Turning on the Thrive Channel to Accelerate Change in Higher Education
Susan Elrod, Indiana University-South Bend; Lorne Whitehead, University of British Columbia
Conversations about "institutional change" in higher education have become pervasive. This is probably because colleges and universities are under tremendous pressure - to graduate more students, to improve success of underrepresented minority students, to reduce costs, and to expand the benefits they provide to our society. Many state systems are engaged in developing performance-based funding metrics that are intended to promote achievement of specified goals. Others are engaged in major reorganizations that are merging or possibly eliminating campuses in service of larger goals that are important to the state, such as enhanced transfer, graduation or fiscal efficiency. This seems scary, but at the heart of all of this is a sound idea - since our society has a long history of improvement and undoubtedly there are still more improvements to make. And to do that, organizations must be adaptable; they must make changes for the better. Why then, is this so concerning for so many? A key challenge is that achieving change in any organization is hard. It is complicated. It involves many levels of the organization. It is motivated by a variety of purposes. It is challenged by competing agendas. It is frequently stalled by a variety of obstacles. Further, positive change requires a vision, strategy, and tactics. But most importantly, it requires effective change leadership. What does that actually entail?

How Does Your Professional Organization Lead Positive Change?
Pamela Brown, CUNY New York City College of Technology
We are creating resources for the ASCN Working Group 4: Demonstrating Impact and others, interested in higher education systemic change efforts, by soliciting responses to important questions. This month's question is related to professional organizations. We are interested to learn about activities different professional organizations in STEM disciplines are using to accelerate change. Professional organizations/societies may have the authority, relationships and access to data to implement positive changes in specific disciplines. One example of an organization actively engaged with this mission is the Research Advisory Group of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences. The report "The Role of Scientific Societies in STEM Faculty Workshops" recommended by Charles Henderson in his contribution is a great resource that provides insights into faculty professional development workshops across STEM disciplines. The December/January question: How does your professional organization try to lead positive change? What changes have your professional organization led or you would like to see them lead?

Beyond the Diversity Status Quo
Stephen Secules, Florida International University
The arc of history is long but it bends towards freedom. - Martin Luther King Jr. Most of us who work in equity and inclusion have an orientation towards wanting to make progress towards systemic change. There is a shared acknowledgement of past injustice, present struggle, and persistent hope. Consistent with the ASCN, those who work in equity and inclusion in higher education are often seeking long term, sustainable transformations of their institutions. And yet, higher education institutions also prize stability and can be remarkably slow to change. Equity and inclusion concerns get framed as issues for committees and task forces, which eventually become standing entities rather than forces empowered to make radical change. Diversity work feels at risk to budget cuts and to voicing unpopular truths. Overworked and underfunded, the point people for equity and inclusion in an institution can take up somewhat conservative goals: retaining individuals who are underrepresented in a discipline can turn into a standing effort to at least not lose the little bit of diversity left in the department. Although its proponents are often oriented towards transformation, it can seem like higher educational diversity work is far removed from the work of systemic change. In my dissertation I made calls for going "Beyond Diversity as Usual" in undergraduate engineering work, using new research approaches and new ways of conceptualizing institutional practice (Secules, 2017a). Here are a few directions from my work and others' that may help move towards systemic change in the institutional diversity landscape:

The Power (and necessity) of Students in Systemic Change
Marcos Montes; Dr. Rob Shorette
Almost any change in higher education is difficult. And slow. Systemic change, which produces seismic shifts in the operations and culture of an organization, is even more difficult to achieve. Or in the words of another ASCN blogger Jeanne Century, "the stakes are much higher and the challenge is greater." Particularly for public higher education institutions, there is no shortage of stakeholder groups with keen interests in the outcomes of systemic change efforts, including faculty, staff, administrators, lawmakers, community members, and the general public. Certainly, a process that authentically includes all of these stakeholder groups and reflects the varying perspectives each bring to the table is essential to successful change. However, no group has as much at stake when it comes to systemic change in higher education as students.

Change as a Scholarly Act
Judith Ramaley Portland State University Judith Ramaley, Portland State University
The Accelerating Systemic Change in STEM Undergraduate Education (ASCN) Network was set up to accelerate change at program and institution levels, and to improve STEM education nationally. Underlying all of these efforts is the question of how to think about change itself and how to launch, expand, and then sustain and adapt a large-scale change effort in the context of our college and university environments. Much of the literature on change has been developed through the study of change efforts in business settings (e.g., Kotter 1996, Heifetz and Linsky 2002). While approaches like these offer a number of useful insights into the nature of change itself and effective ways to think about and lead a change effort, they are based on the culture, approaches to leadership, and working relationships that characterize a business environment.

TIDES Program at University of Texas
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Strategic Toolkit: Strategies for Effecting Gender Equity and Institutional Change
Strategic Toolkit: Strategies for Effecting Gender Equity and Institutional Change The Toolkit includes 13 Strategic Intervention Briefs that each explain a specific intervention to foster change for greater ...

Happy National Mentoring Month!
Patricia Marsteller, Emory University
Since Odysseus left Mentor in charge of his family, estates, and his son, the art and science of mentoring has been critical to guiding career and educational development. Like Mentor, I aim to be a wise and trusted counselor, guide, guardian, and teacher or as the title of a widely read book indicates, an Adviser, Teacher, Role Model, Friend (National Academies of Sciences, 1997). I have learned that mentoring is an alliance between people and that both mentors and mentees benefit from agreements about how the relationship will evolve and how to include social support, career development, and growth. With faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates, mentoring often involves getting to know the whole person, their aims and aspirations, and their qualms about the future. Connecting students to the right resources or empowering them to bring up difficult questions with their faculty or research mentors requires that you be open, listen carefully, and know them as persons.

Leadership on the line, with a new preface: Staying alive through the dangers of change.
× Leadership on the line, with a new preface: Staying alive through the dangers of change. This book describes leadership skills needed to thrive in positions that require disrupting the status quo to ...

Theory and practice of multicultural organization development
× Theory and practice of multicultural organization development This article presents a framework to identify the level of inclusivity in an organization. Change makers can use the information to create ...