People frequently ask me what the “secret sauce” for the UIA’s success is. While there are many elements I could point to in the scaffolding of our collaborative model, I believe the most essential ingredient is the UIA Fellows program. During the first year of building this work, I saw a common challenge on every campus: limited internal capacity to support collaboration and change work. To address this, we evolved and scaled a concept we saw at ASU onto our campuses, and over time our Fellows program has proven itself to be one of the most valuable and important elements of our work to improve student success.
Fellows provide each campus internal capacity to drive change while seeding a talent pipeline of future leaders skilled in facilitation, change management, and shepherding innovation. They allow student success administrators to breathe, do their jobs, and know that collaborative innovation will not be yet another under-resourced work stream. Too many great ideas fail to materialize because we never provide staffing support to ensure sustainable progress over time. UIA Fellows support (and are mentored by) highly effective senior student success administrators with overburdened plates (because good work in the academy is often rewarded with more work).
Over time, we have developed a critically important talent pipeline that the future of higher education always needed: bridge-builders, listeners, facilitators, and change agents. Most fellows are former first-generation college students, students of color, or Pell recipients, and all are passionate about student success. We continue to see exciting new collaborative national work drawing upon this new talent pipeline, expanding the potential impact of our work. Former fellows are now leading national initiatives, new collaboratives, UIA central, and have gone on to countless senior administrative roles at member institutions. I believe that developing this talented class of future leaders will be one of UIA’s greatest legacies.
The bittersweet nature of all this is that because fellows are so capable and talented, we always have to say goodbye as they leave us to move on and advance student success in new and different ways. Most recently, Dr. Derrick Tillman-Kelly, the former director of the fellows program and network engagement on the UIA central team (and the first Ohio State UIA fellow), returned to Ohio State to take on a new leadership position on campus. Like all our former fellows, we are immensely proud of him and can’t wait to celebrate the tremendous impact he will have in his career.
The most important thing we can do to transform our institutions is to invest in people, and the kinds of talented leadership higher education (and our students) need in the future. What talent needs do you see emerging on your campus? Is there a way you could support your current innovation and improvement work while you invest in the talent needs of the future?
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