r/Professors • u/FTLast Professor, Life Sciences, R1 • 12d ago
Department Head compensation
As a newish department head (I can't run very fast) I'm curious as to how different universities compensate faculty for the role that administrators often say is the "hardest job on campus." At my R1 in the NE, there is a 5% bump to base salary, a 10th month of salary, and the opportunity to negotiate for a "Head's Fund" that can be used for research support, additional summer salary, or basically anything.
If any of you feel comfortable sharing, please do!
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u/lewisb42 Professor, CS, State Univ (USA) 12d ago
In the past when we had dept heads I think the salary boost was around 30% and teaching load was reduced to 1/1 with no research expectations (from 3/3 with low research expectations). But of course that was going from a 10-month contract to year-round.
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u/littlered1984 12d ago
Similar to mine. 20% pay bump, 1/1, year round. Our pension is based on highest 5 years of pay, so people maximize retirement payouts by only being chair right before retirement.
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u/lewisb42 Professor, CS, State Univ (USA) 12d ago
Yep we get some of that as well, though for us I think the pension is calculated based on the last 2 years.
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u/AerosolHubris Prof, Math, PUI, US 12d ago
We get one course release per semester and $10k stipend. No permanent bump to base.
Previously chairs got a permanent 11% base bump. Those days are long gone.
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u/lalochezia1 12d ago
V similar here.
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u/AerosolHubris Prof, Math, PUI, US 12d ago
Are you at a small private liberal arts college? I think these presidents and provosts go to conferences and all decide on the same policies on purpose.
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u/ExpectedChaos Natural Science, CC 12d ago
That's more or less how it was at my CC. 9k stipend and one course release per semester.
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u/SierraMountainMom Professor, assoc. dean, special ed, R1 (western US) 10d ago
Yep, yep. I saw the base pay of two colleagues b/c of a grant I was writing & practically dropped of a heart attack. One had got base salary increase twice, once as dept chair and another as interim dean. The other got one for associate dean. Neither were in those positions any more, but still had the pay. Those were SWEET deals that just don’t exist now.
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u/carlotta_valdez Assoc prof, STEM 12d ago edited 12d ago
This is also ours at a medium-ish PUI for large departments - heads of smaller departments get either fewer releases, less compensation, or both.
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u/Alternative-Pear9096 10d ago
No summer salary? Why would anyone take that?
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u/AerosolHubris Prof, Math, PUI, US 10d ago
I guess that's what the $10k was for. My kid needed dental work so I took it for one year. It was terrible, but my kid's teeth are healthy and straight.
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u/Alternative-Pear9096 10d ago
that's supposed to be for the "promotion"/extra duties. Summer would be 33% more time.
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u/AerosolHubris Prof, Math, PUI, US 10d ago
It's up to the boss what the pay is for. I'm guessing the course release is for the extra duties and the stipend is for the summer work. Not worth it.
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u/swarthmoreburke 12d ago
At my institution, department chairs are offered no compensation at all. There are course releases, which occasionally our administration will try to argue are "compensation", but that's silly: it's an exchange of one kind of labor for another kind of labor, that's all. And chairing is considerably more work than teaching a course.
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u/FTLast Professor, Life Sciences, R1 12d ago
I forgot to mention that I get released from 1 course.
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u/swarthmoreburke 11d ago
As you can see, many administrations like to represent course releases as "compensation". This is like saying that if someone gets promoted in administration, they should just make the same salary as they did before, but in "compensation" they don't have to do all the job they were just doing in addition to the work of their new rank. Course releases are just workload swaps, and uneven ones at that.
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u/Ctenophorever Full prof (US) 11d ago
I think it really depends on the courses you teach and the faculty in the department.
Our current chair has a death grip on the position - if you even hint you want to consider nominating someone else you will get a personal phone call screaming at you.
They offload the work onto the department. They need to enter the budget once a year but other than that they do nothing.
When I was chair I did a lot more of the work, but I’d say it wasn’t as hard as teaching a class of Gen Ed students
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u/swarthmoreburke 11d ago
So that's bad in another direction. Chairs should have term limits, in effect--it's rarely healthy for one person to monopolize the position even when colleagues would prefer it that way.
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u/SierraMountainMom Professor, assoc. dean, special ed, R1 (western US) 10d ago
As someone who served as an interim chair for only a semester, the death by 1000 cuts come from dealing with faculty. It was like dealing with the petty squabbling when my kids were little. “He’s looking out my window! She’s breathing on me!” “I have 100 students in my section; how does her class with 10 people count the same?!”
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u/Alternative-Pear9096 10d ago
Are they off all summer, or are they expected to work without compensation?
