Christopher Jochum’s The Department Chair: A Practical Guide to Effective Leadership provides a guide to administration that both new and experienced department chairs will find valuable. The advice it contains is instantly applicable and practical for all types of institutions: large and small, public and private, growing and struggling. It’s exactly the sort of book I wish I’d had when I was first starting out as an academic leader. Jeffrey L. Buller, senior partner, ATLAS Leadership Training
The Department Chair: A Practical Guide to Effective Leadership is a timely resource written from an experienced and highly successful department chair to readers who are considering or already serving as chair. Dr. Jochum succinctly guides readers to reflect on their motives for serving and the awesome responsibilities of leading faculty, staff and students and follows with a practical and ethical approach to effective leadership with numerous illustrative real-world examples. His guide is an important contribution in a critical area of higher education leadership that has received far too little attention to date. Neal Schnoor, President, Northern State University
The Department Chair: A Practical Guide to Effective Leadership by Christopher Jochum with its focus on the chairs leadership which requires courage, character and relationships is a welcome addition to the chair literature. The book contains many questions and challenges to chairs and potential chairs as to their motivation and fitness for the work. Jochum understands that chairs will only go as far as departmental people will take them so selection, thoughtful development and authentic relationships are critical. Following the suggestions and reflections can go a long way to being a departmental servant leader. Daniel W. Wheeler, Professor Emeritus of Leadership Studies and former Department Head, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
The Department Chair: A Practical Guide to Effective Leadership by Christopher Jochum, is as useful as it is relevant for examining effective leadership within higher education settings today. Dr. Jochum brings two decades of experience as a teacher education scholar and administrator to his comprehensive text and illuminates philosophical issues that face administrators (and their often unintended consequences), while it provides avenues for confronting them practically. At this historic moment—when institutional accountability for diversity, equity, and inclusion that is prodigious instead of perfunctory is being made at a range of educational institutions—the case studies, critical questions, and analyses contained in The Department Chair: A Practical Guide to Effective Leadership provide us with a concrete path onward. Jared R. Rawlings, Director of the School of Music, University of Missouri
Dr. Chris Jochum 