Academic agility means looking beyond financial pressures to respond more effectively to learners, communities and workforce needs. By building trust, strengthening collaboration and connecting faculty and staff with external partners, institutions can create more responsive academic models that support student success and long-term sustainability. In this interview, Emily Donnelli Sallee discusses how trust, student-centered decision making and stronger workforce partnerships can help institutions become more agile while protecting academic rigor and shared governance.
The EvoLLLution (Evo): When you think about the pressures facing higher ed today, why has academic agility become such an important conversation for institutional leaders?
Emily Donnelli Sallee (EDS): The fact that academic agility increasingly features in conversations about the future of higher education represents an important and positive shift in focus.
It can be tempting for leaders to frame institutional conversations in terms of the balance sheet—and for good reasons. Financial pressures at an institution negatively impact everyone’s ability to carry out the mission, a comprehensive understanding of institutional finances can equip staff and faculty to contribute to sustainability efforts, and a collective addressing of a budget deficit invokes a sense of urgency that can be helpful to compelling difficult conversations about institutional priorities. On the other hand, an overemphasis on finances can oversimplify the problems facing our institutions and fix attention on technical solutions rather than systemic analysis and lasting interventions. Further, this framing can ironically lead to novel, one-time incentives and artificial structures that can disincentivize innovative by making it a competitive activity rather than a logically integrated and comprehensively supported one.
The concept of academic agility brings the conversations back to our core institutional missions: teaching and learning. It recognizes that the real challenge is adapting to what our learners, their families and the public are telling us through their choices, not finding new austerity measures or forcing forms of innovation imported from other contexts. In short, institutions need to evolve how we design and deliver education, which relies on building solutions with staff, faculty and students. Academic agility results from addressing deeper organizational challenges, not managing financial ones.
Evo: What tends to get in the way when institutions must respond quickly to changing expectations from learners, employers and the workforce?
EDS: I am not alone in admiring the work of Stephen Covey, and I think one of his most salient aphorisms is that change moves at the speed of trust. Lack of trust is what gets in the way of an institution’s ability to be responsive. Likewise, the presence of trust accelerates our ability to respond to opportunities quickly and in ways that strengthen institutional confidence. Resistance to imperatives about the academic portfolio, for instance, can be more about trust in institutional leadership—to follow through with support for program development, continuing education or professional development to support faculty reassignment due to program closure—than inherent unwillingness.
There can be similar breakdowns between an institution and the local or regional business community. It can be difficult to develop relationships—and thus trust—when interactions between a college or university and its surrounding business leaders are limited. Structures that support regular contact between higher education and business leaders at all levels are vital to promoting understanding, identifying shared goals and sharing assets of all types.
Institutions have a responsibility to their communities’ workforce needs. To meet that responsibility, we need the support of business and fellow nonprofit partners. This support is tactical. It’s actionable information about the skills and competencies they need to see in our graduates and opportunities for our faculty and staff to engage with employers to build the knowledge they need to ensure curricular relevancy and guide students in forming their vocational goals. Equally important is support for the cause. We need help telling the story of higher education’s adaptability through examples of responsive partnerships and through vocal, public support of the enduring value of education to transform lives through economic mobility, civic engagement and personal growth.
Evo: How can institutions become more responsive while protecting academic rigor, shared governance and the thoughtful decision making that higher ed really needs?
EDS: First, we need to attend to the ways that we are framing the problem. Too often, we define our challenges pragmatically, exclusively in terms of financial survival, or existentially, questioning higher education’s very relevance. While important frames, these are arguably not the best starting point for conversations among administrators, faculty and staff. Instead, our framing must be relentlessly student focused. What courses, programs and cocurricular learning experiences do our students need to achieve their postgraduation goals—and how do we know? What do we know about the strengths and needs within our student populations and how do we support all student learning and persistence? What are our shared goals for our students’ timely degree completion, and what structures or practices are currently impeding these goals? What kinds of support, including new knowledge, do our faculty and staff need to do their best work with students?
Framing the problem well supports open and constructive deliberation, which in turn supports effective shared governance processes and decision making that feels organic rather than imposed. Moreover, integrating faculty and staff expertise in visible forms along the way builds trust, results in stronger and more sustainable outcomes, and supports a culture of shared governance that goes beyond achieving transparency to generating evidence of interdependence.
Second, we need to invest in getting faculty and staff outside the walls of our institutions. It is important for faculty to maintain current knowledge of, and contribute to, their academic disciplines and fields—both in terms of content and effective teaching practices. These opportunities should be available to full-time and contingent faculty. However, often missing from institutional professional development support and the reward systems for faculty and staff are opportunities to engage directly with the business and nonprofit organizations that our students will enter upon graduating. When faculty and staff see what they expect of students, when they can articulate workforce needs based on first-hand knowledge, they can act swiftly and from more fully informed perspectives. Put differently, directives to create new degree programs or credentials in support of workforce needs, without related professional development support or employer connections, leaves faculty and staff without the necessary equipping to do so.
Evo: What does it take to create the culture, processes and collaboration needed to move from isolated improvements to institution-wide agility?
EDS: Higher education leaders can support institution-wide agility by intervening in the norms and patterns of behavior that constitute institutional culture. For example, if sabbaticals or other forms of leave have been restricted to research activities, leaders can work with faculty and staff to expand those to include shadowing or short-term residencies with local workforce partners. If existing advisory councils are primarily geared towards philanthropy, leaders can create opportunities for dialogue around curricula and career development services for students. Leaders can also make investments that allow institutions to spend more time listening to students, families and alumni. When faculty and staff better understand what students are experiencing and what they need, for instance, they have the knowledge and motivation to respond—and what results will be more effective and lasting.
Evo: If institutions get academic agility right, what’s possible for learners, its people and the ability to compete in the years ahead?
EDS: Academic agility shifts the conversation to an institution’s core mission of teaching and learning and frames financial sustainability as the outcome, rather than the objective, of a well-functioning higher education organization. When institutions get academic agility right, it becomes second nature. Academic agility allows institutions to continue evolving our missions and educational models to meet the needs of learners, the workforce and the communities of which we are a part.