As a tenured full professor in Germany, for the last twelve years (and change) I have also been a “Chair holder” in the famous and infamous “Chair system” of German universities, where the power rests on the Chairs and not on the departments. That is, even if there is a Department of X, the actual administrative unit is the “Chair” (somehow, I feel that I have to capitalize that), where a single full professor has near-absolute power over a few assistants, a part-time secretary, and a modest research budget. The “Department” is then just a loose coalition of Chairs, which sometimes cooperate with each other. The most-prominent alternative is the actual department structure, where professors are colleagues within a larger unit, with hiring committees, common budgets, organized supervision of Ph.D. students, and front offices with shared administrative personnel.
The Chair system has some advantages. One is the freedom and flexibility it grants to the individual professor. As a Chair holder, you have your own budget, your own assistants (independently of whether you get funded research projects or not) who you hire personally, and your own secretary. It’s a comfortable niche, which, well used, allows you to do interesting things. For instance, I used this freedom to turn my economics Chair into an interdisciplinary research group, hiring psychologists in an economics department and building a neuroeconomics (EEG) lab. That would be quite hard to do in a regular econ department.
The other side of that particular coin is that Chairs are untouchable, and it is quite possible to “lose a chair” when a previously-productive colleague decides to go into inner emigration and stops doing actual research (not judging here: some times, people do that for perfectly understandable reasons, but it is still regrettable from a social welfare point of view). Granted, that is a problem with any system granting tenure, but in the Chair system you “lose” a whole chunk of the department, rather than just a single position.
Another advantage is that there are less fights for joint resources, simply because, well, there are less joint resources. In a department system, as in any other structure where diverse opinions on the use of common resources have to be aggregated, and unless clear rules are in place, serious fights can ensue. This happens everywhere, from the American Ivy League to the smallest Spanish or German universities. A Chair allows for easy entrenchment: you always have a basic budget and a couple of assistant positions, so you always have a (small) research group and can move on with your research agenda.
And the other side of that coin? It does not create incentives for cooperation. It is very easy for people to center on “their” group, and time being scarce and administrative duties being frequent, even if everybody has the best intention to cooperate with colleagues, years go by and nothing happens. So you can be in a large department but effectively be restricted to your small group for years. Hence, many departments with a Chair system end up being just the mere sum of the Chairs, neglecting possible synergies.
And since I have just mentioned administrative duties, let me jump to that. This is probably the largest disadvantage. Decentralization at this absurdly tiny scale creates a lot of unnecessary work. A lot of tasks that are centralized in a proper department land on your desk if you have a Chair. Taking care of budgets, organizing teaching rosters, writing contracts, contacting hotels for guests and conferences, and even deciding the norms for student theses. For this reason, Chairs are endowed with secretaries, but since those are underpaid and cannot specialize, they are typically inadequate for the tasks (and I have written about that in detail here). In a nutshell, the outdated tradition to have a secretary for each professor simply blocks resources which could more efficiently be used to finance well-paid, highly-skilled administrators at the department level.
Another problem of the Chair system is that it forces a micromanaging structure where every professor has to do his/her own hiring, PhD student selection, etc. Graduate schools at the faculty level, which are becoming more frequent, ameliorate the problem, but do not entirely solve it: once a PhD student comes into “your” Chair (say, after the first year of courses and just before actual research starts), you are fully responsible, and he or she consumes your Chair resources (meaning you have to finance his or her position, trips, experiments, etc). If the matching works, that’s not too bad. If it does not (and we have, after all, imperfect foresight, so every now and then it will not), you end up wasting a lot of time, nerves, and resources. Within a department, you would simply engineer a re-matching.
In summary, while the system has its advantages, in the end, my balance is negative. I did not hate the experience of being a Chair holder, but I did not actually like it. Don’t take me wrong. I think the German research and university system is not bad. It is better than, say, the Spanish one. (Why that one? Just because I prefer to keep my ramblings limited to subjects I know well.) Research money flows to active researchers, and there are decently-paid jobs for researchers, which is something that cannot be said of the Spanish system. But it could be much better, without being more costly. The Chairs are a permanent source of inefficiency and an obstacle in the way to improvement. Looking back, I consider them to be one of the main problems of the German university system, right next to the incredible legislation which forces young post-doctoral researchers to live for years under precarious conditions (but that is a story for another day).
So, are there ways to improve the system? If you ask me, a radical change would be best, eliminating all Chairs country-wide, creating tenure possibilities at different levels, breaking up the huge departments that exist in some places and creating more synergistic groups, and structuring all PhD programs. But change on such a scale is unlikely. However, there are winds of change which are slowly improving the system, and which should be given as much support as possible.
One is the allocation of research resources through the German Research Foundation (DFG, in its German acronym). Individual research projects (meaning one applicant) are evaluated reasonably swiftly and money flows to good projects (being an elected member of the committee for Economics and Business, I have first-hand experience on both sides of the allocation system). That means that the size of research groups is wildly different nowadays and is not linked to the actual size of the Chair, as many positions are financed through research grants. So if a colleague becomes less active, his or her group shrinks, and if a colleague hits research gold (in the form of particularly productive, interesting, or consequential results), his or her group grows. Incentives at work!
Another is the gradual spread of Graduate Schools, which centralize the admission and allocation of PhD students, and establish the relevant norms (courses, length of financing, etc). They effectively take PhD students out of the Chair system and allow for a more efficient matching between students and supervisors, also enabling easy re-matching. The problem is that participation in Graduate Schools is not compulsory for Professors, and universities typically keep the “classical” PhD route, where the Professor-Supervisor decides everything, has absolute power over the student, and courses are not needed (all wisdom flows from the Professor-Supervisor to the student), as an alternative to participation in the Graduate School. In my opinion, that parallel route is a remnant of other times and should be slowly eliminated. To put it bluntly, we now know better about graduate education, and the old system has to go.
In the end, I think that being a Chair holder set me back, in terms of scientific productivity. There is hope for improvement, but change is maddeningly slow if you are living within the system. Personally, I think that change is too slow for any individual person to reap the benefits. I am actually giving up my Chair now, leaving the country, and moving to a department without chairs. Of course, the points raised above are not at all the main reason for this decision, but let’s just say that being a Chair holder held no weight against it.
Carlos' Ramblings 