The systemic and structural inequalities that undergird the United States have become impossible to ignore over the last year. Higher education cannot ignore its crucial role in addressing crises involving racial disparities, social injustices, and economic inequities highlighted and sometimes exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and high-profile police killings of Black Americans.
From effectively educating students online, to sponsoring research to help cure and prevent COVID, to confronting racism and anti-Blackness, to countering the effects of misinformation and conspiratorial thinking, colleges and universities must lead the way in finding solutions for the most pressing problems of our day.
As a sector, we risk squandering several decades of progress for students of color and low-income students at the precise moment we must recommit to equity and justice for all. We must respond by stepping away from the “on the side” approach of equity and implement broader campus cultural change.
In many cases, interventions employed by postsecondary institutions aimed at ameliorating equity gaps are too narrow in their approach and small in scale, addressing discrete policies and practices in a disjointed and marginal way.
Innovative institutional transformation has been front and center in discussions about how to solve these problems and especially to promote more just and equitable outcomes for students, faculty, and staff of color. In order to create innovative and transformative solutions we need innovative approaches to leadership. However, research on the role of leadership in addressing these equity challenges has received far too limited attention.
In a recent report authored by the American Council on Education and the Pullias Center for Higher Education, including co-authors Elizabeth Holcombe, Darsella Vigil, and Jude Paul Mathias Dizon, we describe one such innovative approach that focuses on the experiences of distributed leadership groups at eight campuses across the country. Each institution grapples with distinct equity goals and challenges, yet all are engaging in a collective, inclusive approach to leadership that we have termed “shared equity leadership” (SEL). SEL is a collective process in which ownership of a campus’s equity goals becomes everyone’s work rather than relegated or siloed in one office or leader’s portfolio.
This form of leadership has three main components—a personal journey toward critical consciousness, and a set of values that undergird the work, and practices enacted by the participants. SEL requires a critical mass of leaders who have undergone personal transformation and who collectively embody the values and practices.
