RHB Director of Qualitative Research Aimee Hosemann and Vice President for Marketing Leadership Rob Zinkan led a February 28 webinar as part of the Leading Edge Thinking in Higher Education Series by Bay Path University’s Center for Higher Education Leadership and Innovative Practice (CHELIP). In the webinar, they share RHB’s latest strategic planning research, including ways in which institutions are maintaining their momentum in achieving DEIB-related progress. You can watch the recording (registration required), and a transcript of the webinar is below.

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Transcript

Melissa Morriss-Olson

And so again, it is my pleasure to welcome Dr. Aimee Hosemann, who is director of qualitative research. I love her background. She is an anthropologist by background, by training. As you hear her talk, it’s going to become very evident how her anthropological background and the lens that she looks through informs the way that she interprets and makes sense of the data that she and Dr. Zinkan have been collecting. Dr. Zinkan, as I said, is a vice president for marketing leadership at RHB, has been working with universities on the ground for a very long time in terms of branding, marketing, communication, and we are thrilled that he is a faculty member in the Bay Path University Ed.D. program.

So with that, I am going to go off-screen. I will come back at the end for Q&A, but again, welcome, Rob and Aimee, to the Leading Edge Webinar.

Aimee Hosemann

Wow. Thank you for that spectacular welcome, Melissa, and we are so excited to be with you today. And thanks so much to Melissa, Jana, CHELIP and Bay Path for bringing us back into the conversation with this wonderful community that you’ve convened.

Rob Zinkan

And Aimee, before we give a quick overview of RHB, I know on the previous slide—and Melissa gave us that kind introduction—as we dive into the topic of strategic planning, perhaps a bit of background on our interests or the angle in which we come to this research on strategic planning.

Aimee

Sure. Thanks, Rob. So I am a former faculty member. I came over from Southern Illinois University Carbondale to RHB, and I’m bringing with me that experience as well as that anthropological training that Melissa mentioned where my interests are about language, culture and identity, including in higher ed. And as we’ll talk about strategic planning today, you will see an emphasis on how those things interact because as we’ve learned, strategic plans are one way of thinking through your institutional identity, your culture and your language.

Rob

Thanks, Aimee. And my role at RHB is vice president for marketing leadership, as Melissa said, and it’s important to note that the focus here is on the marketing that you can’t see. So we help institutions select an authentic market position and then how they channel institutional behaviors and strategies toward that choice. So I’ve been drawn to the strategic planning topic and research with that market positioning work in mind, both at RHB and previously in university administration roles. There’s such a clear link between market position and institutional strategy, yet we don’t often see clear choices about market position as part of strategic plans, who you are and who you intend to be relative to others. And we’ll touch on, today, strategic planning and how it tends to be more about the planning part than the strategy part. 

And yes, thank you Melissa. I do have the great pleasure of being a faculty member in Bay Path University’s doctoral program in higher education leadership and organizational studies, and the opportunity to work with first year doctoral students who are higher ed leaders or aspiring leaders is about as fulfilling as it gets. They’re just tremendous, tremendous students.

And briefly about RHB on the next slide, we again appreciate this opportunity to come back and share the latest strategic planning research that we’ve conducted at RHB. And a brief intro of RHB, our mission is to help institutions achieve greater relevance so that they can achieve their critical missions. And we do that across four practices: Enrollment Management, Executive Counsel, Institutional Marketing and Slate and Related Technology.

And in fact, our VP for enrollment management, Ken Anselment, led last month’s Leading Edge Thinking in Higher Ed Webinar, which was focused on fostering student belonging and how that journey to student success begins when students deposit to your institution. 

Our strategic planning work is part of our executive council practice, and that often includes helping institutions with a needed market orientation, bringing a market orientation to their strategic planning process so that they know their actual market position, they know their position in the marketplace, they know what perceptions their most important audiences have of their institution.

Aimee

Thank you. And so today we’re going to be presenting on most recent findings from a 2023 revisiting of some 2020 research when we began looking at 108 strategic plans in higher ed that were active at that time, from public and private universities. We see a lot of them in our work. We realized after a while as we’re trying to help institutions meet strategic goals, we weren’t necessarily sure that they knew precisely how they were going to get to the ambitious goals that they’d set for themselves. And so we really wanted to know what makes a good strategic plan? What does it mean to be strategic? And so we undertook this study with the help of a graduate assistant named Connor LaGrange. And what we discovered is that there are some common characteristics shared by the most strategic plans, and we’ll look at those on the next slide.

