; keeping a positive outlook focused on opportunities rather than challenges; and communicating a supportive attitude toward faculty, staff, and administrators.
- Ensure that all , including tenured and pre-tenure faculty, full- and part-time instructors, and adjuncts, see themselves as valued members of the department by facilitating their contributions to advancing student learning and their roles in promoting a supportive culture for all.
- Recognize and address inequitable experiences of faculty and staff from by ensuring their responsibilities (e.g., teaching assignments and student advising loads) are equitable and providing opportunities (e.g., mentoring, professional development, and opportunities for leadership).
- Recognize and address inequitable experiences of students from by addressing sources of inequity in your department and ensuring access to appropriate support structures, e.g., mentoring and support groups.
- Educate yourself, colleagues, and students about equity and inclusion issues. Avoid burdening members of with this responsibility.
- See the section on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for guidance on how to engage in practices that enable members of to fully participate and thrive in physics.
Address challenging situations
- Recognize your own cultural biases and others’ exclusionary behavior (e.g., the labeling of someone as “non-collegial”), and address the ways in which such biases and behaviors can impact perceptions of another department member’s participation in discussions. For example, a department member you or others perceive as “quiet” may be reluctant to participate in expected ways because of language differences or social norms from their culture.
- Recognize that cultural differences between department members may incite feelings of non-collegiality. Sponsor departmental discussions about these differences and encourage members to develop ways to work productively and collaboratively.
- Recognize how social dynamics within a department can exclude some people. For example, conducting informal policy discussions with an inner circle, meeting at locations such as a bar or gym, or holding meetings after 5 p.m. can exclude some department members from participating. Work to ensure there are ample opportunities for everyone to participate.
- See the section on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for further ideas.
- Hold one-on-one conversations to understand their concerns and perspectives.
- Shape a strategy for engaging those who are disengaged in a way that acknowledges their concerns and perspectives, e.g., add an element of their concerns to the agenda for group discussions or use a component of their perspective to modify your plans and identify them as the author of this component.
- Strategize with those who feel disenfranchised about ways to bring their voices forward, through, e.g., intervening in meetings when they are interrupted or ignored, bringing their views forward in policy documents or agenda items, calling on them during group discussions, and/or publicly acknowledging their contributions.
- Invite those who are disengaged and/or feel disenfranchised to lead a project or initiative.
- Consult the dean to identify resources and strategies (e.g., faculty review) that can assist in addressing issues of disengagement and/or disenfranchisement.
- Practice inclusive meeting techniques, particularly if disruptive discussions emerge. For example, invite each participant to contribute in turn without interruptions and limit follow-on comments until everyone has contributed at least once.
- Consider establishing smaller working groups that separate individuals who have conflicts.
- Recognize that not all disagreements can be resolved, and choose a path forward.
- Recognize the difference between interpersonal conflicts and inappropriate or abusive behavior. Step in to address inappropriate or abusive behavior directly, working with your human resources office as appropriate, rather than expecting resolution through discussion.
- Meet with those who engage in these behaviors, inform them of their actions, discuss the impact and consequences of those actions (e.g., disciplinary actions, legal consequences), and ask them to modify their behavior.
- Consider how these behaviors have negatively impacted others, and work to redress the impact.
- Discuss potential strategies for addressing these behaviors (e.g., professional development and intervention mechanisms) with others (e.g., your human resources office, ombudsperson, and dean) and gauge their ability to support or guide potential conversations and actions.
- Document these behaviors and subsequent recommended actions in emails, memos, or annual or periodic personnel reviews.
- See the section on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for guidance on how to use departmental and institutional policies and procedures to address bias, microaggressions, and harassment.
- Consider the nature and severity of the behavior, weighing the context (whether the behavior results from, e.g., aggression or bias connected to your identity or rank; emotions running high because of personal, local, or national incidents or events; personal stressors like illness or family pressures, if you are aware the person is facing such issues; and/or different cultural backgrounds or norms), and whether it is a recurring or one-time incident.
