Program Stewardship as Bridge Work:

About this session

Program Stewardship as Bridge Work: Sustaining Educational Leadership in a Time of Disruption. A Bridge Conversation at the 40th Annual UCEA Convention, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Friday, November 20, 2026.

Beth S. Rous, EdD, Professor, Educational Leadership Studies, University of Kentucky (brous@uky.edu; LinkedIn (opens in a new tab)). John B. Nash, PhD, Associate Professor, Educational Leadership Studies, University of Kentucky (john.nash@uky.edu). Nicholas J. Pace, EdD, Professor, Educational Leadership Studies, and Dean, College of Education, University of Kentucky (Nick.Pace@uky.edu; LinkedIn (opens in a new tab)).

Educational leadership programs are navigating political, legal, and institutional disruption, including tenure vulnerability, shifting governance norms, faculty retirements, constrained hiring, enrollment volatility, and program consolidation. This Bridge Conversation frames program stewardship as ethical educational leadership work. Through provocative questions and a Program Stewardship Lens, participants examine how departments can move beyond crisis-driven decision-making toward transparent, evidence-informed, student-centered, and mission-aligned approaches to sustaining, redesigning, merging, pausing, or closing programs responsibly.

Opening frame

The central question for the hour: What can we responsibly promise and sustain as conditions change?

This is a national leadership problem, not a local departmental one. Educational leadership programs are being asked to make decisions about program futures in a period of significant disruption. In many states and institutions, the assumptions that once held academic programs steady (tenure protections, shared governance norms, predictable faculty replacement, and departmental autonomy) are being reconsidered, narrowed, or restructured. At the same time, many educational leadership departments face retirements, enrollment volatility, constrained hiring, program consolidation, online competition, and questions about whether existing program portfolios can be sustained.

The rules of academic work are changing while decisions are being made. Recent headlines: “New state laws land blows against shared governance, tenure” (Quinn, Inside Higher Ed, 2026); “Kentucky Senate passes bill making it easier to cut faculty” (Higher Ed Dive, 2026); “New state laws target DEI, struggling academic programs, and tenure” (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2025).

These pressures often appear as technical questions. Who will teach required courses? Which programs have enough enrollment? Can faculty lines be replaced? Should programs be merged, paused, or closed? They are also ethical and public questions. What do departments owe students when programs were built under one set of conditions but must now be sustained under another? How should faculty take part in decisions when governance structures are shifting? What responsibilities do educational leadership programs have to the schools, districts, communities, and public systems they serve?

Silent reflection (5 minutes)

What program sustainability question is your unit avoiding or circling around?

Write quietly. Note what is changing and who is affected. You choose what to share later.

A shared language

Program decisions shape educational commitments

Decisions about staffing, enrollment, resources, and organizational structure also shape what a program can provide, whose needs it serves, and which forms of knowledge and professional preparation it sustains. Gumport’s (2000) analysis of academic restructuring highlights the tension between responding to economic pressures and sustaining higher education’s educational and democratic purposes. That invites us to examine program futures through both resource realities and public responsibilities.

Framing question: What educational commitments are at stake in the program decisions we face?

Shared governance and shared leadership contribute in different ways

Shared governance concerns the distribution of authority and responsibility among governing boards, administrators, and faculty. The AAUP’s 1966 statement identifies faculty’s primary responsibility for academic matters and calls for faculty participation in institutional planning and resource priorities.

Shared leadership concerns how people contribute expertise and exercise leadership across roles. It requires conditions that support meaningful contributions, including access to information, clear responsibilities, and organizational support (Holcombe & Kezar, 2017; Kezar & Holcombe, 2017).

For program deliberation, we need to clarify both who has authority to decide and how relevant knowledge and perspectives will shape the decision.

Framing question: Who can shape the options before a recommendation is made, and who is accountable for the decision?

Program commitments depend on sustainable capacity

Consider the full work required to sustain a program: teaching, advising, dissertation supervision, coordination, assessment, recruitment, and relationships with practitioners and communities. A program may keep operating while depending on recurring overloads, unrecognized labor, or expertise concentrated in one person. Examining these arrangements helps us consider whether current commitments can be maintained, and what would need to change.

Framing question: What does it actually take to deliver the learning experience we promise, and can that work be sustained?

Program stewardship connects purpose, commitments, and consequences

Program stewardship: the collective responsibility to make, sustain, and revise program commitments through transparent, evidence-informed deliberation about students, academic quality, faculty capacity, and public purpose.

Program management asks how the work will operate. Program stewardship also asks whether the commitments are responsible and sustainable over time. Responsible program decisions require both. For example, the management question “Who will teach the required courses next year?” sits beside the stewardship question “What staffing arrangement can sustain a coherent learning experience without depending on recurring overloads or fragile coverage?”

Stewardship can lead to sustaining, redesigning, merging, pausing, or closing a program. Each option requires attention to its consequences and to the commitments that come with it.

Framing question: What can we responsibly promise under the conditions we face?