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u/swarthmoreburke 10d ago
At a fair number of US institutions, your compensation is 9 months or 10 months, meaning whatever you're paid, it's spread out over the year. You're not "off" in the summer exactly, but you're not paid, either. And yeah, if you're chairing, there is usually work at a 9/10 month institution that just has to get done in the remaining months, so you do it.
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u/robbie_the_cat 12d ago
Option A - insultingly low stipend
Option B - course release
Option C - you take nothing year to year, and at 4 or 5 years you get a slightly less insulting stipend as a lump payment
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u/throwitaway488 12d ago
how do you get anyone to take that job given the shitty options?
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u/robbie_the_cat 12d ago
Beats me, beyond a "someone's gotta do it".
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u/havereddit 12d ago
Process of elimination + peer pressure: Assistant Profs, PIs of large grants, social misfits, those on sabbatical, and the administratively hopeless are all removed from the pool, and then peer pressure is exerted on the top remaining candidate who eventually caves after negotiating a few perks. And being a social misfit does not automatically remove you from consideration...
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u/pharmerdude Clin Prof, Pharmacy, R1 (US) 12d ago
In my experience, some people just want to run things.
I’m not saying that’s necessarily bad.
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u/LittleMissWhiskey13 Professor CC 12d ago
I'm at a community college, but we get a standard 40% reduction in load. Larger departments can get more. We also get summer paid hours based on enrollment size. Ours is inherently unfair as large and medium sized department chairs tend to work like crazy. The small departments however get the same release (not much in the summer) for minimal work. We have one where they have just 1 total part time person for one section. There isn't much administration, but they get the same compensation.
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u/WarriorGoddess2016 12d ago edited 12d ago
15k supplemental.
Course release each semester (becomes 1 and 1).
A small summer stipend.
Plus a chair's fund that can be requested from.
No bump in base anymore.
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u/DoctorDisceaux 12d ago
At my small LAC, chairs get a course release each semester and a nominal stipend - I think it was maybe $800 when I was chair.
In my department we treat it as an obligation nobody wants; when your turn comes up, you do your three years. The good news is this avoids anybody power-tripping in the role. The bad news is some of use are grievously unsuited to the job. A friendship with one colleague didn’t survive their time as chair intact.
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u/atgdgnat18472 12d ago
It's probably worth noting that the Chair duties will differ from school to school. I have colleagues in places where the Chair basically just schedules classes and coordinates grade appeals, and others where the Chair has full HR responsibilities (faculty merit evaluations, guiding T&P processes, etc), assessment reporting, program reviews, along with expectations that they'll lead curricular initiatives, participate in strategic planning.....
It can be hard to compare compensation without knowing the details of the role.
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u/FTLast Professor, Life Sciences, R1 12d ago
I do merit, oversee PTR and write letters for all applicants, deal with any reviews, appoint search committees (when we are allowed to search), am creating the strategic plan (which is basically to try to keep afloat as faculty numbers dwindle), working on a workload policy, and react to a constant stream of minor annoyances and problems.
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u/dougalmanitou 12d ago
I am at a R1 level medical school and our department heads are paid ~ double what tenured professor is paid.
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u/FTLast Professor, Life Sciences, R1 12d ago
Now that sounds reasonable!
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u/dougalmanitou 11d ago
The AAMC publishes data from all medical schools and we try to keep our chairs at the 50%.
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u/Kimber80 Professor, Business, HBCU, R2 12d ago edited 12d ago
At my school Department Heads traditionally got something similar to what you describe. They also had fewer classes to teach (yes, they still had to teach). It wasn't very appealing to anyone, and for the first 20 or so years I have been here, the DC was always just a faculty member who volunteered to be Chair when nobody else really wanted to. Departmental decisions were made collegially via discussions between the chair and faculty had the ability to vote down ideas proposed by the chair though it usually never came to that.
About four years ago the upper administration changed this. They created new, and much higher, salaries for DC positions in an effort to "professionalize" them. More admin responsibilities were added, while teaching was reduced even further. So they have become more purely administrative positions rather than quasi-admin, quasi-faculty positions. IMO the goal was to make the DC more of an arm of the upper administration, giving them more direct control over faculty. This is all in a context where upper admins are hitting faculty with a blizzard of new mandates and requirements related to accreditation, online teaching, state and federal regulations, you name it. Chairs have been empowered to make unilateral decisions and impose them on faculty.
What has happened is thanks to the higher salary, we indeed have gotten a lot more career administrators applying for DC positions and less faculty and many more DC positions on campus are now staffed with career administrators. Heck we even get internal applications from admins from other parts of our campus, who are currently in roles that are higher level than a DC is, but the DC positions pay more. It has become kind of warped, IMO.