- Try to de-escalate the situation while it is happening, if possible and appropriate, by asking questions, lowering your voice, and acknowledging what the person is saying.
- Document the incident(s) in writing and, if possible, corroborate these observations with a neutral party, e.g., someone else witnessing the incident. Do this as soon as possible, as delays may impact your and others’ recall of details and context.
- Consult institutional policies and procedures that may be relevant. Consult with the dean or another administrator who has responsibility for upholding those policies and procedures and supporting you as a chair.
- If appropriate, also consult with other experienced colleagues and allies, e.g., other department members, other department chairs, deans, human resources officials, your institution’s Title IX officer, and/or your institution’s ombudsperson.
- Based on these consultations, outline a response plan. Recognize that the first step is often a straightforward conversation with the person about the inappropriate or disruptive behavior, before you move forward with a formal response, if you deem that necessary. In your consultations, consider who should hold that first conversation with the person.
- Enact your plan as soon as possible following the incident, and document how it unfolds in writing. Identify who should receive a copy of this documentation, e.g., the offender, the dean, and/or a human resources official. Your institution’s policies and procedures may include guidelines or requirements on this point.
- Consider holding follow-up discussions to check in with those involved (e.g., the offender, department members, the dean, and/or human resources) to emphasize the importance of addressing the behavior, and to reflect on and assess the effectiveness of the response.
Establish and sustain a culture of cyclic internal review
- Facilitate the development of departmental mission and/or vision statements that reflect local context and departmental aspirations for student success, e.g., student career aspirations and goals and budget realities. See the section on How to Create and Use Foundational Documents for details.
- Facilitate the development of a department strategic plan and a corresponding action plan that builds on departmental strengths and reflects a shared vision of your department’s aspirations. See the section on How to Create and Use a Strategic Plan for details.
- Construct a set of documents establishing curricular priorities that can also be used for planning and , including (1) , (2) a corresponding , and (3) . See the section on How to Assess Student Learning at the Program Level for details.
- Create a multi-year plan within or linked to the strategic plan or to other external cycles, such as program review, annual assessment of student learning, and . Such a plan allows for regular assessment, review of critical programmatic outcomes, and targeted evaluation throughout the plan, by supporting, e.g., evaluation of graduation rates or course every other year, and review of learning outcomes of non-STEM-major courses at least once per review cycle.
- Refer to these documents when making decisions and setting priorities.
- Review these documents with your department on a periodic basis (e.g., annually, biennially, twice during a program review cycle) in light of your assessment processes.
- Establish, with faculty discussions, priorities across a broad range of departmental activities (e.g., Instructional Laboratories and Experimental Skills, Undergraduate Research, Career Preparation, Recruiting of Undergraduate Physics Majors, and Retention of Undergraduate Physics Majors), ensuring that proposed actions align with your department’s strategic plan.
- Avoid assessment fatigue by limiting reviews of non-critical program elements to a semi-regular basis and focusing on assessments that provide information your department can and will act on.
- Revisit prioritization on a timescale that allows your department to respond proactively to new ideas, challenges, and opportunities.
- See the section on How to Select and Use Various Assessment Methods in Your Program for guidance on how to engage in actionable assessment and assess departmental function and initiatives.
- Identify the information, resources, and tools needed to measure outcomes of proposed actions (e.g., changes in student demographic or course/degree completion data), and ensure that these resources are suitable for informing decisions.
- Partner with appropriate campus offices (e.g., admissions, institutional research, learning assessment, alumni relations, development or fundraising) to better understand institutional data, resources, and tools available to assist your department’s decision making.
- Collect, analyze, and document data for use in discussions with your department, administration, and external reviewers, considering, for example, student learning and other markers of student success, career and graduate placements, recruiting and retention, and demographics. Gather data on an ongoing (e.g., annual) basis, rather than waiting for an upcoming program review.