So here you can see characteristics of the 16 most strategic plans. We picked out 16 that we felt were the most strategic. And one of the things to note about the time when we were starting this research, in the spring of 2020, is that we were launching this research just as the pandemic was kicking off. And one of the questions was, for these plans that sometimes lay out these really grandiose ideas, how stable are they in a time of unforeseen disruption? So that was also part of the conversation and part of the thread that we’ll be picking up in the research we talk about today. But those shared characteristics of the most strategic plans include things like true strategy. Strategy is a change in behavior. It means doing something differently, having that market orientation that Rob talked about.

Clarity of institutional vision: There are a couple of things that really fascinated us, one of which is that a lot of plans were not student-centered. Our grad assistant, Connor, pointed that out: that in a lot of plans he didn’t feel like these institutions knew who their students were. And the other is that the most strategic ones contain a very holistic perspective on DEIB—diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. They really thought broadly about their work in terms of addressing the needs of their communities. And that’s some of what we’re going to dig into today.

And just as an audience note, we think this talk and this research applies to anyone. You do not have to be a president, chancellor, or member of an executive leadership team to come away with work to do today. This applies to everyone. We know there’s lots of practitioners in the audience, and we have geared this toward making sure that you come away with something that you can do to help move your institution forward.

These are the three installments we published in 2023 out of our latest research. The first one talks about shared governance. This is an area that became really important to us in the latest round of research. The second is on changes or shifts that we have perceived since 2023, and Rob’s going to walk us through that, and then finally, looking at DEIB, which is a moral and ethical commitment that some leaders that we interviewed in 2020 expressed. We wanted to check back in with them in 2023 and see what’s happening now that the climate around that work has changed so much since 2020.

Rob

So our latest research, and we’ll start here with an overview of the new strategic plans that we looked at, and our objective was to understand what’s new in new strategic plans. As Aimee said, there’s been so much disruption since our original study, which was during the 2020-2021 academic year. And the next slide, specifically then, how is strategic planning changing and in what ways is it perhaps not changing? So before we address implications about DEIB, we want to briefly give you an overview of what we saw among new plans here over the next, oh, about 10 minutes. And then Aimee will spend the rest of the time getting into DEIB findings, implications, recommendations.

So as you see, we defined new as a strategic plan that launched during the 2022 or 2023 calendar year, and we identified 54 publicly available strategic plans. And 54 happens to be exactly half the number that we originally analyzed in our previous research when we had a broader criterion of simply active or current plans.

And these 54 strategic plans came from 34 public and 20 private four-year institutions spanning 29 states. And we always find it interesting, just a side note, that full strategic plans are not always publicly available, particularly at private institutions. 

And then that next slide, as Aimee alluded to one of the criteria for being strategic, that it should require a change in behavior, that your plan should not be full of items that you should be doing already. Strategy is also an exercise in choice making, what to do and what not to do. And that requires focus. And in these 54 new plans, we saw evidence of greater focus and more choice making. 

So we’ll take a look here at how that played out in numbers. In our previous research of 108 plans that were active in 2020, the average number of overarching priorities was 5.5. And in new plans then, the average number of overarching priorities as you see decreased to just under five. 

And then on the next slide you can get a broader view of that. So having five overarching goals remains the most common for strategic plans, but there’s a much more condensed range of the number of institutional priorities. So in new plans, that range was three to seven. Previously the largest was a whopping 22 overarching priorities. And we saw several examples of institutions with 10 or more strategic priorities or overarching goals. So not exactly examples of exercising focus there. But seeing more focus in terms of number of priorities and newer plans.

So next, we even looked at how long are the strategic documents themselves. The average length of active plans in 2020 was 22 pages as you see. So if newer plans have fewer priorities on average, we would expect the documents to be shorter as well. And that was indeed the case. The average drop to 16 pages across those 54 new plans.

And then here as well, you see a more condensed range among new plans in terms of document length. And yes, there is actually such a thing as a one-page strategic plan, you can have a one-page strategic plan. And then next duration—duration of strategic plans is always an interesting topic. Is, for instance, a 10-year plan too long? Can a 10-year plan be relevant amidst a changing and uncertain landscape? Do you have to have a shorter plan? 

And as you see here on the next slide, we’re seeing more examples of plans having shorter timeframes. New plans are more than a year-and-a-half on average shorter. One of the presidents we talked to across our interviews had moved their institution from a five-year plan to rolling three-year plans and explained to us how a shorter plan enabled the institution to be more responsive.

