Maureen Valentine

Reimagining and Refining Campus Cultures: Promoting Vibrant Learning Environments at RIT

This interactive session explores the journey of a university to intentionally and strategically transform its campus culture. Many organizations exclusively approach cultural change by creating and enforcing rules and regulations to promote gender equity and inclusion. Within this session, we will explore the possibility of augmenting this well-established campus paradigm with intentional organizational development initiatives. Through understanding best practices and developmental models utilized at other ADVANCE funded universities, we reimagine the campus culture and develop possible strategies to achieve the desired state. The AdvanceRIT team shares the story and impacts of their five-year effort to refine and influence campus culture to support a more inclusive campus environment. Campus efforts have included the creation and administration of interactive and high-energy unconscious bias education workshops, theatrical productions that explore navigating key faculty career milestones, bystander awareness sessions using Playback Theater, theatrical readings with discussion forums, and a new campus organization to actively engage faculty men in the cultural transformation process. Data related to these sessions will be shared, including participation numbers and workshop evaluations. The team feature the work of key partners from aligned organizations both within and external to RIT who have worked closely with the project team throughout this journey.

Institutional transformation at a large private technical university: Reporting on the accomplishments of a combined data driven top-down and bottom-up approach

The underrepresentation of women faculty in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) has been studied for several decades. Many programs have been developed with a bottom-up approach toward addressing this underrepresentation. While these bottom-up approaches are an important component in addressing the underrepresentation, the question arises as to their sufficiency for transforming an institution to address the issue. Another method considers the combined use of a bottom-up and a top-down approach in looking toward the goal of institutional transformation by removing barriers to resources that support career success and creating new interventions and resources. This paper reports on the progress of programming and activities that are underway during the first two years of an institutional transformation project (NSF ADVANCE 1209115) at a large-private technical university that incorporates this combined approach. The transformation is outlined using a multi-frame organizational analysis approach from Bolman and Deal, which integrates several aspects of organizational theory, including structural, human resources, political and symbolic perspectives. Data used to inform the top-down and bottom-up programming and activities is presented, as well as a discussion of milestones, accomplishments and lessons learned in the context of the overarching project goals and the framework posed by Bolman and Deals lenses.