- Ensure assessment is a shared responsibility embedded into all key departmental activities, e.g., revision and evaluation of , recruiting of majors, and support of retention in specific classes and throughout the major.
- Recognize department members who take a leading role in assessing the curriculum and course- and as fulfilling significant departmental service requirements.
- Keep activities and documentation around assessment as simple and concise as possible, to meet departmental needs while valuing faculty and staff time.
- Use information and analysis to set priorities for future reviews, keeping in mind departmental priorities and the need for each review to focus on specific program components.
- Integrate into department meetings and conversations regular discussion of , assessment results, and departmental priorities established in the strategic plan.
- Regularly review progress (e.g., at department meetings and departmental retreats) and prioritize actions that address assessment findings.
- Document changes to create a “paper trail” that can be used to bring new up to speed on how changes have been made, and to show continuous improvement to external reviewers and administration.
- Cycle through reviewing each of your between external program reviews to ensure that all critical areas of the curriculum are regularly assessed for potential improvement.
- See the section on How to Assess Student Learning at the Program Level for further details.
- Share and discuss at department meetings and retreats reports from national organizations (e.g., , , ) relevant to program values and priorities.
- Examine programs, activities, and strategies from other departments. Consider adapting their successful initiatives for your program.
- Suggest that faculty members, when visiting other institutions, inquire about practices these institutions have used to improve their programs. This can provide perspective on your own institution’s programs, policies, and practices.
- Encourage faculty members to serve as external reviewers for departments outside of your institution, to gain perspective on your own institution’s programs, policies, and practices. See the section on How to Serve as an Undergraduate Program Reviewer for details.
- Design, in consultation with your department and your development or fundraising office, the mission and goals for the council, e.g., to provide advice on career preparation, to raise funds or endow departmental components, and/or to reflect on curricular issues.
- Set specific parameters for participation (e.g., terms, term limits, frequency of meetings, expectations for making donations, attendance at meetings or events) and diversity, with respect to, e.g., , age, employment sector, and alumni status.
- Work with your administration and development or fundraising office to provide a path for members of your advisory council to get more involved with your institution, to create synergies between your advisory council and other groups within your institution, and to avoid competition among fundraising initiatives.
- Use council members’ time effectively and ensure active participation and positive interactions by setting clear agendas and timelines with specific tasks relevant to the purpose of the council, e.g., fundraising and/or providing recommendations on what companies are looking for in prospective hires.
- Consider using reports and recommendations from your advisory council to augment existing strategies to obtain resources from your institution, or through external grants or foundations.
- Acknowledge and honor council members’ participation through, e.g., letters and/or tokens of appreciation.
Hire strong and diverse faculty and staff
- Identify programmatic needs, using data, and determine how these needs align with your departmental and institutional missions, goals, and strategic plans. Balance requirements for tenure-track faculty members, non-tenure-track (e.g., full- and part-time instructors and adjuncts), and support staff, e.g., laboratory manager, electronics or machine shop technicians, and administrative support staff.
- Understand the hiring models being advanced by your institution and how your department can respond to fit these models, by, e.g., balancing research faculty and teaching faculty to manage costs and/or addressing enrollment variances with temporary faculty.
- Work with department members to create a multi-year plan for position requests based on your department’s strategic and programmatic needs, recognizing pertinent demands from across your institution (e.g., enrollment changes in other departments or across your institution) and research trends or institutional aspirations (e.g., establishing a center and/or cluster hires, recruiting candidates for their specific expertise or instructional excellence).
- Inform your requests (e.g., through conversations with the dean or provost) with an understanding of how faculty hiring decisions are made at the institutional level, including how positions fit into the institutional budget model. Frame requests in terms of the return on investment for your institution, e.g., the grants that a new hire will bring in or the opportunity they will provide to grow a program. Be persistent but also respectful of institutional constraints.