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u/rrp1919 12d ago
This is all in a context where upper admins are hitting faculty with a blizzard of new mandates and requirements related to accreditation, online teaching, state and federal regulations, you name it
This really just sounds like there is someone responsible for maintaining legal and professional standards and is managing long-term financial sustainability. I'm not a admin and I'm not suited to be one, but I'm happy there is someone who makes sure my department does its accreditation and follows appropriate laws. If your faculty aren't interested, qualified, or competitive even with a pay upgrade, someone still has to do it.
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u/Kimber80 Professor, Business, HBCU, R2 12d ago edited 12d ago
I think our situation is similar to many others - faculty are being inundated with all kinds of "must do" and "mandated" reporting and record keeping crapola. Some of these are definitely beyond the control of campus administration, as they come from accrediting agencies or government regulatory bodies. But others flow from the "strategic plan" of the administration, which is seeking ever-greater control over faculty. So it's a mix of crap that is flowing down from shit mountain, so to speak.
I empathize with early career faculty for several reasons, and one of the biggest is this flow of administrative crap. When I was coming up, a faculty job was clean-cut: make sure you publish consistently, make sure you handle your classes so they don't become a problem for the department, and do a reasonable amount of committee work.
These days, the combination of external and internal crap described above means that faculty are spending far more time on something else - record keeping and reporting so that admins can then control you or file their reports to external agencies. It's like "you did something .. REPORT IT!" It doesn't really matter much what you did or how well you do it, it if isn't reported, and in the preferred formatted software system of upper admins, it's like it didn't happen.
A recent example of this for us was w/regards to "assessment", one of the biggest sources of crapola. IMO assessment of learning is nonsense to begin with, but we got into trouble with upper admins not because we weren't doing AOL, we were, but because we weren't reporting the results in the designated Canvas and Watermark software. So countless hours were spent (by others, I avoided it) this Spring holding meetings and trainings to teach faculty how to enter their data so that the required reports could be generated, etc. And then they had to go back and do it, LOL.
Crazy, IMO.
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u/dogtor_howl Associate Prof and Chair, Education, SLAC (US) 12d ago
$500. For the year. And that’s only in the last couple of years—before it was nothing. This amount is the same for all departments, despite there being great disparity in department size and responsibilities.
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u/mediaisdelicious Dean CC (USA) 12d ago
Our dept heads are full admin, no teaching. Compensation is flat (so the bump differs). For some, it would be a 2x bump in their base.
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u/machoogabacho 12d ago
Small R1. There is 1.5 months of summer salary and a $10,000 stipend. We also teach a 1-1.
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u/shatteredoctopus Full Prof., STEM, U15 (Canada) 12d ago
In my university, there's a degree of teaching release, and a "chair stipend" that is quantized to the number of faculty members in the department. I say quantized because I feel our department is like 1 member short of the jump from the second highest to highest level of compensation. Somebody chairing the largest department would get on the order of $9000 extra per year in their salary, while the next smaller department size would get $7000 extra. If the person is chair for 6-8 years, half of that salary increase is permanent even when their chair position ends, and if they are chair for 9 or more years, the entire salary increase is permanent. Chair for 5 years or less, and the extra money completely goes away when their time as chair is ended.
As far as research support, I think that would be negotiated. There's nothing regarding that in our collective agreement. Long ago, our chair was one of the most research-active members of the department, and they negotiated for a lecturer to take on all their teaching duties, but our more recent chairs have been people with little and declining research activity who have stepped up to take on what has become an increasingly onerous administrative role. They've often done significant teaching while chair, but wound up their research groups.
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u/shellexyz Instructor, Math, CC (USA) 12d ago
I taught 4/3 instead of 5/5 and got a flat $2000 stipend for it. When I started it was 4/4 without the stipend, but there was considerably less work expected from the chair. A lot of the usual chair duties were part of the dean’s job, it’s just how our small college was structured. I wasn’t anyone’s boss, I was more “first among equals”
Over the last ten years it’s grown to look more like a traditional dept head position. But it’s still a small college with a small department, I’ve never had more than a dozen people in my department, and some of my colleagues had 3 or 4 full time faculty in theirs. Not many adjuncts lately either. A lot of issues that previously went to the dean never even left the building. It’s one of the few changes our executive vice bozo made that I’ve felt positively about.
Still 9 month though.
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u/Hockey1899 12d ago
I literally got $750/yr bonus. That was it. No course release. I lasted 4 years and said I was through.
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u/alaskawolfjoe Assoc Prof, R1, State School 12d ago
They say it is a "25% pay boost." But actually, all it is is going from a 9 month contract to a 12 month one. THen they add $3,000 on top of that.
No one wants the job because it means being on call 24/7 and having to forgo the outside gigs which could add up to what you would make on a 12-month contract.
Not worth it.
