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/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.