Introduction
This article offers a reflection on the changes my Center for Teaching & Learning (CTL) underwent in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic. The first step was to prepare for the online teaching shift in Summer 2020, which began with a merger of the CTL with the university library and the educational technology support unit—formerly three distinct units. This is not necessarily a new story of that tumultuous time, as every university and CTL struggled to meet the moment of 2020. However, further changes at our university and within our center, prompted by our merger and the large-scale shift to online learning, have provided me with many instances of learning and realization as director of a merged center. As I reflect on what I have learned through the lenses offered by the extant scholarship on change management and organizational development within CTLs, I have landed on a novel claim that ties together many of the change themes explored within Educational Development: that the field has entered a new era, what I am calling the Institution Age.
Specifically, the elements of the Institution Age include the fact that the CTL has shifted from a driver of pedagogical improvement to a tool that universities use to prepare for, navigate, and mitigate the numerous disruptions and upheavals (beyond COVID-19) affecting higher education today. As an outgrowth of the neoliberal era of regulation, centers like mine have become central to university project management, and in particular, for projects of compliance. The CTL in the Institution Age challenges traditional roles and identities within the university, and professionals in these centers face difficult changes in role, purpose, and identity. The Institution Age has expanded the scope and constituencies of CTLs outside of the pedagogical concerns of faculty. The Institution Age poses a threat to academic traditions, as well as organizational change models that are predicated on older conceptions of university culture. To develop and illustrate this nascent definition, this essay will oscillate between my personal narrative, signposted by italics throughout, and a scholarly examination of the change themes associated with this new era.
My Story
A budget crisis began at my small university in Fall 2020 based on lowered enrollment, as many colleges experienced during that COVID year. As part of cost-savings measures, the Center of Teaching and Learning (CTL), of which I was the faculty director, was merged with the library and the educational technology support office. I was offered the director role in this new, merged center of 13 employees and the library building. In this transition, many things changed in each unit, in my professional life, and at our university. I struggled mightily at first, but within a few years began to feel comfortable, competent, and proud of our center.
Five years on, I have had time to reflect on the process, problems, and subsequent results and the implications of this experience. I observe the differences at my university and in higher education generally from my pre-pandemic faculty point of view, to my post-pandemic view as a mid-level administrator. I spend time with the educational development literature—the works that speak to me loudest are by Mary C. Wright, Mary Deane Sorcinelli, Laura Cruz, and others who have analyzed the role that CTLs can and have played in change management and organizational development. Sometimes, the literature asserts that CTLs should be in that position if they are not yet.
While reading this scholarship, I have a smack-my-forehead realization: my CTL did this! It became a unit of organizational change at my university. It went from a one-horse, faculty development carriage to a 600-horsepower organizational development race car. We did not ask for it, but boy, did we become a key player in change at the university. My realization crystallizes into a thesis statement. I had a front seat experiencing what these scholars describe. Heck, I was driving this race car, and I know all about this destination: welcome to the Institution Age.
On Narrative
As mentioned above, this article shares space between narrative and scholarly writing. There is a wide range of scholarship that may be deemed “narrative” in nature within Educational Development. Some recent examples of studies that gathered stories and experiences of those involved in Teaching & Learning include McDonagh and Sanders’ 2025 survey study of staff that elicited people’s reflections through open-ended questions on building trust within a CTL (McDonagh & Sanders, 2025). Additionally, Mihai et al. (2025), interviewed 25 CTL directors to understand their experiences of organizational change, about which more will be said below. Further, Wilder’s 2019 article, “Masculinity, Vulnerability, and Consulting in Educational Development,” which shares his journey through autoethnographic writing, is the type of narrative scholarship that is closest to my approach and reasons for telling my own story here.
My first reason for choosing narrative is because it is closely linked with the feminist scholarly approaches in my home discipline of Writing & Rhetoric. I share some scholarship from the last forty years because it was key in shaping academic values that I hold dear including elevating women’s experiences and voices with the goal of improving conditions in the academy. For example, Weiler (1988) asserted that “one of the major goals of feminist research […] is to understand and explore [women’s] own consciousness and material conditions of existence” (p. 63). Foss and Foss (1994) argued that personal experiences amount to an epistemic challenge to a long history of silence and oppression of women in society and certainly the academy (p. 42). Jones Royster (2000) explained that feminist researchers are “obligated to have [their] work respond to sociopolitical imperatives that encumber the community itself” (p. 275).
