Estela Mara Bensimon

A practical guide for achieving equitable outcomes From Equity Talk to Equity Walk offers practical guidance on the design and application of campus change strategies for achieving equitable outcomes. Drawing from campus-based research projects sponsored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities and the Center for Urban Education at the University of Southern California, this invaluable resource provides real-world steps that reinforce primary elements for examining equity in student achievement, while challenging educators to specifically focus on racial equity as a critical lens for institutional and systemic change. Colleges and universities have placed greater emphasis on education equity in recent years. Acknowledging the changing realities and increasing demands placed on contemporary postsecondary education, this book meets educators where they are and offers an effective design framework for what it means to move beyond equity being a buzzword in higher education. Central concepts and key points are illustrated through campus examples. This indispensable guide presents academic administrators and staff with advice on building an equity-minded campus culture, aligning strategic priorities and institutional missions to advance equity, understanding equity-minded data analysis, developing campus strategies for making excellence inclusive, and moving from a first-generation equity educator to an equity-minded practitioner. From Equity Talk to Equity Walk: A Guide for Campus-Based Leadership and Practice is a vital wealth of information for college and university presidents and provosts, academic and student affairs professionals, faculty, and practitioners who seek to dismantle institutional barriers that stand in the way of achieving equity, specifically racial equity to achieve equitable outcomes in higher education.

This book is for anyone who is challenged or troubled by the substantial disparities in college participation, persistence, and completion among racial and ethnic groups in the United States. As co-directors of the Center for Urban Education (CUE) at the University of Southern California, co-authors Alicia Dowd and Estela Bensimon draw on their experience conducting CUE’s Equity Scorecard, a comprehensive action research process which has been implemented at over 40 colleges and universities in the United States. They demonstrate what educators need to know and do to take an active role in racial equity work on their own campuses.Through case studies of college faculty, administrators, and student affairs professionals engaged in inquiry using the Equity Scorecard, the book clarifies the “muddled conversation” colleges and universities are having about equity. Synthesizing equity standards based on three theories of justice - justice as fairness, justice as care, and justice as transformation - the authors provide strategies for enacting equity in practice on college campuses. Engaging the “Race Question” illustrates how practitioner inquiry can be used to address the “race question” with wisdom and calls on college leaders and educators to change the policies and practices that perpetuate institutional and structural racism - and provides a blueprint for doing so.

This book is for anyone who is challenged or troubled by the substantial disparities in college participation, persistence, and completion among racial and ethnic groups in the United States. As co-directors of the Center for Urban Education (CUE) at the University of Southern California, co-authors Alicia Dowd and Estela Bensimon draw on their experience conducting CUE’s Equity Scorecard, a comprehensive action research process which has been implemented at over 40 colleges and universities in the United States. They demonstrate what educators need to know and do to take an active role in racial equity work on their own campuses.Through case studies of college faculty, administrators, and student affairs professionals engaged in inquiry using the Equity Scorecard, the book clarifies the “muddled conversation” colleges and universities are having about equity. Synthesizing equity standards based on three theories of justice - justice as fairness, justice as care, and justice as transformation - the authors provide strategies for enacting equity in practice on college campuses. Engaging the “Race Question” illustrates how practitioner inquiry can be used to address the “race question” with wisdom and calls on college leaders and educators to change the policies and practices that perpetuate institutional and structural racism - and provides a blueprint for doing so.

Evaluation in departments is widespread but often fails to spark positive change. Based on his extensive work with academic departments across the country, Wergin explains that successful department evaluation exists only when faculty and departments have a strong influence on the purposes, processes, and methods of evaluation. The central purpose of Departments That Work is how academic programs can make evaluation more useful and critical reflection more likely. Topics include: * How quality has become confused with such concepts as effectiveness, productivity, and marketability and how it might more constructively be conceived as focusing on the engagement of the department with its constituencies * An examination of both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators of faculty work, the concept of organizational motivation, and the factors influencing identification with the institution and motivation to contribute to it * The three critical factors of effective department evaluation * How academic leaders can create a culture of engagement * How to define and negotiate academic values with diverse stakeholders * How to ask the right questions and collect the right idea * How to determine standards and make meaning of evaluation data * An overall summary of specific recommendations for academic leaders and departmental faculty, including an appendix of the constructs presented in each chapter

Articulates salient problems of tenure-track faculty, especially women and faculty of color. Offers a new paradigm to delineate ways in which the academic community can help socialize younger faculty, and honor differences more readily.Research on the organizational culture in higher education affirms that congruent cultures are better than fragmented ones, and that managing culture is an oxymoron. Such analyses often lead to the assumptions that unity of purpose is essential and leadership is impossible. This book reframes rather than suppresses these notions, and by respecting the differences, builds a commonality between them.Using data on faculty socialization in academe, the authors consider how the work of cultural leadership becomes interpretation and facilitation rather than management. Through a series of interviews using experimental forms of ethnographic presentation, Tierney and Bensimon articulate salient problems of tenure-track faculty, especially women and faculty of color, and address the issue of individuals voluntarily leaving the tenure-track. They offer a new paradigm to delineate ways in which the academic community can help socialize younger faculty, and honor differences more readily.

Most organizational theorists use the athletic team as a metaphor for the effective work group - specific players motivated to give their best performance in pursuit of a common goal. This book offers a different model, focusing instead on the complex ways that members of a leadership team interact, wield power, use language and create meaning. The authors describe the team as a culture and argue that effective team leadership depends on expecting, understanding and appreciating the differences among individuals. Based on interviews with members of administrative teams on 15 campuses - including research universities, public colleges, private colleges and community colleges - the book examines teamwork as an essentially human activity. It considers how and why people on leadership teams think and act as they do, how they learn and communicate (or neglect to do so), and how they bring their deepest values, beliefs and aspirations into play in the conduct of administrative work. The authors describe how administrative leaders shape and maintain effective teams, and how the teams address diversity and conflict. Emphasizing the importance of inclusiveness, the authors identify a number of hidden dynamics related to gender, race and power inequity. The book contains a number of quotes from team participants.