Audrey Wilson Ellis

May 17, 2024

I’ve been both experiencing, bumping up against, and grappling with the idea of “initiative fatigue” for the last ten years. Finally, I am tackling this concept in my doctoral dissertation in the Community College Policy and Administration Program at the University of Maryland, Global Campus.

The Ranger, a community college Newspaper reported in 2016 that an Aspen Institute draft site visit report described a collective sense of “initiative fatigue” on campus during their visit to the Alamo Colleges District. The report listed a number of anonymous quotes including, “We are a mile wide and an inch deep,” “The strategy map changes every time we see it,” “The next big thing can’t be to add another big thing,” “We don’t have time to become great at anything,” and “We follow the flavor of the month.” (Cotton, 2016).

Community colleges in the United States have faced abundant calls (both external and internal) for significant transformation and change over the last decade and a half. The initiatives that spring up in response to these efforts to improve, transform, change, and innovate, are often one after another, leaving college stakeholders feeling overwhelmed and unsure of how each initiative fits into the larger puzzle of improving outcomes. The term “initiative fatigue” has been used anecdotally in myriad contexts, whether in academic conferences, presentations, workshops, Youtube Videos, and in online publications, yet it has never been empirically studied as its own standalone concept.

Initiative fatigue has been simply chalked up to the perception of a ‘change du jour’ (Achieving the Dream and Public Agenda, 2011), and described in greater detail as “not simply recalcitrance on the part of particularly grumpy personnel. Rather, it should be understood as a genuine heightened psychological and physiological state in which faculty and staff members feel overwhelmed by and sometimes conflicted about the number of improvement efforts to which institutional leaders and external authorities are asking them to devote time and effort—all of this on top of the fact that administrators, faculty, and staff on nearly every campus are doing more with less” (Kuh, et. al., 2015, p. 184-185).

As I began my research in 2023, I started to create an informal “index” of public references to Initiative Fatigue, as I stumbled across them online. I want to make this index publicly available, so others can quickly locate these references as well. I have conducted thorough searches of predominant news outlets in higher education (e.g., CCDaily, Inside Higher Ed, Chronicle of Higher Education), major non-profits that publish literature on community colleges and change efforts (e.g., Achieving the Dream, Community College Research Center), and then conducted extensive Google-searching to unearth less obviously located references to this term. I’m sure there are more than i have captured, but I believe I’ve made a productive dent. Considering that initiative fatigue is, as described above, directly related to internal and external factors on campus, I found it helpful to then chart these references chronologically, so I could explore the referencing of this phrase as a possible indicator of how the sector was experiencing the notion of initiatives and change at a given moment.

I will be continuing to explore this concept in greater length within my dissertation and hope to publish much more across the next year. For now, please find the bar chart and index of APA citations below. Please note that the italics in my citations were erroneously deleted in the process of uploading this index.

If you would like to discuss this topic and my research, please feel free to contact me at [email protected].

Bar chart of Online References to Initiative Fatigue in Higher Education since 2010.

Index of Public References to Initiative Fatigue