Feminism has been woven into the scholarly conversation in the field of Educational Development and in this journal in particular as one way to critique the gender imbalance in the work of educational development as well (see, for instance, Bernhagen & Gravett, 2017; Du Nann Winter, 1991; Gravett et al. 2023); as well as frameworks for educational development (see Bernhagen & Gravett, 2018; hooks & Roberston, 2007). Additionally, as noted above, Wilder (2019) has recently demonstrated his grappling with the gendered nature of authority and evidence by producing an autoethnography of his experience, which “challenges conventional expectations of authority, voice, and method by embracing subjective points-of-view and accepting personal experiences as valid forms of evidence” in the academy (p. 85).
Narrative is, of course, not exclusive to feminist approaches; scholars who are interested in bringing balance to positivistic methodologies have argued that narrative must accompany other types of data, which “have limitations for conveying the value of emerging and transforming practice” in educational endeavors (Raffoul, 2022, p. 91). McAleese and Kilty (2019) claimed that stories bring a nuanced nature to research in fields otherwise dominated by a preference for positivistic, quantitative evidence, such as educational development. Jones (2011) asserted that narrative’s “strength lies in its ability to present the human side of education” and to “illuminate” and “reveal meanings” (pp. 115–116). Le-May Scheffield and Serbati (2022) similarly stated that narrative is apt for “exploring the complexities that exist” (p. 302).
One leading method of narrative scholarship, the Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN), has been well-defined by Nash (2015), who has made the case that reflective writing, when it does not sacrifice scholarly integrity, “has the potential to enlarge, enrich, and deepen the more conventional meaning of academic scholarship.” (“Reimagining,” 2015, p. 42; see for further discussion: Nash, 2004; 2011; 2013; 2015; 2019, among others). In a 2017 study that analyzed Scholarly Personal Narratives within the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Ng and Carney (2017) found that: “SPN challenges researchers to apply theoretical concepts to personal and professional experiences” and that “reflection performed to scholarly standards leads to deeper understanding of the situations and influences that shape instructors, learning environments, and student experiences” (p. 11).
While I did not set out to use Scholarly Personal Narrative, nor any specific reflective method other than an organic program of reading and synthesizing my own experience with scholarly literature, I do find that “SPN’s inclusive parameters [which] allow for the blending of personal narrative with the author’s disciplinary approaches” ultimately worked well in my case (Ng & Carney, 2017, p. 2). In juxtaposing my memories, personal revelations, and emotions alongside the analytic bent of scholarly standards, I offer additional reasons for the choice of narrative for this article: it is well-suited to help define “what counts” as evidence and to create a record of the Institution Age, a reason which Mountz et al. (2015) summarized well: what they call “slow scholarship”—that rooted in both feminism and narrative—disrupts the neoliberal obsession with “counting” with “content” (p. 1241).
Mountz et al.’s claim that the unequal expectations and material conditions of women in the academy places the burden of “institutional productivity” on women in a way that “entrenches the hierarchical valuation of women’s time” (p. 1243) comports with similar arguments that, for instance, Bernhagen and Gravett (2017, 2024) have made regarding the dominant norms in Educational Development. Thus, my reflective narrative, paired with a scholarly examination, is also an example of “slow scholarship” that serves as a “buffer […] from unrealistic and counterproductive norms that have become standard expectations” in the neoliberal university and, by extension, the CTL in the Institution Age (p. 1245).
Merger Nation
The small office suite that housed the CTL is shuttered, and my office is no longer among the many faculty offices in my former building. It is now in the library. I loaded my books and office trinkets into my minivan in June 2020 alone. I snap a selfie and post it to Facebook: “Excited to join the staff at this beautiful place!”
Coming up through the academic ranks, I had hoped to one day lead the faculty development at our university, and as a woman in the Humanities with natural enthusiasm and the ability to galvanize others, the role seemed reachable and maybe even inevitable. My academic socialization aside, I felt lucky to become our faculty developer. I couldn’t have known the role would become unrecognizable in the wake of the pandemic. Stepping into this new, full-time administrative role is a pretty big departure from what I expected of my career as a tenured full professor, even one who served as faculty director of our CTL, which still involved teaching part-time. This is a whole new scenario. I am pretty excited, though. And scared.
The Provost hires an outside consultant to help facilitate the merger. We do some icebreakers during the online meetings, and I do my best to make a good impression as the new boss, a non-librarian library director, a faculty person trying to understand the staff point of view. The consultant encourages us to air our feelings about the merger and brainstorm a new mission statement that will unify the CTL, the Library, and the educational technology support team. There is a range of feelings evident in these meetings include anger, fear, curiosity, and hesitancy. For a mission statement, we come up with community, resources, and support.
