The Essential Department Chair: A Practical Guide to College Administration

by Jeffrey L. Buller

This book is the quintessential manual for what department chairs must know to excel at the many administrative tasks assigned to them on a day-to-day basis. For instance, how do you cultivate a potential donor for much-needed departmental resources? How do you interview someone when your dean assigns you to a committee searching for an administrator in a different academic area? How do you fire someone? How do you get your department members to work together more harmoniously? How do you keep the people who report to you motivated and capable of seeing the big picture? This book is about the “how” of academic administration. Based on a series of workshops given by the author in the area of faculty and administrative development, each topic deals concisely with the most important information chairs will want to have at their fingertips when faced with a particular challenge or opportunity. Intended to be a ready reference that chairs turn to as needed, this book emphasizes proven solutions and stresses what chairs need to know now in order to be most successful in their administrative positions.

312 pages, Paperback

First published March 3, 2006

About the author

"Jeffrey L. Buller grew up in Wisconsin and has since turned a lifelong passion for ideas, stories, and the stage into a distinguished international career. He has served in academic and administrative roles at Loras College, Georgia Southern University, Mary Baldwin College, and Florida Atlantic University, earning a reputation for bringing both rigor and wit to the art of leadership. A classicist by training and a scholar of Wagnerian music drama by avocation, he has lectured and led workshops around the world, including serving as the English-language lecturer for the International Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany. He is also the author of numerous works of fiction, poetry, and essays that explore art, travel, and the search for meaning, including the novels The Archaic Smile and Bird Without Wings and poetry collections Pampelmousse and Sobremesa." "This biography was provided by the author or their representative."

Reviews

[John Ayers · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was helpful during my stint as department chair. Buller adopts a no-nonsense approach. If I had a specific problem, I could usually peruse the list of 50 chapters and find one that provided solutions and references. However, the second edition was published in 2012, so the references are dated.

[Mills College Library]

378.111 B936e 2012