- Be prepared to make a pitch when unexpected opportunities arise, balancing value added from an opportunity hire against the potential impact on obtaining permission for future hires.
- Cultivate a departmental culture that supports creative hiring strategies (e.g., shared or inter-departmental hires, partner hires, cluster hires, interdisciplinary hires) by helping department members understand how such hires can create new and/or unexpected opportunities that benefit the department, rather than be viewed as a burden, obligation, or favor to the dean or another department. See Resources below for recommendations on best practices for dual-career hiring and cluster hiring.
- Identify and prepare talking points on department and institution strengths that can attract potential applicants, e.g., collegiality and inclusiveness, research opportunities for faculty and students, the fiscal health of your institution, strong department enrollments and graduating classes, research infrastructure, and commitment to educational excellence.
- Talk with faculty and staff from at your institution to understand their experiences in the local community and how welcome they feel. Learn what kinds of support they rely on and/or need (particularly when there is a lack of diversity in the surrounding area), for example, identity-specific support structures, childcare, and/or availability of partner hires.
- Even when you are not hiring, establish relationships within communities from which you might recruit candidates, by, e.g., inviting diverse speakers to your department, attending conferences and sessions that address issues affecting , attending presentations by individuals from marginalized groups, and striking up conversations with diverse colleagues at conferences and in other professional settings.
- Attend equity- and inclusion-oriented conferences or events within the physics community to understand concerns of physicists from and to actively diversify your networks with an eye toward future hires, e.g., , , , or national meetings. (See Resources below.)
- Recruit broadly at all levels, using equitable hiring practices such as those recommended by WISELI, the ADVANCE Program, and other Resources below.
- Advertise the inclusive culture of your department and to your intended audience using a diverse network of contacts and methods, e.g., social media, listservs, newsletters, and more traditional routes.
- Learn how to make your job ads inclusive and inviting for the diversity of physicists you seek to recruit, e.g., by working with your office of equity and inclusion.
- Advertise positions in places where diverse candidates can be found, such as and other networks for .
- Reach out to colleagues from for suggestions for candidates to recruit.
- Consider targeted recruiting of candidates who are postdocs or graduate students at other institutions in your region or even in your own department, in order to provide opportunities for physicists with a strong sense of place (e.g., those in local communities, others with family and community in the area), while recognizing issues that internal recruiting can present for both departments and individuals hired.
- Develop relationships with physics chairs at similar institutions and exchange ideas about hiring. If appropriate, agree to share (only with candidates’ permission) information about strong candidates who were not offered a position but might be a good fit for each other’s departments.
- Recruit the dean to endorse your plan for a diverse candidate pool. If the initial pool is insufficiently diverse, use the dean’s commitment to leverage a renewed or extended search, and use the extra time to build your pool by working with your human resources office to improve recruiting, expand marketing of the position, and promote the position in other ways, such as via conferences and networking.
- Collaborate with the appropriate offices at your institution (e.g., equity, diversity, and inclusion; human resources) to create inclusive and successful search processes. Engage these offices early, understand mandated search procedures, and discuss your academic and programmatic goals with them.
- Construct a search committee that has diverse representation, potentially including someone who will assume the role of advocate for an inclusive and transparent process, such as a search advocate.
- Educate all search and selection committee members about equitable and effective practices for recruiting and hiring diverse candidates through required training, discussion of the research literature, and interactive role-play scenarios. Ensure adherence to these practices.
- Learn about and its detrimental effects on people from , and consider how tokenism may affect searches, hiring, and the experiences that faculty and staff from marginalized groups have in your department.
- Learn about and practices for minimizing it. For example, recognize that candidates from tend to be evaluated more fairly when they have more representation in the interview pool, and make it a goal to have more than one member of a marginalized group in your phone interview pool.