But, a shorter plan does not automatically mean a more strategic plan. In our original study, we had examples among the plans that we determined to be the most strategic of a few institutions that took a longer view and did so for compelling reasons. Of course, the reason for shorter plans often is that it’s hard to predict the future, there’s uncertainty, there’s an ever-growing set of challenges. But that is the essence of strategy, making choices about how to succeed in a dynamic, changing environment. And you see here, the most common timeframe for plans is still about five years while the average has come down.

And one noteworthy item that we saw in new plans that we didn’t see in our previous study is strategic plans without a specified end date. We encountered a handful of these examples among new plans. So those three- or five- or even 10-year increments that are often common, are often arbitrary milestones. So does a strategic direction instead make sense, instead of a plan? And a few institutions that we saw called their actual plan or their approach, not a plan, but the institutional strategy or strategic direction—again, with that aim of ideally helping the institution to be more responsive as conditions, as market forces change.

And we also saw this reflected in the terminology associated with overarching goals or priorities. There was a wider range of language conveying those. So you see here, ongoing objectives, imperatives, commitments, guiding themes are all a bit more fluid than finite goals.

And then in our previous research here were the five most frequent overarching priorities across plans. Diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging goals appeared most frequently in plans overall. And goals around financial sustainability, community outreach, student experience and success, and research and scholarly activity were most common. 

And then among newly launched plans, it was clear that institutions are for the most part pursuing the same types of ambitions. Nearly every goal fit into one of these broad categories or the next most common set of categories that we’ll show in a moment. So four of the five categories of goals were again the most frequent across new plans, but this time student experience and success was the most common overall. 

Now that doesn’t mean that DEIB was less prevalent or less important in new plans. We’ll mention next how new plans were more likely to include institutional values. So we saw DEIB expressed in that way and then often embedded in other goals throughout plans such as building more DEIB focus into student success goals.

And we point out the next most common overarching priorities in new plans because people and well-being was a new addition. And it’s not surprising that institutions now wish to put greater emphasis, a higher priority on taking care of their people based on what everyone went through during the pandemic and what institutions experienced with the Great Resignation. 

Aimee will talk more about this in the context of DEIB, but the point I’ll make here is that while it’s encouraging to see new strategic plans bringing attention to their employees and their well-being, the strategy or the set of choices associated with this overarching goal wasn’t necessarily clear as we analyzed the content of these plans. Goals were often fairly vague and we’re heavy on exploration, such as exploring improvements or forming committees to explore. So this will be an interesting one to track going forward in terms of the actual outcomes.

And then one more item from new plans: In our original research, 40% of plans called on institutional values and explicitly stated those values in the strategic plan. Which somewhat surprised us, we would’ve expected a higher percentage. Are values really values if they’re not an evident part of the conversation about an institution’s future? And that percentage, as you saw briefly and will come back, jumped to 55% among new plans launched in 2022 and 2023. So with the disruption from the pandemic and other factors, it certainly appears that leaders are recommitting to institutional values to some extent and trying to ensure that an institution’s choices about its future are anchored in institutional values.

And related to DEIB, there are several implications here. One question is what invitation do your values extend, and who can be included? And it was encouraging when we interviewed leaders and checked in with leaders of the most strategic plans, institutions with the most strategic plans, we got really energized in hearing from those leaders about how they were orienting around moral and ethical values that they were putting into action.

Aimee 

And thank you so much for using that and setting that context for us. This is such an important moment for establishing those values, clarifying those values, and this is such a natural lead in to the concept of DEIB. What was interesting for us this time around, as Rob noted, DEIB is still prevalent in these plans. There’s also the people and wellness and student success categories. It was interesting to get to go back into interviews with people that we met before and talk more in depth about that with them, about what’s happening. I mean in 2020, it seemed like a lot could change. Now we’re curious what’s happening with that stuff. So overall, there are three overarching themes in our most recent work here. The first is, again, that ongoing ethical commitment. Rob talked about that energizing feeling; they’re still feeling that. There is a little fatigue and some getting down in the dirt and doing some really practical work with their constituents, but they’re still pushing. They’re being creative. They’re being persistent. And they’re also really working through, “What is our specific institutional language? What is the lineage or history of the language that we’re using, and how are we putting that into work?”

And of course, this is framed by conversations on social media. We see this in LinkedIn, all of these kinds of questions about, “Does the language of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging really matter? What do you call it? Is it diversity? Is it equity? Is it justice? What is the division that drives these endeavors on your institution called? Does that matter?” And then there’s also this political element as in this cultural element where, on some occasions, it can feel like these things are unspeakable. And we’ll talk a little bit about that.

One of the questions, then, that people always want to ask is, “Does the language matter or is it just the work?” And we say: It all matters. The language very much does matter because that is how you communicate, how you share meaning, how you join together as a community. And then as we’ll talk about, you do have to be thoughtful when you’re crafting that language, about how that then gets expressed through the actions that you take.

