Academic Leaders
Your Cooperative Colleague, founded by Dr. Brielle Harbin, is a higher education consulting practice that helps provosts, deans, and department chairs redesign the institutional conditions driving faculty burnout and attrition.
When leadership becomes constant containment, the system needs redesigning, not the people.
If you’re responsible for people and systems in higher education, much of your work may now happen in moments of tension—department meetings that escalate, decisions that stall, or conflicts that arise without clear pathways to resolution.
The Pressure Shows Up Across Roles
Chairs often absorb conflict without authority, training, or time.
Deans balance faculty needs against institutional constraints.
Provosts see patterns emerge across units but inherit systems they did not design and cannot easily change.
Center and CTL directors are tasked with supporting faculty development inside structures that often undermine the very things they’re building.
These dynamics are not signs of poor leadership.
They are signals of institutional design strain.
The Challenge Beneath Difficult Dynamics
When emotionally charged moments become routine, institutions often rely on individual leaders to stabilize situations rooted in systemic issues.
Over time, this leads to decision fatigue, slower progress on core academic work, eroded trust, and increased institutional risk.
What looks like a people problem is often a design problem — rooted in how roles, expectations, and decision-making structures are set up.
Every semester these patterns continue, the cost compounds: your strongest faculty disengage or leave altogether, institutional trust erodes, and students inherit the consequences. The question isn't whether your institution values its faculty — it's whether the systems you've built actually reflect that.
Civic Courage By Design
Across classrooms, faculty writing lives, and leadership roles, the same institutional design problems appear. Systems optimized for urgency, politeness, or performance leave little room for faculty wellness.
Civic Courage by Design™ is a framework for helping institutions move beyond conflict avoidance toward more intentional ways of engaging disagreement, complexity, and change—so the classroom becomes a rehearsal space for democratic life, and institutional culture reflects the values the institution claims.
What Working Together Looks Like
While every institution is different, this work most often takes shape through a focused set of engagement formats designed to support both people and systems:
Keynotes & Conference Talks
For conferences, retreats, and institutional events. Dr. Harbin is a keynote speaker for faculty development, whose signature topics include teaching in politically charged contexts, faculty retention and institutional trust, civic courage in higher education, and sustaining academic work in uncertain times.
Workshops & Intensives
Half-day and full-day sessions for departments, centers, or cross-institutional groups. Designed around specific institutional goals—from addressing faculty burnout and supporting faculty wellness to building shared frameworks for navigating difficult conversations.
Cohort Programs
Multi-session engagements for faculty groups working on sustained change—teaching redesign, scholarly work systems, or leadership development. Built for depth, not one-time exposure.
Strategic Partnerships
For institutions ready to go deeper. Advisory engagements that address faculty experience, retention, and institutional culture at the structural level.
All institutional engagements begin with a connection call to understand your context, goals, and constraints.
Credibility
Dr. Brielle Harbin — Political scientist. 2023 APSA Distinguished Teaching Award recipient. Nationally recognized faculty development strategist who has partnered with research universities, teaching-focused institutions, and military academies on faculty development and institutional design. Over a decade of experience inside higher education — teaching, mentoring, facilitating faculty development, and helping institutions redesign the conditions that drive faculty burnout.
Brielle is especially attentive to how institutional design shapes who is able to stay, contribute, and be recognized — particularly for women of color and others carrying disproportionate, invisible labor.
A Resource for Leaders Navigating Difficult Moments
The Grounded Leader
A short guide for academic leaders navigating emotionally complex meetings.
For Leaders Ready to Explore What’s Possible
You don't need a fully scoped project to start a conversation. If something on this page named a pattern you're seeing in your institution, that recognition is a good starting point.
If you're also navigating these challenges personally — as a faculty member, not just a leader — explore how this work supports individual scholars.