Multi-campus systems form the foundation of the US higher education sector, encompassing over 500 institutions and catering to over 7.5 million students. Four out of every five Pell-eligible students in public four-year higher education are enrolled in a multi-campus system. Developing a professoriate that reflects the wide diversity and demographic richness of the students entering higher education is more critical than ever.

Mindset Shift

Multicampus systems offer numerous opportunities for strengthening and diversifying faculty pipelines, yet they are often perceived as barriers rather than facilitators. Embracing the potential of these systems requires a shift in mindset. Firstly, we must move beyond viewing them solely as coordinators, regulators, and allocators, and instead, acknowledge their potential to establish a shared vision and facilitate collaboration across campuses. Secondly, it is essential to recognize multicampus systems as more than just independent entities seeking autonomy. They operate under a single governing board and system administration, fostering interdependence and enabling mutual benefits through coordination, shared services, and strategic resource allocation. Thirdly, it is crucial to understand that differentiation and coordination can coexist within these systems. Standardization isn't the goal; instead, the focus should be on promoting diverse mission-driven activities while leveraging collective resources for the benefit of all students and the entire system.

Aligning the Drivers of Transformation

After embracing the necessary mindset shift, our research identifies five key drivers essential for system transformation:

Vision: This involves defining a clear direction for the future and outlining strategic priorities to achieve it.
Leadership: Effective leadership is crucial in understanding and endorsing the vision, making decisions that propel campuses and the system toward its realization.
Resources: Allocating resources and establishing models that support and incentivize actions aligned with the vision are essential.
Accountability Structures: Setting up mechanisms to monitor progress toward the vision and holding leaders and campuses accountable when progress falls short.
Administrative Structures: Creating administrative frameworks that not only support but actively enable actions necessary for realizing the vision.

The greatest impact occurs when all these drivers align seamlessly, spanning across campus, system administration, and governing board. However, even aligning a subset of these drivers can significantly propel transformation efforts.

Leveraging System Levers

Several levers exist to assist RISE-UPP leaders in leveraging their systems and aligning their drivers.

Policy Audits: While we want policies to facilitate positive outcomes, they can sometimes inadvertently have negative effects. Conducting a policy audit involves identifying all policies at the board, system administration, and institutional levels that may impede achieving specific objectives. For instance, recent research suggests that requiring candidates to provide letters of reference at the beginning of the hiring process, rather than conducting reference checks at the end, can pose a barrier for certain candidates, especially first-generation doctoral students lacking the social capital to obtain reference letters from well-known faculty members. Similarly, some policies may hinder the transition of a post-doc to a tenure-track position. Requiring a post-doc to participate in a national search, particularly if they already went through a similar process for their post-doc position, might prompt them to seek faculty or research positions elsewhere, unable to foresee the outcome of another search. This is not to advocate for the elimination of all policies that create barriers, as many serve valid purposes. However, it's crucial to understand their impacts on our objectives and, whenever feasible, adjust them accordingly.
Convenings & Establishing Networks: A powerful, and often overlooked tool, of the system is the ability to hold systemwide convenings (and these can be virtual if needed). Such convenings usually center on a particular issue, bring together a broad cross-section of those involved in addressing the issue, and focus on identifying solutions that can be tailored to and scaled across campuses. A secondary effect of convenings is that they send a signal to the system community that the topic is important, and it can help foster a cross-campus community of like-minded individuals who support each other in the work.
Professional Development: Some systems have the ability to provide focused professional development that may not be possible for their constituent campuses to do on their own. This can include attracting national experts to speak at systemwide convenings or developing tailored training to support, for example, department chairs in ensuring their departments run fair and effective search processes.
Data: Some systems gather comprehensive HR data that can prove invaluable for various purposes. Here are two potential applications of such data:

Trend Analysis: System-wide data can serve as a valuable tool for examining faculty demographics across the system, both presently and over time. In my experience leading academic leadership development for a large, comprehensive system, we utilized data on faculty, department chairs, and deans. Our analysis revealed that although faculty diversity was gradually increasing across the system, the diversity among academic leadership had decreased. Consequently, we recognized the need to implement programs aimed at fostering a more inclusive academic leadership pipeline, while also equipping all academic leaders to address the diverse challenges faced by faculty.
Positive Outliers: System data also offers an opportunity to pinpoint positive outliers—campuses, colleges, or programs that have achieved above-average success in recruiting and retaining faculty from diverse backgrounds. These exceptional cases can be examined to identify the factors contributing to their success and assess the feasibility of replicating these strategies across the system.

System Solutions

Working at the system level may provide program options not available to a single campus. For example, one of the longest-standing programs, the University of California’s President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, started in 1984 to diversify the pipeline of future faculty. The program has supported more than 300 post-docs across the UC system, roughly a third of whom have become tenured faculty members of the system. The program created a vision for creating a faculty that is reflective of the demographics of California. It has received support from the system and campus leadership throughout its 40-year history. Resources were directed to support the program and administrative structures were created centrally to support the initiative, including support for the campuses and for providing professional development for the post-docs. In essence, the drivers identified above were aligned to realize the goal.

This is but one method through which a system can support the work of strengthening and diversifying the faculty pipeline. Other examples could include:

Creating a Grow-Your-Own program where campuses in a system can support academically accomplished, diverse students in pursuing a doctoral program at another campus in the system and then allow campuses in the system to prioritize recruitment of those doctoral graduates.
Develop a systemwide faculty support or mentoring system that fosters cross-campus networking and offers a support structure that individual institutions may not be able to provide on their own.
Provide focused professional development opportunities to upskill academic administrators in how to effectively recruit and retain high-quality, diverse faculty.

Monitoring for System Change

As a system continues a change project, it is important to monitor have the system has strategically made changes to its operations to integrate the outcomes of the project. In the RISE UPP projects, we are focusing on the following system change guiding questions to monitor the impact of the work.

Vision and Goals: How is your system communicating and grounding this work at the system level? (Ex: Strategic plan, communications to or from the Board; Guiding principles from system leadership)

Resource Models: How are staffing and other financial supports being allocated by the system?

Administrative Structures: How has the system changed any organizational structures to support this work? How has this work been institutionalized in system operations?

Leadership: Who has direct responsibility for setting the vision and making decisions to support the work?

Accountability: What changes in the system level data collection have taken place to measure the progress toward achieving the project goals?

Conclusion

The responsibility of faculty recruitment and retention is frequently delegated to individual departments, making it challenging to recognize how systemic changes can offer opportunities to address these challenges on a larger scale. By aligning the key drivers—such as vision, leadership, resources, accountability structures, and administrative structures—across the governing board, system administration, and campuses, we can create an environment that better supports the objectives of the RISE-UPP effort. This alignment enables academic departments to enhance their hiring practices and foster inclusive academic communities more effectively.

Sincerely,

Leveraging the System for RISE UPP

Justice and Education Departments Release Resources to Advance Diversity and Opportunity in Higher Education