In her book, Centers for Teaching and Learning: The New Landscape in Higher Education, Wright (2023) explained that change is an important and inevitable role for CTLs, noting that they are often in a position to stay flexible and move in the strategic directions of the university when there is change (p. 49). This kind of claim for CTLs is not new, but perhaps what is new is that participation in change at the university is no longer an option or wish list item for faculty developers, and that the many novel disruptions in higher education in the 21st century have created a lightning-fast pace of major changes. Change has become, in the words of Schroeder (2011), “inescapable” (p. 273).
The co-mingling of educational development and organizational development has been long-instantiated, as exemplified by the creation of POD: Professional and Organizational Development in 1976. Articles about how educational development can behoove from considering the approaches of organizational development date back in this journal to at least its third volume, when Mathis (1983) argued that faculty developers should be well-versed in institutional concerns in order to make good decisions on behalf of the university:
We must all become specialists in higher education in addition to maintaining the role of teaching scholars in an academic discipline. Faculty development should be the mechanism which gets us beyond our discipline to a competency for understanding institutional budgets, arriving at just and humane decisions about promotion and retention which serve the best interests of our institutions, and recognizing the difference between a fad in educational practice and a reform which weaves a lasting and creative pattern in the fabric of learning (p. 34).
As another early example of arguing for the comingling of faculty development and organizational development was offered by Roberts et al. (1984):
scholars have distinguished instructional development, the application of expertise and resources to the solution of teaching problems, from faculty development, a broad-based emphasis on the enhancement of faculty knowledge, skills and values, and organizational development, the alteration of the structure, climate and processes of a college or university. (p. 76)
Moving into the 1990s, we see scholars explicitly embracing frameworks of organizational development in curricular projects. For example, Smith (1998) bridged theories and analytical tools of organizational development and change management from the fields of human resources, academic administration, and management to a project of faculty development.
The purpose of these processes is to make the link between strategy (top-down) and operation (bottom-up). Strategy needs to be informed by practical realities, so that it is achievable. Similarly, what happens in practical terms must be driven by strategy, in order to be meaningful. Any practical innovation also needs to be supported by institutional systems, or it will become marginalized and unsustainable. (p. 228)
Smith suggested the need for projects of pedagogical improvement to be completed at scale and assessed in response to demands in higher education that necessitated thinking about how to move away from the one-horse faculty development carriage in a strategic way.
A decade later, Latta (2009) spoke of the maturation of organizational development in the field when she wrote: “Increasingly, academic support units working to promote faculty development within the academy are being called on to respond to the need for internal facilitators of organizational change [and that] understanding and managing organizational culture has emerged as a pivotal issue” for educational developers not only within the teaching and learning sphere but across the whole organization (p. 33). Taking a historical view of organizational development in the field, Cruz (2018) cited Bergquist: “His intention was not to focus on student learning, but rather the learning that occurs throughout an institution; and he viewed educational developers as the progenitors for this form of generative organizational culture, connected via a common attention across the many layers of the university” (p. 161).
With these foundational ideas co-mingling and encouraged into the 21st century, CTL directors found themselves facing unprecedented demands in higher education associated with the neoliberal turn, the main thrusts of which include: decreased funding for public higher education, heightened calls for accountability and data use, increased competition between universities for recruitment, ever more available educational technologies, increased reliance on contingent labor, and managerial approaches to governance (see, for fuller explanations, Davies et al., 2006; Olssen & Peters, 2005; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2000).
These changes in higher education coincided with and resulted in what we call the most recent “ages” of educational development, the Network Age and the Evidence Age (Sorcinelli, 2020), which Benito-Capa et al. summarized: “Over the past two decades, the scope of CTL activity has broadened to include instructional design and delivery, curriculum development, integration of technology, assessment, leadership, and organizational development” (Benito-Capa et al., 2017, p. 3). The number and nature of these demands produced the merging or creation of new units (Lee et al., 2011; McKnight, 2002; Zakrajsek, 2013); the creation of new jobs and duties around educational technologies (Cruz et al., 2021; Kelley et al., 2017); the integration of assessment and accountability (Sweet et al., 2018); and many attendant difficulties resulting therefrom, as a study by Kelley et al. (2017) evidenced: “Prevalent challenges included staff integration, navigating a new identity, mission creep, and a lack of strategic planning surrounding the reorganization, and these occurred regardless of institutional type or size. It is clear that for the majority of CTLs who responded, the changes did not make for easy adjustments” (p. 7). That is an understatement.
