Pullias Center 25th Anniversary Reflection: Adrianna Kezar

Adrianna Kezar, Director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education, reflects on the Center’s 25th Anniversary in this tenth and final of a series of essays marking the occasion throughout the year.

It is hard for me to believe that I have been a part of Pullias for 17 of its 25 years! Time cannot have flown more quickly. As the saying goes: time flies when you are having fun. Truly some of the best memories of the Center are about its people and how they came together on work that we were equally passionate about and committed to. One of the first projects I worked on was with Pullias Center Founding Director Bill Tierney and James Minor related to shared governance on college campuses. It was exciting to consider the ways we might inform the selection and nomination of public board members. Board members have tremendous power in shaping our campuses in myriad ways and yet almost no guidance existed for governors in their selection.  Shaping a variety of important public-facing scholarly products continued an important trajectory I had started at the ERIC Clearinghouse of Higher Education by creating a public scholarship that was read broadly by the public, practitioners, and policymakers. We also gathered policymakers and leaders throughout California to draw attention to our research and to engage them in conversation. I knew coming to USC and Pullias that there was an alignment of values around research impacting practice/policy, focusing on equity, and emphasizing innovative solutions. Being a part of that first project really helped me to appreciate that I now had a community that shared my values. 

Over the years, I worked with Center faculty, graduate students, postdocs, and our affiliates on projects that represented these important values, which are still the driving values of the Center and its projects today. For example, right now I am working with Tatiana Melguizo, Zoe Corwin, Ronn Hallett (former Pullias graduate student) on the Promoting At-Promise Student Success (PASS) project. This project studies a comprehensive college transition program supporting low income, first-generation, and racialized minority students, with a focus on creating more equitable student outcomes. PASS has resulted in various policy-practitioner briefs, has a public scholarship focus, and profiles many innovative solutions for improving student success, most prominently the development of an ecology of validation. The commitment to making a difference will result in an upcoming second grant project with the Susan B. Thompson Foundation to implement our recommendations and document the impact. Another example is that I recently had the pleasure of collaborating with Julie Posselt on a book called Higher Education Administration for Social Justice and Equity. I enjoyed several lunches where we hashed out the book and created ideas we hope will push campus leaders to embrace a new approach to practice at their colleges and universities.

The project foci have changed over the years, but the underlying values of equity, innovation, and impact along with a collaborative approach have not! I look back fondly on the grassroots leadership study (with Jaime Lester, Melissa Contreras-McGavin) that captured the work of staff and faculty leaders promoting important equitable changes on college campuses conducted with several Pullias graduate students. I have worked with a dozen graduate students and postdocs on the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success, many have gone on to continue work related to non-tenure-track faculty in their new faculty or administrative jobs.

I want to end by thanking Bill Tierney for recruiting me to USC and making me co-director, and then director, of the Center. I also want to express and share my appreciation to the Pullias Center’s faculty, staff, and graduate students who are the future. They will continue to live along these important values and carry our mission into the next 25 years!