Shared Equity Leadership, New Book and Delphi Award Winners....and more

Guest Editor Adrianna Kezar, Pullias Center Director

Dear Colleagues,

This month's newsletter focuses on a topic that has emerged in my research repeatedly over the years -- the notion of shared leadership. Shared leadership ensures that change processes and campuses daily operations are inclusive, have appropriate expertise to informed decisions and policy, have democratically informed strategy and vision, consciously draw on all groups (most importantly groups that have been systemically disadvantaged), and the buy-in and people power to implement work. I believe this quote from Ryunosuke Satoro captures this concept well and inspires my passion to continue study of this topic -- "Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean."

In this issue of the Pullias Center's newsletter, we highlight many of our projects that delve deeper into Shared Equity Leadership, including:

A look into our Shared Equity Leadership project (in partnership with ACE and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations) with project researcher Elizabeth Holcombe. Dr. Holcombe, along with myself and the research team, are engaged in the second phase of this work.

If you're looking to dive deeper into Shared Leadership, be sure to check out the just-published book, Shared Leadership in Higher Education: A Framework and Model for Responding to a Changing World, edited by myself, Susan Elrod, Elizabeth Holcombe and Judith Ramaley.

We are very excited to begin a new project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create tools to support the development of leaders within collective processes of institutional transformation.

Also, be sure to check out our announcement of this year's Delphi Award winners, University of Denver and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and finalist University of Michigan. While not directly related to shared leadership, the winning institutions are dedicated to making amazing policy and practice changes as they worked as a collective across multiple constituencies to support non-tenure-track faculty members.

Please enjoy this pre-holiday issue of our newsletter, and we'll see you in the New Year!

Warmly,

Adrianna Kezar

Director of the Pullias Center

Elizabeth Holcombe

SEL: Changing Campus Culture to Support DEI

While colleges and universities have worked to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) over the last several decades, campuses are still struggling to make meaningful change to their cultures in ways that truly embed DEI in everything they do. The role of leadership in facilitating this type of change is the focus of a new project currently underway at the Pullias Center, ‘Building a Culture of Shared Equity Leadership in Higher Education.” Elizabeth Holcombe, a postdoctoral researcher (with Adrianna Kezar, Center Director) on the project, shares her thoughts about SEL and provides a project update.

“Shared Equity Leadership is a collective approach to leadership” where DEI becomes everyone’s responsibility regardless of where they are situated in the institution or what their formal responsibilities are,” according to Holcombe. SEL has emerged from the intersection of research on DEI leadership and research on shared leadership. Kezar, who has studied culture change for DEI for more than two decades, noted “Rather than having one person or one department bear most of the responsibility for a task as monumental and complex as DEI, SEL capitalizes on the collective expertise and knowledge available on our campuses and leverages the diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences of faculty, staff, administrators, and students.”

The Pullias Center teams with the American Council on Education (ACE) for the “Building a Culture of Shared Equity Leadership project,” which is supported by a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

Pullias Center Further Explores Shared Equity Leadership with Grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Leadership Moves For Institutional Transformation is a project that aims to develop leadership competencies that contribute to implementing, scaling and sustaining campus transformation initiatives. With a $275,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, USC’s Pullias Center will create a tool and library of resources for change leaders to help create institutional transformation. Learn more about this exciting new project here.

New Shared Leadership Book Now Available

"Shared Leadership in Higher Education: A Framework and Model for Responding to a Changing World" is a comprehensive new book on shared leadership, edited by Elizabeth Holcombe, Adrianna Kezar, Susan Elrod and Judith Ramaley. In addition to providing a foundation for understanding shared leadership, the book also includes case studies from a set of very different campuses (as well as a national multi-institutional project) about the ways they have enacted shared leadership and lessons learned.

Get the Book

Shared Equity Leadership: Grad Students Share the Impact

Three grad students at USC’s Rossier School of Education are key members of the team working on Phase I of the Pullias Center and ACE’s Shared Equity Leadership (SEL) project. Jude Paul Matias Dizon, Jordan Harper and Natsumi Ueda bring their own experiences with diversity to the table with this multi-year research, aimed at developing practice-based insights relative to shared equity leadership in higher education.

SPOTLIGHT

Delphi Award Winners for 2021 Announced

University of Denver and Worcester Polytechnic Institute Selected for Prestigious Award for Their Work Transforming Support

for Contingent Faculty

The Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education, in partnership with the Association for American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) has selected two winners of the Delphi Award for 2021. The University of Denver (DU) and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) will each receive $15,000 cash awards to continue their work to support adjunct, contingent, and/or non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF) in promoting student success.

As in past years, the Pullias Center has identified winners that represent key changes that they believe should be happening across the country. “DU is making across-the-board changes in a systemic way that creates real culture change. And WPI is making one major change around hiring and contracts that is transformational and reversing the contingency trends,” noted Adrianna Kezar, Pullias Center Director.

Save The Date for the 43rd Annual Pullias Lecture

The 43rd annual Pullias Lecture will be held in person at USC's Town & Gown ballroom on Thursday, March 10. This keynote speaker for the event will be California Community Colleges' Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley, who is currently on sabbatical from his position at CCC, and is serving as the temporary senior advisor to U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on higher education issues, including college affordability.

The Pullias Lecture, established in 1978 and dedicated to the memory of Earl V. Pullias, brings a nationally recognized scholar to the USC campus to participate in an ongoing academic dialogue on significant topics in higher and postsecondary education.

RECENT PULLIAS PUBLICATIONS

Lost transitions: The cost of academic misalignment for English Learners in community colleges

AB705 in the Los Angeles Community College District: Results from Fall 2019

MORE NEWS

Adrian Huerta was honored by ACPA's Coalition on Men and Masculinities with their 2022 Outstanding Research award.

Adrian Huerta was interviewed for a Business Insider story on boys and college access titled "Education researchers reveal why far more girls apply to college than boys: Schools prioritize organization and rule-following."

Adrianna Kezar is quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education in an article on higher education institutions that are laying off faculty and staff, while simultaneously approving generous deferred compensation plans for senior leaders.

Adrianna Kezar and leaders from Miami Dade College and Deloitte share how a new age of curriculum could better prepare the workforce for a new economy in “Why higher education must evolve to help fill the jobs gap” on Fast Company.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reached out to Tatiana Melguizo about concerns raised with Bloomberg Businessweek’s business school rankings.

The Pullias Center has received a $50,000 planning grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to scale up the California Consortium for Inclusive Doctoral Education (C-CIDE) project. The project will be headed by Dr. Julie R. Posselt.

Senior postdoctoral scholar KC Culver was named Associate Editor of Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning.

Doctoral student Edgar Fidel Lopez was accepted as an external graduate student affiliate for the Center for Latinx Digital Media at Northwestern University. he also received a 2021-2022 Internal Funds Grant for “A Narrative Study of Latinx Ph.D. Students’ Experiences, Career Preparation, and Mentoring Relationships.”

Doctoral student Doctoral student Aireale J. Rodgers received the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award from the Association of American Colleges & Universities.

Doctoral student Elif Yucel received the NACA® Foundation Advancing Research in Campus Activities Grant, Bronze Award for her work on community college re-entry programs.