Adrianna Kezar

• PhD University of Michigan
• Managing Director at University of Southern California

This study broadens our understanding of conditions that shape faculty composition in higher education. We surveyed academic deans to evaluate their views on the professoriate, values, pressures, and practices pertaining to the use of non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF). We utilized OLS regression to test a model for decision-making related to faculty...

Over a period of several decades, non-tenure-track faculty members (NTTF) have become a majority of instructional faculty among nonprofit higher education institutions. A growing volume of research points to a relationship between the poor working conditions or lack of support these faculty members often experience and adverse effects on student le...

The Delphi technique is a research method that involves experts and stakeholders in structured deliberation about topics through multiple, iterative rounds of data collection such as surveys or in-person meetings. Although it has been utilized extensively in other fields for researching problems, when there is disagreement among key stakeholders or...

This study examines the role of implicit theories of change in inhibiting STEM reform and identifies a range of approaches to help change agents alter their implicit beliefs in order to develop more explicit theories of change. Through observations and interviews, we focus on the experience of reform teams on 11 campuses that were involved in a sta...

Adrianna Kezar from the University of Southern California will reflect on research around implementing change in higher education, and will comment specifically on how improvements in supporting better STEM pathways for all students can be made available for more students in more institutions for higher learning.

The growth in online and distance education has focused increased attention on unbundling faculty roles in delivering instruction, yet unbundling related to faculty work has been occurring in higher education for over three centuries. In this paper, we examine unbundling of the faculty role in higher education to provide scholars, university leader...

In this article, we describe ways that the Delphi technique can be extended from its more traditional approaches and processes in order to make it a tool for scholars using participatory methods. This innovative proposed approach is called the change-oriented Delphi. We describe this innovative approach using an example from our own work to create...

Background/context Over the past 40 years, the composition of the professoriate has changed substantially across all institutional types. Once predominantly tenure track, now nontenure-track faculty (NTTF) constitute more than 70% of the faculty. While these major changes have occurred, we know little about key stakeholders’ views (accreditors, pol...

This chapter explores the ways faculty and staff work with students to support their activism as well as the way students tap faculty and staff to support their movements.

This study examines the values held by 264 academic deans and the decisions they make pertaining to supporting non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF). Multiple analyses are utilized to examine the prevalence of supportive policies for both full- and part-time NTTF, as well as the extent to which deans’ values are associated with the existence of these pol...

This article reviews literature on the potential for understanding higher education change processes through social network analysis (SNA). In this article, the main tenets of SNA are reviewed and, in conjunction with organizational theory, are applied to higher education change to develop a set of hypotheses that can be tested in future research.

Many campuses in the United States have experienced a decline in shared governance and a centralization of decision-making as a result of neoliberalism being entrenched into campus management. As a result, campuses are looking less like a shared environment for decision-making and instead taking a more oppositional character through faculty and sta...

One of the main challenges facing community colleges in creating and sustaining service-learning curricula and programs is their growing reliance on part-time non-tenure-track faculty. Although research suggests there is strong interest among non-tenure-track faculty in civic engagement and utilizing service-learning in their courses, these faculty...

Background The number of non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF), including both full-time (FT) and part-time (PT) positions, has risen to two-thirds of faculty positions across the academy. To date, most of the studies of NTTF have relied on secondary data or large-scale surveys. Few qualitative studies exist that examine the experience, working condition...

This study examines a major shift in the professoriate from tenure track to a non-tenure track faculty (NTTF), with two-thirds of the faculty now being off the tenure track. While some studies suggest negative outcomes as a result of students taking courses with NTTF, none of the studies examine the working conditions of the NTTFs. This qualitative...

Government agencies, foundations, business and industry, and other important higher education stakeholders continue to invest in important and deep changes they think are necessary for the vitality and health of higher education particularly interdisciplinary teaching and research. But we know little about how transformational changes happen, parti...

This article reports on a case study of 25 departments comparing those that have put policies and practices in place to support non-tenure-track faculty to those that have not to determine whether this impacts faculty willingness, capacity, and opportunity to perform. Four departmental cultures emerged related to differential outcomes. This articl...

This essay argues that there is a need for higher education researchers to become aware of methodological nationalism (MN) and take steps to reframe their scholarship in new ways. It illuminates two characteristics of MN prevalent in higher education research and suggests that although a few researchers have attempted to move beyond MN in the highe...

This study is a qualitative inquiry into the institutionalization of equitable policies for non-tenure-track faculty. Through the theoretical framework of institutionalization, we examine factors and strategies forwarding various policies and practices and the challenges that arise. The results highlight themes throughout the stages of mobilization...

