Most of the time, when I get a call about a struggling department, the situation is something the chair is trying to manage. A conflict between faculty members. A grievance. A culture that has soured. The chair is the person asking for help.
Occasionally, though, the chair is the problem.
The faculty in the department are saying so. The dean is hearing it from multiple directions. The chair's own behavior, communication style, or judgment has become the thing the department is organizing itself around (and against). What the chair sees as a difficult department is, from inside the department, a difficult chair.
This situation has fewer good options than any other in academic leadership.
The Pattern That Signals It
A few markers tend to surface together when the chair is the issue rather than a victim of one.
Faculty meetings are attended dutifully but accomplish nothing. Important conversations happen in the hallway after, not in the room.
Faculty stop bringing problems forward, then leadership is surprised when problems surface formally. The path to the chair has been closed by experience.
Senior colleagues quietly route around the chair. They take questions directly to the dean, to HR, to one another. The chair is bypassed, not consulted.
Junior faculty become risk-averse in ways that look like underperformance but are actually self-protection. They are not engaging with the chair on hard questions because the chair's responses are unpredictable or punitive.
None of these markers alone confirms the diagnosis. All four together usually do.
Why Institutions Tolerate It
When a chair is functionally failing but technically continuing, institutions tend to tolerate the situation longer than they should. The reasons are structural.
Removing a chair before the end of their term is institutionally awkward. It requires a process. It generates conversation. It may surface concerns about tenure protections, governance procedures, or political dynamics that the dean would rather not engage.
Replacing the chair requires a successor. If no one is being developed (the pipeline problem), the dean's choice is between a known difficult chair and an unknown unprepared one.
Tenure protections often apply to the underlying faculty appointment, complicating any larger consequences if the chair role itself is removed.
And, sometimes, the dean made the original appointment and would have to acknowledge it was a mistake. This is the smallest reason on the list and the one most consequential.
What Faculty Can and Cannot Do
For faculty in a department where the chair is the problem, the practical realities are sobering.
Direct confrontation rarely works. The chair has institutional authority, and the faculty member has limited leverage. Personalities under that asymmetry tend to dig in.
Going around the chair to the dean is sometimes necessary but always costly. The dean's first move will usually be to encourage internal resolution. The faculty member who escalated will be visible. There is no truly anonymous way to bring this kind of concern.
What does work, sometimes, is collective. When a critical mass of faculty raises the same concerns through formal channels (a faculty meeting, a written letter, a senate inquiry), the institution has to respond. This requires coordination that departments in distress often cannot achieve.
What the Provost or Dean Can Do
For senior leaders facing a struggling chair, three actions tend to matter more than others.
Independent verification. Before acting on what faculty say or what the chair says, commission a climate read or structured conversation that surfaces what is actually happening. This protects the institution from acting on partial information.
Direct coaching, with explicit goals. Sometimes a chair who is struggling can recover with the right support, especially if the issues are about specific skills (communication, delegation, conflict navigation) rather than fundamental character mismatches. This requires honest goal-setting and a defined window.
Honest transition planning. If the chair cannot be successfully coached into the role, the transition plan should be specific (timing, replacement, communication, public framing) and humane. The point is to resolve the situation in a way that protects the department's function and the chair's dignity. Both are achievable. Neither happens by accident.