MA3 Challenge Announces Awardees Advancing the Future of Academic Reward Systems
The Open Research Community Accelerator (ORCA) in partnership with the Aspen Institute Science & Society Program and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, announced today that six universities have been awarded $250,000 as part of the inaugural Modernizing Academic Appointment & Advancement (MA3) Challenge. This new cohort of university awardees will implement bold institutional reforms to faculty hiring, evaluation, promotion, and tenure systems.
The awardees represent a diverse group of institutions committed to redesigning incentive structures to better align with higher education’s articulated values like public engagement and interdisciplinarity. As a core component of the MA3 program, they will form a community of practice in spring 2026 to troubleshoot challenges, learn from one another, and share insights that could support modernization efforts across higher education.
“The Academy, the Aspen Institute, and ORCA had high hopes that our call to bring the values of collaboration and openness to academic incentives would be met with brave new ideas,” said Laurie L. Patton, the president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. “The winning proposals exceed our goals with a range of approaches and depth of commitment to fundamentally transforming how colleges and universities hire, review, and promote. Reforming the system of academic appointments and advancements will be advantageous to individuals, institutions, and the public good.”
More About the MA3 Awardees:
Columbia Climate School will modernize faculty review, promotion, and tenure to better value interdisciplinary climate scholarship, community partnerships, policy engagement, and public communication. Through new criteria, dossier templates, and training, the project will create a flexible, mission-aligned framework that recognizes the diverse outputs needed to address climate challenges and accelerates the translation of research into real-world solutions.
Michigan State University will integrate publicly impactful scholarship, innovation, engagement, and entrepreneurship into promotion and tenure systems. A university-wide working group will develop guidance, rubrics, and tools, while pilot colleges adapt new frameworks to disciplinary contexts. The project includes leadership engagement, mentoring networks, new reporting tools, and national dissemination through the Big Ten Academic Alliance and disciplinary societies.
Philander Smith University will build a sustainable culture of open science by embedding transparent and inclusive research practices into career advancement and annual review. The initiative includes new promotion and tenure incentives, mini-grants for open research and educational resources, professional development, and a recognition and awards program to elevate community-engaged and collaborative scholarship.
Stanford Medicine will advance a comprehensive institutional strategy to better recognize and reward evidence-to-action research, including scholarship that translates knowledge into policy and practice. The project will convene cross-institutional experts and campus stakeholders to revise appointment and promotion processes, develop new evaluation criteria, and train faculty and review committees. Stanford will also build long-term infrastructure to support dissemination and societal impact, including new grant requirements, seed funding for translational research, a university-wide resource repository, and a new Evidence-to-Action Award.
University of California, Santa Cruz will develop and implement institution-wide guidelines to evaluate open science, open source software, science communication, and graduate mentoring in merit and promotion. The project includes faculty working groups to map open scholarship across disciplines, a faculty learning community around equity-centered mentoring, and campus-wide engagement, including Town Halls and Academic Senate consultation on the new evaluation standards. Capacity-building efforts will provide training, professional development, and departmental pilots to embed open scholarship and mentoring practices across disciplines.
University of Northern Colorado will revise faculty evaluation criteria to recognize High-Impact Practices such as interdisciplinary collaboration, open educational resources, community engagement, and student-centered teaching. Through faculty fellows, departmental pilots, and openly licensed toolkits, the university aims for half of its departments to adopt revised criteria by the project’s end, and to create a replicable model for other institutions.
ORCA nurtures cross-sector coalitions to tackle the systems-level challenges that are impeding more intentional approaches to science. The goal is to support research processes and outcomes that are more inclusive, and, by extension, more innovative, efficient, transparent, and trustworthy.
The organizers would like to thank the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Dana Foundation, the Rita Allen Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, who have contributed $1.5 million dollars, collectively, for supporting this Challenge.