- Craft comprehensive position descriptions for all faculty, staff, and postdoc hires, including those with externally-funded fellowships, in order to ensure that all qualified individuals have equal opportunity to apply and be considered. Ensure that each position description elucidates essential functions and roles played by a successful candidate, allowing, when possible, for flexibility with respect to, e.g., rank, research subfield, and experience.
- Develop an equitable review process, including a standard protocol for interview questions and rubrics with clear criteria, that your search committee will use to evaluate candidates. Consider approaches for evaluating candidates that allow them to meet the criteria with a wide variety of accomplishments, rather than using highly specific metrics such as publications in particular journals or number of years as a postdoc.
- Develop an accessibility plan to support disabled applicants in engaging in the interview processes. Explicitly offer and provide accommodations for on-campus interview candidates with disabilities or other needs (e.g., accessibility, pumping), without assuming or asking about disabilities, which is prohibited by and Title VII. Ensure that there is an explicit process and budget to address access needs. See the section on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for guidance on how to support disabled people.
- Ask each candidate to address how they will effectively teach and mentor a diverse student body by, for example, using inclusive and interactive learning strategies, providing inclusive research experiences, and assisting in creating a more inclusive departmental culture.
- Recognize the importance of having family-friendly policies and provide information about these policies to all candidates. See the section on Departmental Culture and Climate for guidance on how to create and/or advocate for broadly inclusive family-friendly policies.
- Be prepared to negotiate with the dean and the candidate on issues such as salary, startup package, facilities, start date, rank, time to tenure or promotion, and release time.
- Identify what is valued by and can be offered to candidates to attract them to your department without incurring significant costs for your institution, e.g., the presence of strong communities and/or resources relevant to candidate identities, a vibrant local arts or entertainment scene, family-friendly departmental policies, opportunities to tie into well-funded research efforts, and/or highly collaborative departmental discussions on teaching, learning, and research.
- Ensure that start-up packages and lab spaces are equitable for women, people of color, , and other members of .
- Discuss with candidates career milestones and expectations, e.g., supervision of research students, publications, summer expectations, and research and service expectations. To the extent possible, ensure that departmental and institutional expectations are conveyed to candidates in writing.
- Provide stewardship of the hiring process by staying in frequent contact with candidates and resolving roadblocks to hiring the recommended candidate. For example, gather information and respond to professional or personal concerns about, e.g., childcare, partner hires, and renegotiating terms.
- Hold discussions with relevant individuals and groups (e.g., the dean, the promotion and tenure committee if hiring with tenure, and/or other departments if considering a partner hire) to advocate for hiring a strong candidate.
- Protect individuals you are hiring by clarifying, in writing, duties, expectations, and performance evaluation processes. This is particularly important for those in shared positions, e.g., joint or cross-departmental hires and/or part-time shared hires.
- Understand your institution’s existing dual-career hiring policies and/or work with administrators to develop or expand a transparent couple-friendly dual-career hiring policy. Highlight openness to dual-career hiring in job announcements, recruitment materials, and institutional websites. Implement the practices for dual-career hiring recommended by the Stanford report on Dual-Career Academic Couples.
Support faculty and staff in achieving excellence
- Encourage and provide support for faculty and staff (including yourself) to attend conferences, workshops, and trainings focused on teaching, research, professional responsibilities, and issues of equity and inclusion. Ask faculty and staff to reflect on these activities in department meetings. See Resources below and the sections on Implementing Research-Based Teaching in Your Classroom and Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for resources on professional development in these areas.
- Locate resources (e.g., trainings, consultants, departmental reviewers, facilitators) to assist with difficult conversations or addressing challenging topics, e.g., moving to student-focused educational paradigms, promoting collegiality, addressing equity concerns, and/or confronting racism.
- Schedule periodic department retreats to address big questions and emphasize the need to do periodic self-analysis, with respect to, e.g., the departmental mission and vision, student success and engagement, a or , strategic plan construction, and/or development of a plan to improve departmental climate.
- Rotate faculty into leadership positions and ensure that all faculty are given opportunities to contribute to the department.
