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Academics are a difficult tribe to rule. We are naturally suspicious of authority: after all, critical thinking is what we are paid for. Thus, managing an academic department is widely regarded as a contradiction in terms: “management” is what vice-chancellors do, while academics try to avoid being managed. You don’t want to get caught between the lines. Or do you? When I tell people that being head of history at the University of Nottingham has been one of the most exciting experiences of my life, many think me weird, or worse. Here are a few tips for potential heads of department that give a flavour of what it’s really like:
1) Don’t get bogged down in trying to manage staff by asserting authority
You cannot force academics to change – but you can inspire them to work with you in the pursuit of exciting ideas and a positive vision of what your department and your university should be about.
2) Accept that change is inevitable
When the new undergraduate fees were introduced, I feared that this would drive students away from curiosity-driven degrees such as history towards more vocational courses. I was wrong. Technology and globalisation mean that most jobs evolve all the time, many almost beyond recognition, in less than one working life. Thus, the best job training you can get is learning to be a good learner: to make sense of apparent chaos, and never to assume you’ve found the definitive answer. History is very good at teaching people both. So as employers are increasingly keen on historians, our student numbers keep growing.
This has given my department the opportunity to appoint lots of new colleagues. I had not anticipated spending much of my time as head writing new job specs. But what could be better than recruiting the best new talents in the field?
3) Be prepared to learn from other countries
My experience at Nottingham may be somewhat special: we have campuses in China and Malaysia, and as our students move around, so do we, working on making the education we offer truly global. But wherever you are, your department ought to be educating students for a global world. Look at the bigger picture, and travel as much as you can. It is hard to describe how much working in Asia has transformed my outlook on life, history and higher education. China in particular gives you a totally different sense of the speed of historical change and social mobility.
4) Work together with other departments – you’re not pitted in a battle with other subjects
I spend a lot of time with my counterparts from politics, theology, law and other departments to explore how we can research and teach together, asking what our particular perspectives contribute to big questions, such as what ideology actually means to ordinary people, what causes religious violence, or how different societies respond to environmental hazards. Don’t be afraid to mix up students, too: last year, my own fascism module had equal numbers of history and politics students on it, and the discussions were the liveliest I have ever witnessed in a classroom.
5) Build connections outside academia
Being a head is about being your department’s ambassador to the wider world. Opportunities for connections are increasing exponentially. Over the last few months, I have helped organise the making of a Mooc, a massive open online course. Subscribers to such modules often number in the tens of thousands, and come from all over the world. This means we need to think about teaching in radically new ways. I am working on this with colleagues from many disciplines, and all our campuses, as well as a whole range of external partners: libraries, archives, museums, film studios.
Is all this a distraction from “proper” academic work? Yes and no. Of course I wish I had more time for the next book. But then, being head of history has possibly made a greater difference to the way I shall write that book then six more weeks in an archive would have done.
Maiken Umbach is head of the University of Nottingham’s history department, and professor of modern history.
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