In 22 February's Guardian, Jonathan Wolff writes of the secret of being Head of Department:
masterful inactivity. There are so many demands, and so many things to respond to as a Head of Department, that the best thing to do is to ignore the demands so that by the time you might get around to dealing with them, the need for them has disappeared, and those requesting them have forgotten.
This all because of the desire for change, which Wolff suggests is taken to be something valuable in its own right. However, "If the background environment keeps changing, you cannot predict the consequences of your actions," he writes, so that what might look sensible at one point in time, may not be so shortly afterwards. His advice: "If you cannot sensibly plan on other grounds, you should at least make sure that what you do is sound in intellectual, scholarly and pedagogical terms."
He is partly right. Change is not always good. But when it is done in support of these intellectual, scholarly and pedagogical objectives, then change can be a force for good. The challenge, of course, is to change when it is needed, and not otherwise. As a new Head of Department, I'm keen to change things, but only when it brings about valuable results in these terms.