- Attend conferences and workshops that focus on the professional development of chairs, e.g., the / Physics Department Chairs Conference. See Resources below.
- Provide transparency in how funding decisions that support professional development activities are made. Monitor equity in the distribution of these funds.
- Create and model a culture of continuous improvement of instruction. Ask to reflect on all aspects of the learning environment through discussions of teaching practice, student evaluations, peer observations, self-reflection, and assessment outcomes. This could be done through, e.g., informal discussion between the instructor and an observer and/or department discussions about effective strategies.
- See the section on Supporting Research-Based Teaching in Your Department for guidance on how to:
- Develop, promote, and institutionalize a departmental culture of scholarly and effective teaching;
- Support all instructional staff in research-based teaching (including professional development and mentoring); and
- Use a cyclic process to design, assess, and improve courses based on student learning outcomes.
- See the section on How to Select and Use Various Assessment Methods in Your Program for guidance on how to support improving their teaching through teaching portfolios, teaching reflections, and classroom observations, as well as assessing student learning.
- Develop teaching assignments based on strengths, experience, and preferences, recognizing opportunities for professional growth, e.g., assigning instructional staff to courses they haven’t previously taught. Equitably distribute the workload (e.g., large-enrollment course assignments), and factor in workload concerns related to, e.g., the number of new preps, scheduling blocks of time for research, and supporting .
- Develop a comprehensive onboarding plan for new faculty and other that includes familiarization with your department’s mission, strategic plan, initiatives, and operational guidelines.
- Provide encouragement, training, and assistance to help new develop teaching skills. For example, review teaching evaluations together, assign a teaching mentor, and facilitate connections with your teaching and learning center.
- Support new faculty and other to attend the and other professional development opportunities.
- Discuss conventional (e.g., , ) and targeted (e.g., internal, foundation and private-sector) grant opportunities with new faculty.
- Provide encouragement, training, and assistance with the grant process (e.g., peer review and copy editing of proposals, mock panel reviews, assistance with responses to negative peer reviews), particularly for faculty members submitting their first proposals.
- Tap institutional resources that can help new faculty members to, e.g., identify funding opportunities, prepare and submit grant proposals, improve their teaching, and effectively mentor students.
- Advise new faculty members on selecting service activities and protect them from taking on excessive service loads in initial years.
- Facilitate and discuss with your department the mentoring models available. These may involve the chair serving as mentor; the chair identifying appropriate mentors for teaching, research, etc.; and/or the chair facilitating mentoring of faculty by multiple mentors and/or mentors outside your department.
- Recognize and promote elements of effective mentoring, e.g., trust, confidentiality, consistent and respectful communication, reflection on experiences, listening more than speaking, using performance reviews as an opportunity to support growth, and checking in regularly throughout the year.
- Promote mentoring of all faculty and staff, at all professional stages, particularly as faculty and staff members transition into new roles.
- Have a mentoring plan for pre-tenure faculty that provides ample opportunities to discuss expectations and ensure that they are on the right track.
- Recognize the critical role mentoring can play in retaining and advancing members of , and ensure adequate support. Ensure that junior faculty from marginalized groups have supportive mentors who understand the issues they are facing. This may require providing culturally aware mentoring training, creating a formal mentoring program, and/or finding mentors from outside the department, e.g., from at nearby companies. See Resources in the section on Advising and Mentoring of Students for details.
- Use institutional resources (e.g., your teaching and learning center, your development or fundraising office, your health and wellness center) that address the professional development and mentoring of faculty and staff and the training of mentors.
- Recognize the need to supplement institutional programs with discipline- or department-specific professional development activities, e.g., serving on proposal review panels, participating in local semester-long sessions on targeted topics, co-teaching courses with an experienced instructor, and participating in physics program reviews at other institutions.
