Portland State’s experience driving its Student Success initiative during leadership transition has resulted in a roadmap for other universities to consult when they find themselves in a similar situation. This roadmap was developed as part of a six-year project in partnership with the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and the Coalition of Urban Serving Universities (USU). PSU was selected as one of three universities nationwide to study how universities overcome challenges stemming from common institutional issues.
The project — part of the Frontier Set initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — resulted in the development of three roadmaps examining how urban universities can turn the challenges presented during institutional mergers, leadership transitions, and new performance-based state funding models into opportunities to advance equity and institutional transformation.
Navigating Leadership Transition at PSU
The average term of university presidents continues to decline, on-average lasting less than seven years. Such transitions present major challenges to advancing and sustaining transformational change on campus. Portland State overcame leadership transition by adopting a student-centered approach to its transformation projects.
“We don’t have time for us to take another two decades to transform and reduce racial equity gaps, so what can we learn together as a network?” said Randi Harris, director of PSU’s Transfer & Returning Student Resource Center Program. “We navigated significant leadership transitions, yet we still maintained very steady in our goal for student success."
When designing programs focused on institutional transformation such as the PSU Futures Collaboratory, the university’s Students First initiative, and its ReTHINK PSU initiative, the university intentionally embedded the student voice throughout phases of the programs’ development and execution. Additionally, Portland State University recognized the importance of putting faculty, staff, and students at the heart of the transformation process, capturing data to measure progress, and acknowledging and accepting the near-term costs of transformation. Harris said this groundwork gives PSU a strong foundation to move forward in a sustainable, student-centered way. But the work isn’t finished. Harris said the next step for PSU will be implementing tangible racial justice.
Roadmaps for institutional transformation
PSU was joined by fellow urban-serving universities Florida International University and Georgia State University. All three serve first-generation, low-income and underrepresented minority students. Over the past six years, the universities shared extensively with each other what they were learning through the process with the aim of creating models for other institutions seeking to emulate and advance institutional transformation amid challenges that universities regularly face.
“Driving institutional transformation can be a daunting undertaking in the best of circumstances,” said Andréa Rodriguez, Director at USU and APLU’s Office of Urban Initiatives. “Yet we know universities are frequently faced with vexing challenges that can hamper the process of institutional transformation. The roadmaps are a guide for how other institutions can too be transformative through internal and external shifts.”
The roadmaps include profiles of essentials of institutional transformation:
- Portland State University’s Path to Transformation through Leadership Transition
- Florida International University’s Path to Transformation through a State Performance-based Funding Model.
- Georgia State University’s Path to Transformation Amid a University Merger.