UMass Boston

The department chair is a significant leadership position. The chair has the opportunity to help shape the department’s strategic vision while managing day-to-day departmental tasks. In many ways, the department is a home base for faculty members. The chair can help create and sustain a supportive and nurturing environment for all department faculty, staff members, and students who are majors, minors, or taking courses.

A major responsibility of the department chair is organizing and initiating the processes for the major personnel reviews of the faculty in your department. For all documents and guidelines pertaining to the major personnel reviews (fourth year, tenure, and promotion), please visit Personnel Committees.

In some departments, the chair is assisted by an associate chair or an executive committee, mainly if the department is large. In smaller departments, the chair may shoulder all the responsibilities. 

Department Chair Handbook

The role of department chair is crucial to the smooth running of the university, as many of the university’s functions happen at the department level. A department offers a focused academic experience, and the department chair guides departmental faculty in ensuring that the department’s curriculum is coherent, foundationally solid, responsive to emerging developments in the field, and intellectually stimulating. The department chair maintains a supportive community among faculty by attending to the needs of individual faculty members and cultivating their commitment to a shared vision for the department.

The role of department chair is complex; therefore, you may find it helpful to consult the department chair handbook. This handbook and the FAQs will cover a comprehensive range of the information that you will need to be an effective leader.

Download Department Chair Handbook

Roles and Responsibilities

The responsibilities of a department chair are diverse. Most chairs rely on the support of their departmental faculty to fulfill these responsibilities; typically, that means appointing faculty members to fulfill specific roles, such as the Undergraduate Program Director, the Graduate Program Director, the department course scheduler, the internship coordinator, and the alumni outreach coordinator.

The department chairs’ responsibilities include:

1. Cultivating an intellectually vibrant and emotionally supportive space where each faculty member’s accomplishments are recognized, and each faculty member’s needs are heard and addressed to the best extent possible.
2. Crafting a mentoring plan for pre-tenured faculty and ensuring the plan is implemented.
3. Ensuring pre-tenured faculty are assigned appropriate mentors and made to feel a sense of belonging.
4. Organizing major personnel review processes—for 4th year, tenure, and promotion reviews—and ensuring adherence to university practices, policies, and timelines.
5. Being responsive to all faculty and staff in the department (i.e., answering emails or other forms of communication as quickly as possible).
6. Assessing the strength of the curriculum and ensuring that the department’s range of courses reflects the discipline’s robustness and the faculty members’ expertise and interests.
7. Ensuring that required and elective courses are scheduled each semester and that each course has a faculty member assigned to teach it. This responsibility may be delegated to an associate chair.
8. Steering the department to recognize and articulate faculty hiring needs and crafting a compelling rationale for these hires to submit to the college dean.
9. Advocating for the department with the dean.
10. Managing the department budget.  
11. Establishing committees to ensure that the work of the department proceeds smoothly. Committees may include the curriculum committee, department personnel committee, research colloquium committee, honors thesis committee, and more.
12. Hearing and responding to student concerns.
13. Keeping in touch with alumni and sustaining their relationship with the department.

Course Planning

In general, your course planning should include: 

• The course description
• Learning outcomes
• Important or key assignments 
• Distribution of grades
• Reading and textbook assignments 
• Schedule of classes
• Topics to be covered

For more detailed information, visit the course planning page.

Attendance Policy

The university has a standard attendance policy.

A number of departments have mentoring plans for pre-tenured faculty. We’ve included some of these mentoring plans below. If you aren’t sure who your mentor is or don’t see your department’s mentoring plan below, please ask your department chair.

Periodic Multi-Year Review

The Periodic Multi-Year Review (PMYR) is for tenured faculty and librarians on continuing appointment and is conducted every 7 years after tenure is awarded. It is a peer assessment of a faculty member's continued effective performance in teaching, research, and service.

The PMYR may be delayed under certain conditions, such as if a tenured faculty member has an administrative appointment (e.g., a department chair or Associate Dean). Consult your department chair about the timing of your PMYR and the materials required for it. The Office for Faculty Development holds an informational session on the PMYR in May of each academic year.

Research Active

What does it mean to be research active? Every department and discipline conceptualizes research, creative, and professional activity in different ways, and the expectations vary across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

Research, creative, and professional activity typically comprises submission of articles, creative pieces, and/or grants for review, presentation at conferences, and other professional activity deemed by a department or college to constitute robust participation in and contribution to the discipline. Being research-active is tied to the teaching load for tenured faculty. All pre-tenured faculty are deemed to be research active and assigned a 2-2 teaching load (2 courses per semester) per academic year.