There is a conversation that higher education has been avoiding for a long time, and it lives precisely at the intersection of human resources, institutional power, and organizational culture. Some institutions have grown comfortable treating HR as a transactional hub where paperwork is processed, policies are administered, and complaints are quietly managed into submission. That model is not neutral. It is a choice and it is a costly one, particularly in academic environments where the stakes of getting culture wrong ripple across generations of students, faculty, staff, and alumni who deserve better than an institution that protects its reputation at the expense of its people. When HR is reduced to a compliance function, it loses its most powerful capacity, which is to serve as a conscience for the institution and a genuine partner in the work of organizational transformation. Ulrich (1997) was among the first to argue that the human resources function within any modern organization must evolve from administrative expertise into a constellation of roles that includes strategic partner, change agent, and employee champion. The fact that higher education has lagged behind other sectors in that evolution is not a small detail. It is a defining feature of the cultural problem this conversation is attempting to name.
To understand why this lag has been so persistent, one must reckon with the particular cultural architecture of higher education itself. Bergquist and Pawlak (2008) describe the academy as a layered set of cultures (collegial, managerial, developmental, advocacy, virtual, and tangible), each with its own history, assumptions, and unspoken rules about how authority is distributed and how work is honored. Within the academic culture in particular, faculty are socialized to understand themselves as autonomous professionals, in many cases functioning as independent contractors who happen to share a payroll system, and that self-understanding shapes how they relate to administrative structures, including HR. Kezar, DePaola, and Scott (2019) extend this analysis by documenting how the broader restructuring of academic labor toward contingency, outsourcing, and managerial centralization has produced what they describe as a “gig academy,” in which the institutional fabric that once held faculty, staff, and administration in shared accountability has frayed considerably. When faculty understand themselves as independent contractors and staff are treated as fungible support, the conditions for nepotism, cronyism, and the unchecked persistence of harm are not aberrations but predictable outputs of the system as currently structured.
Let us reflect on what higher education can become when the wrong conditions are allowed to take root. Nepotism and cronyism are not aberrations in academia; they are, in many institutions, the operating system running just beneath the surface of mission statements and strategic plans. When hiring decisions are made based on relationships rather than merit, promotions are awarded to those who protect the powerful rather than those who serve the institution, and when repeat offenders are quietly reassigned rather than held accountable, the culture of the college does not simply stagnate. It fractures and the people who carry the weight of that fracture are rarely the ones who are empowered to be retained. They sometimes are the individual contributors, the junior faculty, and the staff members who show up and absorb the institutional trauma that screams as loud as silence.
This is the question that deserves a real answer: what does a leader of conscience do when they know that the same individuals are responsible for repeated harm within the organization? The temptation in hierarchical systems is to manage around the problem, to create buffers, and to hope that attrition will eventually resolve what courage has declined to address; however, institutional trauma does not resolve itself through patience. It compounds, embeds itself in the organizational culture, shapes what people believe is possible, what they believe they deserve, and what they understand to be the unspoken rules of survival within that system. No one receives a promotion for absorbing harm gracefully and no one heals because they were told, implicitly or explicitly, that endurance is the only option available to them.
This is precisely why HR must be repositioned, not cosmetically rebranded but genuinely reconceived, as a strategic thought partner in the transformation of institutions. This is not simply a reflection about organizational efficiency. It is an ethical call to action, grounded in the reality that higher education is a helping profession at its core. We exist to develop human potential and that purpose cannot be selectively applied to students while the people who teach, advise, and support those students are left to navigate environments that diminish rather than develop them. The same commitment to human flourishing that animates the classroom must animate the organizational structures that make the classroom possible. HR is uniquely positioned to be the conscience that holds that standard when institutional politics would prefer to look the other way.
The academic impact of this repositioning deserves particular attention, especially in the current moment, in which institutions across the country are engaged in program review, program prioritization, and the difficult work of restructuring during periods of fiscal constraint and demographic change. In these seasons, decisions about which programs to sustain, which positions to retain, and which colleagues will be asked to depart are not merely operational; they are deeply human, and they directly shape the academic mission of the institution. When HR is engaged only at the end of these processes, to administer the paperwork of separations or to defend the institution against the consequences of decisions that were made without people-centered counsel, the academic enterprise itself suffers. Faculty and staff who lose trust in the fairness of these processes carry that loss into their teaching, their advising, and their service to students. The talent that institutions most need to retain in turbulent moments is often the talent most likely to leave when the people experience is mishandled. When HR is engaged from the beginning as a strategic thought partner, it becomes possible to carry out even the hardest decisions with dignity, transparency, and a regard for the human beings whose lives are being affected, and that integrity in turn protects the academic enterprise that the institution exists to serve.
