In 2022, six women academics from three different Maryland institutions – (University of Maryland Baltimore County, Morgan State University and University of Maryland at College Park), at the request of their respective Presidents, designed and launched a leadership development program for humanities faculty. The program, entitled Breaking the M.O.L.D. (BTM) is now a unique Mellon-funded professional development initiative designed to create a pipeline to senior leadership in higher education for faculty members of color and women from the arts and humanities, as well as others with a proven record of promoting diversity within the academy. The six women who designed and became principal investigators (PI) on BTM, all serve as senior leaders on their campus and one is also a co-PI of the HuMetricsHSS Initiative. Over the course of its three year grant, BTM has become increasingly engaged with HuMetricsHSS.
Among the specific aims of BTM is to develop a diverse set of leaders shaped by humanities scholarly values and skills who understand the human experience as lived or performed, in addition to cultivating important leadership skills such as imagination, compassion, and understanding. Thus, as we began curriculum development, Bonnie Thornton Dill, one of the co-PIs on this project and a co-PI on the HuMetricsHSS Initiative, suggested beginning the program with a HuMetricsHSS workshop focused on identifying, sorting and prioritizing values as a first step to assist program participants develop their professional leadership philosophy. This was also consistent with our guiding tenets: that leaders need to know themselves and be given opportunities for self-reflection about their mix of talents and skills, temperament and aspirations within higher education/the academy. We also wanted to provide opportunities for participants to learn to work together, to build trust and community and we knew that discussing and developing shared values would facilitate that.
In the first year of the project, our opening joint cohort meeting (where the teams from all three campuses meet together) - began with a single HuMetricsHSS workshop that focused on building shared values frameworks within each campus cohort. In that two hour workshop led by Bonnie and Nicky Agate, a HuMetricsHSS co-PI, all members of the inaugural BTM cohort teams and their leaders worked in campus-based teams, discussing the meanings of their values, built values frameworks that reflected their aspirations for their institutions and shared their particular campus vision with each other. Throughout the program’s first year, participants and leaders frequently referenced the values framework they had developed collectively. Many indicated how the exercise prompted reflection on personal and professional experiences that they had not considered as explicit parts of “leadership.” This experience offered them the space, tools, and process for creating their own values-informed leadership philosophy and for conducting and engaging in discussions of shared values as a way of working with colleagues toward shared goals.
As we reflected upon the activities of year one and began planning the program for year two, the BTM PI’s agreed that beginning with values was a particularly felicitous way to ground our leadership development program in humanities approaches and thinking. Thus, explicit discussion and clarification of values and their intentional application to leadership topics and challenges were infused throughout our year 2 curriculum. Through our collaboration with HumetricsHSS, which was developing new strategies and exercises, BTM had access to additional tools to apply in leadership development. In this way, we began developing the contours of a values centered leadership program grounded in the belief that participants’ values should serve as the anchor for their leadership aspirations and professional goals.
Thus, the joint cohort meeting in year two began with two HuMetricsHSS workshops: the first was the workshop conducted in year one which introduced participants to the HuMetricsHSS’ values-defining and framework building activities; and the second was a workshop in which participants identified a meaningful change they’d like to make in their institution and learned how design a process using values- centered approaches and strategies to implement institutional change. Each of the three cohort groups were tasked with identifying a meaningful change they wanted to make on their campus, deciding upon shared values that would frame their approach and outlining or undertaking the steps in the process of implementation.
The specific HuMetricsHSS exercises that guided this process were those that focused on assessing their individual agency (power), allies and opponents (people) and outlining a process that took into consideration institutional procedures, resources and points of influence (processes) critical to making change. From there, they identified indicators of progress (milestones) and small steps that could be accomplished over 3 -6 months (stepping stones) toward achieving their goal. In this way they began to see how to move values from abstractions to strategic tools for making transformational change. Each team worked on their project, described below, throughout the academic year:
Morgan:
MSU’s second cohort developed a faculty development project to assist associate professors seeking promotion to full professor and build a community of support for junior faculty around tenure and promotion, more generally. Activities included workshops on teaching, service, and research held in the Zen Den. Faculty in attendance engaged in peer-review of each other’s works in progress. The cohort distributed books, journals, and flash drives to support faculty who attend the planned workshops.