So here’s some of that student success language. And what was interesting in these shifts that we saw is we did see among those 54 plans that some did not use terms like diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging very explicitly. However, they did have a lot of language about student success measures, things like access, affordability, welcoming environment. Now what’s so interesting about these is if you do them well and intentionally, they are penetrated with DEIB concepts, activities and vocabulary. We have heard in conversations that we’ve had with some colleagues on campuses that when they use language like this, they are gesturing to DEIB, but not using those words feels like it might protect them from some external surveillance from people who are watching what’s happening on campus. But it is a way to talk about the things that they want to achieve for students—though as Rob said, sometimes that can be vague. And we see that as well in the next slide when we pair that with “people and wellness” language. As Rob mentioned, it is so important that universities and colleges are taking a look at how they take care of their people.

You can see here “valuing people,” “being a great university to work in,” “faculty and staff excellence,” a “people-centered culture”—these words all sound great, but again, what is the mechanism, the outcome by which this is going to happen? How can you measure that outcome? Excellent, sounds great. What does it mean? And we’re going to advocate continuously throughout this presentation for being really specific and really clear, because then you can set outcomes, you can measure outcomes, and it becomes very difficult to argue with success when you are meeting the checkpoints that you’ve set for yourself.

We want to also give you some examples from strategic plans. This is a really interesting one. Several of the institutions that we dealt with in our research were land-grant universities. Some of them were putting forth really strategic efforts and gaining huge ground. One of the things that we found interesting in this particular plan is the way that it establishes land-grant universities and this particular institution in the American West with the appropriation of Native American territory as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Act. One of the things that was interesting in this plan is to see them tie that institutional history to a plan to engage in DEIB activities: research, more inclusive education, community impacts as a way of redressing that history, and also thinking about all the ways that they could have societal impact. And one of the things that we did notice—getting back to the idea of transparency and the most strategic plans is—they’re really clear about ways in which the institution may not have lived up to its mission or its promise in the past. And they’re also very clear about where they have the opportunity, the power, the spirit to work on those things and to really grasp the things that are beautiful and to push those forward.

This excerpt is from the strategic plan of a southeastern United States public university. And it situates the way that students experience that campus in terms of their long-term trajectory—who will they be when they graduate over the course of their lives as social change agents, as creators, as practitioners? And you see here them talking about belonging, which is something that we’ll talk about in a little bit more depth later, meeting all of the kinds of needs that students bring with them to college, understanding food security, mental health as important issues, and also thinking about how you create an environment where there is safety. One of the things that is really important about these things is, while they may follow under our understanding of DEIB work in certain ways, when you enact these things, they tend to be good for everyone. This is a really clear statement and actually one of the most forthright in our dataset of 54 in terms of laying out specifically what the theoretical and philosophical approaches are that will underpin their activities.

And again, going back to the idea that higher ed is starting to think about employees, one of the concepts that we’ve seen a lot is the idea of meaningful work, or, what is it that work contributes to your life more generally? It’s a recognition that work is more than just the place where you earn a paycheck. Colleges and universities are grappling with the fact that if you give people work where they know what is expected of them, they know what their work contributes to in the larger picture, they are rewarded for their efforts, there is career pathing and they have a sense of accomplishment, that has tremendous positive ramifications across the entirety of their lives. If they feel good, if they feel happy or satisfied at work, it is much easier to carry that feeling into the parts of your life when you’re not on the clock or when you’re not working. Here we see that emphasis in terms of thinking about an inclusive environment and also the idea of skilling your workforce such that even if they don’t spend their entire career trajectory with you, that you are giving them what they need as professionals who are not students who are further in their life journey, giving them the equipment that they need.

An interesting set of conversations happened in this second round of research when we really were tying together DEIB with the other element of shared governance that came up because one of the questions that we were curious about coming out of COVID is now that things have shifted back to normalcy in terms of bureaucratic procedure on a lot of campuses, how are you dealing with, or are you practicing, the same forms of governance, shared responsibility, et cetera? And what your campuses are able to do in terms of DEIB often does come down to what kinds of things are possible given your governance environment.

The president of Volente University, which is a Midwestern university—and just as a note, we pseudonymized the names of these institutions in our original research because some of the things that they were talking about were intimate topics of conversation when you’re talking about the conversations that you have about the things that your institution wants to change about itself—so we’ve been able to continue that in this most recent round.

