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Reshaping Higher Ed: Access, Agility and Institutional Legacy
The ability to innovate meaningfully in higher education depends on a thoughtful balance between honoring institutional history and embracing progress. By connecting legacy to forward-thinking strategies, institutions can evolve to meet diverse learners’ changing needs. In this interview, Emily Donnelli Sallee discusses the interdependence of legacy and innovation, leadership’s role and how to create structures for agility and collaboration.
The EvoLLLution (Evo): How do you view the relationship between an institution’s legacy and the ability to innovate?
Emily Donnelli Sallee (EDS): The relationship is necessarily interdependent. An institution’s ability to collectively define what meaningful innovation looks like relies on a comprehensive and shared understanding of an institution’s legacy—its most enduring successes and even the seasons during which it didn’t serve its communities well. That history is part of the institution’s story and must be understood, wrestled with and woven into the innovation imperative.
In short, innovation pursued outside an institutional context or legacy will never take root. Legacy should be part of the dynamic response of serving students. My institution, Park University, was established in 1875 and has a legacy of accessibility. Our founders believed that a private, liberal arts education should be available to all students who desire the exploration and individualization such an education can provide, regardless of social privilege.
That belief took shape in a work-study model that allowed students without financial means to work full-time at the institution in lieu of paying tuition. In the 1970s, accessibility meant creating off-campus locations on military installations to bring our programs to service members and their families who, at the time, faced limited higher education choices and were often forced to discontinue their studies due to relocation or deployment.
In the 1990s, the legacy of accessibility expanded into fully online classes, which aided service members and made liberal arts programs available to civilian adult learners. Our educational models at Park continue to evolve because they are in productive dialogue with our legacy of identifying and reducing barriers to access for our students.
Evo: What do you think are some of the important values or philosophies that institutions should uphold as they’re navigating that balance of innovation and tradition?
EDS: It is vital to approach conversations about innovation from an asset-based, strengths perspective. Often in higher education, the topic of innovation is initiated in the context of existential threats, institutional deficits or irreconcilable ideologies. That framing is not conducive to engaging widespread dialogue among faculty and staff.
A different approach, as you suggested in your first question, would foreground institutional legacy, prioritize careful reflection on what serves student learning and would look toward—not away from—higher education for inspiration. For example, rather than point to theories and models outside higher education, we can reinforce the fact that innovation is native to what we do.
Effective teachers are continually adapting to their environments, recalibrating their techniques and piloting and assessing new approaches in response to what they learn from students—constantly changing and being changed by the learning process. Innovation in higher education is largely a matter of capturing that magic at an institutional level. We can also look to our higher education leadership organizations, publications and institutional accreditors for research and inspiration. They all have a vested interest in supporting our work.
Another important value to hold steadfast and express without hesitation is higher education’s ongoing relevance and vital nature. Equipping people to be informed, thoughtful, engaged and resilient employees and citizens—these are evergreen pursuits, human work, even if the particulars of how we go about it are in flux.
Evo: What role do leadership and governance structure play in trying to foster that culture?
EDS: First, leaders play a role in adopting a productive tone and positively framing conversations around innovation, intentionally avoiding language that evokes scarcity or deficit. Second, leaders can set the expectation that innovation must be in service of learning. Learning as the chief arbiter for assessing innovation opportunities serves as an important check and balance. Third, leaders can be strong advocates for change management as a discipline and set of skills that are worthwhile to practice across the institution, especially in working effectively across institutional stakeholders.
The decision-making processes and communication protocols that leaders utilize should align with academic shared governance principles and practices. Shared governance ultimately hastens change if undertaken correctly.
Perhaps most importantly, leaders can help create enabling structures. Rather than rushing to questions like “What will this look like?” or “What ROI will this achieve?” leaders can focus on creating the conditions and incentives that motivate innovation.
Evo: How can institutions cultivate the agility to meet the needs of today’s diverse learners without alienating those stakeholders who are so invested in the status quo?
EDS: Liberating organizational structures—ones that actively resist the galvanization so prevalent in higher education—are key to cultivating agility. We know that the status quo flourishes in environments where collaboration is absent, artificial or strained.
Leaders can foster the psychological safety needed to interrogate whether existing structures support or resist the status quo. Liberating structures will mean different things for different institutions. For some, it means conjoining faculty and staff academic advisors within the same organizational structure, so their work is visible to each other and to students.
For other institutions, structures preventing collaboration may exist among programs, schools, colleges or academic ranks. Yet other institutions may need to liberate structures that maintain unproductive cultural or operational divides between modes of instruction such as on-ground and online learning.
Agility is also cultivated by keeping the spark of learning alive among faculty and staff. Just as we do with students, we need to incent and reward continuous learning at our institutions. In other words, if we are not engaged in learning, it will be difficult for us to encourage a growth mindset among our peers, let alone our students. Continuous learning ensures that the engine for innovation is always running and means that something like strategic planning or financial challenges doesn’t have to serve as a cold start.
Like traditional pedagogical practices, traditional approaches to training and development can convey a lack of confidence in faculty and staff skills, abilities and knowledge. In contrast, continuous learning leverages the expertise within our communities by creating venues for faculty and staff to share their work across disciplinary lines, organizational units and ranks—and to connect over shared priorities for the student learning experience.
At Park, our teaching and learning center, the Faculty Center for Innovation, does this work particularly well. The center’s leaders, which include full-time and adjunct faculty, and the faculty and staff steering committee that vets the center’s programs are uniquely positioned to bring folks, including students, together from across the institution. The center facilitates cross-disciplinary conversations about teaching and learning, and it sponsors internal grants and fellowships aimed at providing time and tactical support to pursue new practices.
Evo: How can institutions thoughtfully introduce more of these modern approaches, whether it’s technology or interdisciplinary programs, in ways that enhance a forward-thinking mission?
EDS: Working within and through governance bodies and faculty and staff learning communities shows respect for shared governance and acknowledges the fact that the employees who are most visibly engaged in their own professional growth are probably the ones who will help compel growth within the organization. Making sure that new ideas and approaches have a clear value proposition in terms of compelling student learning or removing barriers to student learning sets the conditions for lasting change.