It can be pretty exciting to attend a higher education conference these days.  Change is in the air!  New personalities offer new insights.  New technologies offer new solutions or pieces of solutions.  Everything is put on the table for consideration as higher education struggles to respond to the myriad of challenges that have presented themselves during that past several years.

Many of the presentations offered at such meetings deal with the process of change, how change (or more popularly, transformation) is managed, directed, or led.  And from the titles of many sessions and from the tone of more than a few, it seems that the consensus is that change has never needed “leading” as desperately as it does now.  It is almost as though no one has thought of this before.

Of course those of us who have been in the business of leading higher education at the college or university level for some time are quite aware of the “process” of change.  Folks have been thinking about it and writing about it and studying it and talking about it for a long time.  But it is all the rage right now to dive into it as though it is something radically new.

A recent publication, Change Leadership in Higher Education – A Practical Guide to Academic Transformation by Jeffrey L. Buller, is one of the many books currently weighing in on the topic.  Buller cites a number of prior publications dealing with change in academe, singling out a 1999 report for the American Council on Education, On Change, by Peter Eckel, Barbara Hill, Madeleine Green, and Bill Mallon, as “the most informative of these earlier works.”  He then explains that because of the new “landscape” of higher education a new approach to leading change is needed.

From 1995 though 1999 the American Council on Education (ACE) ran a study project, funded by the Kellogg Foundation, entitled “Leadership and Institutional Transformation.”  The project leaders chose twenty-six institutions of higher education from across the country (out of some 110 that applied) to participate in the program.  My university was chosen as one of the twenty-six.  I had the good fortune to be a part of the project team on my campus and for four years we engaged in planning, study, activities, processes, and local projects on our campus, all the while reporting to the American Council on Education on the process and the substance of these change initiatives.  We met with the project teams from the other twenty-five institutions once or twice a year for extended discussion and debriefing with Madeleine Green, Peter Eckel, and others from the project administration team at ACE.  The tangible result of this project for ACE was the report cited above, On Change.  I was able to watch the pieces come together from the very beginning of this project.

The tangible results for the participating universities, including mine, were varied.  Mostly for us, the benefits resulting from the project included leadership development, increased campus dialogue and awareness of important issues relevant to us, and a series of small scale but effective initiatives.  Most of the momentum from the project was lost in the change of administrative leadership that accompanied the departure of our president in 2000 and, a couple of years after that, our vice president for academic affairs.  Consequently, the larger issues addressed in the local project were stalled.

However, for those of us who participated as members of the project team, there were quite a few memorable “take-aways.”  Among them:

Institutional change must be believed in, embraced, and championed by the upper administration.  This means the president.  Continually.

Institutional change must be grounded in the grassroots and must engage personnel in all areas and at all levels.

Institutional change must be consistent with the values, mission, and vision of the institution.

Institutional change is utterly dependent on transparency, trust, and communication.

Leading change is leading people.

None of this is new.  None of this is revolutionary.  The American Council on Education project on Leadership and Institutional Transformation afforded me the opportunity to see it “up close and personal.”

Despite the “changed landscape” of higher education very little has changed in terms of how one leads the change process, Buller’s thoughts notwithstanding.  Leading change is only partially about structures and processes and current trends and fads.  It is overwhelmingly about people.

Leading change is leading people.