Call for Proposals

Effecting Change in Academia: Strategies for Faculty Leadership

Edited by Holly Hassel and Kirsti Cole

A regular review of the trade daily sites like the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed will demonstrates that there is no shortage of concerns, problems, and challenges facing higher education in the current moment. Reductions in state funding to universities place ever greater pressure on faculty and staff to make cuts, seek new 'revenue streams' and do less with less. Declining populations of traditional college-going high school graduates leads to refrains around recruitment and retention. Competition for high-achieving students, for international students, for any perceived 'value added' student population is coupled with calls for increases in retention and graduation rates. Faculty and administrators find themselves called to adapt to ever-changing federal legislative landscapes on DACA, Title IX, and Federal Financial Aid. Faculty spend increasing amounts of time on paperwork to document workloads, to justify their program's value to the university through 'program prioritization,' and are pressed to document productivity on all fronts. Practices and policies around trigger warnings, safe spaces, free speech and academic freedom swirl in faculty senates, legislative bodies, and student governance groups. Changing standards for accreditation, the expansion of dual credit/concurrent enrollment courses, online education, and pressure to offer both highly qualified and credentialed instructors while expanding access and quality feels dizzying.

At the same time, most of the published work on leadership focuses on a narrowly defined sort of leadership, one that is largely unidirectional; that is focused on 'change management' and that emerges from publications on educational policy, educational leadership, and degrees with titles like 'higher education administration' or 'community college leadership.' Absent from this published work is two types of leadership work:

1. Leadership, change initiation, and grassroots and groundwork efforts to improve conditions within higher education in ways that substantially influence--for the better, by measures that are meaningful--teaching and learning and working conditions for those who labor in higher education settings
2. Collaborative leadership efforts between faculty, instructional staff, academic, or non-academic staff, and students who work together or with higher education administration (narrowly defined) to achieve goals that enhance the experiences of students, faculty, and staff.

This proposed edited collection calls for chapters that deploy a range of methodologies, but that focus on change efforts across a wide range of institutional environments in which writers describe successful change work. Possible topics may include:

• Access to and support for students, faculty, and staff (including Students’ Rights to Their Own Language, emergency grants for students in need, parental leave policies, contingent faculty rights, Title IX initiatives, protections for DACA recipients, graduate and faculty labor organizations)
• Benefits and workload changes (advocacy for improvements in, and support for, or resistance to imposed changes)
• Acknowledgement of the value of particular types of service or research (area studies, scholarship of teaching and learning, public scholarship)
• University policies and/or faculty and student-led strategies that focus on eliminating harassment/bullying, and improving workplace climate
• Methods for dealing effectively with burdensome administrative requests on faculty time
• Strategies for confronting the language of crisis in higher education
• Histories of effective change (longstanding LGBTQ centers and Women’s Centers, student organizations, faculty development initiatives, academic libraries and librarians, mentoring strategies, leadership development, labor organizing)
• Curriculum development or classroom, department, university, or discipline-wide initiatives geared towards inclusion
• Equity, transparency, and consistency in performance reviews, tenure and promotion decisions, and other evaluative processes

We are particularly interested in proposals that address the following:

• Rhetorical strategies and values for effecting change
• The roles of various disciplines in making change
• Interdisciplinary collaboration
• Cross-campus collaboration
• Cross-rank collaboration (graduate and faculty, contingent and tenured, faculty and administrative, student and administrative)
• Confronting white supremacy and engaging in anti-racist decision-making
• Partnerships between higher education and local communities/community organizations
• Disciplinary organizations addressing challenges
• Launching initiatives and securing resources for diverse groups (inclusive and intersectional initiatives that support multicultural, immigrant, LGBTQ, women, veterans, and other students, faculty, and staff)

Methodologies may include narration and description, situated case studies, data-supported analysis, reflection, multivocal submissions, or others. In particular, we want to ensure that chapter contributions provide clear and specific evidence of the a) participating stakeholders or constituents, b) process by which change was effected, c) documentation of the effectiveness of the change through evidence appropriate to the topic. We are especially interested in success stories of higher education work in which change was effected through collaboration. We seek chapter proposals that reflect both consensus-driven and dissensus-driven change, and welcome proposals that acknowledge how change can happen when the people who have the incentive to change (but perhaps little power) and the decision-makers with the power work together. Successful chapters will describe the writers' goals, how change was leveraged, and how the goals were achieved. Considerations might be:

• What structures were available to you and what had to be created in order to effect change?
• In what ways is your specific context important to the framing of your change--institutional type, state context, academic discipline or department?
• What methods are you using to assess the effectiveness of changes you sought and/or achieved?

Ultimately, what we hope this collection will offer is multifaceted:

• Optimism: that change is possible and that faculty have power and the will to advocate for (or resist threats to) the mission and values that make higher education in the US distinct--an engine for social mobility, a critical force for democratic participation and civic engagement; a tool for social good, in equipping students and graduates with the skills they need to improve the quality of their own lives and opportunities and to bring those skills to the communities they live in
• Success stories (or cautionary tales): too often, the processes for effecting change--whether that's resisting an administratively-imposed mandate, advocating for funding or resources, or creating and maintaining structures that promote equity, fairness, and transparency--is opaque. Conversations happen in hallways or in private social media groups, but larger information sharing about how to get things done is rare.
• Specific strategies: we believe that documenting institutional labor in a broader context will have the benefit of providing readers with specific, context-situated, and resourceful approaches for navigating institutional change. By circulating the ways that faculty, students, and staff have facilitated ground-level change, these strategies become available for use.

Proposal Guidelines:

Please submit a chapter proposal of 500 words to Holly Hassel (holly.hassel@uwc.edu) and Kirsti Cole (kirsti.cole@mnsu.edu) by January 15, 2018. Chapter proposals should describe the author's primary focus or claim, include a brief discussion of methodology and data sources, and situate the chapter within existing literature on the topic. Chapters will be formatted in MLA style, 8th edition. Please include author(s') names, institutional affiliation (if relevant), and contact information (email). Acceptances will be confirmed by March 1, 2018. Full manuscripts due September 1, 2018

References