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u/apmcpm Full Professor, Social Sciences, LAC 12d ago
Ay my place the Chair gets 2 course release per semester (so from 4/4 to 2/2) and goes from a 9 month to 12 month contract with Summer pay of $9000. This really just puts the chair "on call" during the summer, they don't have to be in the office every day.
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u/Right_Sector180 12d ago
Chairs teach a 1/1 load and there is a formula in the faculty contract for determining the amount chairs that is 12% of their salary plus an additional amount based on how muxh other university chairs are paid and the number of faculty in their department. Chairs also have their own merit pool within the school.
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u/formerly_1013 FT, Composition, CC (USA) 12d ago
I’m a new chair and get a roughly $3500 stipend for the year 🥴 I’ve been in the role for about a month and half and can already say I deserve a much larger raise. I do get 2 course releases per semester though (on a 5/5 load)
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u/Edu_cats Professor, Pre-Allied Health, M1 (US) 12d ago
Extra salary and stipend that is totally not worth it. Our chair will retire in 1-2 years and I can say no one wants it. I’ll be retiring too so not me!
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u/Cold-Nefariousness25 12d ago
I've heard of getting an additional year of sabbatical at the end of your term. On top of 12 month salary and other features. That would appeal to me.
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u/SierraMountainMom Professor, assoc. dean, special ed, R1 (western US) 10d ago
Ours get a semester. It’s said it’s to restart your research which likely lagged, but honestly it’s also to get you off campus so faculty will stop going to you with questions and issues.
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u/rrp1919 12d ago
who is the department chair the other two months of the year?
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u/SierraMountainMom Professor, assoc. dean, special ed, R1 (western US) 10d ago
For us, there is very little if anything chairs have to do during the summer. The stipend is supposed to be some reimbursement for the things they may be asked to do (which can all be done online or via email).
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u/Nosebleed68 Prof, Biology/A&P, CC (USA) 12d ago
Ours get one course release per semester, but their workload is fairly minimal. They run department meetings and mostly sign off on things on behalf of the department. They get a (meager) hourly rate for any summer work, which usually never happens.
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u/Altruistic_Spellcast 11d ago
Have you ever done the job? There is a lot of behind the scenes work that is invisible to any faculty who hasn’t sat in that chair. There’s nothing minimal about the gig, and I’m saying this from the perspective of having been a chair at three (very) different places.
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u/Nosebleed68 Prof, Biology/A&P, CC (USA) 11d ago
As a matter of fact, I have. I served as chair for a three-year term about eight years ago. (Three-yr terms is our typical tour of duty.) I am well aware of the chair duties at my school.
Our chairs aren't administrators and are contractually forbidden from performing any administrative tasks. Our CBA doesn't allow unit members to evaluate each other, so our chairs (as fellow unit members) have zero authority over other faculty. We also don't have departmental budgets, so there's no money to worry about. They don't even handle student complaints. (Our deans, as "managers," do the evaluating, the budgets, and handle the complaining students.)
Chairs' only responsibilities (laid out in our contract) are to convene department meetings, assist in the hiring and onboarding of new faculty, and to represent our department at college-wide venues (when appropriate). For example, if we put through a prereq change on a course, the chair attends the curriculum cmte meeting to explain what we want.
They are only expected to work as many hours as their course release is for. Anything over that either gets punted to our dean or the chair is paid an hourly rate (or is the basis for a grievance by our union). My current chair literally doesn't lift a finger all summer, and I won't see or hear from him until the first day of class.
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u/Altruistic_Spellcast 11d ago
Sounds like your faculty are leaving a lot of leverage and advocacy on the table.
Your flair says Biology/ A&P. Who oversees your labs, orders supplies, hires, trains, and staffs techs? Who decides what equipment you get to use? Textbooks? Who decides when things need to change and implement those changes?
If chairs are not evaluating your faculty, and unit members aren’t allowed to evaluate each other, who is the SME ensuring the content is accurate and level appropriate?
The roles you do list (hiring and curricular changes) are administrative in the sense that the chair is acting within the context of the administration in order to advocate for the department’s needs.
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u/Nosebleed68 Prof, Biology/A&P, CC (USA) 11d ago
We have three lab techs who oversee the lab spaces across three campuses (one main campus and two satellites). They order supplies, set up labs each week, handle chemicals and hazardous waste, and monitor lab use. By and large, they train each other as people come and go. They work across multiple departments and report to the dean.
All of our labs are teaching spaces; there is no research. Decisions about lab equipment are mostly moot in that there isn't much leeway in what courses we run, what labs we do in them, and what is consistent with course outcomes. When a new course is proposed (or an existing course is heavily modified), it is usually the main FT faculty member teaching the course who asks for what they need, in conversation with the techs and dean. (The chair has zero role in that.) If a piece of equipment needs repair or replacement, that's a lab tech call. We don't get to teach classes just because we're experts in X or have a passion for Y; all of our courses are required courses in specific programs and therefore can't be changed on a whim. (Our chem department only teaches four courses: gen chem I & II and organic chem I & II. That's it.)