“Staff Integration and Navigating New Identities” (Kelley et al., 2017)
Challenges for the Library Staff
It’s mostly the librarians who are angry. They feel they have been made invisible with the merger. I am affronted by this attitude in private, and in a heated moment, I hold back what I really think: what do you mean invisible!? Your unit has a building, a huge book collection, the most employees! The CTL doesn’t even have a space anymore. I don’t know how to settle this without displaying my own anger, so my resentment builds. I take “angry walks” every night, wearing the soles of my sneakers down faster in one summer than in a year of running. A suggestion to install signage to at least indicate that the CTL is located inside the library remains a touchy subject, even a year after the merger. Today, we have never really solved the problem of having two names: the ABC Center and/in the XYZ Library. While I am more comfortable with the ambiguity, I know why it lingers, and it remains a reminder of some of my early failures of leadership.
The first theme of change evident in our merger was the challenges to the roles, purposes, and identities of the professionals involved in the merger: librarians, library support staff, instructional designers, LMS administrators, and the faculty-director of the CTL. Identity has always been a major concern in regard to theorizing CTLs as explained by Broscheid (2019): “Part of the reason for this lack of explicit definitions may be the fact that there are so many competing definitions of “identity” in a wide range of literature” (p. 48). While Broscheid pointed out that identities are not necessarily stable, our staff’s sense of their own professional identities was strong. Therefore, as Lee et al. (2011) noted, the trend of mergers in teaching and learning centers “can be a disconcerting time for staff undergoing this particular type of organizational change. A new reality suddenly takes hold, full of uncertainty and ambiguity, as new structures, policies, and procedures are put in place” (p. 38). More recently, Pilny et al. (2023) found that identity roles can be significantly challenged, especially during disruptions in higher education.
Lee et al. (2011) advised in the wake of a merger: “[team-building activities] helped us discover that we are concerned about the same issues, have similar needs, and are working toward common goals” (p. 28). Similarly, Hayward et al. (2024) have recently offered a process for integration of units, finding it useful to create a theory of change suitable to articulate their goals and “vehicles” to reach them: “the three-stage process that the Sheridan Center found useful to develop a theory of change: (1) reflective idea generation at a retreat; (2) small-group refinement of ideas; and (3) full-group discussion, refinement, and consensus” (p. 97). These strategies proved helpful. Over time, an emphasis on team-building and social opportunities, such as lunchtime trivia and other light-hearted opportunities to connect, were important to building trust and eventually, opportunities for collaboration emerged between the librarians and the instructional designers. This brought about a zeal for projects related to Open Educational Resources and other technology-related Educational Development. We also hired a 50% librarian/50% instructional designer position, which helped mend seams.
While the literature on mergers in the Library world offers many accounts of mergers between libraries or branches thereof, few direct accounts of libraries merging with teaching and learning centers exist. I focus on this point in particular because in our case, the merger did not cause as much upset based on identity and purpose for the staff of the former CTL and educational technology support unit as it did for the librarians in particular.
One account of a merger between a Library and a CTL by McKnight (2002) in Australia offered an excellent general analysis of the deleterious effects that mergers can have on. McKnight wrote:
As with most organizations, universities are undergoing significant change due to the increasing ‘massification’ of tertiary education, the increasing globalization of higher education, pressures due to space and financial constraints, and the increasing commercial imperative to seek new markets and raise additional revenue. These, together with rapid changes in informational technologies and increasing expectations of students, mean that staff employed in the higher education sector must cope with constant change, not only in work processes but also in the way we think of students and other staff members. (p. 267)
Additionally, new scrutiny of the “value” of our library and its purpose occurred during our merger. The constant questioning of the “value” of libraries is an exhausting exercise in the neoliberal university (White-Farnham & Caffrey, 2023), a hallmark of the Institution Age. In this context, from my point of view, and with the emphasis in 2020 on the importance of online teaching and learning, the librarians did take the brunt of the challenge to their roles, purposes, and identities, more so than our educational technology support team and myself. Although some CTL literature has included librarians in their consideration of educational development (e.g., see Hammons, 2024, for instance), the idea of changing the library—a three-story building named after a former University president—into a “Center of Teaching & Learning” was perceived as a downgrade and an erasure.
My Expectations as Director
You would think that 17 years of teaching first-year writing at the college level would have prepared me to supervise professionals, but I’m stumbling left and right. I butt heads especially with a few staff members who are really struggling with the shake-up of the pandemic in their personal lives and the merger in their work lives. Early on, I ponder why my ability to get along well with hundreds of new students all the time is not translating to getting along with my new staffers. I compare students and staffers mainly because of the power differential I hold in each role; I thought they would be more similar. One major difference is clear after a few months: relationships with students each semester are pretty fleeting – if you don’t quite click with someone, you both get to move on. Not so with staff.
