Category: Q&A

At a time of fear and uncertainty in higher education, what good leadership demands may be as simple as being an excellent human being. Meet Father “Call Me Jack” Butler, the new president of Boston College. The Jesuit priest was a prison minister, administrator, counselor, and spiritual director before becoming the institution’s first new president in 30 years. The week of his much-anticipated inauguration, he was remarkably relaxed, and characteristically modest, saying, “A job doesn’t change who you are.” 

Father Jack, as he is known, may well be the college president of our times. He is discerning, relatable, and refreshingly unafraid of the existential crisis higher education appears to be facing at this moment. For over 15 years, he was the Haub Vice President for University Mission and Ministry, a division of Boston College that invites faculty and students to embrace the school’s formative education mission through retreats and reflection. Grounded in Jesuit educational tradition, BC retains an intentional focus on teaching to the whole person with an emphasis on how to live a good life in many dimensions. 

As a Catholic priest on a multi-faith campus, Father Butler is at once unapologetic about his devotion to his religion and welcoming of all forms of spirituality. He acknowledges the realities of encouraging the practice of personal formation within a highly selective research institution. At the same time, he believes that understanding our roles as humans is more important than ever. In this interview with LearningWell, Father Jack and Winston Provost and Dean of Faculties David Quigley talk about why they are doubling down on BC’s mission in a rapidly changing world.

It’s been 30 years since BC has had a new president, and here you are. How does it feel?

JB: The most important thing in all of this is continuing to be who you are. You might have more responsibility, but if you have people like this [gestures to colleagues], the responsibility isn’t all that different. The one thing I can genuinely say is the love and support and affection that I’ve received since the naming and the first day on the job has been hard to process. It’s been overwhelming. It’s been wonderful. The rest of it, it’s just getting up in the morning and doing what I can do to be the best I can be for myself and for others. 

Do you think your becoming president says something about the direction of Boston College and the importance of formative education at this point in time?

JB: I think that formative education is something that people like David and the deans and the faculty at Boston College all believe in. It is who we are. But formative education didn’t come out of a vacuum. The Jesuit, Catholic education that’s been going on for 500 years has always been formative. It’s always been about the liberal arts: helping us learn how to live life and to become integrated people, the idea that an education isn’t just about a job; it’s about how to maximize your potential and enjoy the gift of creation itself. 

And it’s because we want to be known as a Jesuit, Catholic-faith-based, values-laden school that specializes in formative education that they were looking for a Jesuit to be in this role. I think that’s probably the default on why it’s me, to be honest. It doesn’t hurt that I love human beings, I love the relational aspect of education, and I believe in formative education. 

What do you think, David? What does Father Jack’s presidency say about where BC is right now? 

DQ: If you talk to the board of trustees, there was an absolute focus that having Jesuit leadership has served us well in the past and is really critical at this moment in time. The biggest change over these almost 30 years, and especially over the last 15, is the way in which the language of formation and formative education has taken hold in really powerful ways with faculty, staff, undergraduate and graduate students, friends, alumni, and trustees. There’s a richness in that conversation and the ways in which it’s allowed us to think about how we make investments, how we develop new programs, how we think about hiring, how we think about accompanying our students in light of that kind of broader set of values that Father Jack and his colleagues have created in so many ways. 

I don’t think there’s any place in the country that has done more interesting work than what Father Jack and his colleagues have done [in University Mission and Ministry] for faculty formation, for staff formation, for expanding undergraduate student formation. Here, we have been intentional and creative in thinking about: How do we meet faculty where they are, with a clear sense of who they are in the eyes of younger people, who are coming into universities and are looking for meaning, a sense of community, a sense of a larger purpose? 

You mentioned the importance of faculty in formative education. This is tricky because isn’t there an unwritten rule in higher ed that faculty and administrators sort of mind their own business? Is it a different story here? 

JB: Boston College is a Jesuit, Catholic university, and I’m proud to say that. And I’m a proud Jesuit. But we’re not a church. We’re not about the faith development of everybody here. The primary purpose of a Jesuit, Catholic university is in fact the education. But because we’re Jesuit, Catholic, we have a different reason for doing the education we do, which we welcome the faculty to buy into. What faculty formation really means is getting them to remember why they wanted to be a teacher: the things that got them excited about their particular discipline, the things that gave them purpose and meaning in life, the things that help organize how they negotiate the world. It’s the same things we’re trying to do for the students. 

For us, instead of responding out of fear, we say, “Let’s step back. Why do we do what we do? Has that changed?”

Faculty are the primary formulators. If we can help them help our students become fully alive—to enjoy the richness in life, to be able to live out of joy but also have the capacity and the adaptability to deal with sadness, frustration, and disappointment or failure—that’s what education is really about. We lost our way in higher ed when we made education seemingly only about getting a job

The stakes are a whole lot higher and more important than getting a job. And if you remind faculty that we want our students to be fully alive human beings, to have the capacity to engage life and explore life in all its tremendous magnanimity, very few will find that strange or unappealing. And if you get them to think about why they became faculty, it’s usually because they had somebody like a David Quigley in their life who inspired them. So they are not just teaching math or history or psychology or literature. We’re getting them to understand who they are, integrating themselves, and getting them excited about that. 

