Bootstrapping curricular innovation: how does appointment type help or hurt faculty? by Melanie Fedri

In higher education, calls for more engaging and socially impactful curriculum have steadily intensified over the decades. In response, a complement of curricular innovations has developed around social entrepreneurship, undergraduate research, and service learning—to name just a few. A fair amount of scholarly work and informal commentary have circulated about the definitions and features of these forms of learning.  Equally important but less discussed (and certainly less researched) is exactly how these curricula develop within the university. A relatively straightforward explanation for some might be centrally earmarked or endowed funds provided in a top-down manner. For others, however, curricular innovation is, to borrow from the lingo of entrepreneurs, bootstrapped into existence by passionate people working in a bottom-up manner. These include faculty members, students, and support staff.

The question of how curricular innovation happens (or might happen) in an entrepreneurial way is complex and multifaceted. In this short piece, I’ll focus on how a faculty member’s job appointment could potentially encourage and discourage them from taking an active role in the process of bootstrapping a new or radically revised curriculum. In pursuing this question, I take a pragmatic view of higher education institutions, assuming that most do not have (and will not soon have) free-flowing budget lines to support curricular innovation to the extent needed to meet the demand for education that produces graduates who are visionary and practical social changemakers. I posit that, under these conditions, bootstrapping is (and may increasingly become) an important strategy for generating curricular innovation.

Entrepreneurship scholars define bootstrapping as “a set of processes through which entrepreneurs find resources, increase resource efficiency, and minimize explicit costs” (Patel, Fiet, and Sohl 2011, 421). Through it, the need for resources is partially met “without there being a financial transaction” (Windborg and Landstrom 2000, 237).  It “involves imaginative and parsimonious strategies for marshaling and gaining control of resources” and “strategies for minimizing or eliminating the need for finance by securing resources at little or no cost” (Harrison et al. 2004, 308).

Translating this to the world of curricular innovation, who is passionate enough to generate this scope of change? And who has the creative energy to do so with limited resources?

Tenured professors can safely pursue a full range of their interests, including curricular innovation, because their tenured status protects them from undue scrutiny and dismissal. They have the ability to act as PIs on large grants, from which they may be able to secure some amount of funding to help them in their pursuit of curricular innovation. While some tenured faculty do engage in such self-started curricular innovation, the majority appear content with the research focus they have been acculturated to over the years and lack the drive needed to break out of their well-trodden routines.

What about junior faculty members, whose younger age seems to predispose them to interest in curricula that makes a difference in the world as much as the lives of their students? At most universities, and especially at research intensive ones, junior faculty members tread on very shaky ground when they divert time away from the development of their research portfolio. Almost universally, they are counseled to put off their engagement in such efforts until after they earn tenure—a process lasting about six years from the time of appointment. After gaining tenure, perhaps because of additional obligations from young families or the momentum built around their research agenda, these faculty members remain, like their tenured mentors before them, unlikely to launch their own curricular innovations.

What about the other two-thirds of the faculty, who are now neither tenured nor on the tenure track?  Little is understood about the implications of this sea-change in appointments that has taken place in recent decades (Kezar and Sam 2010; Schuster and Finkelstein 2006). The proportion of non-tenure-line faculty has increased in most fields and across all types of colleges and universities (Baldwin and Wawrzynski 2011). When both part-time and full-time faculty are counted, three out of four new faculty appointments are now made off the tenure track (Kezar and Sam 2010).

Regardless of appointment type, deeply passionate faculty members will find ways to capitalize on the encouraging aspects of their positions while simultaneously working around or compensating for its discouraging aspects.

It is debated whether this dramatic shift in appointments away from the tenure-track is deliberate or accidental. Kezar and Sam (2010) suggested that faculty hiring practices fall along a continuum, which has “at the one end the conscious creation of an exploited class of faculty and at the other the accidental development of a non-tenure-track workforce” (41).

In support of the first explanation, scholars point to academic capitalism and the deliberate actions that department heads, deans, and other administrators take to maximize profits and efficiency through reduced benefits, voice in governance issues, and job security in the face of fluctuating student interests and enrollments (Slaughter and Rhoades 2009).

According to the second explanation, the current state of faculty appointments is the cumulative but unintentional result of a number of fairly independent decisions. Decisions about hiring are responsive to several factors, including unpredictable course enrollments and a limited number of relatively costly tenure-track appointments. Collectively, these decisions favor the appointment of non-tenure-track faculty.

Several scholars have often repeated the conclusion that non-tenure-track faculty negatively affect student learning. This is not, however, well substantiated or explained; many studies have had too narrow a focus to allow generalizations (Umbach 2007). Recent findings drawn from a large, representative data set by Baldwin and Wawrzynski (2011) showed that, “in most cases, full-time contingent faculty (usually on fixed-term contracts) approach their teaching more like their tenured and tenure-eligible colleagues than like their part-time contingent counterparts” (1504).

This finding points at a more nuanced, well-researched understanding of non-tenure-line faculty. It suggests that full-time contingent faculty, in particular, might be motivated to bootstrap around curricular innovation, because they focus almost exclusively on teaching and are freed from the obligation to engage in traditional research.  On the other hand, they are often already undercompensated for the work they do, and engaging in efforts to innovate the curriculum is, like for most faculty, an unrewarded “add on” to their other responsibilities.

Each type of faculty appointment has aspects that both encourage and discourage efforts to bootstrap the creation of innovative curricula. In the above discussion, I briefly sketched some of these factors for tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure-track faculty.  Regardless of appointment type, deeply passionate faculty members will find ways to capitalize on the encouraging aspects of their positions while simultaneously working around or compensating for its discouraging aspects.

Presently, among the typically more youthful faculty, those on the tenure-track are least likely to innovate the curriculum in a bottom-up manner, with the exception of those employed at the rare institution rewarding curricular innovation as well as it does traditional research, teaching, and service.

As universities look to expand their effectiveness at educating future leaders who can adeptly and enthusiastically tackle society’s pressing challenges, the above discussion draws special attention to the role that the now-majority of faculty occupying non-tenured positions might play. Among their ranks, there is a great deal of underappreciated and untapped potential. The more the opportunities for faculty members in these appointments are understood, the more readily they can be supported in their efforts to bootstrap, and ultimately lead a groundswell in, impactful curricular change.

References

Baldwin, Roger G., and Matthew R. Wawrzynski. 2011. Contingent Faculty as Teachers: What We Know; What We Need to Know. American Behavioral Scientist. 55 (11): 1485–1509.

Harrison, Richard T., Colin M. Mason, and Paul Girling. 2004. “Financial Bootstrapping and Venture Development in the Software Industry. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 16: 307–333.

Kezar, Adrianna, and Cecile Sam. 2010. Non-Tenure-Track Faculty in Higher Education. ASHE Higher Education Report 36 (5): 1-91.

Patel, Pankaj, James Fiet, and Jeffrey Sohl. 2011. “Mitigating the Limited Scalability of Bootstrapping Through Strategic Alliances to Enhance New Venture Growth.” International Small Business Journal, 29 (5): 421-447.

Schuster, Jack H., & Finkelstein, Martin J. 2006. The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Slaughter, Sheila, and Gary Rhoades. 2009. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Umbach, Paul D. 2007. How Effective Are They? Exploring the Impact of Contingent Faculty on Undergraduate Education. Review of Higher Education, 30 (2): 91-124.

Winborg, Joakim, and Hans Landstrom. 2000. “Financial Bootstrapping in Small Businesses: Examining Small Business Managers’ Resource Acquisition Behaviors.” Journal of Business Venturing 16: 235–254.