How Colleges Change

Understanding, Leading, and Enacting Change

Adrianna Kezar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351356213
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Joining theory and practice, How Colleges Change unmasks problematic assumptions that university leaders and change agents typically possess, and provides research-based principles for approaching change. Featuring case studies, teaching questions, change tools, and a greater focus on scaling change, this monumental new edition offers updated content and fresh insights into understanding, leading, and enacting change. Recognizing that internal and external conditions shape and frame change processes, Kezar presents an overarching practical toolkit—a framework for analyzing change, as well as a set of theoretical perspectives to apply that framework in order to custom-design a change process, no matter the organizational challenge or context. How Colleges Change is a crucial resource for aspiring and practicing campus leaders, higher education practitioners, scholars, faculty, and staff who want to become agents of change in their own institutions.

Part 1

Thinking Differently about Change

The first part of the book focuses readers on understanding why change is necessary and encourages them to think differently about the change process through an exploration of theories of change that emphasize aspects that are often not visible to change agents. Part 1 also establishes the main assumptions and theories that undergird the framework presented in the second part of the book.

Chapter 1 explains why change is needed in higher education, as well as how today’s context is unique. Chapter 2 explores ethics in relationship to change. This chapter refers back to ideas presented in Chapter 1 on the current context of change and how it presents ethical dilemmas. This chapter challenges change agents to consider the ethical underpinnings of all change initiatives and provides critical areas for reflection. I foreground ethics as without considering the “why” and “what” of change first, no matter how strongly you implement a change process, if it is wrongheaded, all the effort is for naught.

Chapter 3 reviews six theories of change that can help leaders to think differently and expand their ideas about change. These six theories will also inform the framework presented in Part 2 of the book. Appendix 1 includes teaching case studies that allow the reader to apply the concepts presented throughout Parts 1 and 2.

one

Why Change?

One should be leery of people who describe changes or crises in higher education as being unprecedented. Some critics today note that higher education faces unparalleled crises and issues, and that it is facing a revolution or devolution (Christensen et al. 2011). Yet significant changes have occurred throughout the history of higher education. For example, there were the debates about changes to liberal arts education around the Yale Report of 1828, the Morrill Act of 1862 introduced vastly different institutional types, massive growth and changes in the student body occurred following World War II and the introduction of the G.I. Bill (Servicemen’s Readjustment Act), and the introduction of federal financial aid made it possible for many more and different types of students to enter higher education. As this list suggests, though, many major changes within higher education have come from the outside, rather than resulting from intentional changes made internally. Higher education has always faced changes (some quite dramatic) that shaped the character and mission of the enterprise. Yet the multitude of directions for change and the lack of capacity (e.g. fiscal and human resources) to meet today’s changes present challenges and threaten to overwhelm leaders, requiring more and perhaps even different ways of thinking and reflecting on problems and change than have been common in the past. While higher education may not be at the crossroads of a revolution, the enterprise will be required to shift in significant ways, and is already undergoing many changes.

Furthermore, the context in which higher education operates has changed in complex ways that need to be engaged by change agents. This is a time when skills in change agency are critical to the health and success of the higher education enterprise. This chapter examines why leaders need to engage with the change process, as well as the particular challenges we face in this era. I also suggest that the context for change is shaping the way change can and does occur—the nature of change processes is itself being altered. Thus, being a change agent today is different. Change agents can engage social media and technology, which were lesser factors or levers in the past. Change agents also need to be more accountable and transparent as there is less trust in higher education as a sector. Leaders need to recognize that the deeper interconnection of higher education to the larger social and economic goals of the public makes them less independent than in the past and more vulnerable to external forces and demands. In addition, change agents need to do more with less based on the financial situation that most campuses face as a result of the global recession. These are just a few of the circumstances that make the context for change different. And the context will continue to change over the years, and leaders need to be constantly scanning the environment; continuous adaptation is needed.