Is the goal for faculty to really see the students in more ways than just a receptable for knowledge in a particular specialty? 

JB: I don’t want education to just be a transmission of a subject, of a discipline. We want cognitive development, but we want that to be integrated into their volitional drives, into finding out who they are as they embrace the liberal arts. Like a pinball machine, we want them to bounce off of history and English and psychology and math to find out what they are really interested in. Because some of them come here already hardwired for a career. I think we win if they change their desires because they are doing so based on what they really want to do with their lives. At Boston College, we ask all of our students to consider three questions: What brings you joy? What are you good at? And who does the world need you to be? To us, these three questions are at the heart of formative education. 

DQ: Father Jack was a key ally and driving force when we renewed the undergraduate core curriculum a decade or so ago. One of the key developments there was that many faculty who were most engaged in helping lead the process came to it with a sense that we needed to up our game because the generation of young people who are coming to our classrooms had different needs and different experiences. 

We can talk about all the overdetermined ways in which social media and the various crises of our time are weighing on these young people. But I thought that there was a wonderful openness in that core process to think about, as a Jesuit institution, what kind of a liberal arts core do we need, but also to imagine it involving a lot of creativity about reflection experiences across many of these courses. This is what the retreat work that BC’s Division of Mission and Ministry took on under Father Jack is all about. It is about getting faculty more attuned to what brought us into this work in the first place—that joy of scholarship—which helps our students come alive. 

Let’s talk about the students. David mentioned seeing a different kind of student arriving on campus about a decade ago. That’s when we were just learning the extent of the college student mental health problem and some of the other struggles like loneliness and fatalism. Do you think about that in terms of everything that you’ve designed here, from your work in ministry through to your leadership now?

JB: Answering your question honestly, I’d say—is that the guiding principle behind everything I’m thinking about? No. Is it a large portion of what I’m thinking about? Absolutely. Jesuits have been famous for being countercultural, which most people think of as social justice. But the countercultural is precisely what you’re talking about. And if you have a sense, as I do, that the human organism itself is self-correcting, then you believe that it’s going to be fine. It will move out of loneliness. It will seek relationships. It will have a sense of joy. And I don’t mean this from a religious sense but rather understanding what it is to be human so that they can live their lives to the fullest. 

Take loneliness for example. Why are people so lonely? In part because they haven’t realized they can have a relationship with themselves or they’re afraid to have a relationship with themselves. So we need to get them to be quiet—to reflect. You get the organism to function correctly with the cognitive development. You’re giving them resources, you’re giving them insight, but you’re moving from intellectual growth to wisdom. Wisdom is the way to incorporate this into a life. The intellectual growth is just how to do something. So somebody who’s fatalistic falls in love. Love has a way of getting you out of fatalism. You start bringing that together, and the organism starts to function better. 

What about the pressure students put on themselves to pursue certain majors, constantly striving towards their goals? David, do you talk about that with the deans or the faculty at all? Because that can lead to some mental health issues, as well.

DQ: BC is certainly not immune to this. Historically, across the 20th century up until the 2008 financial crisis, across higher education, there was a counter-cyclical relationship between the economics major and the business cycle. In bad times, people rushed to the economics major. As the economy improved, people went to philosophy or history or fine arts. Since 2008, and this goes for BC but it goes for just about all elite schools around the US, that relationship has been changed, and the push towards the economics major has just continued. So there is a desire on the part of students, families who are committing to support their students, to find their way into particular majors. 

As Father Jack said, they’ve got a certain mindset coming in here. I think why it’s so important to have such an extensive liberal arts core is that we really believe that the kind of flourishing that we’re after for our young people across their lives will be best developed by encountering great works of literature, reading about the greatest approaches to the big theological questions across those areas. Another element—and it’s been part of Jesuit Catholic education especially inventively done here at BC since the late ’60s—is a real institution-wide commitment to service learning, to getting our students out into the city of Boston, into neighboring communities, and encouraging them to think about their obligation, what they owe their fellow men and women and the communities around them. 

JB: I’ll jump in here. I’m not the historian; David’s the historian. But if you really traced it back, before higher education became overly focused on job placement—that’s when we started to lose what I think is the true impact and the essence of what education’s all about. When your kids were young, they were asking you, “Mom, Dad, why?” Everything was why, why, why. 

But we sent them into an educational system, and too often it took the why out of them. And then it became, “How many pages do I have to write? What courses do I have to take that will lead to a job?” Don’t get me wrong, BC is an elite university, and 96 percent of our graduating seniors have a job, are attending graduate school, or are engaged in a meaningful volunteer experience like the Peace Corp. But what distinguishes us as a university is that we consider everyone here an educator, and we’re trying to get our students back into the wonderment of the why.

