Ten Ways to Promote Culture Change on a University Campus

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Based on my 37 years of experience working at public universities, my seven years of experience as an associate dean, my seven years of experience as an associate provost, and my current experience as a dean, here are my suggestions for those who want to create culture change on their college and university campuses.

1. Do your research. I don’t just mean you should research the change you want to institute. I mean that you need to research your campus so that your proposed action targets a specific concern that a critical mass of people share. You need to be sure that you have data that demonstrate the need for your proposed initiative (which needs to include specific data drawn from your campus) and data from other institutions that have proposed similar programs in order to show that your program has a good chance of achieving the outcomes you intend.
2. Become a Broken Record. Talk up the change you advocate every chance you get. Don’t miss an opportunity to say things like, “If we had Program X in place now, we’d be able to gather the data you want.” or “Program X would feed into the new strategic plan in these ways…” Don’t exaggerate, but be on the lookout in every conversation — with both obvious influencers on campus and people who don’t seem to have any obvious connection to the decision-making. These folks may well be talking with each other and might be able to drop a comment about your program into a conversation to help it along.
3. Talk about your proposal with every group on campus you can. I suppose this is especially true if you are interested in making a change that will support students’ timely degree completion. Most large-scale changes require the input and support of many groups on campus and they can be undermined easily if a key group doesn’t see the point of a proposal. For instance, let’s say that the change you want to impose is a requirement that all faculty who teach general education courses must submit early term grades in the Student Information System (SIS) so that advisors and anyone else who has been given SIS access may follow up with students who are in academic difficulty early enough in the semester to help them improve their academic performance. It is obvious that faculty need to support the program, and you will have a lot of work to do to demonstrate to some of them the value of the proposal. You also, however, need to make sure that the Information Technology division understands the importance of providing students with this information in the SIS since they are the individuals who will need to ensure that the SIS can receive the grades efficiently, and they may need to develop a system to push grades from the institution’s learning management system (LMS) to the SIS.
4. Don’t worry about your allies’ motives. OK, I am not entirely sure that I mean this, but my point is that you will need to understand that your reasons for recommending a new initiative and other administrators’ reasons for supporting it may be radically different. One area where this is frequently true is in the push for small class sizes. Let’s say you are responsible for staffing the first-year writing courses on your campus and that those classes have historically been capped at 24. You, understanding that the professional recommendation for maximum class size for such classes is 16, petition your Dean for the funding necessary to hire faculty to reduce the class size so that faculty may provide more focused attention on the students’ writing improving their skills. Your Dean and Provost may support your request not because of the potential for learning gains (though, of course, they are hopeful such gains will occur), but because reducing the class size to below 20 may yield a significant increase in the university’s U.S. News and World Report rankings. The increase in rankings is likely to spur additional student enrollment in your institution and support the long-term financial health of your school. Should you be troubled that the reason for the Provost’s support is not focused on student learning or faculty workload? Not really, because you are achieving the goal of improving the learning environment.
5. Be opportunistic. I mean that in the nicest way possible. The time has got to be right for the change you are advocating to be accepted on your campus, but you also need to have a number of different proposals ready to go so that you are able to seize the opportunity when it presents itself. Let’s say that your overall goals are to increase retention and graduation rates and close achievement gaps among the undergraduate students at a large public university. There are many initiatives that might be implemented to support that goal: your job is to listen to the conversations occurring on campus for the indicators of what options faculty might be willing to implement, or what policy changes the university committees might be ready to support. It really isn’t that different from the process a faculty researcher undertakes when seeking grant funding: they have a suite of research questions ready to go so that they are primed to address the specific frameworks of various proposal calls.
6. Share what you know and stop worrying about your ego and about making your institution look good. At least some of the time. You need to find colleagues across the profession who share your interests and objectives and you need to be able to speak freely with these colleagues about successes and failures. You are undoubtedly not the only person who is working to improve retention, or expand the use of high-impact practices, or develop more useful methods of program assessment, or whatever your focus is. Others have tried to change their culture in the same area and have some strategies to share. We don’t want to repeat strategies that don’t work, and we have a moral obligation to promote strategies that do strengthen educational opportunities for our students. We need to be able to exchange stories of failures in an environment that is protected by our professional regard for each other’s institutions, but we need to be sure to give credit for the successful ideas that we gain from each other. (That can, admittedly, be difficult when the good ideas come from your athletic rival from across the state.)
7. Don’t limit your approach to moving forward based on what has been acceptable in the past. Too often we whittle away at our own good ideas because of our preconceptions that “the administration” won’t support a program that requires the amount of resources needed. Because we want our initiative to be approved, we cut corners and shave off aspects of the initiative that would make it truly transformative. The result is a weaker program that campus will have less enthusiasm for and that is less likely to succeed. Leave all of the bells and whistles on your proposal so that your campus can see what the full impact of the complete program could be. Yes, you probably will need to make some compromises and forego some parts of your plan, but you will have inspired the imaginations of the campus and urged them to think in more expansive ways. And they might even fund the full proposal.
8. Use external consultants judiciously to make your case. We tend to trust external consultants (at least up to a point). If there is a logical way to make use of an external expert to make your case for you, use it. Program reviews provide a clear case where this can be true. While faculty tend to dread program review for reasons beyond the hours of work required to compile the self-study document, the results of the process are generally positive since the reports frequently include expert analysis that can be used to support programmatic and other changes that the unit desired. External consultants can shake loose resources from reluctant Deans and Provosts, they can provide external validation that the new path a campus leader wants to chart is not foolish, and they can provide language that can be shared across campus to remind our colleagues of the value of our work.
9. Don’t create a system that depends on you — or any single person — for its continuation. If an initiative only succeeds because of the charismatic, tireless, or obsessive person who leads it, it is doomed to failure. The expertise necessary to run any initiative needs to be spread among several individuals who are cross-trained in the various aspects of the program. Any one of us could be out of our current position tomorrow, and the likelihood that our work will continue after we have moved on depends upon our ability to create a group of individuals who can advocate for the program and implement it alongside us. Of course, a new administration can always choose to dismantle the programs created by its predecessors, but that is much harder if there is a group that is able to demonstrate clearly the value a program or initiative provides to the campus.The more a program is identified with a single individual, the less long-lasting the initiative will be. Your goal is for the campus to forget how the program came about and for there to be a pervasive sense that the program has always been part of campus life. (And that can take less time than you may imagine.) One useful strategy for developing this broad base of support is to create an appropriate group — call it whatever fits: a task force, fact-finding committee, advisory board, etc — and be sure that it is as broadly representative as possible. Include students.
10. Don’t take it personally and know when to move on. Creating change requires that a whole constellation of factors align perfectly on campus. You alone can’t make it happen. And sometimes the campus just isn’t ready for a particular change, regardless of how clearly you can see how much the initiative you desire would enrich the campus, or strengthen students’ education, or deepen the quality of the faculty’s research. And to “to move on” is not synonymous with “to give up.” There is wisdom in recognizing when the program or policy you are proposing is not going to take hold and moving on to your next strategy for achieving the same long-term goal.