Meeting the Challenge of a Janus Job

Abstract

No one becomes an academic department chair in higher education without first having been a facultymember. After eighteen years as a faculty member at the same university, I was named interimdepartment chair in 2005. With this administrative appointment came the assumption of what Iperceived as a Janus job. In Roman mythology, Janus was the god associated with doorways andgates. He was frequently portrayed with two faces–one looking forward and one looking backward.Rather than being viewed as two-faced, Janus is more accurately described as vigilant. This imageseems to fit aptly the role of academic department chair, which Rud (2004) has identified as anunderstudied administrative role. In this essay I describe this particular leadership role and presentquestions for self-assessment.