Human Capital In Higher Ed: Reconnecting Faculty, HR & Accreditation

Across business schools and universities, a quiet misalignment is widening between faculty, who represent the intellectual heart of the institution, and the human resources systems meant to support their growth. Despite being the most valuable form of human capital, faculty are often managed through administrative routines that fail to connect with institutional strategy or the future of learning.

The result is an academic ecosystem that values compliance more than creativity and checklists more than curiosity. The same pattern extends to accreditation and rankings, which were designed to encourage reflection but now too often reinforce bureaucracy. If higher education wants to stay relevant, it must rebuild the bridge between its people and its processes.

WHEN HR REMAINS HOUSEKEEPING

In most universities, HR departments still function as service centers, managing hiring, contracts, and compliance. Few play a proactive role in shaping academic capability or future talent pipelines. Faculty development programs, meanwhile, tend to be reactive, built around what has worked before rather than what will matter next.

This backward orientation keeps universities behind the curve. Faculty design research and teaching around outdated assumptions, while HR systems remain preoccupied with paperwork and bureaucracy. The result is a cycle of administrative efficiency that undermines strategic agility.

To break that pattern, HR must stop behaving like a maintenance department and start acting like a talent architect. Its job is not only to hire and retain but also to develop the intellectual capital that defines a school’s reputation. This means that HR personnel must truly understand faculty and their roles in the institution and not treat all employees of the institution the same. When a knowledgeable HR, faculty, and academic leadership jointly plan around future competencies, universities can begin managing talent with the same foresight that companies apply to innovation.

ACCREDITATION WITHOUT OWNERSHIP IS JUST PAPERWORK

Accreditation frameworks such as AACSB, EQUIS, and AMBA were designed to ensure quality and comparability. When used well, they encourage schools to reflect on engagement, innovation, and impact (AACSB, 2020). Yet in many institutions, accreditation has drifted into a bureaucratic ritual, a cycle of documentation that feels more like an audit than an act of learning.

Faculty, the very people whose work defines engagement and impact, are often invited to the table only at the reporting stage. They provide data but rarely shape how standards are interpreted at their institutions. This strips accreditation of authenticity. As the EFMD (2023) reminds us, genuine quality assurance depends on collective ownership. Accreditation that excludes faculty is little more than administrative theater.

The irony is that accreditation and HR are deeply linked. Every accreditation system depends on HR-driven processes: hiring, promotion, professional development, retention, and faculty qualification management. When these systems operate separately, institutions waste time and energy. When they are aligned, accreditation becomes a reflection of genuine capability rather than compliance.

RANKINGS: PRESTIGE THEATER OR IMPACT CATALYST?

Rankings are the public face of the same disconnect. They promise accountability and recognition, but in practice they reward the most measurable, not the most meaningful, aspects of education. Salary outcomes, citation counts, and internationalization ratios dominate metrics, while innovation in teaching, collaboration with industry, and societal impact remain invisible.

Some leading schools have started pushing back. As the Financial Times (2022) reported, even Harvard and Wharton have questioned ranking methodologies that fail to capture educational depth or research relevance. The problem is not rankings themselves but what they measure.

Imagine if rankings assessed how well a school’s research shaped public policy, how effectively its graduates advanced sustainability, or how inclusively it developed leaders. Imagine if teaching innovation carried as much weight as alumni salaries. Rankings could evolve from prestige theater into impact catalysts, tools that highlight how education changes organizations, industries, and societies.

That transformation starts by involving faculty directly in defining what counts as impact. When the people who produce knowledge shape the way success is measured, rankings begin to reflect academic reality rather than administrative fantasy.

THE TEXAS LESSON: BIG HATS, BIGGER HORIZONS

There is an old saying in Texas: “All hat and no cattle.” It describes someone who talks big but delivers little. Too many institutions today fit that description. They boast about innovation and impact but operate through systems that measure compliance rather than creativity that leads to innovation.

Texas folklore also celebrates the opposite kind of character, the rancher who quietly builds, invests, and adapts to changing land and weather. That is the model higher education needs. Real transformation will not come from new slogans or rankings but from a deeper cultural shift that aligns people, purpose, and process so that faculty can drive innovation from the inside out.

Universities that take that approach will have what Texans call “true grit”, the resilience to evolve without losing their soul. They will treat accreditation as a living framework, HR as a strategic ally, and faculty as co-creators of value. In short, they will stop polishing the hat and start growing the herd.

FROM COMPLIANCE TO CO-CREATION

Whether in HR, accreditation, or rankings, the core issue is the same: faculty are treated as implementers rather than co-creators. To fix that, universities must rethink their culture of governance.

HR should view faculty development as strategic talent management. Faculty should see accreditation as an opportunity for professional visibility and influence, not as a bureaucratic burden. And leadership should measure institutional excellence by the depth of faculty engagement, not the number of forms completed.

When these groups align, accreditation and rankings regain their original purpose: to stimulate innovation, reflection, and renewal.

A BLUEPRINT FOR RECONNECTION

1. Create Joint Talent Councils: Bring HR leaders, faculty, and academic executives together to set talent priorities and align them with the school’s mission and accreditation standards.
2. Build Faculty Foresight Programs: Help professors anticipate business and societal trends and translate those insights into curriculum and research design.
3. Make Accreditation a Living Framework: Integrate principles like engagement, innovation, and impact into everyday practice and communications. Accreditation should guide improvement, not just validate it.
4. Rethink Faculty Development: Expand training beyond teaching techniques to include leadership, digital transformation, sustainability, and industry collaboration. These are the skills essential to tomorrow’s academy.
5. Measure What Matters: Add qualitative metrics that capture pedagogical creativity, social relevance, and intellectual influence. When faculty help define success, measurement becomes motivation.

THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THE CO-CREATORS

At the heart of every great university lies its faculty, the collective engine of discovery, teaching, and societal progress. Yet that engine remains underused in shaping institutional direction. The next era of higher education will belong to those schools that can reconnect their people, policies, and purpose.

When HR acts as a partner in academic strategy, when accreditation reflects faculty insight, and when rankings measure real-world influence rather than symbolic prestige, universities will not only meet standards, they will set them. And as Texans might say, that is when higher education will finally show it has both the hat and the cattle!

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Benjamin Stevenin is special adviser to Poets&Quants and former Director of Business School Solutions and Partnerships at Times Higher Education. Geralyn McClure Franklin is an executive search consultant with Higher Education Leadership Search and a retired business school dean who led schools in Texas, Florida, Louisiana, and the United Arab Emirates. 

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