Supporting Faculty Grassroots Leadership

Abstract

Various factors are making faculty leadership challenging including the rise in part-time and non-tenure-track faculty, the increasing pressure to publish and teach more courses and adopt new technologies and pedagogies, increasing standards for tenure and promotion, ascension of academic capitalism, and heavy service roles for women and people of color. This article focuses on describing actions taken by institutional agents and aspects of campus environments which are supportive of grassroots faculty leadership. While there are many conditions which inhibit faculty leadership (i.e., part-time and contingent faculty trends, rising publication standards, etc.), our study demonstrated certain campus conditions or characteristics can overcome the forces of change including counting leadership as service, creating campus networks, addressing dysfunctional department dynamics, fostering role models, supporting faculty who question or challenge decisions, ensuring flexibility and autonomy, and altering contingent faculty contracts to include service and leadership.