“You feel quite proud to run it”
After two years as Department Head, Professor Timothy Roscoe is going back to business as usual – teaching and research. He reflects on his time running the department and the importance of having a positive outlook.
Professor Roscoe, your time as Department Head has ended. What will you miss the most about this period?
It is a difficult job with a lot of responsibility. But our department operates well, has good processes and the staff is amazingly good. So for the most part, it is a very satisfying job. You feel quite proud to run it. Somehow, through some bizarre set of circumstances, I ended up as the head of one of the best computer science departments in the world. I am not sure I will miss that satisfaction, because I am always going to be a part of the department, but running it gives you a very nice feeling. It is also not a lonely job; you do it as part of a group of people. Everyone is supportive and helpful. Outside of the department, you also meet and interact with many people, like other heads of department and administrative staff. This increases the sense of belonging and you get to know more about how ETH works.
Surely it was not always smooth sailing. What were the biggest challenges?
Coronavirus was still one of the biggest challenges. My predecessor, David Basin, had to deal with moving the department from an in-person model to one where we were under lockdown and everything happened remotely, and he was very successful in doing that. The challenge I faced during my time as department head was figuring out what to do after coronavirus, or at least after lockdown, and this is still an ongoing process. Another massive challenge was the department evaluation. I was unlucky enough to have it take place during my term, as it only happens every seven years. It was a huge amount of work with many people involved. We started working on it in February 2021 and the assessment was actually carried out in October 2022. The most difficult part was the fact it was all online. If the committee had been here, you could have improvised, walked around, talked to people. Nevertheless, it was a good exercise, and being subject to critical assessment from time to time is important. The evaluation brought the department together quite a bit and everybody did a great job.
Is there something you wish you could have done differently during your two-year term?
Definitely, you never do enough. We did not manage to get everyone we wanted, but I still think we did pretty well in terms of hiring. Another thing I tried to do was documenting the processes in the department. Sometimes it is not clear how something works and there is a degree of inconsistency. It would be nice to have had all the processes written down so that everybody could look at them. I made some progress, but I would have liked to have done more there.
What would you say is your most noteworthy achievement?
We have two-year terms for the chairs of the department and that is too short of a time to do anything radical. You want to have change that is more gradual, and not somebody to come in and just change everything. A bunch of changes that started long before I became Chair are continuing. There are many things that we as a department can feel very proud of, but they are not down to me. I helped, but it is more of a collective thing. I hope that we will continue to improve steadily. Therefore, I guess one of my greatest achievements is continuing the good work of my predecessors and not screwing up too much.
What was your best and least favourite part of the job?
The best part of the job is when everybody is pulling together, the department feels like a cohesive unit and everything works well. It is a great feeling when that happens and a lot of the time that is the case. My least favourite part is dealing with misunderstandings or strong disagreements. When things become very political or personal, it takes so much more energy to resolve them. There are also many factors that you always have to bear in mind: the department, research, teaching, the welfare of your students and more. There is a remarkable consensus among all the department heads that juggling everything at once is a big challenge.
Is there a way to make running the department easier?
There is a set of proposals coming out of the rETHink initiative about how to make departments run more efficiently and put less load on the head of department. In some ways, they are good, but often they reflect what we already do. It was nice that ETH's recommendation to departments as to how to run more efficiently is “do what D-INFK are doing”, which is great if you're not D-INFK or one of the departments that looks a lot like us. The initiative recommends things like having an Executive Board to spread the work out, a Department Coordinator who has huge autonomy and can take over a lot of work, rotating the Chair and Deputy Chair, and undertaking succession planning so that there is continuity. There was very little that we did not already do.
Where do you see the department in five years?
All over Zurich! The department – and ETH – faces many challenges. This is a difficult time economically and it is not going to get any better in the next few years. There are resource challenges, space challenges and fragmentation issues. The department is split up, and this situation will be exacerbated when part of us moves to the Andreasturm.
The world is changing; globalisation is going to be very different in five years’ time. Society’s view of universities is a very difficult thing to predict. I would like to think that Europe and Switzerland would continue to see great universities like ETH as essential to their security, autonomy and prosperity. They certainly should. The economic impact of ETH Zurich on Switzerland is staggering, and computer science is an increasingly important part of that. At the same time, there has been an interesting new trend for us as a department. During my term, we received a generous donation from the Dieter Schwarz Foundation. For some departments, that is not unusual, but it was a new thing for us. I think we will be able to attract other big donations in the future. The challenge for the department in five years is to figure out what to do with them. That requires the department to think very differently about how it plans ahead. We are not used to thinking on that scale.
“The economic impact of ETH Zurich on Switzerland is staggering, and computer science is an increasingly important part of that.”Professor Timothy Roscoe
What is your main takeaway from these last two years?
Without doubt, do not assume the worst. Having a positive outlook is not sufficient by itself, but it helps a lot. Your job is never to tell people what to do; it is, in a sense, to nudge people in the right direction. My experience is that most disagreements are not fundamentally about what the department should be doing, but rather how it achieves those things. And that suggests that, in general, most people want the same thing for the department, they just disagree on the right way to get there.
What tip can you give your successor, Kenny Paterson?
The most important thing to remember is that you are not alone. If something happens and you must react, the first thing you should do is stop and think: Who can I talk to about this? It is very easy to forget that in the heat of the moment. The way the department works is that most people are generally very happy to discuss these things. I have always given him that advice and told him to put it on a post-it note on his monitor. Another thing is to remember that most people mean well, even if it does not always look like it. You do not want to be naïve, but you can make much more progress and be much more successful in this job by assuming that people have the best of intentions, rather than assuming that people are evil.
What is your next step?
I am not going to disappear completely. Right now, I am trying to turn down other jobs, like serving on different commissions, for at least a year but I will stay on the Executive Board during that time. I just want to go back to research and working more with students. We have spent about four and a half years building this cool computer called Enzian. Suddenly it is working, and there is all this exciting stuff we can now do and I have not had the time to engage with it. We have now got 14 of these very cool machines that nobody else has so I want to do some fun stuff with them.