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Including Faculty in University-wide Student Success Initiatives

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Written by
Jessica C. Murphy, Dean of Undergraduate Education and Associate Professor of Literature at The University of Texas at Dallas

In February, Dan Cavanagh, Chair of the UT System Faculty Advisory Council, posted on this blog about the need to "bridge" silos in order to encourage student success.1 Cavanagh's shift away from the language of destruction ("break down," "get people out of," etc.) is a provocative one that I embrace in my discussion today about how to bring together people form across campus with very specific areas of expertise in order to help our students thrive.

Faculty participate regularly in the committee work of governance, which is crucial to the shared governance of our universities, but it is often the case that faculty are less likely to be invited to serve on committees that relate directly to student engagement. This is partly to do with a limited view of how faculty encourage student success. The personality model of excellent teaching encourages us to focus on one-on-one relationships with our students as mentors, instructors, and guides through the major and into the field. While those relationships are crucial to an individual student's success, there is excellent work going on across Academic and Student Affairs that would benefit from faculty involvement.

In 2017, we established the New Student Engagement Board (NSEB) to bring together faculty and staff who work regularly with students who are new to UT Dallas. Early in the board's existence, we had one or two faculty who regularly attended the large meetings, but there was not enough infrastructure to support their deep involvement with the work of the board. We established the faculty subcommittee to create opportunities for that involvement. Chaired by Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki (Physics) and Carol Cirulli Lanham (Sociology), the subcommittee works to find ways to engage faculty across campus in larger-picture student success initiatives.

Of this committee, Ishak-Boushaki writes: "I felt that our subcommittee allowed me and my colleagues to learn important information about our new student population profile that I would not learn otherwise. We also learned about university offices or services involved in trying to help students. Another aspect that I find interesting is to share and learn about various school initiatives for new students, although we are still in the process of compiling those."2 By connecting with the campus, the subcommittee created a way for faculty to learn about student data, student services, and initiatives in other schools.

Lanham also sees the subcommittee as allowing for the improvement in individual schools. Lanham writes, "By sharing new-student initiatives among subcommittee members, we can adopt best practices in our own schools to better serve our students."3 J.D. Thomas, the director of our campus-wide student success initiative, "Orbit: Keeping New Comets on Course," and the administrator of NSEB asserts that communication is the key to the board's accomplishments. Thomas writes, "At large universities, communication is always a challenge NSEB's Faculty Advisory subcommittee was designed to serve as a conduit between UT Dallas' schools and administrative offices, providing opportunities for faculty and staff to stay informed about developments taking place across campus and to relay up-to-date information about their respective units to other interested parties."4 I would like to suggest that this communication is a crucial first step in building the "bridges" for which Cavanagh's post calls.

Universities may not regularly call for faculty and staff to come together to solve problems and share ideas, but maybe the time is right to change the way we work. In their presentation at the 2019 annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U), "Using a Shared Leadership Model to Foster Institutional Transformation," Susan Elrod, Judith Ramaley, Elizabeth Holcombe, and Cynthia Bauerle discussed the principles of the shared leadership model as a meaningful response to higher education institutions' challenges. In this presentation, each discussed how they were able to share leadership in higher education. The kind of sharing required to lead change should encourage us to consider the importance of our shared responsibility for the well-being and academic success of our students.

 

1 See Dan Cavanagh, "Academic Work-Out: Bridging Silos in Student Success Work" February 22, 2019 https://www.utsystem.edu/sites/academy-distinguished-teachers/blog/academic-work-out-bridging-silos-student-success-work-2019-02-22 Cavanagh draws the concept of 'bridging" in his title and the post from the work of Kezar, A., & Holcombe, E. (2018). How organizational silos and bridges shape success: The CSU STEM collaboratives project. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 50(2), 48-56.

2 Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki, email message to author, March 25, 2019.

3 Carol Cirulli Lanham, email message to author, March 25, 2019.

4 J.D. Thomas, email message to author, March 25, 2019.