Adrianna Kezar – Pullias Center

Dean’ s Professor of Leadership
Wilbur-Kieffer Professor of Higher Education

Director

PhD, Higher Education Administration, University of Michigan

Contact Info

kezar@rossier.usc.edu

Expertise

Links

Curriculum vitae
Twitter
Website
Hi-res photo

Adrianna Kezar is the Dean’ s Professor of Leadership, Wilbur-Kieffer Professor of Higher Education at the University of Southern California, and Director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education. A national expert on change, governance and leadership in higher education, Kezar is regularly quoted in the media, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Atlantic, Boston Globe, Washington Post, PBS, and NPR (national and local stations), among others. At the Pullias Center, Kezar directs the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success and is an international expert on the changing faculty. She also regularly consults for campuses and national organizations related to her work on non-tenure-track faculty, STEM reform, change, collaboration, leadership development, and change.

Extended bio at USC Rossier

Projects

Change Leadership Toolkit

Change Leadership Toolkit is a project that aims to develop leadership competencies that contribute to implementing, scaling and sustaining campus transformation initiatives.

Building a Culture of Shared Equity Leadership in Higher Education

Building a Culture of Shared Equity Leadership in Higher Education is a multi-year project that will provide insights into the opportunities, challenges, structures, context, roles and other core features of shared equity leadership in higher education.

Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

Kezar leads the Delphi Project, dedicated to enhancing awareness about the changing faculty trends using research and data to better support faculty off the tenure track and to help create new faculty models to support higher education institutions in the future.

STEM Reform

Kezar leads several projects aimed at improving STEM education, including the NSF-funded Achieving Scale for STEM Reform project, the CSU STEM Collaboratives project, and a study of the AAU STEM Initiative

Promoting At-Promise Student Success (PASS) Project

Kezar is the principal investigator of the Promoting At-Promise Student Success (PASS) Project, formerly known as the Thompson Scholars Learning Communities Study, which aims to explore, document, and better understand whether TSLC program experiences translate into greater student success.

Books

Shared Leadership in Higher Education: A Framework and Models for Responding to a Changing World
Stylus Publishing, December 2021
Buy Now: Amazon

Today’s higher education challenges necessitate new forms of leadership. A volatile financial environment and the need for new business models and partnerships to address the impact of new technologies, changing demographics, and emerging societal needs, demand more effective and innovative forms of leadership. This book focusses on a leadership approach that has emerged as particularly effective for organizations facing complex challenges: shared leadership.

The Gig Academy
Johns Hopkins University Press, October 2019
Buy now: Amazon | Johns Hopkins University Press

The Gig Academy assesses the impact of a disturbing workforce development, providing an overarching framework that takes the concept of the gig economy and applies it to the university workforce, this book scrutinizes labor restructuring across both academic and nonacademic spheres.

Higher Education Administration for Social Justice and Equity
Routledge, October 2019
Buy now: Amazon | Routledge

Higher Education Administration for Social Justice and Equity empowers all administrators in higher education to engage in their work―to make decisions, hire, mentor, budget, create plans, and carry out other day-to-day operations―with a clear commitment to justice, sensitivity to power and privilege, and capacity to facilitate equitable outcomes.

How Colleges Change: Understanding, Leading, and Enacting Change (2nd edition)
Routledge, July 2018
Buy now: Amazon | Routledge

Joining theory and practice, How Colleges Change unmasks problematic assumptions that university leaders and change agents typically possess, and provides research-based principles for approaching change.

Envisioning Public Scholarship for Our Time: Models for Higher Education Researchers (co-editor)

Stylus Publishing, July 2018
Buy now: Amazon | Stylus Press

This book proposes a new paradigm of public scholarship for our time, one that shifts from the notion of the public intellectual to the model of the engaged scholar.

Envisioning the Faculty for the Twenty-First Century: Moving to a Mission-Oriented and Learner-Centered Model (co-editor)
Rutgers University Press, June 2016
Buy now: Amazon | Rutgers UP

As colleges and universities evolve to meet the changing demands of society, how might their leaders design viable alternative faculty models for the future? Envisioning the Faculty for the Twenty-First Century weighs the concerns of university administrators, professors, adjuncts, and students in order to critically assess emerging faculty models and offer informed policy recommendations.

Recent articles and publications at USC Rossier