[Englecturers] Re: Voting for Chair

[englecturers at lists.ucr.edu]

>Colleagues:

      Since I will be at a meeting at UCSB on Monday, I'm taking this 
opportunity to register an opinion about the proposal to elect the 
departmental chair.  I'm against the motion, not only because I think it is 
a reaction to a personality (the interim dean's) rather than a response to 
a systemic problem, but also because it would introduce a series of new 
problems without giving us greater benefits than the system of 
consultation, rotation, and appointment that has served us for more than a 
generation.

      I agree with those who believe that the chairmanship should not 
become a prize that subtly transforms well-meaning faculty members into 
competing candidates and their colleagues into supporters and 
rivals.  There are higher though unglamorous principles at stake in the 
selection of the chair, and they are at their heart democratic.  There is 
especially the unglamorous notion that there is a fairly regular rotation 
of the most senior members of the department (at least those who are most 
available and who have not disqualified themselves) into and out of the 
job, and the tempering notion -- served by the principle of rotation -- 
that the work is necessary rather than desirable, something to take on 
rather than to aspire toward.   I don't believe a chair has served two 
regular terms in the entire history of the Department.  The only associate 
to serve in the last thirty years has been Milton Miller, who was at that 
time approaching retirement.

      In my twenty-five years on campus and my experience with the 
selection of seven chairs, I have been impressed with how the choices have 
always reflected a tacit consensus within the Department.  There has never 
been a sense that a selection has set us on a particular road -- on a path 
that an election, with its inevitable roster of winners and losers, had 
forced the Department to choose instead of another.

      Our current interim dean has committed a terrible error in holding us 
in limbo, perhaps not even understanding that he was doing so.  But now he 
has finally appointed an interim chair, and will, if he knows anything at 
all about his job, appoint one for a longer term beginning in July.  I 
think it would be wrong to indirectly institutionalize his grave 
administrative mistake with an election process that would introduce new 
and unnecessary uncertainties into our departmental life and our relations 
with the college office.

John Briggs









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