Preliminary Overview of Higher Education Field Research

Cross cutting questions for Diversity and Innovation Projects:

• What are the frameworks used to transform selection processes and institutional cultures so that they cultivate potential and provide opportunities for people from diverse backgrounds to thrive?  How do they conceptualize and operationalize the relationship among diversity, opportunity, inclusion and merit?  
• Who are the key catalysts in that kind of institutional transformation, and what skills and knowledge do they deploy to catalyze change and overcome organizational stasis?  Are there organizational structures, policies, or tools that enhance their effectiveness?   To what extent are these understandings particular to institutional context? Are any of them generalizable to other practitioners or settings, as tools, principles, modes of inquiry, skills, narratives, or repertoires of intervention?
• What does institutional transformation toward greater inclusiveness and equity look like?  What are the indicators?  How can we distinguish between cosmetic change and transformative change?
• How do change agents, both individual and institutional, link local interventions to systemic change that enhances participation of currently marginalized groups and is sustained over time?
• How do people in different organizational and professional roles and institutions collaborate to produce sustainable institutional change?  What role do lawyers play in facilitating innovation?
• How does leadership get diffused and sustained throughout an organization or network?
• How does public policy and public institutions build the capacity and accountability for these projects to endure and spread?

Projects Descriptions

A. Bridge/partnership/institutional transformation projects

These field studies will document and analyze successful “bridge” programs aimed at improving higher education access and success for disadvantaged and underserved populations who are not identified or adequately included under current approaches.  The research will identify (1) the features of innovative programs that create the bridges, networks and supports needed to succeed at the individual, institutional and community level, (2) the strategies for incorporating the strategies of bridge programs into institutional practice and sustaining them over time; (3) the emerging roles, strategies and skills important to the success and institutionalization of these programs, and how those roles are sustained and reproduced in different settings and over time, and (4) the metrics of success that can track change within and across institutions.  The working hypothesis is that programs building lasting institutional and professional relationships, and implemented with an institutional transformation approach, will have greater sustainability, effectiveness, and institutionalization.  The research will examine innovative programs to learn what works and what doesn’t, and the conditions that have facilitated success in diversifying institutions.  The research will also examine the frameworks, practices, and strategies that enable innovation to be transmitted from one institutional setting to another. 

These projects could produce articles and case studies that would inform similar programs, tools and instruments that could be used by others interested in creating bridge programs, policy documents aimed at foundations or public agencies in a position to  generalize the lessons from this program, and a co-inquiry group that would share knowledge with each other and the field.  They could also be used as the basis for developing programs like this at Columbia or in New York, including a post-doc, post-bac or masters-to-PhD program.  The current sites for bridge research include the following:

1. Vanderbilt/Fisk institutional collaboration. 

This project will continue a study of an institutional collaboration between Vanderbilt and Fisk.  This collaboration will be looked at both for its programmatic goal of increasing successful participation of under-represented groups in PhD programs and long-term institutional transformation potential. In collaboration with other faculty and leadership at Vanderbilt and Fisk, Keivan Stassun from Vanderbilt and Arnold Burger from Fisk develop a multi-institutional partnership between Vanderbilt and Fisk focused on “deliberately preparing underrepresented minority students for success as they traverse the critical Masters-to-PhD transition.”  (Stassun, 2006).  The Vanderbilt-Fisk approach emphasizes: (1) institutional transformation, starting at the departmental level; (2) institutional partnerships between research universities and primarily minority serving institutions; (3) developing effective mentorship; (4) developing and diffusing leadership; and (5) developing internal and external networks to support and extend this work. 

Stassun, Burger and their collaborators mobilized a group of committed faculty, administrators and community members at Vanderbilt and Fisk.  This process enlisted sufficient support to shift the criteria and process for selection from proven ability to unrealized potential, and from relying on referral networks that excluded minority candidates to a participatory outreach process including those from excluded communities.  For the HBCU partners, institutional transformation means developing sustainable research capacity.  As a result of the partnership with Vanderbilt, Stassun reports “a strong enhancement of research at Fisk in building the Bridge program.  This new research capacity has bolstered the graduate program at Fisk, leading to a dramatic increase in the number of graduate students and new collaborative research efforts, thus strengthening and sustaining the flow of students between the two institutions toward the PhD and beyond.” (Stassun, 2007).

Vanderbilt has agreed to collaborate with the Center, using research and reflective practice inquiry to identify mechanisms that contributed to change, barriers to change, strategies, refine usable indicators and tools for institutionalization, adapt existing tools to an ongoing collaborative change initiative, and identify and examine possible mechanisms and turning points that are indicative of transformation as compared to cosmetic or superficial change. 
 