Why Leaders Should Engage Change Rather Than Being Passive Recipients

While history suggests change is a common facet of higher education, history also helps us see why it is important to the vitality of our colleges and universities that leaders engage change. Sometimes change agents are creating changes that are of their own making—implementing a strategic plan, rethinking the curriculum, or implementing a new program. However, just as often, changes may not be of our own making (e.g. enrollment declines, financial stress). We are often less likely to think about these types of changes. In this book, when I speak about engaging change, I am referring to both types of changes. Higher education leaders ignore external pressures or organizational devolution at their own peril. And to some degree, I argue a lack of attention to managing external forces is what has happened in the last 20 years among administrators, faculty, and students. Campus leaders can impact and shape the nature of changes and whether they will support or upset campus operations. Take the response by campus leaders in World Wars I and II, for example. In World War I, campus leaders felt that the military was intruding on campus operations and that supporting the military was not part of their public mission. Thus, as military efforts were moved onto campuses, it created chaos and obstruction. However, during World War II, academic leaders on campuses were proactive and decided to invite dialogue about the ways campuses could support the military; they created new programs such as area studies and language programs that were aligned with their missions but also supported military efforts. As a result, they actually increased their access to resources and capacity, rather than depleting them. The military presence became complementary and did not disturb campus operations, as it had in earlier times. Academic leaders can shape outcomes differently through their responses (or lack of responses). Another example is more contemporary.

In the last 20 years, higher education leaders have largely not responded to changes in the public policy environment around funding and public support rather than thoughtfully adapting to them. Campuses have believed that state money would return to former levels and that public support would rebound, but such changes have not occurred and conditions have gotten worse. Without responding to declining funds, campuses will face increasingly difficult decisions and a worsening climate and set of conditions within which to make changes.

But responding to changes may not always mean supporting them, as seen in the examples of the military presence on campuses during the two world wars. Sometimes the best response is to resist changes that may threaten the campus’s mission and ability to best operate. For example, in the last 20 years, campuses have adopted corporate employment models of contingency, moving to a workforce wherein 70 percent of the faculty have no consistent employment or connection to campuses. They also encounter working conditions that make it difficult for them to teach and contribute to the core mission of the institution. In fact, higher education has become a “poor” employer to these faculty members, offering low pay with no benefits, short-term contracts with precarious job stability, unsystematic hiring processes, and little, if any, orientation or support. Few, if any, campus leaders resisted this change in faculty composition and practices; instead, they mimicked this new approach to employment that was prevalent among corporations and increasingly among their peer institutions as a way to deal with shortfalls in state revenues. So, resisting contingency and considering other employment options may have been a more appropriate response.

Some argue that leaders did not intentionally create this change in the faculty. In Chapter 2, I will examine theories of neo-institutionalism that look at how organizations engage in massive changes, often with limited intentionality (Cross and Goldenberg 2009). Yet the change in faculty composition did occur and there was little, if any, leadership to alter this change—to resist it. So, change agency is engaging change proactively, whether to support or resist it. While implementing changes that leaders see as necessary is critical, change agents cannot ignore alterations that are happening around them as well. They also cannot ignore the enterprise by always focusing only on their own campuses. Leadership and change agency mean thinking systemically about changes. Appropriate change agency also means knowing about the context and external environment for change.

Change in This Era

The environment for change is different today for several key reasons:

1. connection of higher education to the global economy;

2. the greater public investment and sense of accountability;

3. increasingly diverse students who engage campuses differently;

4. the corporatized higher education environment;

5. for-profit higher education, competition, and marketization;

6. new knowledge about how people learn;

7. technology; and

8. internationalization of campuses.

These issues also suggest and reinforce the imperative to change. While this brings up a litany of recurrent issues that are described when people suggest the urgency to change, I attempt to examine these as more than just drivers for change. I also examine how these issues change the context for change and create a new era in which change occurs, which no other source has examined. I do not wish to suggest these are the types of changes that higher education should be engaged in; rather, I mean to describe how they are creating pressures for change and creating a new context for change. In fact, I hope that leaders will instead choose changes and initiatives that are based on evidence and research.¹ Too often, changes chosen are merely a response to political and other external pressures, rather than being guided by the mission of learning, knowledge creation, and public service.

Connection of Higher Education to the Global Economy

The primary and overarching shift that shapes many of the other conditions below is that higher education has become the gateway for entry into the knowledge economy. As the labor market has shifted from industry and lower-skilled jobs to positions that require critical thinking and higher-order skills, a college education will be required for most high-paying jobs in the future. Also, innovation is key to global economic development. While this has been an important part of the context for the last 50 years, competition in terms of innovation has become intensified as more nations are providing resources toward creating an educated workforce. Thus, other countries are working to educate more individuals in order to create the potential for driving innovations that will allow them to compete in the global economy. Many reports cite how the number of college graduates in the United States has been declining in recent years (often due to our high dropout rates as compared to other countries), which may impact our global competitiveness (Christensen et al. 2011). These trends have resulted in the introduction of President Barack Obama’s 2020 College Completion Goal plan, which intends to double the number of college students, and efforts such as the Lumina Foundation’s Goal 2025 to increase the percentage of Americans with high-quality degrees and credentials to 60 percent by 2025. To meet these ambitious goals, higher education needs to respond and change in new ways, as there is limited, if any, new funding coming to incentivize such growth.