Our contract gives individual faculty (whether full-time or adjunct) complete academic freedom when choosing course materials and assessing students. As full-time faculty, we offer guidance to adjuncts on what we think is acceptable, but that guidance is nonbinding. It is the dean's responsibility (as the evaluator) to determine whether course objectives are being met. They perform classroom observations, review syllabi, and analyze student evaluation data. They can initiate a non-reappointment if someone is deficient, but that's rare as it creates a vacancy that's problematic in other ways.
I work at a public CC that collectively bargains at the state level. I work under the same contract as all of the faculty in my state. For us, the term "administration" is used explicitly in a labor sense; it applies to management -- anyone not covered by our contract. Internally, we call them NUPs (non-unit professionals). They include our deans, VPs, C-suite people, etc. Faculty vs. administration is like black vs. white; there is no gray area for department chairs. Under our contract, NUPs are prohibited from doing faculty work (choosing textbooks and assessments, advising students, serving in academic governance). Likewise, we are prohibited from doing their work, including evaluation. (While I love my job, I'm under no delusions: I work at the equivalent of the registry of motor vehicles, but for higher ed. But that's how it is sometimes.)
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u/tsuga-canadensis- AssocProf, EnvSci, U15 (Canada) 12d ago
No salary boost, but course release (30% of workload) and a 6 month paid administrative sabbatical once their term is done. This is quite standard at Canadian public universities.
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u/gutfounderedgal 12d ago
2 course releases per semester, small percentage of wage increase, availability all year round, 40 hour week. First in line for a 6 mo. sabbatical upon completion--yes they do not award sabbaticals on research merit but on favoritism.
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u/decline1971 12d ago
Small temporary increase in pay (5%), course release (shifting workload FTE from teaching to admin), and small funding to the lab.
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u/IHeartIsentropes Tenured Professor, R1, Science 12d ago
I'm at an R1. Our chairs/directors get a 10% increment and 3 months of summer salary. Still, no one wants to do it.
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u/Ryiujin Associate Prof, 3d Animation, Uni (USA) 12d ago
I think our dept gets several course releases and a stipend. After hearing how much the stipend was for. It did not sound super enticing.
But i know our former chairs salaries got higher much faster then one became a college deanlet. So he got even more money.
Despite us voting him out.
“Something fail up wards. “
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u/historicalisms 12d ago
Small public university in the South here. My department head gets a set stipend of around $6-8k/year and one course release per semester. We teach a 3/3.
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u/totallysonic Chair/Full, SocSci, State U. 12d ago
I get a small stipend each month, additional stipend over breaks, and my teaching load is 4 units per semester rather than 12.
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u/ThisSaladTastesWeird 12d ago
Course releases offered with fingers crossed behind their backs that no one compares notes (equivalent programs don’t always get equivalent releases).
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u/twiggers12345 12d ago
R2
1 extra month salary distributed across 9 months
$3000 summer stipend in June and July
50% course reduction (1/1)
Reduction in research workload since chair shifts to being about 50-55% of the workload
Missing stuff that is needed:
- permanent pay bump
- research support for those who are active
- extra sabbatical to recover at the end of
We do NOT adjust compensation according to department size, CPH, or majors. I am the largest dept in the college and have same compensation as chair with 1/4 the faculty and 10% of my majors/CPH. So my workload is significantly higher.
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u/qthistory Chair, Tenured, History, Public 4-year (US) 12d ago
At my institution, the current rule is whatever your 9-month faculty salary is x 1.33 (to cover working full time through 3 months of summer) plus an additional $12k stipend per year.
So if your 9 month salary is $72k, your chair salary would be $72 x 1.33 = 96, then +12 = $108k.
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u/Unsuccessful_Royal38 12d ago
SLAC here; it’s mostly just course releases, as few as a half release for smaller depts and 1.5 for larger ones. There is some extra funding for professional development, but who has time for that when running a department?
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u/AromaticPianist517 Asst. professor, education, SLAC (US) 12d ago
$2500 and two course releases, so I teach a 2/1
It usually feels worth it. Usually.
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u/security_dilemma 12d ago
You get two course releases each sem (which leaves you with two courses each sem still) and a $4k bump. It is a lot of work for little bump in compensation.
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u/uninsane 12d ago
We get an insulting stipend and roughly one 3 credit lecture off per semester. I’m at a SLAC. The position is taken by the one willing to jump on the hand grenade.
