At most universities I work with, the succession plan for academic leadership is the same plan: when the current chair's term ends, ask around for who is willing to do it next.
The pattern is old enough to have been measured. In a national survey of chairs at 101 research and doctoral-granting universities, 80 percent had been appointed from within their own institution, serving an average of six years in the role after sixteen years as a professor. The pipeline is almost entirely internal, which makes the absence of internal preparation harder to excuse.
This is not a plan. It is a hope.
The pattern shows up in two ways. The first is reactive: a chair leaves, sometimes mid-term, and the department scrambles. Whoever is most senior, most willing, or least objected-to takes the role. The second is more orderly but no less default: terms rotate predictably, but the question of who is being prepared to take the next term is rarely answered, often because no one is being prepared at all.
Either way, the result is the same. Each appointment is its own emergency, and each new leader starts from a standing position.
The Default: Tenure Plus Availability
The default model for chair selection in most departments has two criteria. The first is tenure: the chair must be senior enough to have institutional credibility and a permanent position. The second is availability: the chair must be willing.
These are not bad criteria. Tenure provides the stability the role requires. Willingness is non-negotiable.
But they are insufficient. A faculty member can be both tenured and willing and still be a poor fit for the role. The relationship management, conflict navigation, budget tracking, and policy interpretation that fill a chair's calendar are not part of the tenure review. They are not part of disciplinary training. And they are not part of the "willingness" calculation, which usually amounts to whether the person can stomach the workload, not whether they have the skills to do it well.
The institutions that get this right know that tenure-and-availability is the floor, not the criterion.
What a Pipeline Actually Means
A leadership pipeline is not an org chart with arrows. It is a deliberate practice of identifying faculty who might one day lead, giving them work that develops the relevant skills, and creating opportunities for them to fail in low-stakes settings before the stakes get high.
Concretely, that looks like:
- Assigning emerging leaders to committee work that involves managing relationships, not just contributing expertise
- Letting them run the search process for a new hire
- Putting them in charge of a curriculum review or a program assessment
- Having them sit in on a grievance process, with appropriate confidentiality protocols, as a learner
None of this is dramatic. It is the academic equivalent of stretch assignments. The point is to give people the practice of leadership before the title arrives.
Three Markers of a Healthy Pipeline
When I work with deans who have built pipelines that actually function, three things tend to be true.
First, they can name three to five future chairs by name. Not theoretically. They can tell you which faculty member is most likely to be ready in two years, in five, and what that person needs to develop in the meantime.
Second, they have ongoing conversations with those faculty about leadership. Not "are you interested in administration someday." Specific conversations about specific skills. What was hard about chairing that committee? What surprised you?
Third, they create opportunities for emerging leaders to make decisions that matter, with backup. A chair-in-waiting who has never had to make a personnel call is not ready, regardless of their committee record.
Where to Start
For deans or provosts reading this with no pipeline in place, the work begins with a smaller question: who in your unit, right now, has the temperament for leadership work? Not the credentials. The temperament.
Some signals are useful. Faculty who navigate complex committee politics without burning bridges. Faculty whom both junior and senior colleagues trust. Faculty who have managed something hard, a search, a grievance, a curricular reform, and have emerged with their relationships intact.
Once you have a list, the next step is not formal. It is a series of conversations, conducted over months, in which you express interest in their development and learn what they want. That is the pipeline's foundation. Everything structural builds from there.
If your institution's plan for the next ten years of academic leadership is to wait and see, you do not have a plan. You have a hope. And hope is not a strategy.