Mapping the Current Culture
Driving Culture Change in Higher Ed
Jeff Selingo and I teamed up to author our first white paper together. It’s part 1 of a 5-part series on culture that Jeff is doing and that is sponsored by Amazon Web Services.
In this first installment, we explore how campus leaders should develop a systematic approach to understanding their institution’s cultural DNA before they even begin seeking to transform it.
“We need to fix the campus culture.”
It’s an often-heard refrain in higher education, increasingly so since the Covid pandemic demanded more flexible approaches to teaching and the student experience. Now, as enrollment challenges mount, public trust drops, and universities everywhere grapple with the potential loss of billions of dollars in federal funds, the pressure to upend legacy models has never been more urgent.
Culture is seen as both the cause and the cure for higher ed’s ills. At a private university in the Midwest, we recently facilitated an exercise at a retreat for senior leadership and the board. When we asked a dozen breakout groups to choose among three focus areas to capitalize on near-term opportunities—strategic, financial, or cultural—all but three groups picked culture.
This university is not an anomaly. In our work with dozens of institutions of all types and sizes, we’ve found that many faculty members and administrators seem to agree on why their campus culture needs to change. While there’s less alignment on what should be done, ideas for new academic programs, strategies to raise revenue, and proposals for enriched student experiences certainly aren’t lacking. It’s actually the how that tends to derail culture change initiatives: Our campus needs to be more innovative…more collaborative…more adaptive….more…
What Is Culture, Anyway?
Before we fix campus culture, we need to define it. According to the late Edgar Schein of MIT, broadly speaking, an organization’s culture is its shared assumptions, values, and behaviors—all of which strongly suggest a “right” way to view the world, interact, make decisions, and collaborate.¹ Culture is reflected in both formal structures and informal norms. And it influences everything from leadership styles to daily operations. …