I also realize: students generally give your experience and knowledge the benefit of the doubt and treat you with respect if not at least reserve their judgement on whether they will respect you by the end of the semester. I feel as if my new staff pre-judged me unfairly and did not give me a chance to earn their respect. Eventually, a tense situation with a certain person comes to a head, and I call HR for help with mediation. I am humbled to learn that I made some classic rookie mistakes that contributed to this person’s recalcitrance. The other person humbled themselves during the mediation as well, and we started a fresh relationship. It is awkward, but I am proud of us both.
Moving from a more “traditional” faculty-reassignment CTL director role to leading “from the middle” as a full-time manager with 13 direct reports and stewardship of the university’s library challenged me personally and professionally (Grupp, 2014, p. 51). The single most challenging aspect of my transition from faculty director of a CTL to a full-time staff director of a 13-person unit of non-instructional staff was a lack of managerial skills. As Zakrajsek (2013) succinctly said: “If you are new to supervising others, there is a wake-up call headed your way” (p. 128). Where I thought 17 years of teaching college students would stand in for authority, decision-making, leadership, and people skills, it did not fully.
Wright (2023) explained this kind of shift in expectations and skills necessary for CTL directors:
Key competencies needed for an effective TL director [include]: budgeting, understanding of institutional politics, hiring and mentoring staff, program evaluation, maintaining visibility, networking, strategic planning, relationship management, internal and external mentorship, knowledge of theories relating to higher education, and [being] an effective change agent. (p. 160)
Although a “people-person” who worked hard to learn all the administrative tasks of a director, I had major skill gaps in conflict management, holding people to accountability, budgeting, safety, and facilities management (to name one of the biggest challenges of the pandemic) that took a long time to develop without training. It was much later when I developed my understanding of the sea-change of the Institution Age and the expectations assumed for a director who, like me, may have expected to have a far less complicated job as the director of a CTL. The complications are further explicated in the later sections of this essay. During my early days in this position, to grapple with what felt like simply my deficiencies as a professional, I undertook an independent course of reading, listening to podcasts, and taking informational interviews with leaders around me to learn how to be a unit leader.
The Provost’s Expectations
My Provost is a teaching-focused administrator with many ideas to improve and support faculty. She often brings a brainstormed list of projects that she would like to see the center undertake to our one-on-one meetings. “The center” is often volunteered to lead new curriculum projects and sit on committees on the topics of advising and student success. It is a lot, and then it becomes too much. “The center” really means me. I can tell that the more singular faculty director model, with some attendant assumptions about who has expertise and authority in the new center, may be operating in the Provost’s expectations. I spend time hyping up the good work of my staff, so she’ll see that the project and committee work can be delegated throughout the new center to librarians, instructional designers, and other professional staff.
Attendant to the division between the role of a faculty director and a full-time administrative director, the merger created some misunderstandings across the organization. Above me, my supervisor, the Provost, had held the former role of faculty director in our CTL some fifteen years prior. Therefore, she was steeped in a model of faculty-supporting-faculty. The merged CTL has its own staff who, in addition to the faculty we serve, needs professional development and mentoring, which is certainly a change in the direction of attention and resources that formerly served only the faculty constituency. Groen et al. (2023) touched upon this point, now relevant to expectations of CTL directors in the Institution Age: that the new CTL director is not only thinking of their own agenda in serving the faculty outwardly, but needing to emphasize the success and oversight of what is now a unit unto itself:
From leading institutional projects to managing staff and budgets, the work of a director can be vast. Dawson et al.’s (2010) research identified more than 20 competencies directors need to succeed [and] CTL leaders need to focus not just outwardly on institutional-level work but also inwardly on their own burgeoning units. One key aspect of this inward focus is human resources. (p. 3)
This made for an adjustment on the Provost’s part. Eventually, great new ideas and projects that clearly offered both my staff and the faculty opportunities to improve teaching and learning broke through this older mindset. The reach of the staff’s expertise in, for example, Open Educational Resources, as noted above, would not have been achieved in the former units in the same way the merged CTL achieves this integration.
In addition, the reputation and cachet of the former CTL helped bridge what can be a stark divide between faculty and staff. For one thing, librarians and instructional designers are sometimes unfairly not seen as peers by faculty (Gardner & White-Farnham, 2013). In our case, these new educational development avenues allowed faculty to realize the richness of the resources and expertise in our new center. In the other direction, staff sometimes perceived faculty as inaccessible or uninterested in them. In reflecting on what a former faculty director brings to a merged center, the coaching of both sides to understand each other better, serving as an ambassador of sorts has been a benefit to dismantling a long-standing division within many universities—the us/them divide that can occur between faculty and staff and kindling new relationships, what Larsen et al. (2021) call the “heart of successful CTLs” (p. 228).
