Working with Problem Faculty: A Six-Step Guide for Department Chairs

by R. Kent Crookston

Working with Problem Faculty When asked to name their number one concern and problem, department leaders overwhelmingly said that it was dealing with difficult people. Now R. Kent Crookston draws on the wisdom of seasoned department chairs, the academic literature, and his own experience as a department head and dean to shed new light on this perennial problem. Working with Problem Faculty outlines a practical six-step process that aims at improving an entire department and charts a clear course for dealing with problem faculty by By following these six steps, department chairs are able to challenge problem faculty with consideration, confidence, and effectiveness. "Anyone seeking practical help in dealing with difficult people will appreciate this book. Using relevant examples, Crookston describes a six-step process for managing people who might appear to be unmanageable."
— Mary Lou Higgerson , vice president for academic affairs emeritus, Baldwin Wallace University "Crookston has done his homework. After careful research and decades of personal experience Dr. Crookston shares a practical, insightful, and crucial handbook for addressing the most formidable challenge all leaders face. And best of all, he doesn't just advise on how to act when things go wrong, he gives proactive guidance to ensure that things go right."
— Joseph Grenny , New York Times bestselling coauthor of Change Anything and Crucial Tools for Talking When Stakes are High

240 pages, Hardcover

First published September 11, 2012

Reviews

[Krista · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a self-help guide for department chairs, walking us through scenarios with different problem faculty we're likely to meet. While I found most of the advice not much beyond common sense, the book does offer a list of resources and gives some points that are worth remembering/heeding.

[JD Waggy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actually, a 3.5. I thieved this from my boss (who is a department chair) and read it in about 4 lunch-hour breaks, so that tells you something about the accesibility of the language used. This aims to be helpful, not encompassing, and I think it makes it.

R. Kent Crookston (I don't know why this edition lists his names as "K. Crookston") sets out to give department chairs a handle on how to deal with problem faculty, and if you don't know that all departments have variations of problem faculty, you're not paying attention to higher academics. I was very glad to see that Crookston hammers a restraint for chairs, setting up the steps such that action against the faculty is a very last thing after much examination of clarity and self. The biggest thing, as always, is communication. Without it, any problem becomes oh so much worse, and I think Crookston does a good job of reminding chairs of that without being heavy-handed.

That said, I appreciate very much that Crookston does include action as one of the steps and has lots of examples about how to avoid mollycoddling your faculty. It's important to be the chair when you're the chair, and that's a hard line to walk but a necessary one. There's a lot of starting ground here to be able to handle things rather than just a box full of suggestions.

One thing I wasn't overly fond of in this was that Crookston doesn't seem to have dealt with a powerful faculty union before--a lot of his suggestions don't recognize the difficulty of a tenured professor with a union behind him/her such that ousting can't really even be a last resort. Also, many of the suggestions count on the chair having a solid ladder of people to turn to above him/her if faculty get too far out of hand, and that isn't the case at a lot of universities. (There's a special emphasis on HR departments for one of the steps about gathering information, and I know many HR departments that are just useless as far as that goes.) It would be a different book to examine what a chair is to do when faced with that, but I would've liked at least a nod to that being an extenuating circumstance when handling issues.

Also--and this is so nitpicky but I don't care--I had no idea what Crookston was doing with citation. For every note the source was fully cited, even if the note directly above was from the same source. Really? All citation styles use abbreviated source titles after the first mention. Why didn't he?

Props, though, for the inclusion of the chapter on mental illness. This really is a thing of which chairs need to be aware, and it can be so much harder to spot in academic departments where all the professors are a little kooky. But it matters so, so much.

Overall, this was a good overview to get some gears going in the mind of a department chair, and it was accessible to those coming from humanities andsciences, which isn't always the case. I would recommend it especially to new chairs, or to those finding themselves in a position of leadership with some...strong personalities.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

First of all, if you are seeing this and you are a faculty member I obviously didn't pick this up with you in mind. This book is geared toward department chairs which I am not but the concepts are universal for dealing with conflict. It was a good review of content I'm already familiar with. I did actually really appreciate the faculty lens on this material though. Helps understand the faculty culture and the pressures it entails.

[Kristen Pombo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought it offered good solutions to issues that a department chair might face. The best part were the scenarios for each chapter. It changed my perspective about what creates the problem faculty in the first place and that the road to changing the department is a long and slow one.