2. Universities as Public Problem Solvers: The Dental School example

This project will study the dental schools’ diversity project, which grew out of and is rooted in the commitment to tackle a public health crisis disproportionately affecting poor communities and communities of color:  the US has the best health care in the world for the wealthy, and among the worst for people who cannot afford to pay for this high quality, privately administered care, and particularly for people living in racially isolated communities. This study will identify the key mechanisms accounting for the programs development and growth.  It will seek to develop a way of documenting and assessing the institution-level impacts of the program.  It will also consider the implications of this innovative approach for other aspects of higher education, including potentially law schools. 

This long term initiative began with a program aimed at increasing the number of black dental specialists, which was viewed as a predicate to any successful effort to address the public health issue.  In the late 1980s in New York City, the largest city in USA with largest number of African American residents of any city in USA, there was not a single black periodontist. The graduates from the black dental specialist program became the leaders that ultimately diversified the student body and faculty of the dental school and ultimately moved this work into the community and started the access for the residents of the community.  This initiative was the source of inspiration for a multi-institutional partnership beginning with Columbia Dental School and Harlem Hospital, and then expanding to include community based organizations, CUNY, and a consortium of other dental schools. Together, Columbia and Harlem Hospital decided that they needed to offer population based solutions to oral disease, and that this goal required reorienting the mission of the Columbia dental school to make service delivery the equal of research and teaching.

The partnership then moved to the creation of a multi-institutional Dental Pipeline Program, rooted in the observation that it was imperative to diversify the faculty and student body to meet this crucial public need.  This initiative provides institutions with grants to link their schools to communities in need of dental care and to boost their underrepresented minority (URM) and low-income (LI) student enrollment numbers.  In the process, they expanded the concept of admissions, but linked faculty and student diversity to a re-articulation of the dental school’s mission.  This approach also enabled the dental school to transform the curriculum, and to develop new relationships with community and with other dental institutions.  They also changed the curriculum, both to make science courses more interesting and less foreboding and to build the capacity to serve underrepresented and diverse communities into the core competencies and curriculum.  All this created a platform for expanding the admissions conversation and decision that is rooted in a broader mission connected to advancing public ends.

The project has now moved to an even broader collaboration between CUNY and the dental school, which will develop long-term relationships between minority serving institutions and dental schools.  It is also important to track the crucial role of public and non-profit intermediaries; Robert Wood Johnson and Kellogg found these innovators, studied them, engaged them in setting up a collaborative network that work diffuse the learning and create incentives for other institutions to participate. 

3. Mentorship as Institutional Transformation; University as Public Problem Solver: the HIV Prevention Example

This project will study and collaborate with an innovative program housed at the Social Work School, which develops the participation of researchers from diverse backgrounds, able to work effectively with communities facing AIDS epidemic.  This program is housed in the Social Intervention Group at the Social Work School, which focuses on bringing social services and medical research to design implementation of HIV prevention, with a particular emphasis on designing culturally congruent intervention and prevention models.  They have developed the idea of cultural congruence, which includes a scientific process of designing and implementing an intervention that involves the community and participants in the process of implementation and design.  The program has also focused systematic attention on developing and institutionalizing effective mentoring relationships, and then connecting those relationships to institution-level change.

B.  University as public citizen: Clark University

This project seeks to document and analyze an initiative undertaken by Clark University organized around the concept of :university as public citizen.  This initiative, begun as a response to the decline of the community surrounding Clark, has developed through a partnership with the community of Worcester proceeding in multiple arenas, including housing, safety, community economic development and K-12 education. There is anecdotal evidence that this project, begun as a way to address neighborhood decline and community relations, has begun to transform the educational mission and culture of the University. 

C.    College-prison project

The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) was established in 2001 by Max Kenner, a recent graduate of Bard College. grants associate’s and bachelor’s degrees from Bard College to students who take liberal arts courses taught within the prisons by professors from nearby colleges, the academic standards unaltered. BPI Director of Policy and Academics Daniel Karpowitz describes the program’s philosophy: “Unlike methods grounded in rehabilitation, corrections, and therapeutic behavioral modification, the Initiative cultivates students’ capacity for and engagement in the liberal arts.” The second major program existing in New York State takes place at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility (BHCF) in partnership with bachelor’s and master’s degree-granting Marymount Manhattan College, as well a consortium of cooperating colleges that contribute faculty and other resources. Michelle Fine et al., Changing Minds: The Impact of College in a Maximum-Security Prison 6 (2001).

