Abstract
At this critical time, higher education needs more women prepared to assume senior leadership roles, both to fill the openings from anticipated presidential retirements and to provide higher quality decision making through more diverse perspective at all levels of leadership.
Higher Education Resource Services (HERS), founded in 1972, has provided leadership development opportunities for more than 4,300 women faculty and administrators sponsored by 1,100 institutions in the United States and abroad. HERS has recently implemented significant revisions of its signature HERS Institutes to address the new circumstances and challenges women leaders will face in guiding institutions in the decade ahead. This article examines the historical development of HERS, recent revisions, and future plans for expanding programs.
Revisions to HERS Institutes suggestimplications for those developing women in HRD, conducting research on leadership development, or concerned about higher education as a new leadership cadre faces the demands of the future.
Higher education institutions must develop more women faculty and administrators ready to lead now and through the difficult decade ahead. The White House Project’s Benchmarking Report (2009) documents research that increasing the percentage of women in leadership positions correlates with better organizational performance. Especially convincing are the Catalyst studies (Joy, Carter, Wagner, & Narayanan, 2007) that show a correlation between presence of women directors on corporate boards and better decision making and financial results. Because the impact of the current economic crisis will be with the higher education sector for the next decade and beyond, it is crucial for academic institutions to have the best leadership possible for steering the changes required.
After a decade in which the number of women college presidents has not increased (The White House Project, 2009), the widespread retirements anticipated over the next 10 years offer an unparalleled opportunity to create a more diverse leadership cadre. The American Council on Education (ACE) study, The American College President (King & Gomez, 2007) predicts significant turnover in president and chancellor positions and also indicates that retirements will affect the broader ranks of senior institutional leadership on most campuses. The decade ahead will be a critical period to prepare and promote women of all backgrounds to the highest executive positions and to strengthen the entire pool of women holding institutional leadership positions.
Advancing women to senior leadership positions and developing administrative leadership throughout the ranks of the faculty and staff have been the goals of Higher Education Resource Services (HERS) since the first HERS Institute in 1976. Between 1976 and 2011, more than 4,300 women faculty and administrators from 1,100 campuses in the United States and abroad have participated in intensive residential leadership and management development at one of three HERS Institutes—the HERS Bryn Mawr Summer Institute, the HERS Institute at Wellesley College, and the HERS Institute at the University of Denver. More than 90% of these participants were fully sponsored by their institutions. In Diamond’s 2004 survey of 1,347 HERS Institutes alumnae, 32% reported they had advanced to higher positions in the intervening years, with 14% of the total responding having moved into ranks of senior leadership. Today more than 400 HERS alumnae hold positions of dean, vice president/chancellor, or president/chancellor.
While these impressive numbers indicate the success of the HERS Institutes in advancing women leaders, they fall short of the increase needed to enhance gender diversity in higher education leadership. With that concern in mind, HERS has spent the last 6 years assessing and revising its signature programs with the goals of improving and expanding them. This assessment had two stages. The initial review addressed what were perceived as more difficult conditions for women leading in higher education during the past 10 years, noting generational differences in those perspectives. A second set of revisions responded to the increased challenges following the economic crisis of 2008.
This article traces the historical development of the HERS Institutes and the analysis of internal and external assessments used to shape changes to the curriculum, pedagogy, and format of the Institutes during the past 6 years. In addition, the article outlines next steps that HERS will pursue in research and program development to provide both more targeted support for women seeking executive roles and broader opportunities for more women’s leadership development on campuses that have sponsored HERS alumnae. Finally, the article will review key insights from the HERS program revisions and suggest implications for leadership development and human resource development (HRD) practitioners who wish to facilitate programs for more women to step into senior roles.
HERS Institutes 1976-2005: Advancing Women in Higher Education
The HERS Project, the forerunner of the HERS Institutes, began in 1972 at a time when higher education was facing pressures for change. Title IX of the Higher Education Reauthorization Act had just been enacted and a small group of women administrators working together in New England created a proposal for an organization that would offer support to women who wanted to move into administrative leadership positions in higher education. In addition, through the work of advancing women leaders, HERS also would provide assistance to academic institutions now facing legal requirements to provide gender equity in educational opportunities. The curriculum of the HERS Institutes, first offered in conjunction with Bryn Mawr College in 1976, had at its core this dual mission: providing leadership development to women faculty and administrators and supporting institutional change through the impact that HERS alumnae would have on their campuses.