When HR operates as a genuine thought partner, it does not simply uphold the policies that the President finds convenient or the priorities that the Board of Trustees finds politically palatable. It holds the institution accountable to its own stated values, even and especially when that accountability is uncomfortable for those in positions of power. It recognizes that protecting the institution and protecting the people within it are not competing priorities, but the same priority understood at different levels of depth. An institution that sacrifices its people to protect its image is not protecting anything of lasting value; it is simply deferring the consequences of its own dysfunction. Edmondson (1999) demonstrated through her foundational work on psychological safety in organizations that teams are only able to learn, innovate, and perform at high levels when their members believe that interpersonal risk-taking will not be punished.
Fleming et al. (2023) extended that insight in their longitudinal study of school staff, finding that low psychological safety and unsupportive administrative leadership were among the most significant predictors of burnout over time, a finding that speaks directly to what happens inside any educational institution when leadership fails to create an environment where employees are demonstrated to be equally important.
Inclusive excellence, a phrase that gets invoked frequently and practiced inconsistently, means something specific and demanding in this context. It means that HR is present and responsive not only for senior leadership but for deans navigating complex departmental dynamics, for faculty who are trying to do their work in environments shaped by politics they did not create, and for staff members whose contributions are essential and whose experiences are too often invisible to institutional decision-making. It means that the organizational transformation conversation includes everyone who has a stake in the health of the institution, which is to say everyone within it. Holcombe et al. (2021) have argued that the complex challenges facing higher education today require precisely this kind of distributed approach to leadership, in which authority and responsibility are shared across roles and levels rather than concentrated at the top. HR has a critical role to play in cultivating the conditions under which such shared leadership can take root. When HR shows up only for the powerful and manages away from the vulnerable, it does not practice inclusive excellence. It practices selective protection, and that distinction matters enormously to the people living inside the culture every single day.
The work of organizational healing is not soft work. It requires the kind of honesty that hierarchical systems are structurally designed to suppress, and it requires leaders who are willing to name what is happening rather than always attempting to control the narrative in areas where it is not warranted because everyone already knows. It requires ethical HR professionals who understand that their role is not to manage risk on behalf of administration but to support the conditions under which all people within the institution can do their best work and be treated with dignity in the process. Kidder (2007) has argued that restorative approaches to workplace conflict offer institutions a meaningful alternative to purely punitive or compliance-driven responses to harm. HR offices that have built capacity for restorative practice are uniquely positioned to facilitate the kind of conversations that allow individuals and teams to address breach, repair relationship, and move forward without pretending that the harm did not occur. The call to higher education is not simply to restructure HR reporting lines or revise job descriptions but to make a fundamental decision about what kind of institution it intends to be. An institution that uses HR to uphold the status quo will continue to protect power at the expense of people, while an institution that positions HR as a strategic thought partner in its own healing will begin to close the distance between what it claims to value and how it operates. That closing distance is not merely a strategic advantage. It is the moral baseline that the profession demands and the people within these institutions deserve. Thus, I end with the question, “How do you engage with HR to provide strategic partnership in the healing as well as the restoration of your workforce?”
For leaders who are ready to move from reflection into practice, three concrete next steps offer a starting point. First, build genuine relationships with HR leadership through learning rather than evaluation. Schedule meaningful time with the Chief Human Resources Officer or members of the senior HR leadership team. Approach the conversation not as an opportunity to assess the work that they do, but as an opportunity to learn about the field, to ask substantive questions, and to engage HR colleagues as the professionals that they are. As institutions of higher education, reading about the discipline of HR should be as important as having conversations with them to learn more about their functionality within the organization. Within some institutions of higher education, faculty are treated as deities while others may perceive their treatment as less than, eroding the cultural fabric of the institution before any single crisis arrives. To deepen this relationship, invite HR into your department meetings to provide a presentation about their function within your organization and allow the team to ask questions. Considering higher education sometimes operates in silos, it is important to name that HR professionals seek relationality at their institutions like everyone else. The more present HR is in the everyday rhythms of the institution, the greater the sense of psychological safety and shared community an organization is likely to experience.