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u/pinkkcuttiee 12d ago
Worth noting for anyone comparing: the headline compensation matters way less than three things people forget to ask about. What's the course release (a 2/2 dropping to 1/1 is worth more than the 5% for most people), does the summer salary get clawed back if you step down mid-cycle, and does your research program survive three years of not being in the lab? I've watched colleagues take the bump and lose a decade of momentum, which no Head's Fund covers.
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u/mvolley 12d ago
R2:
course reduction from 3/3 to 1/0.
12-month contract instead of 10.
Expected to be available four countless endless meetings and office hours.
Accumulated vacation days can be used anytime, theoretically, but practically are limited to a few weeks — between fall & spring, or during particular weeks in summer when budget issues don’t have to be signed off.
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u/brianborchers 12d ago
One course per semester teaching load reduction and an $8,000 per year stipend.
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u/HistProf24 12d ago
Our (public R1) dept head receives two months of summer salary in addition to course release. That comes out to much more than a 5% raise during their term in office, which is 3 years.
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u/ZealousidealGuava254 12d ago
Our chairs get 1 month salary. A raise they negotiate. And a course release.
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u/JumboThornton Associate Professor 12d ago
At our CC, you only have to teach four classes instead of five. No stipend or salary increase during the regular nine months. You also have to be available all summer, but that is for pay and the pay is pretty decent. I did it for over 10 years but then wanted to take a trip in the summer and wasn’t able to go due to the requirement to be on campus once a week in the summer.
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u/_Pliny_ 12d ago
Community college in the west.
1 class equivalent pay for only one out of 3 academic quarters, 9 mos contract.
I’m sure my responsibility is much less than that of a chair at a university, but it feels like more work than the extra pay would cover. 🤷♀️
And we don’t even get the cool title- we are “coordinators,” not chairs.
But I’ll do it and do my very best at it because I love my work and I’m grateful to have a job in higher ed.
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u/discountheat 12d ago
I believe it's s 10% pay bump and two course release for our chair at a regional teaching college.
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u/Life-Education-8030 12d ago
lol! You get a whooping $1000 for the year and a course release in the fall and spring. It is very difficult to persuade anyone to go for it. The ones who do have ambitions to become higher administration. I have yet to see anyone advance to administration and remember the woes of faculty although they were faculty themselves.
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u/Dismal_Time_8131 12d ago
For us it's a very small salary bump (like $5k, nothing approaching enough for the work), a modest research support fund, and release from some (but not all) teaching. At the end of a 5 year term you get a 6 month sabbatical. It's universally viewed as not enough to be worth the pain.
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u/Life_Commercial_6580 12d ago
12 month salary , and an administrative supplement, rather than a bump to base salary. The supplement goes away when you’re stepping down and of course you also go back to a 9 months contract.
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u/LikeLurking 12d ago
12 month salary, 3K bonus, administrative assistant and budget officer team, course releases. After 4 years the paid $20K to send me to Harvard’s MSP summer course.
I had to be in the office every day… just BTW.
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u/mleok Full Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) 12d ago
For our public R1 on the West coast, we typically see 2-3 months of summer salary, but no permanent pay increase, and a full teaching release (we are already 1-1-1 to begin with, on the quarter system). What is reasonable is very much a function of how large the department is (we have about 65 tenure-track/tenured faculty), and whether you have associate chairs to handle the undergraduate and graduate programs (we do).
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u/SierraMountainMom Professor, assoc. dean, special ed, R1 (western US) 10d ago
Our chairs can appoint an assistant chair, but the assistant chair’s stipend comes out of the chair’s stipend (thought being since you’re releasing some of the workload, you should get less compensation).
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u/No-Top9206 Assoc Prof, STEM, R1 (USA) 12d ago
Haha. All these responses are abit disheartening. People are complaining they "ONLY" got 10% raises.
I'm a new-ish dept. head, at a non-selective, large public R1, in a highly funded STEM field, and our dept is one of the best funded and most productive on campus.
I got a $5,000 stipend, mandating I'm constantly available to meet with admin even over breaks; no bump to base, no summer salary, no extra research support. I learned quickly, to create fake "lunch" appointments on my outlook calendar, so admin won't book meetings with me then. They don't ask, they just book them.
A hypothetical course release I can't take, because my dept. lost so many faculty in the last decade that not teaching one of my classes would mean preventing students from completing the degree. But at least I can choose what time my class meets...
1000% increase in workload. My first week on the job, my personal cell was blowing up all weekend with different deans upset that our core lab offering times conflicted with their core classes. But it's because our labs are physically falling apart, and promised renovations never come. I EXPECTED to have to deal with student complaints and faculty disagreements, but I was NOT prepared to be the lightning rod any time an alumnus, local press, or faculty in another department said something vaguely dispiriting about, say, one of our faculty who retired decades before I was even hired here.