Last year’s study had two aims: first, to pick up where existing research and theoretical frameworks concluded by examining not just the individual-level changes but also change at the level of institutional priorities that occurs when college takes place in prison; and, second, to examine the potential of these programs—involving partnerships between prisons and private colleges—for reimagining where education can occur, and how desert is understood in the context of higher education. The study was designed to answer the following theoretical questions:

• What happens to both sets of institutions when collaborative partnerships are created between elite, capital-rich institutions and the most marginalized institutional settings composed of people who bring a different set of resources to the table?
• What is the relationship between different systems of merit (traditional, individualized merit versus alternative, “democratic” merit, as manifested in these institutional settings) and institutional, cultural, political, and individual change?

For this coming year, we are developing field research project, in collaboration with Michelle Fine and others at the Participant Action Research Collaborative at CUNY to continue what we learned from the Bard Prison Initiative Research done last year.  This new project, which is in development, could  craft a piece of research that cuts across institutions of higher education that developed educational programs for current or formerly incarcerated people.    The idea is to look at the way participants understand the institutional impact of bringing together higher education with prison on both sides of that relationship.   We would enter at a bunch of those idiosyncratic but linked puzzles of possibility around prison and education, and in the process see whether there is a  common language for talking about those interactions.  It would also give an opportunity to see the different ways that merit gets reconceptualized in the process.

D.   Lawyers facilitating innovation

The primary purpose of this study is to explore the ways in which in house counsel participate in the development and implementation of diversity and inclusion initiatives, particularly within higher education.  University lawyers play a key role in shaping how universities approach their goal of advancing diversity.  They counsel universities on how to pursue their interest in diversifying student bodies and faculties, while minimizing their risk of liability.  In an age of legal uncertainty, they are searching for innovative approaches to performing their role.  Preliminary research shows that general counsel representing corporations have developed problem solving models that could be used effectively in the university context.  This study will explore innovative strategies employed by general counsel in the corporate environment and in universities.  In particular, we will assess the strategies used to enable organizations to pursue diversity and inclusion under conditions of legal risk, and to facilitate innovation in these programs.  We will explore the transferability of innovative strategies employed by lawyers in different contexts, including higher education, foundations, non-profits and corporations. Ultimately, we hope to identify innovative diversity strategies that will support and encourage lawyers counseling university leaders in their efforts to advance diversity in higher education.

This project is building on the project of the same title from the seminar last year.  We are adding general counsel located within universities, non-profits, and foundations to the scope of our study.  This year the project will be expanded to include lawyers in foundations, non-profits, and private firms.  We will also be developing a co-inquiry group to begin meeting in January.

E.  Democratic merit group

This project seeks to explore how traditional concepts of merit can be redesigned and expanded to incorporate merit that is not recognized in traditional frameworks (i.e. standardized test scores and GPAs) and that will connect selection to universities’ public mission.  To accomplish this objective, the project will examine emerging frameworks designed to prompt rethinking of the role of merit in higher education, and how those frameworks are effectively translated into practice.  Several different concepts designed to expand the current conception of merit in higher education have emerged, including democratic merit, institutional citizenship, the opportunity agenda, and affirmative capabilities.  The study will identify the range of frameworks designed to connect universities to their public mission, explore how these frameworks are perceived by different audiences, and identify a group of actors in different domains who are positioned to employ those frameworks to shift public discourse and institutional practice about merit.  This study will identify public intellectuals, researchers, practitioners, and activists who are involved in creatively rethinking approaches to merit.  Through interviews and document review, the study will examine the prevailing framework for defining merit, explore how it can be reframed, and identify important participants in this work to collaborate in this effort.

Researchers last year conducted interviews that have generated a range of perspectives and questions that will help the project leadership flesh out the contours of the democratic merit concept, identify the aspects of the concept that need further development, identify related frameworks and language that share the values and orientation of democratic merit, and identify the leverage points and roles positioned to advance democratic merit as a framework and practice.  That research explored the following questions:

What are the conceptions of democracy that democratic inform the project of reconnecting universities to their public missions?  How does democracy relate to universities’ public mission?  What does a democratic space look like in the context of a university?  What are the narratives that tell this different story of the relationship between democracy and merit? 

• How does the project of rethinking merit relate to diversity and inclusion?  
• Where are the locations where the shift toward democratic merit can occur?  How do admissions and hiring get connected to rethinking the values and goals of education and research?
• What is the relationship between traditional and democratic approaches to merit, both conceptually and as a strategic concern?

Common features of all projects:

1. They undertake to address structural inequality, but link that to a larger vision or goal of the university.
2. They employ collaboration and multi-pronged approaches.
3. They address issues of institutional culture
4. They are leveraged within larger networks and communities of practice
5. They are inventing or redesigning roles to enable innovation.
6. They are about enhancing mobility, developing capacity and enhancing mobility
7. They connect the individual and the systemic levels.
8. They require and connect to new forms of public policy, advocacy and regulation.