UMCP:
Title: Humanities Co-Lab
The UMCP cohort’s idea was to lay out a plan for creating a Humanities Co-Lab; a space for humanities scholars from different disciplines “to co-dream; co-organize; co-teach; co-edit; co-author and co-operate!” They envisioned that each year the Co-Lab would have a theme and developed a proof of concept for the first year focused on Catastrophe!
The values that framed their thinking were: Curiosity, Courage, Creativity, and Community. In preparing their proof of concept, they also identified a set of
Ethics, which included: Compassion, Empathy, Kindness, Imagination, Generosity, Respect, Engagement
Their milestones and stepping stones included identifying key institutional players and administrative avenues of support through meeting with the Dean's office; individual meetings with their Department Chairs to solicit ideas and attain support; working with Student Affairs to coordinate student engagement; and identifying local organizations that confront the issue through arts and community engagement. Down the road they envisioned developing undergrad or grad seminars on the theme; producing co-edited essays; and co-editing a special issue in a transdisciplinary journal.
The group presented and discussed the ideas with the Associate Dean and agreed to explore the possibility of doing this work through the College’s Frederick Douglass Institute for Leadership in the Humanities.
UMBC:
Title: A Proposed Center for Interdisciplinary Collaboration
This cohort proposed the establishment of a center for interdisciplinary collaboration, especially among STEM and the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. They imagine a space for sharing ideas for research, teaching, and community engagement, as well as fostering community building among faculty in order to reduce isolation and create opportunities for innovation. In addition, they plan to identify and develop mechanisms that incentivize, facilitate, support, and disseminate collaborative projects across different UMBC colleges.
In Fall 2024, the Dean ( Kimberly Moffitt, one of the BTM PIs) set aside a space about the size of a conference room, with comfortable seating areas, snacks, and a large dry erase board with pens in the Fine Arts building for faculty to use for meeting and discussing ideas.
In this, the third and final year of the project, we have institutionalized this approach and are convinced that the ambitions of the Maryland-Mellon Breaking the M.O.L.D. project were enhanced and advanced by expanding the initial one-day HuMetricsHSS workshop into a year-long approach that infused explicit and intentional discussion and analysis of values throughout the second year of programming. We found that HumetricsHSS provided the tools and mechanisms leaders needed to define and enact values in an explicit and intentional way and bring them together into a coherent strategy for change. This engagement also helped us broaden our understanding of leadership to present it as more than a title, a position or a set of specific skills. Instead we have come to see it as relational, based on trust and the inclusion and recognition of multiple voices and perspectives that broaden our focus beyond the individual to the collective. It requires practices that bring people together, facilitate trust and a shared sense of purpose in order to make strategic interventions that redress policies, practices, and organizational habits. These insights and conversations also helped broaden our approach to leadership development, because in extending “leadership” beyond particular academic administrative titles,we encompassed the ways our scholars lead in disciplines, in departments, among peers of faculty and staff members and through engagements in public communities. This approach affirms diverse identities, perspectives and knowledges as a basis for assessing and thereby enriching academic life so that it becomes a space in which a variety of people and voices can thrive. It was also an approach more suited to our body of participants, most of whom were associate professors and some of whom began the program expressing ambivalence about embarking directly on a path to senior executive leadership.
Both HuMetricsHSS and Breaking the M.O.L.D. share the goals of moving towards greater consistency between values and rewards in a more inclusive and equitable academy. They strive to redefine success and excellence in scholarly work by beginning with values discussions at all levels, as a way to better reflect the diverse and multifaceted nature of scholarly contributions and create greater alignment between institutional ideals, scholars’ values and the work and structure of the academy.
Portions of the language in this essay were drawn from a proposal written by the HuMetricsHSS team to which Bonnie Thornton Dill contributed.