- Suggest mentors who can provide guidance on issues a particular faculty mentee may face, e.g., raising a child while seeking tenure, recognizing how student attitudes can impact self-confidence, supporting the development of an undergraduate or graduate research group, and/or seeking external funding for research or teaching development.
- Suggest mentors who can provide guidance on issues a particular non-tenure-track mentee may face, e.g., recognizing how student attitudes can impact self-confidence, securing longer-term contractual arrangements, navigating departmental politics and the professional advancement process, securing professional development opportunities, and defining one’s role as a leader in promoting educational innovation.
- Engage all faculty in developing clear, specific, and widely applicable written expectations for research, teaching, and service. Expectations should include clear goals and product definitions (e.g., whether peer-reviewed conference proceedings count as publications) that meet institutional standards for personnel evaluations related to, e.g., promotion, tenure, post-tenure review, and contract review. Ensure that these expectations are adhered to in all faculty reviews.
- Clearly communicate expectations for faculty and staff with regard to professional obligations, e.g., expected outcomes and time commitments for each component of their work and how many days per week they are expected to be on campus. Whether or not institutional policies stipulate these obligations, ensure departmental expectations are clear.
- Facilitate conversations at least once a year between pre-tenure faculty members and members of your department’s personnel committee (or equivalent) regarding expectations for research, teaching, and service. Ensure that these conversations allow pre-tenure faculty members to receive honest feedback on whether their current path is likely to lead to tenure and on what changes they might need to make.
- Treat faculty evaluations (e.g., annual review, peer observations, student teaching evaluations, research-based assessments of student learning) seriously. Refer to contracts, policies, and agreements that are conditions of employment; recognize specific accomplishments; and describe concerns and how they might be addressed.
- Recognize the limitations of common faculty evaluation metrics, e.g., publication rubrics for evaluating research productivity (which may be overly simplistic) and student evaluations of teaching. Work to improve these metrics, and supplement them with other measures, e.g., peer evaluations of teaching, assessments of student learning, and the broad range of contributions faculty can make to the institution, profession, and community. See the section on How to Select and Use Various Assessment Methods in Your Program for guidance on how to assess teaching effectiveness, using multiple methods and recognizing the limitations of each method.
- Consult with the dean to understand how they approach evaluations and what strategies they use to provide guidance, mentoring, and feedback to personnel.
- Know your institution’s labor policies and procedures, and discuss with your human resources office or other recognized officials any exceptions that may arise.
- Ensure all faculty and staff know that you follow institutional and departmental policies and procedures and that they should too.
- Discuss and document goals and expectations with faculty and staff prior to the beginning of any personnel evaluation period.
- Highlight accomplishments, nominate noteworthy faculty and staff for honors, and provide constructive critiques in formal (e.g., written) and informal (e.g., conversational) reviews to guide individual improvement.
Manage and advocate for resources
- Develop a line-item understanding of departmental budgets, including institutional allocations (i.e., your department’s annual operating budget from the institution), indirect cost recovery, fees, endowment, and occasional funding sources (e.g., one-time allocations of funds to remodel a classroom or buy a specific piece of equipment).
- Understand processes and deadlines for requesting funding (e.g., equipment or facility requests, one-time allocations, base or merit salary increases) and strategies for justifying requests to those who make funding decisions, including how to align requests with departmental and institutional priorities, context, and assessment metrics.
- Learn the institutional model for determining budgets and communicate the budget and funding allocation processes to your department. Learn and discuss with faculty what issues or data affect the budget (e.g., number of majors, course enrollments, student credit hour production, research productivity) and how the budget affects department operations. For example, implementing active-learning pedagogies may require additional personnel and equipment and thus be more expensive, budgets may dictate your department’s ability to conduct research and hire personnel, and budget cuts may lead to fewer sections and larger class sizes or to a push to teach more courses for non-STEM majors to increase student credit hour production.
- Understand and precisely follow guidance on how funds may be spent.
- Understand time restrictions on budget allocations and how unspent funds are reallocated at the end of a budget cycle.