This president was really tying all of these things together when he talks about wanting to foster a campus culture where conversation can be had in a civil manner. Also, how they use that conversation to define the concept of inclusiveness and their strategic plan because they’re very committed to that. And also, again, getting to that idea that people are watching the things that happen on campus, that external watching and readiness to intervene on campuses can make it difficult to have a good conversation. But they really were invested in a very deep way in figuring out how to have a lot of tough conversations. And he is one of the presidents who expressed this incredibly deep ethical commitment to inclusion. As we’ve been able to follow them over time, we’re happy to be able to report that his community seems to be really moving in a unified direction with him. They’re taking on the language of the strategic plan, understanding, regardless of their role on campus, how they can push that forward. And so for them, it’s been working.

He wasn’t the only one to mention how the Chicago Principles play into shared governance and the concept of heterodoxy, which we’ll talk about in just a minute. And one of the things that we wanted to point out from the Chicago Principles is that essentially the university as an institutional or bureaucratic body would set the trajectory. It is the combined efforts of the conversations of individuals, the discourses that they have among themselves that help push the institution forward. And so we just wanted to bring this text forward, the idea that it’s not up to the institution to set the boundaries for those conversations. It is up to individuals to do those things. And then as a product of those conversations, institutional goals can be achieved.

So you may have seen in Volente’s president’s statement this idea of a traditional sense of inclusiveness. This was a really interesting moment in the interview for us. It caught our ears. What does it mean to have traditional DEIB at a moment when it feels like it’s pretty radical to be talking about diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging on a campus? And so what we’re saying is that people are positioning binary categories of traditional DEIB discourse—that which is coming out of the civil rights movement that has an intellectual and traditional and scholarly history, there’s been a lot of activity there—with this idea of a heterodox or non-traditional form of DEIB. And that emerges out of a couple of different perspectives, one of which will come from a religious institution we’ll talk about in a little bit, where their religious charter understands human diversity a little bit differently. And they say that traditional American discourse is based in traditional or American historical understandings of race, ethnicity, et cetera, so it doesn’t necessarily apply or recognize everyone.

There’s also this concept that as an institution, our mission may be written in such a way that we need to make this vocabulary work for us. So we’re going to revisit that a little bit, but we wanted to mention this because you will hear this. And one of the things that comes up out of this discussion for all of us who are interested in this is the provocation and invitation to be really intentional about our language to understand if we use those words, what do we mean by them? How are we getting to that definition? What is that going to lead us to do?

Now we’re going to move into some practical advice. As we’ve mentioned, we think that this can apply regardless of what role you have on a campus, and it’s really about being steadfast in your commitment once you develop what those are. And we’re going to talk about some more of our interview data, what leaders have taught us about how they’re doing this work. One of the things that’s great about this is if you’re writing a strategic plan right now, if you are working up to one, if you’re in a plan, these are things that you can apply across all of those phases. Once a plan is activated, tuneups can be a great idea. So this can apply at any point in a strategic planning process. And we know faculty, students, staff members, all of them, can be called upon to participate in this process.

Okay. The first bit of advice is just to be a student of your own community. One lesson that we’re taking away here is that a lot of times we talk about our community members, but we don’t necessarily know them well or some of the details of their lives. And here in these questions, you’ll see some of the things that we are attentive to if we’re on a campus visit. For instance, if people are dealing with the institutional bureaucracy, say students, how do they interact or self present when they go into the financial aid office or the registrar, are they dressing up? Are they working on their self presentation in some way to show themselves to be competent adults? Who speaks in meetings and other public places? What do they say? How do people respond to them? And then how is space used differently by different members of your community? One of the things I can tell you as an anthropologist is that walking is a valid research method. Going out and looking at your community, trying to see it differently, asking yourself, “What is really happening here? What haven’t I noticed before?” That can give you a lot of information about thinking about those details of daily life that sometimes we don’t necessarily know so well because we’re just so used to navigating that environment already.

And we saw this at work with the president of New Center University, which is a public university in the northeast. In 2020, they were really set on becoming a Hispanic-Serving Institution. And when we checked in with them, they were well on their way to getting recognition as an Emerging Hispanic-Serving Institution—even though, as you’ll note in her quote here, “It has been challenging because everyone’s not on board with that.” But she is leading as part of a team and she is very clear that she is a teammate in this effort, engaging in those conversations, getting out in the community talking, and her sense of trying to understand what it is that people need has led to a couple of other really important initiatives. One of which is the development of a collaborative budgetary process where she invites faculty and other members of the community into the budget process so that they see where money is going, what kinds of buckets it’s going into.