The goals of that curriculum were captured in the title of Secor’s (1984) chapter on the history of HERS: Preparing the Individual for Institutional Leadership. The month-long HERS Bryn Mawr Summer Institute contained sessions related to broad areas of institutional practice: academic governance, human relations skills, finance and budgeting, administrative uses of computing, management and leadership, as well as professional development for leadership in the academic setting. By 1992, the curriculum was revised into units: Academic Environment, Institutional Environment, External Environment, and Leadership and Professional Development. The HERS Management Institute at Wellesley College, launched in 1977 as HERS Administrative Skills Program, met in five 2-day sessions across the academic year. As described by Speizer (1984), these interrelated seminars had three curriculum units running through them: Planning and Fiscal Management, Managing in Organizations, and Professional Development.
At both HERS Institutes, the curricular units were planned and led by senior women administrators who served as the faculty coordinators. The individual topic sessions were presented by administrators actively involved on campuses, rather than by scholars in these fields. The preference for practitioner faculty was designed so that the presenters served as role models for campus leadership and the situations they discussed illustrated real life for women leaders. The participants themselves were chosen from across the institutional areas of specialization: while faculty members were in the majority, women also came from student affairs, business affairs, library, computing, legal affairs, fund-raising, and other fields. Thus participants’ interactions reflected varied institutional viewpoints. The HERS assignments also reinforced the institutional perspective needed for best engagement at the HERS Institutes. Participants were required to interview at least five senior officers on their campuses so that they came with broad ranging information and varied perspectives from their own institutions. In addition they had to complete the HERS Current Position Analysis, in which they reviewed their roles on campus in relation to institution-wide challenges to find opportunities for professional growth, impact, and advancement.
Thus the HERS Institute leadership development programs exhibited five defining characteristics:
Focus on institutional leadership;
Time-intensive commitment (4 weeks or 5 weekends);
Practitioner faculty rather than scholar presenters;
Diversity of personal and professional backgrounds among participants;
Professional development for women leaders at different stages of their careers.
Other organizations committed to women’s leadership development sought the assistance of HERS in developing similar programs. From 1995 to 2005, the National Association of Collegiate Women Athletic Administrators (NACWAA) partnered with HERS to offer two 1-week NACWAA/HERS Institutes run for women coaches and athletic administrators. Today the program is a partnership of NACWAA and the NCAA (National Association of Collegiate Women Athletic Administrators, n.d.). From 2000 through 2007, HERS was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to help create a program for advancing women leaders in higher education for the new South African democracy. In 2003, women working independently as HERS-SA offered their first week-long HERS-SA Academy, with topics relevant to South Africa and to broader issues of higher education on the African continent (HERS-SA, 2011).
From 2002 to 2007, the Mellon Foundation supported Nancy Diamond in writing a history of HERS, which resulted in a study of HERS alumnae: the HERS Alumnae Survey, 1976-2003 (2004). The survey was created to gain insight into backgrounds of HERS participants, to gauge their satisfaction with the program, and to measure their sense of the effectiveness of HERS Institute participation in advancing their careers and their leadership capacities. Diamond (2004) distributed a self-administered questionnaire to the 2,887 HERS alumnae (out of approximately 3,300 total) for whom reliable mailing addresses were available; the survey received a 51% response rate. Participants were asked closed-ended questions about demographic, institutional, and professional characteristics, and perceptions of obstacles or barriers and satisfaction with career advancement. They were also asked two open-ended questions about their aspirations before and after attending a HERS Institute. A sample of 88 survey respondents was selected from various class years to participate in a follow-up telephone interview.
