Building Institutional Capacity for Inclusive Excellence Builds Capacity for Faculty Leadership

In 2017 and 2018, HHMI awarded $57 million in $1 million, 5-year awards to 57 colleges and universities to build institutional capacity for Inclusive Excellence (IE1&2). This new initiative constituted a major shift in funding philosophy: from funding programs to fix students to funding institutions to fix themselves so that students of diverse backgrounds have equitable opportunities to succeed in science.

Key elements of the initiative focus on institutional accountability and sustainability such as distributed grant stewardship (a grant core leadership team in partnership with the program director); opportunities to facilitate community building among peer implementation clusters (PICs); and a tool for guided annual reflections based on the scholarship on organizational change, developed by the AAC&U's IE Commission (IEC) – the PIER (Progress towards Inclusive Excellence through Reflection) -- with prompts on the evolution of key institutional aspects related to building capacity such as:
- historic and contemporary context
- aspirations and values
- growth in intra-institutional collaborations and professional competencies

From reviews of the PIERs, HHMI staff observe changes in faculty practices among the core leadership teams that indicate development of leadership skills beyond the traditional faculty domains of the classroom and lab.

Some examples of this newfound agency among program directors and members of the core leadership teams include being strategic about
- cultivating alliances with existing or new key senior administrators
- recruiting people with complementary expertise into the core leadership teams or the larger grant effort
- integrating IE programs with existing infrastructure, including nonacademic units and initiatives.
- cultivating faculty learning communities

To test the hypothesis that the key elements of IE, perhaps in combination with larger social factors, have facilitated faculty develop in institutional leadership, we will develop methodology and collect data triangulated among three sources: self-efficacy, motivation and future intent, and observed behavior.