The study advances higher education leadership and change scholarship by examining a mostly unexplored area—the convergence between grassroots leadership with top-down leadership. The study is framed by two theories: tempered radicals framework and distributed leadership. Three common example of convergence are described as well as strategies for...

This chapter describes the characteristics of non-tenure-track faculty, which now make up the majority of faculty on campuses; highlights the importance of reporting complete data; and calls upon institutional researchers to contribute to addressing this growing segment of the faculty.

This article explores the organizational impediments and facilitators that influence the implementation of student learning outcomes assessment (SLOA). This review points to the importance of culture, leadership, and organizational policies to the implementation of SLOA. However, we need to approach research differently, both conceptually and metho...

Policymakers and leaders have been calling for changes in the Academy for nontenure-track faculty. This study focuses on the role of governance in creating that policy change, and the practices facilitating their role in changing the institution through governance. Findings include: governance facilitating day-to-day changes, establishing nontenure...

This study examined the nature, characteristics, and challenges of grassroots leadership teams and the role of these factors in promoting cognitive complexity in order to provide insight into collective forms of bottom-up change. The study is framed by the literature on leadership teams. Using interviews from a case study conducted at five higher e...

This article examines the underlying assumptions brought to bear on studies of non–tenure track faculty. The authors examine the deficit views that characterize non–tenure track as other than professional. Furthermore, they explore and challenge theories brought to bear to currently understand this population and suggest other theories that may bet...

This article examines a common problem in higher education – how to create more widespread use of improved practices, often commonly referred to as innovations. I argue that policy models of scale-up are often advocated in higher education but that they have a dubious history in community development and K-12 education and that higher education lea...

This book explores a mostly untapped resource on college campuses—the leadership potential of staff and faculty at all levels—and contributes to the growing tradition of giving voice to grassroots leaders, offering a unique contribution by honing in on leadership in educational settings. In an increasingly corporatized environment, grassroots leade...

This chapter, which examines leadership in higher education, reflecting on existing leadership theory as well as on recent literature about faculty and staff, highlights the ways the current study enhances current theoretical understanding about leadership. It also summarizes themes about advice for faculty and staff grassroots leaders that have im...

This chapter provides an overview of the literature on the tempered radicals framework. Tempered radicals are individuals who desire to create positive change and who challenge the status quo within organizations but lack formal authority. The chapter also reviews concepts from grassroots leadership literature that help familiarize researchers with...

This chapter looks at how the new climate of academic capitalism shapes grassroots leadership, and how faculty and staff have adapted their behavior to be successful within this new reward structure and organizational values and norms. It examines how shifts in institutional culture can change the nature of leadership through academic capitalism.

This chapter illustrates the relevance of the tempered radicals framework and continuum of tactics. The overall concept from the tempered radicals framework is reflected in the narratives of faculty and staff grassroots leaders. The chapter describes strategies and tactics, and the ways they might be used in a tempered way to varying degrees.

This chapter describe ways that administrators can support bottom-up leadership and can help foster more of this important work, focusing in particular on support by those in positions of authority such as presidents, provosts, deans, and department chairs. It examines the roles that others, outside of the grassroots effort and, in particular, indi...

This chapter, which describes the methodology for the study of grassroots leaders, presents major assumptions, and introduces the five case study campuses, examines the bottom-up leadership efforts of faculty and staff working within typical institutions of higher education.

This chapter examines the ways in which grassroots leaders interpreted and understood power and the impact on the way they operated as grassroots leaders, particularly their resultant view of power dynamics, which had an impact on the leadership style they assumed.

This article focuses on the nature of power dynamics that faculty and staff grassroots leaders encounter as they attempt to create change. I identified five distinctive types of power dynamics – oppression, silencing, controlling, inertia, and micro‐aggressions from the most overt to more subtle and covert forms. Staff experience multiple forms of...

Given the importance of postsecondary institutions partnering with community agencies and groups to meet a variety of essential goals such as access and success of students, this study investigated one such partnership with the aim of attempting to understand the experience of community-led partnerships and the role of culture in partnerships betwe...

This article describes a study of the tactics used by faculty and staff grassroots leaders at colleges and universities to create important changes that increase the capacity for leadership. The study identifies how academic and administrative staff, as employees within an academic culture, have access to grassroots leadership tactics that honor th...

While the work of academics—teaching, research, and service—is the core of an institution, they need someone who can attend to the following: 1. Manage their finances and budgets and provide key services, such as payroll, and health and retirement benefits 2. Serve as a go-between to the scholars from different disciplines and coordinate individual...