The HERS Survey yielded significant data about the experience of HERS alumnae. Of the 1,337 HERS participants who responded, more than 60% were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the overall HERS leadership development program. According to the combined measures of institutional impact, 75% of the alumnae demonstrated that HERS attendance had helped them achieve moderate-to-high effectiveness within their institutions (Diamond, 2004). Alumnae reported that HERS participation helped them to understand how their positions fit into the larger institutional mission and helped them to increase their credibility and influence on campus. Diamond’s survey (2004) found 70% of alumnae were either “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their career progress since attending the HERS program. Even more significant was the credit given to HERS for assisting with career advancement. About 60% of the alumnae indicated that an obstacle had impeded achieving career objectives. Of those who identified an obstacle, almost 60% indicated that the HERS program helped them to address that obstacle. Those in the position of dean, provost, vice president, or president were even more likely to credit the HERS experience with helping them to address barriers to move into senior leadership roles.
HERS 2006-2008: Curriculum for Advancing a New Generation
In 2006 HERS completed a major shift in leadership and organizational structure. After nearly 30 years, the founding director of the HERS Institutes retired. A cadre of the original advisory group for the HERS Institutes incorporated the previous HERS sponsored program as an independent nonprofit organization. The new president/executive director was hired to lead HERS under the guidance of a board of directors. With new leadership in place, the board began to discuss potential HERS program expansion for 2007-2010, including launching a new HERS Institute at the University of Denver, the first since the original two HERS Institutes were started in the 1970s. One of the first projects of the new president and board in 2006 was to begin a review of the long-time HERS curriculum. Lending urgency to this review was awareness that recent studies had revealed a slowing of progress for women’s leadership in higher education (Valian, 1998). HERS needed to understand the new conditions that might explain the lack of advancement.
The first stage of the program review targeted those in executive roles. HERS Board members felt that it would be important to understand the views of current senior leaders in higher education regarding women’s institutional advancement. A phone survey of 25 senior officers of colleges and universities (19 women and 6 men), as well as 5 academic search consultants, was conducted by 4 HERS Board members and a research associate in the HERS office during the winter and spring of 2006. The sample was selected by the research associate to include representation from different racial and ethnic backgrounds and institutional types. Participants in this inquiry were asked to respond to these three questions:
What are the current institutional barriers to women’s advancement in higher education administration?
What might HERS do to help women faculty and administrators overcome these barriers?
What might HERS do to help educational leaders in addressing these barriers?
Conversations with the senior leaders and consultants produced three major conclusions. First, gender-based obstacles remained firmly in place as women sought advancement to highest positions in higher education leadership. More than one interviewee reported recognizing how hard it was for trustees to accept women’s authority on finances or strategy. Second, higher education leadership positions were becoming more difficult as institutional executives faced challenging and even hostile responses from many constituencies. Presidents were almost wistful about an earlier time when their status guaranteed respect in the community. Finally, all reported trying to recruit women at middle and upper ranks of faculty or higher education administration who declined to take on the executive leadership positions.
HERS staff followed up the responses from senior leaders with questions for the graduating 2005-2006 HERS Wellesley Institute participants—early and midcareer women administrators. The two goals were to see how these women—who were perceived by women in the generation ahead of them as reluctant to advance to senior positions—would describe their circumstances and then to understand the implications for revising the HERS Institute curriculum. It became immediately clear that these participants would frame many of the issues in different language. When HERS staff described the research project to several younger women in the HERS Wellesley class, they refused to answer the initial question as posed. Instead they insisted that the question be reframed to acknowledge “progress” and opportunities as well as obstacles. The revised questions were then asked of the 50 women faculty and administrators completing the HERS Wellesley Institute in April 2006. Responses were gathered in anonymous written evaluations (Higher Education Resource Services [HERS], 2005-2006) and in a group interview conducted with the HERS research associate.
In many ways, the core findings from the recent HERS alumnae corresponded with those from the survey of senior leaders. The alumnae agreed that significant institutional barriers remained although these obstacles were often more subtle and thus harder to name and address. The opportunity highlighted most often by the 2006 HERS alumnae was the presence of many women in administrative positions, in contrast to conditions that had faced many women earlier as firsts in their roles. Nonetheless, the 2006 HERS Wellesley alumnae agreed that the move to the highest leadership positions was still blocked by gendered expectations of leadership as a man’s role. For these respondents, another frequently cited obstacle to advancement was the reality that women still bore primary family responsibility with inadequate accommodations from institutions. This finding was a strong echo of the generational difference found in “A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT” (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1999). In this study the senior women science faculty noted biased behavior and treatment blocking their path, while younger women resisted seeing discrimination. Instead they voiced the need for assistance with their families, a disparity in responsibilities they accepted with little question.