Second, engage HR early and as a thought partner rather than an adversary. When personnel challenges, promotional opportunities, retirements, and other employee matters arise, begin the conversation with HR before pursuing other actions that may cause more harm than benefit. Thought partnership cannot occur when participants are positioned against one another; it requires that both parties be regarded as colleagues working toward the same institutional good. When HR is practiced well, it supports the entire community, not only those in management. With proper competency and training, HR professionals can facilitate conversations that transform conflict into clarity rather than allowing it to harden into resentment. This is an example where HR can be the conduit of healing within institutional contexts instead of being viewed as adversarial.
Third, receive HR’s accountability with integrity, even when the answer is not what you had hoped to hear. HR is a strong partner for accountability that is shared across the institution, which means HR will at times provide leaders with feedback that does not align with what those leaders wanted. That moment is not the ground for speaking negatively about HR or characterizing the office as obstructive; it is, in fact, the ground on which trust is either deepened or eroded. For example, if a dean wants to terminate an employee because they challenge decision that are being made, that employee cannot be terminated due to personality differences; however, the dean may desire for HR to side with them in the termination which is essentially unethical. There are rules to follow, and there is a holistic impact upon the experience of people that HR must consider in every decision. Leaders who can sit with that reality, rather than retreat into frustration when their preferences are not validated, model the very kind of accountability that transformation requires.
When the house is on fire, no member of the household has the luxury of pretending the smoke belongs to someone else. The metaphor that gives this piece its title is not rhetorical flourish; it is a description of where many higher education institutions actually find themselves at this moment. The work of putting the fire out cannot be outsourced to a single office, a single executive, or a single committee. It belongs to all of us. Every leader, every faculty member, every staff colleague, and every administrator carries a piece of the institutional culture in the way they greet their colleagues, in the assumptions they make about who matters, and in the biases they bring into hiring conversations, performance reviews, and difficult decisions about which voices will be heard and which will be quietly set aside. Examine those assumptions.
Interrogate the unspoken and spoken hierarchies that determine whose work is honored and whose is rendered invisible. Notice when you are tempted to dismiss colleagues because of their title, their tenure status, or their distance from the rooms where decisions are made and recognize that dismissal as a failure of the very inclusive culture the institution claims to want.
We are all human resources, in the most literal and most sacred sense of that phrase: we are human beings whose dignity, intelligence, and contribution are the actual resources from which any institution is built. We share the responsibility of ensuring that no colleague’s experience inside our walls is left to burn because we may have set the fire. Begin where you are. Speak to the colleague whose name you have not yet learned. Advocate for the staff member whose contribution has gone unacknowledged. Engage HR not as the office that handles other people’s problems but as a partner in the shared work of proactively keeping the house from burning down around the people who call it home. The healing of higher education will not arrive through the heroism of any single leader; it will arrive through the daily, deliberate, humanizing choices of people who refuse to look away when the smoke begins to rise.
References
Bergquist, W. H., & Pawlak, K. (2008). Engaging the six cultures of the academy: Revised and expanded edition of The four cultures of the academy. Jossey-Bass.
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
Fleming, C. M., Calvert, H. G., & Turner, L. (2023). Burnout among school staff: A longitudinal analysis of leadership, connectedness, and psychological safety. School Mental Health, 15, 900–912. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12310-023-09594-x
Holcombe, E. M., Kezar, A. J., Elrod, S. L., & Ramaley, J. A. (Eds.). (2021). Shared leadership in higher education: A framework and models for responding to a changing world. Stylus Publishing.
Kezar, A., DePaola, T., & Scott, D. T. (2019). The gig academy: Mapping labor in the neoliberal university. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Kidder, D. L. (2007). Restorative justice: Not “rights,” but the right way to heal relationships at work. International Journal of Conflict Management, 18(1), 4–22. https://doi.org/10.1108/10444060710759291
Ulrich, D. (1997). Human resource champions: The next agenda for adding value and delivering results. Harvard Business School Press.