- Establish transparency and promote fairness by collaboratively developing written policies for how decisions about resource allocations (e.g., office or lab space, travel funding, equipment purchases) are made and how funding is pursued (e.g., what the department’s fundraising priorities are and what funding agencies and sources the department will pursue).
- Provide regular departmental budget overviews, including available spending lines, supplemented by ongoing updates on spending to faculty and staff.
- Allocate resources in a way that avoids creating undesirable precedents and be consistent in your criteria for allocating resources.
- Connect budgeting and external funding requests to departmental and institutional goals, data, and strategic initiatives.
- Understand your department’s instructional data (e.g., production of student credit hours, student-to-faculty ratio) and how this impacts your budget and personnel requests.
- Know your budget and its history through (at least) the previous program review and become familiar with metrics that shape departmental budgets.
- Develop, with the administration, financial incentives (e.g., start-up funds, sustaining funds, or bridge funding between grants) for faculty members who seek and receive external funding.
- Understand your institution’s policies with respect to the use of indirect cost funds.
- Ensure equitable use of shared resources, e.g., discretionary funds and staff support.
- Understand how to leverage funding (e.g., matching or contingent funds) from administrative or other sources to magnify departmental fundraising or grant resources, documenting commitments in writing.
- Use and, if necessary, enhance institutional processes to ensure that grant proposals are reviewed and approved by relevant groups (e.g., department members, your grants and contracts office, facilities, your administration) in advance of submission to ensure that there is institutional awareness of proposals and that support being committed is allowable and within institutional capabilities.
- Consider forming or participating in a departmental or interdepartmental committee that uses input from relevant stakeholders to provide guidance and/or oversight on space allocation and maintenance and sharing of major equipment.
- Review space and resource allocations and usage periodically with an eye toward equity (i.e., everyone gets what they need), rather than equality (i.e., everyone gets the same).
- Foster good working relationships with other departments with which you share space, to help reach agreements when space issues or needs arise.
- Delegate, when appropriate, equipment maintenance and budgetary responsibilities to appropriate staff members, e.g., machine or electronics shop technicians and instructional laboratory staff.
- Maintain a prioritized list of departmental instruction and research equipment that needs to be purchased and/or replaced, so that you’re ready to respond when resources become available unexpectedly.
- Keep a list of service contracts on department equipment and include this list in departmental budgets.
- Maintain a list of critical pieces of equipment with maintenance agreements, service records, and expected lifetime, to plan for their eventual replacement.
- Understand the infrastructure needed for equipment (e.g., IT, physical connections, space) and the budget needed to implement and sustain equipment use.
- Build relationships with local industries or other potential partners that can donate equipment your department needs. Develop a plan to implement and use this equipment; this plan may include appropriate approvals (related to, e.g., radiation safety), infrastructure requirements, a maintenance schedule, and a budget for installation, operation, maintenance, and eventual disposal or recycling.
- See the section on The Physical Environment: Encouraging Collaboration and Learning for recommendations concerning major building or remodeling projects.
- Partner with your development or fundraising office to develop a plan and tap available resources for raising funds and developing and maintaining relationships with potential donors.
- Ensure that all department members follow your institution’s procedures regarding contacting and negotiating with prospective donors or receiving gifts.
- Treat all alumni as potential donors and cultivate relationships with them.
- Build and maintain relationships with donors, acknowledge gifts, and regularly inform donors about how their donations are impacting the department.
- Meet with a member of your development or fundraising office regularly to coordinate discussions and update one another on current initiatives and opportunities.
- Understand administrative expectations (if any) of your department with respect to broader institutional fundraising goals.
- Maintain a list of needs (e.g., scholarships, student travel support, major equipment, summer research student stipends) donors could help support.
- Maintain and use a list of departmental talking points for your institution and department to incorporate into communications, e.g., alumni newsletters, websites, acknowledgements of gifts.