Like the more senior group, the HERS Wellesley participants also reported their perceptions that the environment in 2006 was more “demanding” and even more “hostile” than for leaders in earlier eras. The impact for women was disproportionately negative. Gender stereotypes about women’s lack of “toughness” worked against them under harsher circumstances. Women were subjected to quick, sharp criticisms for perceived “mistakes” or “weakness.” Yet when they did meet tough challenges in determined ways, women were faulted for being less than “nice.” Bias persisted that women could not handle money decisions. The women in the HERS participant group, often working in positions in middle levels within their departments and units, reported the new conditions in terms of much higher and more complicated workloads. They were intensely conscious that more was expected with fewer human and financial resources.
The gap between the views of senior leaders and those of the younger HERS participants came in their understanding of why younger women felt ambivalence about moving into executive leadership roles. As executive women and men saw it, the younger women were unwilling to “take risks” to advance. For many younger women, “advancement” meant harsher working conditions, ever-intensifying demands, and for those with families, the likelihood of strain and sacrifice in juggling competing responsibilities.
While understanding the perspective represented in the responses of the recent HERS alumnae, the HERS Board members, many of them leaders from the earlier generation, focused primarily on the suggestions from the senior respondents. After a discussion of both sets of findings, the HERS Board approved four recommendations as part of their HERS Strategic Directions: The Goals, Programs, Audiences 2006-2010 (2006b) on June 10, 2006:
Focus on external relations and connections between campuses and their communities;
Increase instruction related to financial analysis and budgeting strategies;
Encourage “risk-taking” as part of career and professional development;
Provide explicit gender analysis of academic politics and challenges women leaders face in this culture.
The HERS staff recognized that the first two topics recommended were already part of the HERS curriculum. Strengthened approaches would be welcomed by HERS participants. The second two suggestions, however, were in areas where the recent HERS alumnae differed in their perceptions from the views of the more senior women in the survey and HERS Board members. Before deciding on how to address these more contested areas (i.e., risk-taking and gender politics), the HERS staff needed better understanding of these differences in perceptions and their implications for revising the HERS curriculum.
The HERS staff reviewed the anonymous evaluations of the 71 participants of the month-long 2006 Summer Institute at Bryn Mawr (HERS, 2006a). Out of this follow-up inquiry came important insights about how HERS Institutes might help women overcome ambivalence about advanced leadership. Highly satisfied with the curriculum—90% rated their experience as “very satisfying” or “somewhat satisfying”—participants nonetheless suggested additional sessions in areas that clearly presented obstacles for women seeking to lead under more demanding conditions: negotiation and conflict management, career development, and understanding off-campus issues buffeting many institutions. And even though participants were divided, and some conflicted, about advancing into more senior roles, they were eager for more career planning and advice.
Reflecting changes in the academy and their own experience and commitments, participants wanted more diversity in the backgrounds of the faculty. They were looking for expertise in ethnic and racial analysis of the curriculum as well as gender analysis. Participants also requested attention to changing student populations and more focus on diversity issues in higher education. Additional topics were proposed in areas of emerging interest: assessing student outcomes, expanding distance education, combining research and service learning. Participants were not shy in noting that some of these topics were better understood by participants than by some senior presenters!
The most significant recommendation was not a set of additional topics. The participants of the Summer Institute 2006 were primarily concerned with the method of delivering the curriculum. HERS alumnae of 2006 were working on campuses that boasted “student-centered” learning. They made it clear that they were looking above all for a more “participant-centered” experience. They were not “blank slates.” Rather they brought expertise from a wide variety of positions. For the HERS staff, the challenge now was to find a curricular strategy that engaged the expertise of the participants and highlighted the relevance of their experience to the challenges to be faced in “higher” positions. With such an approach, HERS could underscore the steps that participants had already made in advancing toward institutional leadership.
