Enhancing Faculty Involvement in Program Review

This Organizational Improvement Plan provides a pathway to addressing the organizational problem of enhancing faculty involvement in program review, such that programs of instruction undergo a meaningful and rigorous review process that results in program improvement. This problem of practice is set in the context of a large, urban Ontario public college. The relevancy of this problem is born out of an increasing climate of accountability and the performative nature of the provincial quality assurance system’s audit process. A contextual and historical analysis illustrates how adverse faculty-management relations and neoliberalism have affected faculty autonomy, leading to the marginalization of faculty in quality assurance processes. An organizational analysis reveals the incongruence between a growing audit culture, embedded in the formal organizational structure, and faculty culture, disallowing the meaningful participation of faculty in the determination of program quality. The proposed solution employs distributed leadership practice to engage faculty planning and design of program review in order to instill in this critical group more meaning and ownership of the process. Coupled with this is an authentic leadership approach that builds a trusting and collaborative relationship between faculty and management. Proposed theories for leading, monitoring, and communicating change are outlined