“The Scope of CTL Activity Has Broadened” (Benito-Capa et al., 2017)
The new center is charged to create a summer-long program that will support all instructors in their preparations to teach in online and hybrid modalities in Fall 2020. It is mandated that all instructors will attend and that their courses will be reviewed, a new approach to faculty development that is causing a lot of grumbling among faculty. I project-managed the program’s design and its roll-out in June. Cohorts of instructors have worked through a curriculum, designed their courses, and offered each other feedback. Now in August, the instructional designers and I are reviewing 100s of classes for accessibility, etc. Up late one night, I get an uncharacteristically critical text from a colleague/friend about the program: It’s administrative overreach, she types. It’s not well-organized. And, who do you think you are, reviewing our courses? I am crying on my front steps in the dark. I see her point.
Among the challenges that Summer 2020 brought was the need to help the entire faculty develop online courses that were not of the rushed, “anything goes” quality of the Emergency Transition to Online Learning (ETOL). Like many others, our center was charged with a large-scale project to train all faculty on course design and online teaching tools, then review the courses for quality. The program was met with mixed reactions from the faculty. Some had just experienced the ETOL as a nightmare and were relieved to “do it right” by creating well-designed asynchronous courses. Others ranged from uninterested in to very angry about attending trainings and being held to online course design standards.
This large-scale, highly charged project provides an example of two hallmarks of the Institution Age: it was mandatory, and our center was used as an administrative tool for institutional change. Mandates are, of course, unpopular, and faculty are used to freedom in preparing their course content, in undertaking research, in developing pedagogical approaches, and generally in choosing how they spend their time. Looking back, this mandate was the beginning of a new approach to change at our university, and thereafter administrators took a firmer hand in creating new initiatives to reach university goals. Benito-Capa et al. (2017) described where these hallmarks converge:
Many faculty developers, as CTL members, are also involved in large-scale institutional change efforts to transform teaching and learning structures and practices within the organization. The role of faculty developers has evolved over the years from being a source of “teacher tips” for faculty to offering comprehensive faculty development programs. With this evolution in offerings comes a need for new knowledge and emerging competencies that enable a faculty developer to effect change not only with the faculty but with the institution. (p. 8)
Our center became a seat of curricular and pedagogical initiatives with me serving as project manager and advocate for various projects, not all of which I would characterize as educational development. This mirrors what Wright (2023) has explained: “CTLs are seeing an increase in constituencies served and aims described […and therefore] CTLs are taking on initiatives outside of the realm of teaching and learning, mandates that were traditionally housed in other spaces of the academy” (p. 173). Interestingly, Grupp (2014) asserts that there are advantages to a center director serving as a change agent:
Some things cannot be imposed top down, yet they won’t grow from the bottom up. Somewhere in between administrators and faculty, where faculty developers may be, is where much of the work of change can be done. A center director who is aware of this space, willing to speak up, and has credibility is uniquely positioned to effect change. (p. 52)
The downsides are explained by Benito-Capa et al. (2017): “the shifting and evolving nature of the faculty developer’s role may make some faculty feel that their territory is being encroached upon” (p. 3). And Broscheid (2019) cautioned that educational developers “may become (or become perceived as) the tools of a one-sided neoliberal vision of higher education that prioritizes isolated and measurable marketable outcomes over social responsibility and a holistic understanding of education” (p. 52).
I observe the ongoing tension between the respect for the autonomy of academic life and the need to support and help make our institutional projects of a high quality. What may be left behind in former CTL eras is a characteristic I have heard described as “Switzer-Vegas,” or the role of a CTL as an institutionally-neutral, enjoyable place where university politics will neither dictate nor constrain ideas. The shift, as reported often in the literature of becoming a more central part of organizational change, is evident in our case (Broscheid, 2019; Grupp, 2014; Kelley et al., 2017; POD, 2016, among others).
“CTLs Are Seeing an Increase in Constituencies Served” (Wright, 2023)
During the pandemic, the university responds to employee attrition with a few ideas, including the creation of a leadership program. To my initial chagrin, our center is assigned to create the program for all employees, and not just faculty. I think: No! I am supposed to mentor the faculty, help them improve their teaching and provide support for their research agendas. Still, there is really no such thing as saying no. I convene a planning committee, and we dive into the literature on leadership in higher education.
The planning committee creates a pretty interesting curriculum and meaningful activities about leadership in higher education for many roles within the university. The program runs for the first time with 35 participants from three different employment categories: faculty, salaried academic staff, and hourly support staff. It is a satisfying recognition of and investment in people. I learn some new things myself by helping to create this program, and, to my surprise, I softened a bit on who we can serve (those beyond faculty) and on what higher education topics (those beyond instruction).