HERS Institutes 2007-2008: Advancement as a Continuous Path
In the fall of 2006, HERS staff and faculty moved in three directions toward this continuous path approach. First, they reshaped the HERS curriculum to highlight the more complicated and rapidly shifting conditions for higher education. Second, they designed new approaches of the curriculum to affirm and strengthen the leadership already being exercised by HERS participants. Third, they encouraged participants to map their potential advancement as a continuation and enhancement of the contributions they had made and wanted to make to their institutions and to higher education more generally. Within this new framework, HERS participants were engaged to take risks on behalf of their commitments. Through the new HERS curriculum, participants would be prepared to seek higher positions if they chose. Two key changes catalyzed this transition: Reorganizing the “environments” units into broader curricular themes and creating new faculty roles and participant assignments to support greater engagement.
HERS Institute Curricular Themes
For the HERS Institutes curriculum 2007-2008, the environment units of the HERS Bryn Mawr Summer Institute were reorganized into four curricular themes. Each of these allowed the HERS faculty to focus on new relationships among topics that were raised in the curriculum review. The four themes developed were as follows:
Charting and Achieving Institutional Priorities;
Developing and Maximizing Institutional Resources;
Leading in the Academic Institution;
Mapping a Leadership Path.
Having made these key curricular revisions for the 4-week HERS Summer Institute, the HERS staff also determined that the shorter HERS programs would address the same curricular themes. While clearly it was not possible to cover all the individual topics of the Summer Institute in the 5-weekend HERS Wellesley Institute and the new 4-session HERS Institute at the University of Denver, HERS faculty developed an interconnected set of assignments linking the themes across the several sessions of the 12-day HERS Institutes.
New Expectations for Faculty and Participant Engagement
The four areas recommended for more emphasis in the HERS Strategic Directions (2006b) were all part of the new themes. Both external relations and finance and budgeting were clearly noted and combined with other topics in integrated themes. The recommendations on risk-taking and gender equity analysis were embedded in the units on Leading in the Academic Institution and Mapping a Leadership Path. The new themes addressed the skills and perspectives needed to handle the demands and the risks involved in exercising leadership. In addition, the HERS staff and faculty encouraged participants to link personal values with institutional missions—giving a feminist twist to Collins’ (2001) definition of “Level 5 Leadership: Personal Humility and Professional Will” (p. 20).
To support these new approaches, the previous role of faculty coordinator was redefined to take on new responsibilities to shape interactive assignments for the participants rather than focus primarily on the agenda of presentations. Two associate directors joined the director as full-time residential faculty. These new associate directors and several new faculty for the Summer Institute were chosen with the specific goal of adding to the diversity of the backgrounds and skill sets represented in the Summer Institute leadership.
The HERS Leadership Project was initiated to give each participant the opportunity to identify a project that she was expected to lead on her campus during the coming year and to work together with others in her project group to improve her design and implementation plan. Participant groups were formed to use in assignments and activities; the groups reflected both institutional types and professional roles so that participants had more chances to share experiences both within and across various professional identities.
This new approach to the HERS Institutes curriculum emphasized the steps that participants had already made in advancing toward institutional leadership and encouraged the midcareer and veteran women in the Institute to examine the values that lead them to commit themselves to higher education. The goal was to have HERS alumnae leave the Institutes with enhanced confidence in their leadership skills and more clarity about the reasons for taking risks and making trade-offs: to have more institutional impact.
HERS Institutes 2008-2011: Advancing Women and Reinventing Higher Education
By the fall of 2008, HERS staff and faculty had to move quickly to help participants respond as major shifts in American economic, political, and social life challenged institutions of higher education. The global financial crisis made it all the more important that HERS participants connect with urgent problems their senior officers were facing and prepare themselves to contribute to the reinvention of American higher education. During 2008-2011, HERS Institutes initiated three more major curriculum revisions to address the challenging work ahead. First, responding to the reality of greater time pressures and more limited financial resources, the schedule of all HERS Institutes, including the long-time 4-week Summer Institute, were shifted to offer a core 12-day women’s leadership development curriculum. The Summer Institute would be a 2-week residency; the academic year Institute would be a combination of four interrelated 3-day seminars.
Within this new format, two additional changes were initiated. Curricular themes were changed and expanded to allow for emerging issues. More attention, even in this shorter schedule, was devoted to analysis and solution-building by participants. After more than 30 years of offering HERS Institutes with similar goals but different curricular units, the HERS faculty and staff now focused their efforts on refining approaches to a single intense program of leadership development for women in higher education.