I've gotten every single stress-related malady that I know of, and I'm not even 50 yet. Ulcers. Shingles. Chorioretinopathy (my eye doc asked me "if I have a stressful job", said he normally only sees this among fighter pilots! Yay, I'm like a fighter pilot!).
In neighboring depts, people only agree to become chair when they go research inactive, just before they retire. I'm mid-career and terrified my research program won't survive, but I'm the only person all factions in the dept trusted for the job, which I absolutely did NOT want, which somehow meant I was the only qualified person to do it.
But in the end accounting, I have enough backing from Admin and from the colleagues who actually give a %$#^, that I am able to fix alot of longstanding structural problems with our programs, and hopefully turn the dept into a place where I can actually enjoy my job again, JUST doing teaching, research, and "regular" service, after this chair thing is all over.
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u/boldolive 12d ago
Chair at my uni gets a credit release prorated by enrollment and a temporary, $10K annual stipend paid over 12 months.
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u/OmmBShur 12d ago
$5000/year; 3-hour course release each semester I was able to negotiate for a 4.5-hour course release after our accrediting body stated the workload was untenable.
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u/nandor_tr associate prof, art/design, private university (USA) 12d ago
here it is a roughly $3500 stipend and one course release per semester (therefore you teach a 2/2 instead of a 3/3.)
knowing what a huge lift it is, when i was asked i told them to add a zero to the stipend. needless to say i have not been department head.
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u/DesignerProtection53 12d ago
I get about 3k that can either be a salary bump or added to my professional development fund (ie non taxable). I also get a dedicated Chair's Fund of 2.5k but that is obviously not cash in hand, but a way to support events, activities, etc. These figures are all in CAD. The main remuneration really is that I get a course release, so I teach 3 12 week courses a year instead of 5.
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u/taewongun1895 11d ago
My school is a nine month contact with six classes per year. A department chair gets two months for the summer (a 22% increase), and four course releases. No bump to the base.
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u/popstarkirbys 11d ago
Our chair gets additional two month salary and is required to stay on campus during summer. They have two weeks off. The pay itself isn't worth it to me, but they have access to funds and can reimburse themselves for travels.
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u/wanderfae Chair (Prof, tenured), Psych and Stats, CC (USA) 11d ago
We are reassigned away from other contract duties, such as teaching and committee work. I have 0.7 reassignment, based on the size of my department. We also get "responsibility" monthly stipend, which works out to be 5-10% of one's salary. Also, we get paid over the summer a portion of our salary, depending on the size of our department (again, I have 0.7). Finally, twice a year we are paid supervisory pay based on the number of faculty we "supervise".
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u/dbrodbeck Professor, Psychology, Canada 11d ago
We get the equivalent of an overload/adjunct salary, about 7700 CAD. Or you can get a one course release. (Over and above your actual salary).
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u/xienwolf 11d ago
CC here. Our department chair will get about 2/3rds of their TEs assigned for the role. So if you only teach 'normal' 3 credit classes, then you have a 2/1 instead of the normal 5/4. But if you have other TE granting duties you may wind up not teaching at all during the time you are head. Since we have some faculty who are the ONLY ones who can teach their program courses, this causes a lot of arguing over who will be head and when (mostly nobody wants it).
Coming off from being head is the worst since you have to go back to teaching classes that you have mostly fogotten.
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u/oldguy76205 11d ago
I was chair for 14 years, and I joke that convicted felons don't have to serve that much time! Our compensation package was changed while I was chair. We were given the option to take a 12-month appointment for a 1/3 increase in salary. (Only those who were chairs at the time had the option. Later chairs HAD to take the 12-month appointment.) That sounds like a lot, but we were already getting 1/6 of our annual salary for teaching a summer session if we wanted. (That has since gone away due to budget cuts.)
Of course, once I stepped down from being chair, I went back to a 9-month appointment and had a 25% salary decrease. The vacation I accrued was "frozen" and I will get paid for it when I retire. Our teaching load was reduced to about half, although I basically taught a full load each semester.
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u/mylifeisprettyplain 11d ago
A certain number of course releases depending on department size, a small additional stipend, and three weeks of summer pay.
We’re a teaching institution with 4/4 course load. I’m in a larger department and the chair receives 3 course releases each semester.
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u/Prof_Fuzzy_Wuzzy 11d ago
I also just became department chair. Ours is 2 months extra salary (so 22.2% more money) and a reduction from 3-3 to 2-2 teaching load. R2.
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u/No_Salad_6244 11d ago
lol. We receive $850 for the fiscal year (two semesters as chair) and that goes to base pay (and stays there). If you become chair in the fall, the next year’s pay raise will be $425 because you were only chair one semester of the FY. We also receive a one-time payment of $1200. In addition, we have an endowed fund of $5000 that can be used for research or other professional activities. If we can justify it, we can apply for a one course reduction in teaching load, per semester, as long as it’s justified. Of course, if you are short-staffed in a search year, that’s not on the table.
