One of the most challenging roles on any campus is that of academic chair. Chairs are charged with many essential administrative duties that are core to Ivy Tech’s educational mission, including building course schedules and hiring, onboarding, and evaluating faculty. Even more importantly, chairs play a critical role in managing and leading faculty in efforts that align course and program outcomes with the College’s work in continuously improving retention and completion efforts. This requires an understanding of how to use the data that Ivy Tech collects to understand where additional efforts are needed. So much of the work that chairs do centers on people leadership: resolving challenging situations in emotionally intelligent ways; understanding how to support faculty development; and providing needed feedback to faculty.
This library guide is designed to provide Ivy Tech’s chairs with materials that can help them navigate the leadership and managerial challenges they may encounter. It is organized it by major topics to make searches easy. As you encounter additional resources or topics, we hope that you will ask your campus librarian or use the Ask-a-Librarian service to add them to this library guide. Our chairs are critical student success leaders at Ivy Tech!
- Suzanne W. Summers, Assistant Vice President, Teaching and Learning
Arntzen, E. (2016). The changing role of deans in higher education--from leader to manager. Universal Journal of Educational Research, 4(9), 2068–2075.
Baker, V.L. (2023). The department chair triumvirate. Inside Higher Ed.
Dettmar, K. (2023, August 15). Ask the chair: Are great chairs born or made? The Chronicle of Higher Education.
More from the advice column: Ask the Chair in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
O'Brien, M. (2008). Navigating the SoTL landscape: a compass, map and some tools for getting started. International Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2 (2), Article 15.
More from the International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
Perlmutter, D.D. (2023, November 22). Admin 101: Does what you do matter? The Chronicle of Higher Education.
