3.5 Striving for social justice and community: the personal

Becoming a Department Chair

It had been a great 9 years. From my first day as a professor, I knew that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. What was there not to like? I had always enjoyed writing. As a doctoral student I discovered that doing research was a blast. After a few initial rocky class sessions, I discovered that teaching adult students was equally as much fun as doing research. On top of all that, I was getting paid to do this!

Now, 9 years later, I had matured a bit as a professor and lately had been feeling a slight void. I loved teaching, writing, and working with students, and I got along well with my colleagues, but we, as a department weren’t really about anything. We prepared students to be school administrators and educational leaders, but the preparation occurred in a vacuum of sorts. What did we want our students to lead schools toward? The leadership preparation we were providing rarely asked the bigger questions of leadership preparation: What kind of world do we want? What does this mean for the education of children and young people? What kinds of schools are required to provide this type of education? What do school leaders need to believe, know, and be able to do to help develop these types of schools? Not only did we not address these questions in our leadership preparation programs, we, the faculty, did not even discuss them among ourselves. It was understood that we wanted to prepare our students to lead“good”schools that were“effective”—but what did that mean? What is a“good”school? What makes a school“effective”? Thus, in a sense, we were preparing educational leaders searching for a purpose.

After attempting a number of times to initiate discussions that explored questions like these, the void began to grow and gnaw at me. I increasingly realized that the university programs in which I had been teaching did not really stand for anything. It was okay for my personal work to strive toward the ends I viewed as important, but I wanted to be part of something bigger—a cause beyond myself (Glickman, 2003). I wanted to be part of an intellectual community with a moral purpose, a community where we collaboratively learned how to prepare leaders who would strive for similar moral purposes. I wasn’t unhappy in my work or at my institution—I just wondered if there was a place for me that was more completely fulfilling.

Thus, after 9 years of working as a professor in 3 different university contexts, during a casual reading of the Chronicle of Higher Education position announcements, one particular announcement caught my eye. It was for a department chair position that read very differently than other job announcements. It spoke of, as a department, striving for a moral purpose and a transformative vision of change. It spoke of a department that included educational leadership and cultural foundations of education and that wanted a department chair who would help department faculty explore the intersections of those programs and how the two programs could contribute to each other’s areas. The announcement seemed to speak directly to me and to the void I’d been increasingly feeling. A little over a half year later I began what has become a decade long journey as department chair and professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG).