An Unexpected Journey

 'Sorry! I don't want any adventures, thank you. 

Not Today. 
Good morning! 
But please come to tea -any time you like! Why not tomorrow?"
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

[Editor's Note: I first published this on May 20, 2020 as COVID descended fully onto education with devastating and multigenerational impact. I cannot help but think I'll be writing about the impact of artificial intelligence in a similar way very soon. But first, some tea...]

None of us asked for the kind of adventure we are on in the time of COVID. Our adventure, the one we thought we were on anyway, was trying to create a culture of change. But I think we need to go backwards before we can go forwards!

We opened the year focused with a relatively few outcomes that we thought could advance the college. It seems like a long time ago but we held the department chair retreat with the intent of thinking about how we could expand leadership through our organization and think about leadership not just in terms of us as leaders but around our teams. We talked about all the standards stuff:  leadership development, budget and planning, professional development, enrollment management, and assessment. Even then, we were talking about the importance of building a culture that empowers our faculty and staff and that provides them with a different experience of the way the college operates then maybe they had experienced before. We talked a lot at the beginning of the year about love, trust, and communication.

We entered this year with high hopes.

Then we ran out out of money. Our dreams turned into reactions and we lost sight of the reason many of us entered this calling in the first place: to be servant minded leaders who believe in critical role of faculty as problem solvers for the institution.

We forgot to be the most critical of traits-- active listening, responsiveness, and support while maintaining accountability. These are needed consistently over a long period of time before our colleagues beliefs will change. And without a change in beliefs, we will not see the kinds of individual and collective actions that lead to better outcomes.

The budget crisis served to remind us that our efforts to create islands of sanity are for naught unless all areas of the college are functioning at a very high level. This demands a higher caliber of administrative practice around the four pillars of efficiency, effectiveness, equity, and sustainability so that we can maintain and advance our mission to the public good: to meeting the needs of the neediest and serving our communities

Islands of Sanity, as expressed by Margaret Wheatley (2017), recognizes that it is possible for leaders to use their power and influence, their insight and compassion, to lead people back to an understanding of who we are as human beings, to create the conditions for our basic human qualities of generosity, contribution, community, and love to be evoked no matter what. I know it is possible to experience grace and joy in the midst of tragedy and loss. I know it is possible to create islands of sanity in the midst of wildly disruptive seas.

When COVID -19 hit us in March and we all attempted to move with our faculty to remote learning, we started talking about the need to be flexible and adaptive in teaching and learning. While there are many elements to this, over the course of the last few months we've talked a lot about not only teaching and technical skills but also the need to be a good human, and to instill a sense of worth and cultural responsiveness in our faculty. We asked faculty to start planning for contingencies and to make choices for themselves. We built a huge enterprise on an assumption that it would be temporary and now we are finding ourselves in a situation where it may exist for much longer than we expected. Collectively, we have kept the wheels on, applied duct tape were necessary, kept our faculty and staff focused, and modeled -to the extent possible - a modicum of work life balance.

Two critical questions stand before us in this time of COVID -19. First, how do we continue to make progress around the multiple needs of our institution as a leadership team, and how do we continue to build a culture of inquiry and improvement among our faculty while operating remotely.

How do we continue to make progress around the multiple needs of our institution as a leadership team while operating remotely?

We need to be creating not only islands of sanity, but pockets of change wherever we can. We have entered a different kind of leadership model where our daily huddles and just in time check ins have replaced a more formal model of leadership. We need to be intentional about how we are creating social processes that are effective for communication, collaboration-and caring- and we need to push these efforts further down the organization.

These themes are connected. Islands of sanity born of communication, collaboration and caring lead to pockets of change because the people who live on them - even in the confines of their own homes - are influencing colleagues around them. This is particularly true if we can make apparent what we're trying to do.

Talent Management

Even before COVID, we have struggled with talent management. Too much of our efforts are focused on addressing the personnel challenges we face and not enough time is spent getting the right people on board with the right initial orientation and getting them onto the right seat of the bus (James Collins, Good to Great). When we're in the middle of layoffs forced by budgetary problems the problem is exacerbated. We not only let go of good people that we need, but we slot people where we can put them not where they need to go. Now that crisis is the foreseeable future, we need to stop triaging and start planning forward related to talent management. We need to be thinking about each of our influencers across our divisions regardless of their official status. Who are the influencers and how can we help them grow? How can they help us change?

How can we develop some intention around how influencers' professional development remotely. This will require we be explicit about their leadership development. Individual reflection: values, beliefs, work/life balance, what they need, where they want to go, and how they want to get there.Feedback: evaluations, coaching, 360 feedback. Context: what kind of leadership culture do we want and what opportunities the influencer wants aligns with it. What stretch projects and challenges can we give them that advances their interests and our needs? (Hanson, 2013).

We also need to be thinking about how being remote - with all of its associated reactions- actually impacts our efforts in creating cultural change.  How do we support our faculty and staff -before, during, and after unplanned and planned changes?

As illustrated by Smollan (2016), there are a variety of supports that can mediate the kinds of stress we all are feeling right now. Our colleagues are in fight or flight mode, they are burnt out and stress, and the onslaught is unlikely to abate anytime soon. The fear of layoff- or infection -impacts focus and commitment to the changes we are trying to gain traction on: whether building a cultural of inquiry, impacting student success, or driving greater effectiveness.

Our first job as leaders in this context is empathy. Ironically, how we supervise right now can be seen not as supervision, but as support, if we spend time building great communication, showing concern, and creating communities of practice that lead to reflection, learning, and self-awareness. We can do this by modelling it ourselves as a team and proffering our own feelings of uncertainty, depleted bandwidth, and anxiety. We can give ourselves and our teams permission to express fear, anger, and exhaustion (Smollan, 2016).

Being supportive, having emotional intelligence, is not enough for us as leaders right now. We are coaching virtually and we need to be really intentional in building relationship with our teams with assignments/assistance, specific role expertise/performance feedback, and impact that builds trust, helps with career goals, and creates learning (Hart, 2016). Am I providing this for you? Are you providing it for your team? All of this takes time and a personal touch that now must be technology mediated. Are we making the time and creating the touch?

How do we continue to build a culture of inquiry and improvement among our faculty while operating remotely?

I have been really surprised by the faculty response to our instructional contingencies model that places decision-making for program modality "subject to statutory guidance" with programs and departments. While some faculty are expressing appreciation for this, I am hearing from deans that many others would like "someone to tell them what to do." The irony of faculty interest in codified shared governance while resisting local control of their own programs in the time of COVID has been befuddling.

The practice of shared governance in critical times not only contributes to a healthy culture and climate but also better decision-making. As academic leaders we need to consistently and collectively ensure are faculty are experiencing both the rights and responsibilities for both input and, where appropriate, authority.

I expect this will be a difficult matter. we need to delegate to faculty at a time they themselves are isolated and overwhelmed. Doing so, I think, can reinforce the faculty experience that they are problem solvers. That we need their expertise. That real shared governance is the kind where we all shoulder some of the responsibility closest to our spheres of work. Delegation needs to really be about appreciation. Valuing your influencers means delegating where there is passion, not just offloading work.

Finally, we can't overlook the most important component of all, our students. We all need to look at data with open minds and hearts, prepared to address the needs and solve problems. This includes trying to find ways to temporarily bend the quality/service balance toward service even if faculty need to make some concessions. Students are already being asked about their preferences and one that gained national prominence showed, unsurprisingly, that students overwhelmingly want to return the face-to-face classes. Students want to return to the way things were, but they also like the idea of block schedules and hybrid face to face. One-third of the 10,000 surveyed, presumably the most privileged, indicated they might transfer if their courses are all-online. (What Students Want This Fall, Accessed 20May20 from https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2020/05/20/survey-results-15-fall-scenarios-suggest-what-students-want).

These survey results, and the ones we will get from our own students, will be strong indicators but how we need to continue to pivot forward as student opinions about learning and living change.

As noted in early discussions around Instructional Contingencies, none of us may see a return to the old normal but may persist in a new normal with more online and hybrid options, contingency based instruction that can pivot in a term “high flex”, competency based instruction that assesses learning from all sorts of places, and highly adaptable delivery systems. In a high flex world, student choice will increase and student challenges around time and life management will increase too. Our teams need to engage students around this new reality. Our leadership approaches and talent management need to begin selecting for and shaping our teams for this reality.

Really, none of asked for this adventure, but we've got it just the same and we'll make the journey a bit better if we take the time to engage our teams, our faculty, and our students with communication, collaboration, and caring...perhaps over a cup of tea.

References:

Hanson, B. (2013). The leadership development interface: aligning leaders and organizations toward more effective leadership learning. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 15(1): 106-120.

Hart, R. K. (2016). Informal virtual mentoring for team leaders and members: emergence, context, and impact. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 18(3): 352-368.

Smollan, K. R. (2017). Supporting staff through stressful organizational change. HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT INTERNATIONAL, 20(4): 282–304.

Wheatley, M. (2017). Who do you choose to be? Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.Oakland, CA 94612-1921

Aligning student and academic services to ensure student success.

 [Editors Note: I first published this 19Apr2018 while Executive Vice President of Academic and Student Affairs at Tacoma Community College. I no longer supervise both areas but see more than ever the challenges of misalignment and possibilities of overcoming them. Updated to reflect changes in perspective and eight years out of a dual role.]

Student success through completion with quality and equity has been a major focus of every place I’ve worked since the early 90s but increasing focus has aimed toward creating conditions that serve all students and consistent use of disaggregated data to identify gaps in success for particular groups of students. Lately, such efforts include development of guided pathways that aim to create clearer stepwise paths to career options, holistic advising support that help students choose and enter those paths, intentional support systems to improve term to term persistence, and clear demonstration that learning outcomes are assessed and met. These four pillars of the guided pathways efforts fit very well with other systemic change efforts such as scheduling for completion and enhancing inclusion and student sense of belonging.

All of these efforts require deep collaboration and strategic partnerships between instruction and student services. Without common purpose, coordination of plans, synchronization of efforts, and honest assessment of what is or isn’t working inside and outside the classroom, change efforts are doomed to fail. Campus climate likely erodes as faculty blame staff and vice versa.

While there are many examples of ways to ensure that academic and student affairs are aligned, many institutions align the areas under one executive. Proponents argue that doing so ensures cohesion and accountability, skeptics argue that the job is too complex and that holders of the position are almost always biased toward one or the other area. Many have explored the experiences and perceptions of the experiences of community college leaders in the combined role of vice president for academic and student affairs and a dissertation of the same title by Paul Broadie provides some interesting insights.

In 2014, Dr. Broadie, now President at Santa Fe College (and previously, Housatonic Community College), interviewed sitting leaders – including me- to determine how combined positions promote collaboration and eliminate silos. Themes regarding a unified approach, intentional communication strategies, and work teams that promote commonality are clear from the participants. Another clear theme is the complexity that arises when two vice presidents are not aligned. One participant, “Dr. Thomasville” noted that

You know, I could do just as much good if I [worked with another VP] who was collaborative and on the same page and the same wavelength as I am. If [that person and I are] not on the same page and not collaborative, then we would not be able to accomplish anything. So the answer to your question is it would really depend who was over [each area]. I could imagine that we’d be able to solve the same problems exactly the same way. I could imagine that we would continue to meet together and continue to interface the same way we are now. Or I could imagine that something would blow up and personalities will get in the way and we go back to an era of the Cold War (p. 100).

The organizational chart is important, but it is really the culture beneath the structure that creates collaboration. Noted “Dr. Tillerson,”

You certainly could have the structure without the culture, but it does not work very well and I think you could have the culture without the structure and it can work but it just requires a different kind of intentionality. I have worked in places where there is an academic vice president and a student services vice president, and they collaborate and by virtue of their collaborating and creating activities that allow their staff to collaborate you get collaboration. I think the more organic your structure the more likely you are to be successful without the reporting lines dictating it. If you’re a hierarchical organization or there is not a culture that people can feel they can cross reporting lines [then] you almost have to have something like a joint position that provides permission for people to consider collaborations across the two areas… (p. 101).

Several of the participants noted that the “cultural and institutional personalities (p. 106)” can make a joint role or collaboration between two split roles difficult. Additionally, the ethics necessary to keep things balanced places a burden on the unified role to ensure a “deep understanding and respect for one another” (“Dr. Tillerson,” p. 114).

“Dr. Cartright” sums the joint role very succinctly as a “focus solely on the success of that student by creating more streamlined lines of communication, tearing down silos organizationally, reducing the administrative foot print, and creating a singular vision for the success of our students (p. 118).”

As sole VP with direct reports, the responsibility is clear, but other constellations (joint VPs, an EVP dotted line relationship to another VP, or an EVP with a direct VP report) require a range of collaborating, influencing or nudging dependent upon the interests of the President. Regardless of structure, when the culture unravels, momentum slows, and students are not well-served.

Prior to my current role, I have always nearly always been a Vice President with a responsibility for both areas. Having worked in executive roles for ten presidents, I have seen the nature of supervision and leadership shift considerably, and I have even experienced an uncoupling of the role in unusual circumstances and observed the consequences. I have returned to Dr. Broadie’s work periodically to reflect on how my role should reflect the purpose so well expressed by Dr. Cartright. We build teams and reporting lines, we communicate the values that underpin our work, we build and sustain a culture. I’d like to think we are always trying to put students at the center by demonstrating that we are emotionally intelligent leaders, that we bring people together, ask for input across both instruction and student services, and communicate an expectation for collaboration across senior leaders.

These principles have never been more applicable than today when guided pathways demand the tearing down of silos all across the college to ensure the student experience from connection to beginning to belonging to navigating toward an academic focus and completing. Instruction and Student Services are two sides of a common coin: an investment in student success.

Tearing Down Fences

 [Editors Note: This blog was first published January 5, 2020 and inspired by an administrator I admire very much who spends as much time wearing the scrubs of a nursing instructor as she does ensuring the program and its graduates are outstanding. I have republished it as my current institution works to address silos of all sorts...]

At all-faculty meetings, I often like to tell the story of the college where I grew up as an administrator. I obtained my first faculty job there and subsequently became a Dean over a nearly 15 year period of time.

In the early days at that institution, a very dynamic president with great vision established a strong career development and talent management perspective that remains with the institution today. Her perspective was that the best administrators are those that know the institution well and are grown internally by careful cultivation, stretch assignments, and encouragement. When she arrived, prior to my time, the administration was bloated and her first effort was to begin unifying the leadership, winnowing down the administrative ranks until her senior administrative team consisted of an executive assistant, an executive vice president for academic and student affairs (evp), a chief administrative officer, and a senior student services officer. Once she had assembled the right team, the president drew a much heavier line between internal operations and external advocacy, entrusting the evp to manage all aspects of the internal operations, including the budget. This dynamic duo, a picture of contrasts, then set about establishing the next generation of leaders.

The college established a four day retreat style leadership development Institute open to all employee types with a promise that every desiring employee would eventually have an opportunity to attend. A nationally recognized figure and former president facilitated sessions on leadership versus management, the college budget, personnel evaluation and improvement, institutional improvement, accreditation, and other meaty topics. An important aspect of the Institute involved using various sorts of leadership inventories to identify both individual characteristics and the complementarity between team members. An explicit component of the Institute was ensuring that every participant knew their leadership would be needed at the institution in both current and future positions.

The president also handpicked a few members of the organization at all levels to participate in individual development. These folks were provided stretch assignments and other career enhancing activities, such as establishing a professional development plan, participating in out-of-state recruitment efforts, course release for administrative and professional development duties. As the capacity of the college grew, internal applicants became highly competitive and earned important senior and executive positions. The few external hires in this period were unsuccessful for a variety of reasons and the internal promotions typically lead to positive results. The evp had been a tenured math faculty who later became the department chair for mathematics and that philosophy extended to other leadership positions. Over time, the college expanded its senior academic leadership to include the evp, two assistant vice presidents for academics (1 Ag Professor), a vice president for student services (tenured counselor), a vice president for professional development (English Professor), and a dean for academic services (chemistry professor). All but one of these individuals had come from faculty ranks and had been tenured as faculty prior before being promoted. The only “outsider” in the bunch began as a department chair for e-learning before being promoted.

In addition, the institution I grew up in had an interesting organizational structure. Department chairs--elected members of the faculty with continuing teaching assignments -- reported directly to the evp. The end result was that the distance between cabinet level decision-making and directly serving students remained very short. The development of this cadre of faculty administrators created a camaraderie and commonality of interests across the faculty and administration such that on issues we often felt more at odds with colleagues in our employee group than with the “other side.” There was no “us and them,” only “us.”

The institution I grew up in was not perfect. It sometimes struggled under an unrealistically positive sense of self-efficacy. This positivity is understandable. All of us in the administrative ranks had strong institutional identity. We believed that we were engaged in something important together. A strong sense of purpose in terms of both community and student success had been very intentionally instilled in us from our early days as faculty. So yeah, we were all a little bit nearsighted and starry eyed.

The funny thing is that even though I know we were a bit idealistic, I have sought to replicate the same conditions at every institution. More than anything, I’d like to tear down the fences between faculty and administration, to muddy the waters to the point where we are not really distinguishable from one another but bound together with common understandings about work and purpose. The institution I grew up in eroded that artificial barrier by promoting faculty to senior administrative positions and did so with intention. That college seems long ago and far away but it remains with me as an ideal.

Deconstructing fences is not something you do in one season. It takes time and intention. The first step is to move from a privacy fence to something cuter you can see through. Transparency does a lot of things. It helps those on the other side see what you are doing. It gives them the opportunity to ask questions, and if you answer those questions with honesty and authenticity, it helps them understand complexity that goes into so many of the decisions that must be made. With transparency and understanding, one can begin to develop trust and that underpins everything.

Foundations of Administrative Practice

 

[Editors Note. This blog was first posted on Saturday, February 22, 2020 and is republished as part of institutional improvement work with appropriate updates and improvements.]

In the current context of difficult economic times in higher education and an ever-eroding appreciation of  higher education as a public good, I am reminded of foundations of administrative practice aimed at good-faith efforts at institutions to be better. These foundations– efficiency, effectiveness, equity, and sustainability – best operate when are all are held in a balance. Overemphasis of any one pillar to the detriment of the others negatively impacts all.

In recent years, inattention to equity brought higher education to the brink of crisis as an increasingly diverse public grows skeptical of higher education as a public good. The high water mark of public perceptions about higher education may correlate to the development of state community college systems in the late 50s and 60s. Coupled with the G.I. Bill, the promise of institutions to provide liberal and professional technical, developmental, and community education suggests that the public in general had high hopes that the education system would meet the needs of all. Both what are these needs? The Lumina Foundation recently moved its strategic focus from attainment (The Big Goal) to attainment with prosperity (Stronger Nation). Credentials alone are no longer sufficient: now they need to have economic value (see February 6, 2026 Forbes article: Lumina Measures New Goal: Do Higher Ed Degrees Yield Economic Payoffs.

The double whammy of reduced appreciation for higher education and the need to prove economic value means that most institutions need to get really, really good at understanding their business model.  The American promise of socioeconomic liquidity, in which a first generation college student ascends to economic fortune based upon their educational attainment isn’t quite as fluid as we would like. Strata remain, and our systems replicate the strata. Harvard is expected to be inefficient. By lavishing resources on a relatively small group of students, Harvard's students benefit greatly.  But is it equitable?

State policymakers have underfunded most public colleges and universities since their inception. The logical response to these economic pressures is to wring out the extras. Students at these institutions haven't received the individualized attention and cocurricular niceties. Until recently, research was frowned upon in community colleges, notwithstanding the fact that undergraduate research is a solid contributor to the development of skills that lead to success in a major. Extracurriculars are minimized and student life limited due to the large portion of students commuting to class. Faculty teaching and advising loads were raised, despite the fact that such loads reduce faculty capacity to serve individually students in need. Public perception of our colleges and universities fell into clean little tiers: highly selective privates, research ones, regionals, community colleges, and technical colleges.

Public policy has reinforced these tiers, or perhaps reflected them. Rather than providing sufficient resources to colleges and universities directly, policymakers began creating algorithms that calculate student need based upon both family income and cost of attendance. The theory is that a high performing student who lacks financial means will simply have those financial needs met through financial aid and then, when the student succeeds and enters the workforce, their income will allow for such debt easily be paid off. The reality of this theory is much different as student debt mounts and is now a priority topic in political debates. Nonetheless, educational financial policy reflects the dramatic shift from higher education as a public good to higher education as a private good paid for by individuals for their benefit.

Exacerbating all of this is the emergence of a new kind of higher education institution, the for-profits. Driven by stakeholder investment expectations, these institutions are not interested in sustainability, but quarterly profits. Efficiency levers are ramped up in such institutions. Sophisticated means of student recruitment and intake, pricing thresholds, and financial analytics are key components. While the worst actors in this sector have been held accountable, the sector remains strong and the financial aid system provides a cash flow for those students who don’t have financial means. Is this equitable?

While I may not have all the facts right related to the aforementioned stories, it does not take an economist or a higher education administrator to see that depending on what kind of institution we are talking about, the four pillars skew and may fall out of balance. The consequences are dramatic at both the macro level and the institutional level.

At the institutional level,  the need to integrate the four pillars of efficiency, effectiveness, equity, and sustainability is critical. Inattention to sustainability hinders long term viability. Sustainability takes the long view (not the quarterly stakeholder view) in building a healthy environment for learning with a great employee climate and financial investment that leads to long term survivability of the institution.

Yet, community colleges, the most social justice minded institutions, are at risk. As of this writing, the United States has enjoyed a long economic recovery with extremely low unemployment rates. In 2026, US colleges and ununiversities are hitting the infamous "enrollment cliff"(See College Board, November 2025). Consequently, community colleges and regional institutions across the country are struggling for enrollment in funding models that aren’t designed for sustainability and resilience. The noble mission of these institutions to serve communities that are growing more diverse leads us to focus rightfully on a growing litany of unmet need. Scholarship now shows unequivocally that students of color and first-generation students must overcome substantial cognitive and noncognitive barriers. Gaps in education require additional support such as tutoring, supplemental instruction, and faculty who know how to use tools that are culturally responsive. Because the students often lack the support of someone at home who has gone through the process previously, the students need even more individualized attention around advising and navigation. Students today suffer from transportation, food, housing, and childcare insecurity, even as they make the brave choice to try to educate themselves to better their lives of their families. What these students need more than anything is for our institutions to be positioned to sacrifice efficiency in order to enhance effectiveness and equity.

For administrators caught in fiscally constrained scenarios, this is simply not possible, and it is heartbreaking. Forced to choose between keeping the lights on and serving our students better, we are left with difficult choices. Talent management and institutional climate suffer with negative impacts on effectiveness. Financial cuts remove the very supports our neediest students need. In turn, we fulfill the reduced expectations of higher education by serving on those who can fend for themselves in programs that can pay for themselves.

Despite the general premise of this blog, I remain an optimist. Watching participation rates of first-generation students, students of color, immigrants, and others who have not had access, I am excited to see what the world will look like as the students increasingly find their ways into positions of influence, including an academic administration. Excited by efforts of colleges and universities toward equitable student success, I believe we will eventually bridge opportunity gaps. Inspired by students and colleagues who have been successful and are now telling their stories, I still believe in our mission. 

The mission and promise of community colleges demands a higher caliber of administrative practice around the four pillars so that we can maintain and advance our mission to the public good: to meeting the needs of the neediest and serving our communities. I wonder if we would benefit from a little more intention. What would it look like if conversations around equity included chief financial officers and the finance office? What would it look like if effectiveness conversations around student success similarly included facilities and other staff? What if everyone in the institution understood the financial underpinnings for providing great services sustainably? Finally, what if we paid as much attention to our people, our institutional climate, as we do to our environment and finance?

Our communities need us to be more than credentialers. They need us to do more than just polish off already high performers. We stand in gaps where poverty, community decline, workforce and economic pressures need us to be focused, present, and resilient. We cannot do any of it well unless we integrate all four pillars of efficiency, effectiveness, equity, and sustainability to meet our mission.

Community Colleges for International Development (CCID) releases Framework for Comprehensive Internationalization

 [Editors Note: I first published this in the CCID newsletter on September 1, 2012. This weekend CCID is celebrating 50 years! I am proud of this work (coauthored with Shawn Woodin) and equally proud it continues to prove useful to colleges attempting to meet global needs locally.]

On September 1, CCID officially released the Framework for Comprehensive Internationalization to member institutions and the world. The FCI is a first important step in implementing the broader System of Comprehensive Internationalization that CCID expects to be the engine driving our vision of transformation through local access and global opportunities.

As the first framework of its kind specifically for community colleges, it is important to CCID that the FCI be research informed, but practitioner focused. The FCI should be seen as a tool for institutional use for their own institutional efforts. To that end, CCID consulted a number of member institutions that were asked to pilot the framework. Member college feedback is making clear that institutions are taking their own paths to improvement using the framework,  providing rich reflection and clear value. Waukesha County Technical College is using “color harmonization” to create a crosswalk between the FCI, WCTC’s strategic plan, and institutional metrics. Northcentral Technical College created a cross-disciplinary team to use FCI as part of an international strategic plan leading to five global education steering committees, awareness, and energy toward the effort. Several other colleges have engaged the instrument in unique processes on their campuses with uniformly enthusiastic results and/or have provided broad engagement by the campus community with buy-in by the campus leadership (including active commitment by College Presidents). The enthusiasm and commitment of these pilot institutions affirm our belief that we are engaged together in deeply meaningful work.

There is no right or wrong way to use the framework. However, it was designed with a few key questions in mind: What does an institution look like after a sustained effort to develop international capacity with broad buy-in by faculty, staff, and students? What results demonstrate that such effort has value? How can effort be recognized without giving an impression that the institution has “gotten there”and no longer needs to keep working to improve?

When used for critical self selection, the FCI is both celebratory and aspirational: celebratory, as the FCI allows those who have worked so hard to see the fruits of their labor, and aspirational as the thresholds don’t assume an endpoint. The FCI points institutions in directions for improvement whether the institution is just getting underway in international work or has built significant capacity already. We expect that there will be several sessions provided by pilot colleges at the annual conference in which they share their stories. We invite you to give it a try! 

A Four Legged Stool of Faculty Life

 (This blog was originally published March 17 2014, and is republished as part of current institutional development work with appropriate updates and references as warranted.)

