From Faculty to Chair

By David Evans. My first chair position was in a six-person department at another small college here in Iowa. We had a fairly regular rotating-chair system, and my term came early: I’d been there almost six years and had just been approved for tenure and promotion when the incumbent chair, who was finishing her first year of a three-year term, took another job and departed. I was next in line but had expected to wait another couple of years; I was very young, and had not yet really become a “player” on campus in the areas where real power and influence were exerted. More...