And she also has been involved in generating a program to help students who have stopped out because of life circumstances or because of small bursar bills to bring them back in to clear those bills if they need to and to get them graduated, understanding that students might have made different choices if other opportunities had been open to them. But the genesis of that is her immersion in her community and understanding that. And also, we’ll note, we talk a lot about data, having data, knowing where you can get it, having people on your team who understand, who think about what is the smart way to use this data, what does it tell us about where we’re going—that’s absolutely fundamental. She has created this beautiful web for herself that supports her efforts precisely because she’s such a student of her community.

“Diversity is everybody’s job.” This is something that we heard across several interviews, and this is from the chancellor of the University of the West. When we met them in 2020, they had launched this very ambitious strategic plan that had lots of DEIB components in terms of internationalization of the campus, supporting faculty, things like creating more housing for students, I mean really getting into the nitty-gritty. And they’ve been so successful and achieved so much positive press for the things that they’ve been doing that they actually have been asked to lead new efforts for their state because of the notoriety that he says there, those “positive consequences.” And they’ve moved into thinking even bigger in terms of what it is possible for a land-grant institution to do. What are the real universe-transforming kinds of activities that they have at their fingertips? And they’re able to do that because they are so attentive to what’s happening around them.

We also want to urge being attentive to language. We talk about the language of DEIB, and sometimes in plans we see we want students from or scholars from other countries to come. We want language learning to be part of this. But they’re not necessarily specific about how that’s going to happen, what the outcomes of that are. And as you’re taking that ethnographic walk or you’re seeing your community anew, really look at the language that is happening around you. So you can think in terms of your language landscape, your linguistic landscape, where are the posters, what sorts of scripts do you see around you? Where do you see language being present in the physical environment? Do you see promo videos? Are people subtitled? Who gets subtitled in videos? Things like, who benefits from your language curricula? There’s evidence in the literature that folks who are second language speakers may get more economic capital or economic success after graduation than people who are first language speakers.

And then also, if you have people who use signed language on your campus, where do you see that happening? Those conversations require different space affordances because signing in a large conversation takes up space differently than an oral conversation. And so paying attention to all the ways that language plays out on your campus, including is it safe for all members of your community to use their languages off campus or are they really trying to restrict that behavior to an on-campus environment? All of these things can be really important for helping you understand what sorts of opportunities you have for thinking bigger about DEIB.

Then once you have this understanding of your community language, then you can engage in these intentional conversations about, “Are we going to use the word diversity? Are we going to talk about equity? Are we going to talk about inclusion”? And inclusion is one of those words that we see so often, but again, it can be used in very institution specific ways. One of the most frequent references we see is to the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ definition of inclusion that you see here involving intentionally bringing together diverse groups that are “actively connected and engaged,” talking about being part of an “active and just community”, “knowledgeable,” “respectful” and “rich.” These are all really wonderful things, but you get a sense of motion and activity. There’s no resting here.

And one of the things that we do see in some strategic plans is the concept that if we just bring people of different backgrounds and perspectives into a shared space, that constitutes inclusion. But what we often see is that they’re just putting people in the same space. You have to be very intentional about thinking about how you get them to interact. If you want them to understand each other, what does that mean? What should they be able to do because of that understanding? Inclusion is something that is very intentional and active.

And on the next slide, we’ll talk about the concept of belonging because this is a big one that people use, and they’re not necessarily using it the same way. We give a sense of what it would feel like to belong. In this definition, this ties this to the student experience saying that a student who feels that they belong “feels oneself to be an important part of the life and activity of the class.” And this always makes me chuckle thinking about those student emails: “if I miss class today, what am I missing?” The reflex of that question is that if that student misses class today, the class is missing them, they belong, they are seen, they are understood, their perspectives are very important. There’s also this sense of naturalness. They naturally are part of that class.

We sometimes see this paired with welcome. And welcome can be great language, welcome is a great thing. In some cases, that can mean, also, that if we are welcoming you in, you are not naturally or innately a part of the community. So that is a word to use with some circumspection, intentionality and thought. As you’re thinking about this in your own lives, I mean, think about a moment when your colleagues have really seen or understood you, when you have felt that they knew who you were and appreciated what you were bringing to your role. And have conversations with your colleagues about moments when that has happened. See what’s shared among those experiences, and that will help you to understand what it means to think about belonging. And again, this certainly should be applying to faculty, staff and administrators.