Revising Curricular Themes and Adding Special Themes
In 2009 the curricular themes for HERS Institutes were revised to focus more clearly on the challenges of global crisis and the need for immediate and long-term changes in higher education:
Understanding the New Environment for Higher Education;
Planning and Leading Change in the Academy;
Managing and Investing Strategic Resources;
Engaging Individual and Institutional Diversity;
Mapping Your Leadership Development.
In addition, special themes were articulated for the Institutes. For 2009-2010 the theme was “Women Leaders in Time of Crisis: Leveraging our Responses for Institutional Renewal.” In fall 2011, the special theme became a central focus of all major sessions: “Women Leaders Accepting the Challenge of Reinventing Higher Education.”
Participants Doing Analysis and Solution-Building
HERS faculty prompted participants to raise specific questions and share solutions they were trying on their campuses. The small group sessions devoted to HERS Leadership Projects and the Senior Officer Interviews encouraged participants to observe and analyze the processes by which their campus leaders were addressing the changing conditions. These discussions were shaped by theory and examples from the curricular units on Leading Change in the Academic Setting. All were integrated into the sessions on Mapping Your Leadership Development. HERS participants were challenged to realize they had much experience and creativity to contribute to immediate solutions and to the long-term reshaping of higher education needed for the decades ahead.
Evaluations from the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 HERS Institutes indicated high satisfaction with the quality of the 12-day residential program (HERS, 2009-2010, 2010a, 2010b, 2011a, 2011b). Enrollments increased such that by 2011-2012 the three HERS Institutes included 200 women faculty and administrators from 152 institutions in the United States and six other countries—the largest and most diverse classes ever. The revisions to the HERS Institutes curriculum, pedagogy, and format have been successful.
At the end of four decades, the intense residential setting of the HERS Institutes continues to provide an enduring and resilient model for women’s leadership development. What is equally clear is that in the decade to come, the HERS mission of advancing women leaders requires outreach beyond the Institutes.
HERS 2012: Advancing Women’s Leadership Development Beyond HERS Institutes
In 2012 HERS will celebrate 40 years since the HERS Project was launched to provide leadership development opportunities to women in higher education. Recent studies have only heightened the sense that the HERS mission is as urgent as it was in 1972. The White House Project’s Benchmarking Report (2009) documented that in higher education, as in other key fields of American life, women’s percentage of highest leadership positions has held steady over 10 years. The retirements expected among leaders in higher education will require more candidates for these executive offices as well as in many other senior leadership posts across all campuses. Equally pressing will be the need for creative, resilient, and mission-focused leaders at all levels. In order better to address its mission of advancing women leaders, HERS will mark the 40th anniversary of the HERS Project by launching three initiatives. All three build on the legacy of the HERS Institutes, employ insights from the curriculum reviews, and engage HERS alumnae. At the same time, the three anniversary initiatives represent significant new directions for HERS.
Women’s Leadership Research Project
What factors facilitate career advancement and what factors derail careers for women? HERS will collaborate with the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) and other institutional partners and sponsors to examine the experiences of women in executive leadership positions in higher education. HERS alumnae and sponsors will be among the participants, complemented by a large sample of women leaders representing different institutional types, regions, ages, and ethnicities. The project is designed to allow a cross-sector analysis with findings from similar studies carried out by CCL among women in corporate and other occupational sectors. The findings will be used to shape new curricula for women’s leadership programs both at HERS and at CCL. In addition, the research will be shared in presentations and publications so that it can also be available for leadership development, HRD, and higher education scholars and practitioners.
HERS Project on Presidential Succession for Women in Higher Education
The impending retirements among presidents and chancellors in higher education make it particularly urgent for HERS to take more initiative in advancing women through the senior ranks and into the chief executive role. Interviews with women presidents reported by Madsen (2008) and Kampel (2011) show the importance of having continuing connections with mentors during the transition to executive positions. Recent research by Hewlett (2011) indicates the significant impact of women having “sponsors” willing to use political capital to champion them for positions.
