While all would agree that intra-department tasks (assigning teaching, hiring adjuncts, recruiting new faculty, completing reports and other paperwork, evaluating faculty and staff, mentoring, advocating, etc.) are important and need to be done well, there is much more to effectively chairing academic departments at this point and a good deal of this work is enhanced or made possible by external exposure and collaboration across units.
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Creating an Academic Culture of Working to Live
I’m often asked how I succeed at managing work-life balance—or as I call it, “life-work balance”— and it stems from my childhood. My parents both worked as educators, and