In the eyes of policymakers, higher education leaders have been uneven in responding to these goals, often unwilling to consider new delivery systems such as hybrid and online learning or rethink course creation or size in order to increase access more quickly (Christensen et al. 2011).² The nationwide dropout rate is over 50 percent and we have not made progress on changing this outcome. And while most of these national reports speak to goals in the next decade, this is likely an even longer-term challenge the enterprise will face. The challenge of continued massification needs systemic solutions that address high school completion, K-20 partnerships, rethinking remediation, and greater investment in the community college sector. Furthermore, costs have skyrocketed and tuition has increased approximately 6.3 percent annually for the last three decades (Christensen et al. 2011). Tuition and fees went up 274 percent from 1990 to 2009, faster than any other good besides cigarettes. Affordability is a major concern among policymakers and impacts goals for access.

This trend makes the change process different as well because individual campus decisions are now tied into the overall economic decision apparatus of the state and federal government. Many higher education leaders continue to operate in isolation; they do not realize that they are more intimately a part of a much larger capitalist-industrial complex. While this shift has been taking place since the 1950s, it has intensified with changes in the global economy and competition over the last two decades. Also, changes to address completion and greater access require making partnerships and working more across sectors (e.g. working with K-12 and community agencies), as many of these challenges cross the boundaries of sectors. The change context requires more collaboration among higher education institutions, across sectors, and also within institutions themselves (Kezar and Lester 2009).

The Greater Public Investment and Sense of Accountability

In the past 40 years, the federal and state governments have increased their funding substantially for higher education, primarily through federal financial aid, but also through state grants to students and research funding through government agencies such as the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health. Higher education was able to undergo substantial growth and spawned new sectors such as for-profit education because of the increased availability of financial aid, which boosted the number of students who could take advantage of higher education.

Due to the increases in funding, however, federal and state policymakers began to feel that they should have greater say in institutional operations—particularly those they saw as being central to their investment—such as functions affecting student retention, transfer and completion, and employability. Also, they started to require conformity to new legislation and regulations on issues of equity and civil rights, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, Title IX, and laws protecting employees from sexual harassment. Federal and state governments have continued to call for greater accountability and transparency as a condition of the government’s investment by requiring assessment of student learning outcomes, for example. Government entities want assurances not only that students are learning, but that they are acquiring the right type of knowledge to be successful in the information economy.

Because higher education has historically enjoyed financial support with limited public accountability, campus stakeholders have not always been quick to address calls for change on campus from outside. Many different public opinion polls show that the public worries about college affordability and access, particularly in states such as California, where many students are being shut out of classes and institutions. There is greater public scrutiny, rising calls for transparency and accountability for outcomes, and a growing demand for using new means for assessment. The lack of action from higher education leaders or institutions in addressing growing concerns may result in sharper declines in state funding, as higher education is increasingly seen as the problem, rather than part of the public policy solution. Thus, the collective lack of response for the need to change, and lack of acumen about how to do so effectively, may lead to a decline in our perceived value as a social institution.

All of these forces mean change is much more strongly associated with accountability, and again that higher education can no longer be considered to be an independent actor, but one tied to the demands that accompany public investment. Still, this change is not so simple. Even though much more federal and state money has been going into higher education over time, recently declining state budgets and states’ ability to provide incentives have resulted in academic leaders calling for greater freedom from state regulation, accountability, and control. So, while there are increased expectations around accountability, there are also proposals to release public higher education institutions from accountability due to the declining role of public funds in their budgets. State investments have simply not kept pace with rising expenses. Campus revenue streams have been further hampered by the recession, which negatively impacted campus endowments and also alumni giving to higher education.

Increasing accountability concerns are also connected to the emergence of other new stakeholders that see higher education as being accountable to them. While Kerr documented the phenomenon of increased stakeholder interest back in the 1960s in his book The Uses of the University, the number of these stakeholder g...