The first step in the HERS Project on Presidential Succession for Women is the convening of a HERS Summit for Women Presidents and Chancellors in Higher Education. One of the key themes for the gathering will be Creating the New Leadership Pool. Presidents and chancellors attending will be asked to identify factors they have experienced or observed among those they mentor that should be addressed in supporting women’s advancement. The second step will be interviewing HERS alumnae who are in positions of dean, vice president, or provost to encourage their interest in executive positions and gauge their needs for a more formal program of advice and coaching. Using these initial findings as well as research acquired through the collaboration with CCL, HERS will use its network to support more structured mentoring and advocacy for women candidates seeking positions as president or chancellor.
HERS Alumnae Women’s Leadership Development Network
HERS alumnae have always been urged to “take the Institute home”—to share their new learning with other women on their campuses. Most have done this through informal alumnae events with graduates sharing topics from the HERS Institute curriculum or inviting HERS faculty to make presentations. On some campuses, alumnae have undertaken more formal programs. These range from institutionally supported women’s leadership programs, such as those led by HERS alumnae at Emory University, Metropolitan State College of Denver, and the University of Tennessee–Knoxville, to a multi-institutional regional program, the Midwest Women’s Leadership Institute held at Minnesota State University, Mankato.
During this year of 40th anniversary celebrations, HERS will be working with a small group of recent alumnae to pilot another approach to offering HERS curriculum on campuses. This effort will foster collaboration among HERS staff, faculty, and alumnae, and offers potential for partnerships with senior institutional leaders and HRD professionals on these campuses. Recent alumnae, those most familiar with the revised HERS core curriculum, will work with others on their campuses to develop the series of topics most appropriate to the needs of the institution and of the women leaders to be involved. The campus team will then work with HERS staff and faculty to determine which topics will be addressed by campus or regional resources and which will be offered by HERS faculty. The partnership takes advantage of campus HRD expertise and focuses on local conditions and priorities.
As part of its anniversary projects, HERS staff will promote two additional on-campus efforts. First, HERS will survey alumnae for a more comprehensive account of the HERS-influenced and alumnae-led women’s leadership development programs being offered or being considered. Second, HERS will support the creation of a HERS Alumnae Women’s Leadership Development Network. The goal is to connect alumnae leading efforts on their campuses, both those of long-standing and the newest projects, so they can share expertise and encourage each other in continuing assessment and program improvement.
Implications for HRD Practice and Research
As HERS begins new efforts to expand leadership development opportunities for women, it is instructive to reflect on how HERS Institutes have been reshaped. Recent revisions to the original five key characteristics have implications for HRD practice and raise questions for further research by HERS and by others committed to advancing women leaders in higher education.
Focus on institutional leadership
HERS continues to focus on developing women faculty and administrators to lead in the complex institutional conditions of higher education. While HERS Institutes are clearly off-site programs, the curriculum attempts to ground the participants in the culture of their institutions through multiple campus-related assignments. At the same time, off-campus HERS Institutes offer space and support for participants to develop a broader perspective and a more critical stance toward institutional practices—including those that currently may be inhibiting women’s advancement into senior leadership roles. HRD practitioners leading on-campus women’s leadership development programs will surely find that some are reluctant to focus on various kinds of discrimination in their workplaces. Others will be eager to analyze institutional policies and to seek help in finding new approaches to gender equity. A key question for leadership development and HRD practitioners will be how to prepare participants to navigate their institutional politics and to lead in ways that create more opportunities for women of all communities.
Time-intensive commitment
HERS Institutes are now shorter but, at 12 days in length, they still represent a significant commitment on the part of participants and institutional sponsors as well as the planners and faculty. Such a commitment is necessary to provide what women leaders need: a comprehensive curriculum of interrelated subject matter and an opportunity for participant interaction and individual self-reflection. A key question for HERS and for HRD practitioners will be to determine what length of on-campus program is necessary to have an impact. It will be important as well to assess what types of formats—including new mixes of on-site and online offerings—can best provide the leadership development needed for women’s advancement.