In this study, we build on two recent works (Gaston-Gayles, Wolf-Wendel; Tuttle, Twombley, and Ward, 2004; Slocum & Rhoads, 2008) that examine faculty and staff work with student activists, but expand the scope to include new questions such as why and how they partner with students, the impact of institutional context, and what role it might play i...

This study examines how to fill the growing need for community college leaders by creating “grow-your-own” (GYO) leadership programs through a national interview study and a case study involving action research. The findings demonstrate design flaws that are typical in the development of GYO programs. Strategies for overcoming these flaws are recom...

This article reports on a three year case study and interview project of a federal initiative to help low income students access college called individual development accounts (IDA). The study focused on partnership development between community agencies that offer IDAs and postsecondary institutions, examining challenges and facilitators. A set of...

This article reviews the promise of using positionality theory for expanding our knowledge of leadership. Based on a critique of leadership studies that have traditionally maintained a simplistic view of social identities (particularly race and gender), the authors suggest that our understanding of leadership remains partial. Using empirical resear...

Innovative Strategy Making in Higher Education is an excellent primer for understanding how notions about strategy have changed in the last 30 years. Perhaps the big question is: Does higher education need strategy and, if so, what kind? But before we get into that question, more about the book. Martinez and Wolverton provide an excellent overview...

Adrianna Kezar and Hannah Yang argue that financial literacy is both an important life skill and a critical intellectual competency.

Campuses face a worldwide recession, decreasing state funding, increasing competitive pressures, and demands to be more responsive to a host of changes including diversity and technology. Clearly this is a time when leadership is sorely needed. These problems are so complex it is important that we focus on training a new generation of leaders—not j...

Various factors are making faculty leadership challenging including the rise in part-time and non-tenure-track faculty, the increasing pressure to publish and teach more courses and adopt new technologies and pedagogies, increasing standards for tenure and promotion, ascension of academic capitalism, and heavy service roles for women and people of...

Change is a perennial struggle for campuses. Trustees, presidents, policymakers, faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community groups all seek to alter some aspect of colleges and universities. Common wisdom is that higher education faculty, staff, and administrators do not want to change and are slow to innovate. This article examines the challe...

On college campuses today, women from a variety of generations— baby boomers, generation Xers, and nexters—come together to work, learn, and lead. Women of different generations were born and raised under diff erent social, economic, and political conditions; approach feminism in a different ways; and have experienced more or less overt forms of di...

While widespread financial illiteracy and reduced opportunities for low-income students to participate in higher education may seem unrelated, both challenges can be addressed through Individual Development Accounts (IDAs), an existing but widely underutilized tool. IDAs have the potential both to increase access and retention of low-income student...

In this paper, I have been asked to address planned change in higher education related to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) reform. I was charged to review what concepts or theories have been identified in the higher education research that can help advance thinking on STEM reform. In order to meet this objective, I draw large...

This study draws on the experiences and insights of current college and university presidents to understand whether transactional, transformational or a combination of these leadership strategies advances an institution-wide diversity agenda. The qualitative elite interview study demonstrates that both styles of leadership appear important and that...

Given the importance of moving diversity agendas forward nationally and the lack of understanding about how to address the politics that almost always emerge when institutionalizing a diversity initiative, I endeavored to examine the method by which presidents handled the politics related to moving a diversity agenda forward. I address two research...

Research demonstrates that leadership, particularly among presidents, is important for moving a diversity agenda forward and make appreciable progress on it. The research questions pursued here are: What is the role of the college president in advancing a diversity agenda? What strategies do presidents identify as important to facilitating a divers...

Campuses worldwide struggle to create greater equity for different groups of students. This qualitative study examined the Equity Scorecard Project aimed at helping institutions create more equitable outcomes for all students. This article focuses on organizational contextual features that enable and inhibit implementation of these types of initiat...

In recent years, a variety of books have been published on the commodification and commercialization of higher education and the shift in the mission of higher education institutions from serving the public good. These texts synthesize and investigate a critical challenge that has been emerging over the last few decades, one that most commentators...

In an era of increased accountability in higher education, stronger and more compelling evidence of what and how students learn is needed. Ways in which qualitative approaches can be used to assess student learning are described in this chapter.

Methodological diversity has enriched higher education research. One area about which little is known is the dynamics of multi-investigator multi-institutional projects. This paper examines what happens inside a large-scale, team-based research project with an emphasis on decision points related to methodology and reporting results. Systematically...

In Pursuit of Knowledge unfortunately misses the mark in informing the debate about ways that higher education can be more effective and reach excellence. While it is well written, its ideas are unoriginal, the recommendations oversimplified and disconnected from the analysis, and the scope narrow—crippling to its goal. Like many before it, this bo...