Collins (2009) explained that in a networked era in higher education, scope creep is an inevitability (p. 127). The first area of creep in my experience occurred with the change as described of the center in serving as a launch-pad for large-scale change projects qua mandates at our university. The second occurred with a shift in focus to other constituents and not only the faculty as the beneficiaries of our resources, relationships, and recognition for work such as innovation, research, and publication.
The first project aimed at people outside of the faculty, the leadership program as described above, has become popular and highly regarded, as it welcomes any employee regardless of role or rank, and the cohorts are very collegial. Next came a second project stemming from a state system-level mandate on “civil dialogues” training for faculty, staff, and students. Although there is a classroom element to this mandate, teaching is not the only focus, and all staff at the university attend the programming on this topic. While I do not take issue with these types of opportunities for employees in general, it does push the boundaries of the many categories in which my team and I have pedagogical and curricular expertise. Further, it creates new workloads of organizing people, resources, marketing, etc., for constituencies other than instructors.
On the one hand, the former CTL faced criticism sometimes for excluding staff who do not teach. Once in a while, a more general workshop on, say, student development, would be offered to include any type of employee who interacts with students, such as advisors or student employment supervisors. Today, one could not level that criticism at our merged center, but one might level a criticism that our impetus for programming and resources has moved well beyond instructor needs, which may indeed also be a criticism of the mandates attendant to the Institution Age for CTLs.
“Welcome to The Institution Age” (White-Farnham, a-ha Moment)
Take-Away #1: We Need Help to Change
The state system-wide CTL directors’ meeting is normally a supportive group. My counterparts across our large state system convene regularly to help each other problem-solve and share new ideas. But lately I feel unheard. The organizer seems to misunderstand the many new demands placed on our center. Similar to my Provost’s familiarity with the former role of CTL directors, the organizer seems to me to have a similar “old” model in mind – when faculty developers worked directly with faculty on pedagogical improvements. That is so not what my work looks like as a merged center director.
A year later, we hear from another campus in our system that a round of layoffs has included the library director. Within days, I get an email from the CTL director there: they are merging with the library, and she will become the director of a multi-unit center like mine. I feel a surge of understanding – I can help her! And also: finally, someone will understand me. She asks: what do I need to know? We arranged several calls throughout her first semester. I perceived similar emotions, challenges to identity, scope creep, skills gaps, new kinds of regulatory projects, etc.
CTLs have always been in the business of change—improving teaching and learning. Often this occurred at a personal scale and at a slow rate of influence and learning over time. The Evidence Age brought another dimension to this work, which was to rely on data, assessments, and evidence as reasons to improve pedagogy and curriculum at scale. Moving into the Institution Age, change has taken on several new dimensions—roles, responsibilities, audiences, scope, large-scale approaches—each with its own possibilities for further conversation, problem-solving, and study. By way of conclusion, I will imagine possible futures of these new dimensions, explain the need for new terminology and resources, and suggest a way to collect more evidence and documentation.
In regard to purpose, the personal level of helping people change their pedagogies or improve their teaching has intensified since 2020. While “change” has sometimes seemed to be the least of faculty’s desires, the thing they would not do, the online learning shift of 2020 has shown us that the desire of instructors, students, staff, and administrators has become change in general. All of these constituents want to add, pivot, be flexible, adopt new technologies, and expand access. The ability to help others change and therefore be fleet oneself with ideas, with tools, with resources, with knowledge about the latest thing is now a needed skill and purpose of a CTL. From my observations, our center is expected to have the capacity to react, stay flexible, adopt the new, anticipate the next thing, and shed the old far more often than educational development expectations prior to 2020.
The irony of the Institution Age is that, where educational development literature argued for many years that CTLs were well-positioned potential change agents, the choice in playing that role has been removed. In accepting that CTLs like mine are now central to institution-wide change processes, it is important to remain mindful of and preserve the elements and traditions of self-governance and decision-making central to university existence and, it must be said, which may be eroded when administrative centers, rather than faculty bodies, become a main driver. To tackle this new problem of this new age, I echo the recent call of Hayward et al. (2024) to suggest that the field consider change as a more embedded part of CTLs’ purposes and the work of educational development.
An initial conversation around this suggestion might be the exploration of guiding principles for change-work responsibilities, such as change management approaches, people-centered processes, fairness, and decision-making heuristics. Currently, while many helpful guides from POD exist, they do not speak directly to change. The ACE-POD Matrix (2018) offers guidelines to create and judge structures, resources, and efficacy. Additionally, POD ethical standards speak to the individual directors’ interactions with clients, nodding to the former faculty-director model. One new development by Mihai et al. (2025) is a four-part model of CTLs based on their activities, governance, social capital, and identity, which, according to the authors, may be helpful to centers “who are in the midst of integrating or merging with other institutional units/departments, or who are in the midst of strategically planning to be agile and adaptable to changing needs in the future (np).”