Practitioner faculty rather than scholar presenters
HERS Institutes still use active and recently retired senior officers to present most of the curriculum. Unlike earlier Institutes in which presenters generally spoke only about their own areas of expertise, most HERS faculty now work together to create explicitly interdisciplinary assignments and case studies, or present in panels to provide a greater diversity of perspectives. The greatest change at HERS Institutes, however, is engaging the participants as practitioner faculty—to share their expertise in group work and consult candidly about each other’s projects. A similar approach in campus-based women’s leadership development programs would allow participants to expand their knowledge in areas outside of their own professional responsibilities, and create the institutional networks essential to broader impact and advancement. Using these practices in a campus setting, however, may present a new challenge: how to handle issues of trust and confidentiality when the information shared, by presenters and participants, has potentially more direct consequences to those involved. It will be critical for HRD practitioners to develop protocols to determine how to handle confidential information in the sessions while still developing the trust needed for shared reflection and support within the cohort.
Diversity of personal backgrounds among participants—and among faculty and staff
Valuing diversity has been an explicit part of the HERS commitment from its earliest years, with most of its efforts focused on greater representation of women of color and other groups underrepresented in higher education leadership. During the past 6 years HERS has added to this effort a new emphasis on creating a multicultural leadership team for HERS. Today the majority of the HERS Institute coordinators and consultants, and at least half of the guest faculty, are women of color. In addition, the HERS faculty regularly include women with a variety of personal and family backgrounds (e.g., straight, lesbian, single, partnered, with and without children). The percentage of women of color within HERS Institutes has increased to greater than 33%. The goal now is for all HERS participants, regardless of background, to have the experience of diverse role models, thereby preparing them to create inclusive leadership teams in their own departments and on their campuses. HERS seeks to join other women’s leadership practitioners in pursuing an aggressive plan to highlight leadership by women of color and to encourage program participation by women of color. The question for leadership development researchers will be whether this approach helps to make a difference in the number of women of color seeking and securing senior leadership positions.
Diversity of professional backgrounds among participants
HERS Institute classes include women from a broad range of professional roles and areas of specialization. Today, HERS faculty focus on making connections among their own areas of expertise, modeling the collaboration increasingly needed on campuses. They create interdisciplinary assignments so that participants can practice interdisciplinary approaches. They deliberately bring together women who work in different divisions on their campuses. Many campus-based programs and off-campus professional development opportunities are offered by specialty and thus tend to duplicate rather than dismantle these silos. A key question for HRD practitioners on campuses and in professional associations will be whether there is a distinct advantage in either of the approaches: does the need for more collaboration in higher education argue for the cross-specialization model?
Professional development for women leaders at different stages of their careers
HERS Institute classes today include a wide span of ages—from late 20s to early 60s—with the highest concentration of women in their 40s and 50s. This profile reflects a somewhat older and more experienced group than participated in HERS Institutes through the 1990s, but still represents a wide range of organizational positions and personal stages in each cohort. Across their differing ages and professional stages, women of recent HERS Institutes exhibit a common generational perspective about advancement. As with the HERS classes of 2006, they focus on family balance and express ambivalence about the trade-offs involved in moving up. In addition, the rapid changes coming in higher education are making the paths for advancement less clear for women faculty and administrators. For HERS and for other HRD practitioners, the immediate implication is that for women to advance they will need access to development programs early in their careers. They will also need continuing leadership development and advising, personal and professional, to navigate the rapid changes ahead. Providing this level of HRD programming under current budget constraints will require institutional commitment. The key research question for women’s leadership development practitioners will be determining what new skills may be necessary to prepare these women—now and at more advanced stages in their careers—to lead the transitions in higher education as new institutional models emerge.
Conclusion
For nearly 40 years HERS has been providing a model curriculum of leadership development for women in higher education. During the past 6 years the HERS Board, staff, and faculty have been in a continuous process of program review and curriculum revision. More than 1,000 HERS Institutes participants have been engaged in this process through evaluations, interviews, and planning sessions. In this unique laboratory, HERS has attempted to craft a program of women’s leadership development that both builds on its legacy from 1972 to 2005 and also moves beyond it to support the needs of women leaders and their institutions for the challenging times ahead. As a result of the recent assessments of the HERS Institutes, this signature program has changed in format, pedagogy, and curricular themes. For the first time, HERS is now planning initiatives beyond its Institutes to offer additional women’s leadership development opportunities. With these transformations, HERS is ready for another decade of pursuing its original mission: to advance women leaders for changing academic institutions.
Footnotes
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.