This study examines college presidents who have successfully institutionalized diversity measures on their campuses, focusing on their strategies. The study focus was: Do campuses at different stages of institutionalization in their diversity agendas use different strategies? If so, why? And how do different strategies help move the campus toward i...

This study focused on examining the roles that leaders, in particular college presidents, may play in creating organizational learning that helps move diversity agendas forward. This study highlights under-examined information sources (students own stories and experiences) for creating organizational learning that can advance a diversity agenda. Th...

Ethos, the fundamental character of a culture that underlies its beliefs and customs, can create strong emotional attachments if it is thoughtfully conceived and carefully nurtured. Adrianna Kezar describes how several institutions tend this fundamental character, with positive results for student engagement.

School and university partnerships are a key strategy for reforming education and increasing college going. Successful programs such as GEAR UP demonstrate the need to expand these relationships. Yet, practitioners find it is difficult to work between these two very different contexts. This paper explores successful practices for navigating between...

“Theory” is one of the most commonly used terms in academic research. Faculty extol the value of theory, critics rail against it as a constraint, and practitioners often believe it is useless. Students attempt to learn theories as undergraduates, and graduate students create and apply them. Authors of research texts, journal articles, and books all...

This study examines performance among public higher education boards, describing the results from a national study. The research questions that framed the study were: What are the elements of high performance/effectiveness in public higher education governing boards? How does performance among public higher education boards compare to the research...

Much has been written about the barriers to collaborative work, but little research has been conducted on how to foster collaboration within higher education. This article presents the results of a case study of four campuses that have organized to enable collaboration. The study builds on earlier literature from the corporate sector using a model...

This article reviews the results from an in-depth multi-site case study of 20 institutions examining approaches to student engagement exploring differences by mission. The research questions pursued were: Is mission related to distinctive approaches for creating an engaging environment for students? If so, in what ways? The results demonstrate a se...

This article reviews the results from an in-depth multisite case study of 20 institutions examining approaches to student engagement exploring differences by institutional type. The two research questions pursued were: Is size related to distinctive approaches for creating an engaging environment for students? If so, in what ways? The results demon...

Incl. bibl., index

As a result of both the external pressures and the known benefits of collaboration, many higher education institutions are trying to create learning communities, service and community-based learning, and interdisciplinary research and teaching. However, over 50% of collaborations fail. There has been virtually no research on how to enable higher ed...

Recently, policymakers have called for total restructuring and redesign of campus governance, claiming governance processes are incapable of making strategic decisions. The purpose of this study and article is to provide evidence about the consequences of engaging in radical alteration of an institution's governance system. Because no earlier studi...

This chapter provides an overview of the literature on organizational learning and the learning organization, sets out key concepts in each area, and reviews the way that organizational learning and the learning organization have been applied within higher education.

Instead of the traditional view of learning as acquiring cognitive knowledge or data, the author argues for a broader notion of knowledge that includes emotions, values, intuition, and creativity.

The Review of Higher Education 28. (2005) 436-437 It is important to occasionally reexamine the status of key issues in higher education, and this volume attempts to bring together knowledge from the past, challenges and research about the present, and visions for the future of gender on campuses. In a word, I think it accomplishes the task of remi...

Changing structures may be a less important factor in creating an effective approach to governance than leadership, relationships, and trust.

Previous governance scholarship focused almost exclusively on structural and political theories and provided limited explanation of improving governance. This article reviews theoretical perspectives that have been applied to the study of governance to identify conceptual gaps, synthesizes what we know about governance from existing scholarship to...

The purpose of this paper is to review and analyze significant empirical research related to the new industrial model, which is characterized by privatization, commercialization, and corporatization, to determine its pervasiveness and effect. In a section, the author define three terms that are key for understanding the concept in this paper: (a) p...

This article explores whether the scholarship in the field of higher education suffers because of limited exposure to and engagement with the philosophical debates and assumptions that shape and frame thinking in the social sciences. It offers a series of examples that have emerged through the teaching of qualitative research, reviewing scholarship...

The Journal of Higher Education 75.1 (2004) 1-6 Over the past three decades, researchers' approaches to studying higher education and the questions they explore have changed markedly. In the 1960s and 1970s, the field was dominated by quantitative approaches (Keller, 1998), particularly small-scale statistical studies that sought to document such p...

Almost every leadership study conducted falls into one of these two perspectives: essentialism (one best way) and non-essentialism (context and interpretation focused). This article traces how essentialism and anti-essentialism became so prevalent within Western philosophy/science and later became embedded in studies of leadership. Reconciliation o...

This study presents the results from a national survey examining a recent innovation in higher education partnerships between academic and student affairs. The focus was on what change process can best assist institutions in moving to this model, which helps increase student learning on campus.