Then we urge when you are getting to the point where you’re starting to write a goal or an objective, even at the department level—we’ve seen lots of department or unit level strategic plans as well—what are the outcomes that you want to create for members of your community and what are you actually willing to commit to? And we’re going to talk a little bit more about that because we’re going to talk about the concept of performativity in just a minute. For instance, if you are telling your students, “Coming here is going to give you exposure to lots of different kinds of people, you’re going to have to work in a multicultural environment. You need to be competent to do that.” What does that actually mean? Can they imagine what that’s going to look like? Do you share with them that teams that comprise people who have different backgrounds and perspectives often come up with the most innovative and novel solutions to problems? There’s a lot of creativity and smartness that is generated by being part of a community of people who are different from each other. Being specific about what you think it would look like for your students to have that experience is really important for setting out the outcomes. And you can think about that as it applies to faculty, staff and administrators, and even the goals that you have for your communities as well.

So this goal of committing to DEIB with clarity, I mentioned we were going to talk about an institution with a religious background. We call it New Ignatian University. There are some really provocative points in this president’s quote. First, “Diversity is a means, not an end.” This quote is taken from a conversation we were having about a student who came from a country who was the only person from that country to ever attend this university. And this president was saying, under “traditional” American DEIB discourse, this person does not register as a quote “diverse” person, even though they’re very clearly bringing with them a different background and perspective—we’re not trying to bring him here to add to our institutional diversity. The point that we’re bringing him here for is to equip him with knowledge, with skills, with ways to improve his life and the life of his family.

And he also said, “DEIB in the United States is a different intellectual tradition” than their religious tradition, which has a span of hundreds of years and a “global perspective,” that he says, “orients them a little bit differently.” And he also gets concerned that sometimes students from underserved backgrounds come in, we wrap them in the language of social justice, but are we also wrapping them in our professional networks? Are we sending them job ads? Are we walking them through how to interview? Are we getting them those material effects of having a college education? And his line here: “We tend to underserved underrepresented students, not consciously, but out of habit,” should be an invitation for all of us to think, “Are we serving our habits or are we serving our people when we undertake these initiatives?”

I mentioned performativity. Sometimes we hear or are part of conversations about, “People on the internet are going to come get us. This is really hard work.” It is hard work. People do get upset. Let’s unpack this concept of performativity to take some of the air out of that or to help you understand what’s going on with that so that you see that as actually an invitation. So when audiences are talking about performativity or performative language, we know they’re pointing at a moment where they feel like something that you’ve said and your actions don’t align. Now, one of the things that is at play here is there’s some discussion or debate in American society about whether language is powerful, whether it has any effects on the world, whether it changes anything, or whether it creates a context in which actions can happen. And people who are talking about performativity are standing in that space that says, yes, language does do things. It makes possibilities. It creates responsibilities.

When you say something as an institution, we [as the audience] are thinking about what institution you are. We are interpreting who you are as an institution. We are interpreting promises or things that you’re going to do now that you’ve spoken. And they want to see what those effects are. Understanding that audiences are seeing it that way, that when you talk about an issue of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, you’re saying something about those institutional values that Rob talked about—that you are talking about whether you can live up to your commitments. Understanding that at the beginning is really important. 

Understanding that when people respond with accusations or say you’re being performative, that’s an invitation to a further conversation. And if you see it that way, that can take some of the power out of that or give you a new entrée into that conversation. It’s also an invitation to acknowledge when we don’t know something to say how we’re going to figure it out, when they can expect to hear from us about what we’re figuring out. So this possibility—understanding that your language is powerful, it does things in the world—that actually can empower you to act.

At this moment, we’re going to move toward concluding. And again, we hope that this advice that we’re bringing to you empowers you to act or to think in new ways. And we’d love to have questions and conversation about this. Of course, one of the things that we want to say is our motivation in this work is really inspired by you and the important work that you do and the belief that we have in higher ed as a transformative entity, as transformative in the lives of so many people. We do this to support that effort. And so if you have any questions or comments, we would love to have them either here or via email afterward. And again, we’re just so thankful to Melissa, to Jana, Bay Path and CHELIP for the opportunity to participate in this conversation.

Before we end, we have a few more further resources. On RHB’s website on the next slide, you can see we have an executive summary and a book-length version of our 2020 research, which goes more in depth into some of the things that we’ve talked about today, including DEIB. One of the other things we want to note from our work is the importance of having your marketing and communications folks in the conversation. Because they are the champions of your audiences and they understand your community, they can help guide you in this process. Lots more information about all the things that make strategic plans strategic.

And then on the next slide, again, more about our most recent three installments, that shared governance, as well we talk about the rise of chief strategy officers, more on those shifts in higher ed that we’ve talked about—even more than what Rob was able to cover today—and more about DEIB in higher ed. We really want you to come away with this and from our research generally with the sense that we had that: this is a really great opportunity to join forces and to unify and to move with a spirit of hope toward progress for your institution. Thank you so much.

