Envisioning Equity Minded Leadership for a New Academy

This fall, ACLS convened a series of virtual and in-person focus groups with higher education leaders to explore how best to answer the call for a new approach to leadership within the academy. ACLS envisions a “New Academy” in which higher education leaders center equity across all aspects of academe. Instead of seeing differences in backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences as challenges, they are seen as part of that institution’s definition of excellence.

The meetings, which engaged dozens of scholars and administrators via Zoom and in Philadelphia and Washington, DC, were extensions of the Leadership Institute for a New Academy (LINA), which debuted in 2023 as a pilot aimed at identifying shared strategies for addressing institutional and systems-level challenges such as retaining faculty of color, setting disciplinary norms, and rethinking the social role of colleges and universities. LINA is made possible by generous funding from the Mellon Foundation.

Building on the 2023 pilot, LINA has continued as a vibrant peer community where participants can share, amplify, and refine effective strategies for sustainable change, all toward developing equity-minded leaders at all levels of higher education.

On November 15 and 16, 2024, in Washington, DC, Nicole Stokes, Professor of Sociology and Director of Academic Partnerships and Campus Grant Initiatives at Pennsylvania State University at Abington, as well as a participant in the 2023 LINA pilot, led a two-day focus group exploring such solutions. Participants included additional 2023 LINA pilot alumni Bonnie Gunzenhauser, Vice President for Academic Affairs at John Carroll University; Ifeoma Nwankwo, Dean of the College of Liberal & Creative Arts at San Francisco State University; and Stephen Trzaskoma G’22, Dean of the College of Arts & Letters at California State University, Los Angeles; as well as Michelle C. Chatman, Associate Professor in the Crime, Justice, and Security Studies Program at the University of the District of Columbia; Crystal deGregory, Associate Professor of history and founding director of the Mary McLeod Bethune Institute for the Study of Women and Girls at Bethune-Cookman University; and Yuko Miki F’20, Associate Professor of History and Latin American and Latinx Studies at Fordham University.

“We are excited to continue this important work in developing a framework for a New Academy,” said Jovonne Bickerstaff, Director of Intentional Design for an Equitable Academy (IDEA) at ACLS. “These leaders have been invaluable in their willingness to share their insights and expertise in helping us build an actionable plan that can be taken on by institutions committed to a more equitable academy.”

Insights from all four focus groups will be used to shape the next phases of LINA, including continuing to cultivate, train, and support a robust new network of equity-minded leaders.

LINA is part of the ACLS Intentional Design for an Equitable Academy (IDEA) unit. IDEA, which also runs the ACLS Digital Justice Grant Program and the Intention Foundry (IF), draws on human-centered design as a methodology for developing activities and convenings that re-envision academia’s culture, policies, and practices.