New Dept. Heads Will Begin Five-Year Tenure

As the five-year term for department chairs ends, the heads of the health, theater and dance, English and science departments will turn over to the selected successors this fall. Health Instructor Michelle Soucy, English Instructor Ellen Wolff, Theater and Dance Instructor Robert Richards and Science Instructor Alison Hobbie will assume the positions of department heads from the current heads: Health Chair Carol Cahalane, English Chair Lundy Smith, Theater and Dance Chair Sarah Ream and Science Department Chair John Blackwell.

Members of each department nominate fellow members who they believe would make a successful new chairman and meet with the dean of faculty to decide via a department vote. The term of each department chair typically lasts five years, although all have the option to end their term earlier. Each chair also continues to teach classes during the five-year period.

According to Cahalane, each chair serves a similar function. Chairs work with the other members of their department to maintain program excellence, assess the work of the department and department members and look for opportunities to innovate and make improvements in work. Much of the department chair’s role is to represent and manage the will of the department and potentially implement changes the department wants to see.

In addition, the chairs also take on the extra roles of overseeing hiring, managing spending and providing acknowledgement and support for colleagues.

However, each department chair also has different details they have to focus on. In the science department, the department chair has the unique job of overseeing the technicians that work for the department. Hobbie explained that, while Blackwell is not specifically their boss, he is still in charge of them.

For Smith, managing the little details of his department proved to be the most time consuming task. He described this aspect as “minding the store.”

“You’re constantly involved in little details that take up time,” he said. “It’s a time commitment more than anything else. Anything from emails, requests for visitors from other schools or buying supplies. There’s this myriad of things that I did expect but didn’t realize the volume would be so high.”

In order to alleviate the volume of day-to-day tasks the chair should not necessarily be responsible for, Smith decided to organize a job chart for the English department, where other members of the department can take on tasks.

During his time as chair, Smith said that he most greatly enjoyed the discussions about curriculum and ways to make the department stronger. He found the department head meetings to be “fascinating.” Because each department has such different perspectives, being apart of the department chair discussions gave Smith a greater sense of how the school works as a whole.

“I think sometimes we become so isolated in our own buildings that we don’t really know what the other departments are doing,” Smith said. “It is a wonderful job in giving you an overview of the school.”

After nominating other English instructors with experience for the role, Smith was confident the department would find an appropriate new chair.

He was satisfied with the selection of Wolff, who he described as “one of the best candidates [the department] could have hoped for.”

“She is incredibly bright,” he said. “She’s been such an important part of the department and part of the school over the last 15 years.”

Smith said that it is part of his role in combination with other former chairs to help Wolff find the shortcuts for things they hadn’t found until the last minute.

“You spend five years and by the end you really start to figure out the job,” Smith said. “Then it’s time to turn it over to somebody else who has to figure it out all over again. So I’m trying to ease that transition for Ms. Wolff.”

Wolff said that as well as looking forward to the new challenge of being a department chair, she is excited for the new senior-elective curriculum and the multitude of administrative details that will need sorting in response.

Like Wolff, Hobbie also expressed an eagerness to start her new role. As the new Science Department Chair, she is looking forward to helping her colleagues figure out how they excel in the classroom. Due to the ambiguous ways of using Harkness in science, she said there is more freedom as a teacher in deciding how to use the oval table to facilitate content in the science process. She looks forward to helping fill that potential.

Also, unique to the science department are the sub-disciplines such as Biology, Chemistry and Physics. In addition to the department meetings together, the sub-disciplines meet weekly. Hobbie will assume the role in managing the department broadly as well as in the specific sub-disciplines in order to keep the lines of communications open and encourage groups to work together.

Because the science department just received an external review, Hobbie is also eager to talk as a department about the report.

“I myself don’t have a large vision for the department that is very different from what it is right now. Instead, [the results from the external review] will be a great jumping off place to start thinking about where we might go,” Hobbie said.“It is important that we grow, change and learn from people from the outside.”

Overall, the current department heads seemed satisfied with the new selection of chairs.

Cahalane said that she is looking forward to seeing how the Health department will succeed under Soucy’s leadership. She lauded Soucy as a deeply committed and excellent educator who is supportive, well-organized and a great role model.

“She has a good sense of the needs of the students, faculty and staff. She thinks carefully about short and long range implications of choices and is a creative thinker,” Cahalane said. “I have no doubt she will be a terrific chair for our department.”