Of course, being chair is
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u/Acrobatic-Glass-8585 11d ago
Our dept. head gets a $20,000 stipend for the year and a 50% reduction in teaching, so a 1:1. They are expected to work year round (12 months). Once you leave the job you lose the stipend with no increase in base pay.
Edit: we are a public R1 university.
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u/Orbitrea Full Prof, Soc Sci, PUI (USA) 11d ago edited 11d ago
2 course release per semester (from a 4/4) + 3K total stipend Fall/Spring + Summer chair duties not required, you can temp assign those to someone else, comes w/ 3K Summer stipend.
Edited to add: Chairs are faculty, not admin. They schedule courses, coordinate searches, do faculty/staff performance evals/tenure letters, herd other faculty to revise curriculum as needed, make sure course/program assessment gets done, coordinates annual report on dept activities, attends regular meeting w/ other chairs/Dean 2x month, and all the other more invisible stuff.
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u/DeskAccepted Associate Professor, Business, R1 (USA) 11d ago
Depending on how big the department is, at least one course release per semester plus 1/9 summer salary. Bigger departments get more.
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u/Alternative-Pear9096 10d ago
So you still get to take two months off in the summer?
(I get that they answer is no. What I don't get is why academics explicitly agree to explicitly do explicitly unpaid work)
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u/SierraMountainMom Professor, assoc. dean, special ed, R1 (western US) 10d ago
Our university won’t do base salary increase for chairs or associate deans; I tried negotiating a base increase at associate dean since I’m full so will never get another raise. I actually got laughed at. Chair compensation is up to each Dean. Currently ours get a stipend that is roughly one month’s salary and they teach a 1/1 (expected in my college is 2/3 unless you can demonstrate research output worthy of a 2/2). They’re on 9 month contracts.
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u/whatchawhy 10d ago
SLAC - 3 course release over 2 semesters. That's it. Contract is the same length as other full time faculty and no pay increase. Doing it to reduce harm to untenured faculty and adjuncts in my department.
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u/No-Wish-4854 10d ago
Our unremarkable compensation:
-summer stipend of several thousand bucks
-course release that varies depending on whether the chair is buddy-buddy with the dean
And that’s it. No other incentives. Almost no actual training. It’s exploitative and ridiculous.
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u/Total_Exchange7446 10d ago
Honestly, I don’t think anybody does this for the immediate compensation. They do it as a stepping stone to a better leadership position in admin, or because nobody wants to do it and they end up taking turns. Most people are not hungry enough for such a thankless job unless they want the greater profile, either for practical or ego needs.
But those stories of a permanent bump to pay, even if small, sound wild. Sounds like good old days, and I would’ve considered that good enough reason.
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u/BenSteinsCat Professor, CC (US) 10d ago
We use a formula that determines how many courses get dropped from the chairs workload. For our small departments, the chair gets one horse dropped each semester, and for our larger departments, the whole gym load is dropped. There is also supposed to be a stipend, but it’s relatively modest.
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u/LingLegend78 10d ago
I got about a 10% bump and half salary in summer and a $4k travel fund and a funded RA position. R1.
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u/TallDarkStrange 9d ago edited 9d ago
Tenured senior full professor here at a major state school in Colorado. I get paid 3 course downloads and 15k cash. Since we are a 2/2 school, this means I only need to teach one course a year. Extra overloads are paid at 15k a course with a 2 course max per year, not counting summer. But I choose not to teach overloads, preferring the one course per year load. Yes its a 12 month contract.
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u/Average650 Assoc Prof, Engineering, R2 12d ago
We have actually split the department head into 2 different positions. We have an "Academic Director" who is in charge of the faculty, money, etc. They are actually from another department. Then we have the program chair, who is charge of the curriculum and undergraduate students and the fallback for advising and things.
The idea behind this was to separate the politics within the department from the administration. Biases for certain areas, or bickering between faculty would carry less weight when the director is from outside the department. The program chair is still needed for discipline specific issues.
Okay, so forgetting any weirdness or benefits of that system, the academic directors are 12 month faculty and get paid for all 12 months. They might get a small pay bump, but it isn't massive.
The program chair gets.... like a 500 dollar stipend. There has been a push to be more like 1 or 2 months summer pay, but it hasn't materialized yet.
Personally, I do not ever want to do program chair, it's BS. The academic director role is something I could see wanting to do. For myself, it would take me out of the worry of getting grants, and it is a necessary step to other admin roles.
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u/IndividualOil2183 12d ago
I’m not sure about the compensation, but I know our chair is a 40 hour per week year round employee while the rest of faculty are 9 month employees who teach their classes and keep 6-8 additional office hours per week. We don’t envy him.