Melissa

Thank you, Aimee and Rob. This was so insightful, and I really appreciate the wisdom and the strategic thinking that you both bring to this work and the good suggestions. Let’s take a moment to see if there are any questions. We’re going to ask Jana to take a look at the question box and let us know.

Jana O’Connell

Go ahead. First question we have is, do you find that land-grant universities have any different perspectives on DEIB than non-land-grant universities given their histories?

Melissa

That’s a great question. Which one of you wants to take it? 

Aimee

Rob, do you want to start?

Rob

Yeah, feel free. It’s so interesting across the portfolio of higher ed and all the different institution types to see how that is played out. It’s always interesting with land-grant institutions how that mission—and purpose—is manifested in such a visible and tangible way with so many of those institutions and what serving their state represents. And we hear from institutions, for example, a real intention around how do we and our student population, for example, how do we ensure that we’re representing or reflecting what our state looks like? Are we representing that in our student population, in our faculty and staff, for example? And in the way that there may be—and we talk about this in the research with—there need to be specific measures for your strategic plans. There need to be clear KPIs associated with your strategic plans and clear markers to track progress, to assign responsibility and accountability.

However, when it comes to DEIB work, for example, that work is never really finished. And those markers of progress need to go beyond that. There are qualitative metrics as well, and the work is ongoing. So we see a real attentiveness among land-grant institutions to factors such as that.

Melissa

Can I jump in? And obviously I wasn’t a part of your research, but from my own work with DEIB, I think the commitment to being transparent about reporting, assessing, however you do it, is so absolutely critical. And a willingness on the part of the institution to document your results even when the results maybe don’t match up to what you had hoped for, because trust is the bedrock of effective work in the DEIB space. And the way to get trust is to be transparent authentically and be willing to be honest about your efforts to have the commitment, but then to be honest in a very public way with how you’re doing, what’s working, what isn’t working.

Aimee, did you want to add to that?

Aimee

Just a quick thing and you actually, your comment there is so smart and segues into it so neatly. When I think about land-grant institutions, one of the things that we think about is the Extension service and the way that that works. We saw boots on the ground, hands in the dirt with different community members within a state. And that is one of those places where that trust building happens. But it’s also one of those places where people who work on the Extension side, including faculty that we meet at land-grant institutions, really come to understand their communities well. And then going back to Rob’s comment, this is really where you get some of that qualitative detail that helps you move forward in this unfinished work. But yeah, that was such a beautiful question. Thank you so much for that.

Rob

And Melissa, your point about transparency is critical across all of strategic planning. If we go back to how we determined plans were the most strategic, and that was on Aimee’s, on the slide with that list of genuine transparency at all phases. And sometimes that is, as you know, that can be really challenging. And those plans that were the most strategic, when they have that, what we called an honest self-examination, by doing that and being open and transparent, it makes a really persuasive case about the goals that you’ve identified and the outcomes that you’re aiming for when you’re open and honest about even where you’re falling short as an institution, including areas related to DEIB, how that does give credibility to the focus of your plan. 

And again, we don’t see a lot of that really genuine transparency across all aspects of strategic planning. We often say that strategic plans are, in many cases, more of a PR exercise because you’re trying to show how great the institution is and all the things that we’re going to achieve and how we’re great and we’re just going to become greater. But when you are willing to be transparent, it can generate momentum around the goals that you have within the plan.

Melissa

Yeah, I will say I think that’s easier for presidents who’ve been in the job for a while. It is virtually impossible for new presidents to lead in as transparent and as honest away as they might like to, just because of the pressure to succeed. It is tough. And that’s gotten increasingly more difficult as the years have gone on. So that’s another topic. That’s another topic for your research.

Rob

And I think of your conversation with Dr. Lori White from DePauw University, the president there, that was just released yesterday through the IngenioUs Podcast. And it will be interesting in her second phase, as you described, of her presidency there, the ability to likely be more transparent because of that, not being a new president anymore and having that contract extension. And it’s such an important point because the pressures are real and evident and sometimes not always realistic. As we looked across 108 strategic plans, for example. Everybody talked about growth, and we know that’s just simply not feasible for everyone to grow from an enrollment standpoint, for instance.

Melissa

Indeed. Indeed. Jana, any other questions?

Jana

No, that’s all we have for questions today, but it could have something to do with this just past the noon hour, so.

Melissa

Okay. Well, again, I want to thank Rob and Aimee. If anybody does have a question, feel free to send an email directly to them. I know that they are very accessible. They’d be happy to respond and have some dialogue with you about this.