Program stewardship as collective leadership work

Changing conditions (political, institutional, and resource conditions) bear on a program’s educational commitments and public purpose. Inside program stewardship, shared governance (authority and responsibility) and shared leadership (expertise and participation) feed collective deliberation. Deliberation uses the Program Stewardship Lens and leads to a program decision: sustain, redesign, merge, pause, or close. Implementation and review follow: honor commitments and examine consequences. Then the unit revisits its commitments and conditions and deliberates again.

The Program Stewardship Lens

The lens brings six dimensions into the conversation. Across them, ask: What evidence do we need? Whose perspectives should inform the decision? What risks arise from acting, or from waiting? The lens helps identify what deserves attention and what needs further inquiry. It supports a reasoned decision and an explicit account of how commitments will be honored. It does not produce a score or an automatic decision.

Small-group conversations (20 minutes)

Keep the same group and the same issue across both conversations where you can. Use one member’s question or a shared concern. Discuss without identifying colleagues, students, or institutions.

Conversation 1: What is changing, and what obligations follow?

Choose an issue and consider: What can no longer be assumed? What do we owe students, faculty, and the public under these conditions? When could continuing unchanged cause harm, and what harms could change cause? Carry forward one program issue, one changed condition, and one obligation. Keep this brief so there is time to apply the lens.

Conversation 2: What should inform a responsible decision?

Scan all six dimensions of the lens and focus on the two or three that matter most for your issue. Discuss what evidence is available or missing, whose perspective is needed, and the risks of acting or waiting. Prepare one stewardship principle and one decision-making risk for the whole group, using the response fields on Handout 1.

Whole-group synthesis (15 minutes)

Each group shares one stewardship principle and one decision-making risk. As themes collect, we ask what recurs, what is missing, and where context matters. For a few themes, we ask: What practice or safeguard would make this principle visible? Unresolved tensions stay on the table rather than being forced into agreement.

Application and closing (5 minutes)

Use Handout 3. Choose one question to take back to a faculty meeting, retreat, program review, teach-out plan, or restructuring discussion. Name the people or forum needed, and one next step within your role.

• What program sustainability question are we avoiding or circling around?
• What do we owe students if the conditions under which we admitted them have changed?
• What evidence would help us decide whether to sustain, redesign, merge, pause, or close a program?
• Whose work makes this program possible, and what would sustainable capacity require?
• Whose voice is missing, and how can that perspective shape the options before a decision?
• Which commitments to academic quality and public purpose should guide us across all options?

Program stewardship is educational leadership work. What can we responsibly promise as conditions change?

Questions to keep asking

Conditions of disruption

• How are legislative, political, financial, and institutional changes reshaping what educational leadership departments can promise students, faculty, and communities?
• What happens to program stewardship when tenure, shared governance, faculty replacement, or departmental autonomy can no longer be assumed?
• How do educational leadership faculty deliberate responsibly when the rules of academic work are changing while decisions are being made?

Obligation

• What do we owe students when a program was built under one set of faculty, enrollment, and institutional conditions, but must now be sustained under another?
• At what point does continuing a program “as is” become less ethical than redesigning, pausing, merging, or closing it?
• How do we honor program histories without allowing history alone to determine future commitments?

Decision-making

• How do departments avoid making program decisions based mainly on scarcity, nostalgia, individual faculty preference, or avoidance of conflict?
• What evidence should matter when deciding whether a program is viable, including enrollment, workforce need, student experience, faculty capacity, accreditation expectations, and public mission?
• How can shared governance be used not only to protect faculty autonomy, but to support collective responsibility for students and programs?

Future design

• What would it mean to put students and public purpose at the center of program redesign?
• How do educational leadership programs prepare leaders for complex public problems while also modeling responsible leadership in their own organizational decisions?
• What bridges are needed among faculty, students, alumni, practitioners, college leadership, and community partners when programs are being redesigned?

Reference guide

Questions, evidence, voices, and potential consequences to consider in program decisions (Handout 4).

References

American Association of University Professors. (1966). Statement on government of colleges and universities. https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/aaup-policies-reports/topical-reports/statement-government-colleges-and

American Association of University Professors. (n.d.). Shared governance.

Gumport, P. J. (2000). Academic restructuring: Organizational change and institutional imperatives. Higher Education, 39(1), 67–91. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1003859026301

Higher Ed Dive. (2026, March 27). Kentucky Senate passes bill making it easier to cut faculty. https://www.highereddive.com/news/kentucky-senate-passes-bill-making-it-easier-to-cut-faculty/816039/

Holcombe, E., & Kezar, A. (2017, May 10). The whys and hows of shared leadership in higher education. Higher Education Today. https://www.higheredtoday.org/2017/05/10/whys-hows-shared-leadership-higher-education/

Kezar, A. J., & Holcombe, E. M. (2017). Shared leadership in higher education: Important lessons from research and practice. American Council on Education.

Quinn, R. (2026, April 30). New state laws land blows against shared governance, tenure. Inside Higher Ed.

The Chronicle of Higher Education. (2025, May 5). New state laws target DEI, struggling academic programs, and tenure. https://www.chronicle.com/article/new-state-laws-target-dei-struggling-academic-programs-and-tenure