Actualization in Faculty Life

My current institution initiated an ambitious project before I arrived known as the curriculum alignment project or CAP.  The intent of CAP is to ensure alignment between our degree learning outcomes, program learning outcomes, and course learning outcomes. As such, CAP is both a curriculum project and an assessment project. My enthusiasm for the project stems from a belief that this is deeply meaningful work that will enhance the overall quality of instruction and the overall quality of learning at the institution.

My enthusiasm, however, was dampened by the realization that many faculty have not been fully engaged in the process and see their role narrowly as that of classroom instructor without clear roles in the areas of curriculum or assessment.

The root of this disengagement goes to the core of faculty life. The question of faculty life is not primarily a question of contracts, performance reviews, time and effort, or other human resource questions but of professional existence. In this respect, Maslow's hierarchy of needs provides an appropriate context: faculty who consider their work to be fully self-contained in instruction are not fully actualizing their potential. In fact, regardless of the type of institution faculty work in,  self-actualization requires some reflection on multiple different roles. On my first day, I stood before the faculty and talked about my interest in seeing faculty life from the perspective of teaching, service, scholarship, and outreach. I commented that in my own journey the emphasis of these different areas has shifted according to where I work and what I'm doing, but they all still exist.

The CAP discussion served as a reminder that faculty, like all employees, may have specific focus on particular roles but need a framework to aid in conceptualizing the nature of their work. Foundational to faculty life is scholarship within the discipline and practice. While on faculty at a research I institution, this meant -- for me-- basic research in human resource development with all the affiliated efforts towards presentations, publications, and grants. But scholarship remains a foundation at all institutions even those primarily focused on good teaching. Scholarship can be a presentation at a teaching/learning/technology conference, facilitating a professional learning community, exploring a new potential teaching technique for efficacy, or practicing classroom assessment techniques. But without effort to remain grounded in both the discipline and the practice through scholarship, faculty life is destined to go stale.

The legs of faculty life are multiple (conceptualized liberally from Richard Swanson's three legged stool of human resource development) and focus on curriculum, andragogy, advising, and assessment. Student learning, the outcome of faculty instruction, requires all four of these, not just one. Fail to address any single leg, and the entire stool falls. The integration of these in the CAP project speaks to a realization that one must teach something, and that something, most hopefully, is socially relevant, employment relevant, and skills relevant. One must also teach somehow to ensure that end users (our students) interact with information in ways that create knowledge transfer and knowledge production...and do so in a way that leads to a credential. Finally, one must measure to ensure a desired result.  Without something to teach, techniques to teach it, and evidence that learning has happened, the faculty endeavor crumbles.

Finally, faculty are the heart of an institution: academic leadership and governance set the stage for all the wonderful outcomes that result from faculty scholarship, curriculum, instruction, advising, and assessment. Increasingly, efforts to disaggregate governance from decision-making lead institutions astray. Management is responsible for efficiency, effectiveness, equity, and sustainability, but faculty are the moral compass and their input through shared governance is crucial.

Actualized faculty life is inherently enlightening, but the outcome and impact is magnified when faculty reach out to audiences inside and outside higher education, sharing what they know and love. True actualization is obvious to the community member watching the music faculty conduct, children laughing an explosion in a demo, or participants from an assisted living facility dreaming of that faraway place that a guest speaker describes. They see that the flame of passion for the work is brightly lit, sharing light for all.

Institutionally, it is far less important that all faculty serve all these roles all the time than that the institution support a robust faculty who collectively exhibit high performance in all these areas all the time. Faculty deeply engaged in governance might be less involved in the community, while those working in outreach might be less involved in their own scholarship and professional development. In either case, however, actualization requires sustenance: each faculty member may want to re-position his/her own activities over time to ensure sustainability. And the institution will want to ensure -- through coaching, management, and intentional human resource development -- the consistent, collective high performance of the faculty as a whole to realize robust outcomes and impact.

Conceptual framework of full-time faculty work (image augmented by AI).