Striving 2.0: Faculty Collaboration and Advocacy as Strategies for Overcoming Post-Striving Organizational Priorities

A case study at a large, public research university was conducted to understand how post-striving environments, defined by those universities that achieved very high research activity classification, influence campus structures and practices related to faculty and organizational approaches to pedagogy, teaching, and learning. Participants explained how organizational structures, practices, and relationships affected the process of seeking to achieve very high research activity and the impact on institutional commitments to teaching and learning. Findings indicate that striving produced an unexpected early change in Carnegie designation and created organizational tensions. Outcomes expected from the literature, such as faculty divides and inequities, contrast with new but complicated opportunities as a result of the increased research activities. Faculty had to rely on relationship building and use of mission-focused and data-driven advocacy efforts to enact pedagogy change on their campuses. A major contribution of this study is an understanding of how faculty and other teaching advocates, who are focused on non-striving priorities like innovative teaching practices, employ strategies to overcome research focused striving structures and practices.