Take-Away #2: We Need Narrative in the Institution Age
My whole career in higher education, since 2002, has taken place during its downfall. You can read a hundred books and articles on how and why: public defunding, neoliberal obsession with business methods and data, a centralization of power, and the managerial culture edging out academic traditions like faculty self-governance, tenure, and unionization. Waning public appreciation and even mistrust of the purpose of higher education.
Then there are the major social changes that make it harder than ever to work in higher ed: the mental health crisis among young people. Declining enrollments. Small liberal arts colleges are closing every year. More recently: culture wars, AI, a whole new set of gut-wrenching educational gag orders around topics that animate the very purpose of higher education, revoking of student visas, lawsuits…
I conclude with a brief exhortation for the role of narrative scholarship in the Institution Age. While there are many comprehensive explanations of expecting and managing change in educational development—the authors of which I owe a great debt in understanding my own experience—I assert that there is room for further narrative work of many kinds including SPN, autoethnography, creative vignettes such as mine, or more radical approaches to qualitative inquiry, such as the work of Bhattacharya (2015), which dispenses with italics or other divisions between experience, scholarly writing, citations, analysis, and even dreams.
I feel strongly about this because such inquiry would respond to a feminist imperative that values personal experiences in order to improve the conditions of a community. What improvements could we see? It is true that this scholarly community already shares many theories, ideas, research studies and results, solutions to problems, approaches, etc. I assert that what may be added through narrative is specific to the role CTLs are playing in the Institution Age—as institutional tools that respond to the long and upsetting list of crises and upheavals that have characterized higher education my entire career and which seem to compound each year, as Hatfield et al. (2022) noted of sharing stories to make sense of crisis and disruption.
If we agree that COVID-19 and its attendant large-scale, centralized projects of change was a factor in pushing CTLs into becoming larger, multi-faceted units responsible for change management and organizational development, then it stands to reason that a CTL in the Institution Age will be called on to respond to the next crises, the next mandate, the next major project to stabilize the university. My guess is that many right now are helping to understand, navigate, strategize, and perhaps mitigate attacks on DEI programming, for instance.
When these things happen, when the CTL is the institutional tool to tackle crises and upheavals, what may be improved in our working conditions by sharing our narratives is the feeling that you are not alone in a long, sad decline of our sector. In the big lift that is sustaining careers in higher education in the 21st century, these kinds of stories will continue to orient and guide directors and professional staff entering situations that come with not only technical needs for frameworks and models, but a difficult set of adjustments and emotions related to changing what you do, convincing others to change what they do, and perhaps accepting loss of what was.
More narrative infusion to our methods will also expand our capacity to express the “complexity of the human experience” (Raffoul et al., 2022, p. 91) and “the new normal” of higher education in particular (McCloskey, 2014, p. 17). Borrowing from militaristic parlance, McCloskey suggests that higher education today is characterized by “VUCA,” or “volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity” (p. 17). To achieve a preponderance of evidence of this “VUCA” and to bear witness from our vantage point as educational developers, I find the metaphor of “layering” stories offered by McAleese and Kilty (2019) inspirational: “If we layer various stories over a significant amount of time, and perhaps across diverse groups of people, and we are able to see the same themes repeated time and again, we suggest that this illustrates the continuity, strength, and authenticity (Fabian, 2014) of the overall narrative” (p. 836).
During an era of decline and of distress, I find the idea that sharing will bring us strength and continuity very appealing. Narratives from the perspectives of educational developers about the contextual factors of higher education and our responses to them are no easy feat when purposes, identities, academic traditions, and even wellbeing are challenged. In my narrative, these challenges clearly map onto decades of observed claims. What would your narrative add? What will our overall narrative be of the Institution Age? It is up to us because, as Kelley et al. (2017) suggested, the “new normal” is both playing out within and being managed by CTLs.
Biography
Jamie White-Farnham is Professor in the Writing Program at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, where she serves as Director of the Markwood Center for Learning, Innovation, and Collaboration and the Jim Dan Hill Library. Her scholarship on the teaching of writing, writing program administration, assessment, and library administration has appeared in numerous journals and edited collections. Her most recent co-edited collection, Confronting Toxic Rhetoric, explores the challenges of teaching ethical argument during the “post-truth” era.
Conflict of Interest Statement
The author has no conflicts of interest to declare.
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