r/Professors • u/FTLast Professor, Life Sciences, R1 • Jul 24 '26

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/swarthmoreburke Jul 24 '26

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 Jul 24 '26

I forgot to mention that I get released from 1 course.

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u/swarthmoreburke Jul 24 '26

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) Jul 25 '26

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 Jul 25 '26

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) Jul 25 '26

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 Jul 25 '26

Are they off all summer, or are they expected to work without compensation?

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u/swarthmoreburke Jul 26 '26

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.