Meet Misha Becker, Chairs Leadership Program Co-Director
January 9, 2025 | Kristen Chavez
There’s no shortage of responsibilities department chairs juggle on top of their own teaching, research, and their personal lives. In reflecting upon this, Professor Misha Becker (FFP ’12, ALP ’19) recalled what Rob Kramer, former Senior Leadership Advisor to the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, would say:
“When you have too many balls in the air, decide which ones are glass and which ones are rubber.”
But Becker mused that sometimes, while some are rubber or glass, others can be bowling balls. It’s an apt metaphor for the challenges department chairs face. As chair of the linguistics department, Becker is familiar with the concerns of faculty in leadership positions. Now, as Becker steps in as co-director for the IAH’s Chairs Leadership Program with dramatic art professor Adam Versényi, she passes on her own insights to other chairs in the College of Arts and Sciences.
In fall 2024, Institute Director Patricia Parker tapped Becker to serve with Versényi, putting two experienced department chairs at the helm of the program. In recent years, CLP has been facilitated by a faculty program director and the IAH’s Senior Leadership Advisor. Kramer, who served in that capacity from 2011 to 2024, recently stepped down after moving to Oregon.
Becker herself participated in CLP when she was appointed to her first term as linguistics department chair in 2018; it was also the same academic year she joined the Tyson Academic Leadership Program. “I loved getting feedback from these other chairs and being able to bounce ideas off them,” she said of the monthly dinners.
In 2002, Becker joined Carolina’s linguistics department as a faculty member. Shortly after gaining tenure in 2008, she joined the IAH’s Associate Professor Program. At the time, she realized how helpful it was “to have that community of people who were grappling with similar questions” about their careers and balancing service. “We had been working for so long towards tenure, and there’s this question of, ‘now what?’”
It was the start of her relationship with the Institute. She received her Faculty Fellowship in 2012, where she worked towards her book, The Acquisition of Syntactic Structure: Animacy and Thematic Alignment, published in 2014 by Cambridge University Press.
Becker later joined the IAH’s Faculty Advisory Board and its strategic priorities task force. As a member of the board’s Fellowship Selection Committee, Becker evaluated applications to the Faculty Fellowship Program. “That was a great experience to learn a little bit about the process and how decisions get made,” said Becker. She was also amazed by the variety and quality of the research proposals, with only limited fellowships to award in a given year. “It was such a hard decision because the quality of the proposals was always so high.”
It brought another opportunity to see how the Institute operates in other ways, as Becker served on the strategic priorities task force. “I felt like I could play a role in brainstorming about what the IAH wanted to be as a resource on campus for faculty,” she said.
After years of discussion and planning – including a retreat outlining five priorities during Parker’s tenure as director – one aspect Becker was excited about was internationalization. She was excited about the prospect of fostering faculty development beyond campus: with the Summer International Collaborative Research Grant in particular, “it was nice to bring that energy outward and see how we can connect with other places.”
Becker’s own interest in languages and linguistics starts with a global element, beginning with a desire to learn German in elementary school. Continuing the language through high school, she earned a scholarship for a German exchange program. Interested in linguistics but not having a deep understanding of the field, Becker sought colleges with those programs. When she later returned to Germany as an undergraduate, where she worked as an au pair for a family, she wrote a senior thesis about the toddler’s language development.
“And the rest is history,” Becker said, who also leads the Language Development Lab in the linguistics department. With her research, Becker has collaborated with fellow faculty in UNC’s departments of psychology and neuroscience and American studies, as well as colleagues at Rutgers University.
In reflecting on her first year as chair, Becker noted the importance of needing to be flexible and being “prepared to be surprised.” In the midst of balancing administrative duties with teaching and research, things change and require pivots. For her, it was important to identify her values to inform her leadership. “One piece of advice I would have given myself is to find core values or goals that would be your guiding principles,” she said, which would help lend perspective and guidance to focus on what’s most important.
For her, one of her values is respect; that shared respect for one another is likewise valued and ingrained with her linguist colleagues. “I am very fortunate to have a department where that is really how people operate.”
With a consensus-building approach to leadership, Becker works to help people feel supported and valued. With a focus on community, Becker believes a leader should ask themselves how to enhance and build a strong community. “To me, building a strong community means having members that feel valued, accepted, welcomed and supported.”
By Kristen Chavez ’13
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