And the last piece I’ll say is we need to teach them that it is okay to fail. I want them to fail while they’re here because that’s a part of what formative education is about. Because if we don’t let them fail, they won’t take risks. And so part of formation is how do we get them to take risks, to teach them that failure isn’t really failure—it’s the beginning of success.

There is a lot about higher education that needs to be addressed, including affordability. What do you worry about most? 

JB: Sure, we worry about access and affordability. Boston College invested $100 million to establish Messina College, a two-year residential program for low-income, first-generation students on our Brookline campus. It allows people who didn’t have access or couldn’t have access to a school like BC to come here, in many cases, free of charge and transfer into Boston College after two years of study if they maintain a 3.4 cumulative average or better. I would love for BC to try to join universities like Harvard and MIT that offer free undergraduate tuition for families with annual incomes of less than $200,000, but we are not there, yet. We allocate a tremendous amount to need-based undergraduate financial aid, but we have to do more for middle class families. That is something we are all paying attention to.

Do I think that what’s going on at the federal level is hurting us? Absolutely. Do I worry about the distrust of institutions in general and whether or not people believe that a college education really is worth it given the price? Absolutely. Do I think that college athletics—something that I love and is big here—do I think it’s gone astray and that it is putting a strain on BC and other Division 1 universities? Yes. 

There are lots of challenges out there, but if we’re really about formative education, then my line is, “Where there’s love, there can be no fear.” For us, instead of responding out of fear, we say, “Let’s step back. Why do we do what we do? Has that changed?” We will continue to be honest about who we are and not try to change our core values for the circumstances of the time. 

We’re a Jesuit, Catholic university—that’s who we are. This is the kind of education we offer, and this is why we do it. This is the time to double down. This is the time to say, “What we do is really important because we’re actually trying to address the issues of the world.” It’s a very challenging time in one way, to be in higher education. But if you look at it the way that I think people like us look at it, this is the best time to be in education because now the stakes really count. I think we are well positioned to prepare students who can make a difference in the world.

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

Kristie Norwood, the counseling director at Hampton University, a historically Black college in Hampton, Virginia, is willing to sound like a broken record when it comes to what the growing number of students attending HBCUs need and want from their education: It’s all about belonging.

In the seven years since Norwood started at Hampton, following a decade-long clinical career working with veterans, she’s seen her home institution transform. Amid a trend of increasing enrollment across HBCUs nationally, Hampton’s surged 46 percent between 2022 and 2025 alone. 

With LearningWell, Norwood offers her perspective on why Black students today may be feeling drawn to Hampton and HBCUs widely, the mental health pressures they continue to grapple with on campus, and how her center is growing and innovating to meet the moment. 

Dr. Norwood is a mental health expert at the Steve Fund, a leading nonprofit dedicated to promoting the mental health and emotional wellbeing of young people, particularly those from underserved and under-resourced communities.  

LW: HBCUs widely, and Hampton in particular, are seeing upticks in enrollment. Has that shift been noticeable in your work, or did it surprise you?

KN: Our president, President Darrell K. Williams, came in about three years ago with this vision around having the number one student experience in America, and part of that vision encompasses mental health and wellbeing. I think that has really set the tone and really galvanized our team. Students coming across the country to college — they want a great education, but they also want other aspects that incorporate wellbeing. They want activities. They want a sense of community. They want to know that many of our students now have had some exposure to mental health care and that the support and resources are here. 

From a student mental health perspective, are there specific factors you think have made HBCUs, and Hampton, most appealing to students lately?  

At Hampton, there’s a really strong sense of community and belonging. For example, each of the classes has its own name, its own identity. There’s this friendly banter — or I would say really, it’s friendly pride — that happens between the classes. Students walk in with this sense of community. The alumni base is also incredible. So while I am not a Hamptonian, I have come to really appreciate and value the connection that students feel to the alumni base. 

“It doesn’t mean that you have to come to an HBCU, but I would offer for other institutions to think about, how are we creating that sense of belonging for Black students?”

There’s a sense that the sociopolitical climate in recent years — school bans on D.E.I., racial violence, discrimination — might be inspiring more interest in HBCUs. Does that align with what you’re seeing and hearing from students?

We do hear students talk about having been connected or grown up in predominantly white spaces and that, for them, it’s really important to seek out an environment where they feel a connection to parts of their culture or they’re around other students where aspects of Black culture are honored and an inherent part of the community experience.

The other piece we have to think about is the impact of the global pandemic. At that point, many of these students were transitioning to high school or in middle school — critical age periods. When you transition to high school, it’s a big transition. So if I didn’t get those typical transition or social skills at that point, now I’m getting them when I’m coming into college, but they might feel a little bit insurmountable. On top of that, during those times, we were witnessing the killings of Black people across the country. So all of those pieces play a role psychologically in belonging. Students may feel that they want to be somewhere where they feel connected and where aspects of heritage and culture are going to be shared — going to be valued. It doesn’t mean that you have to come to an HBCU to have that, but I would offer for other institutions to think about, how are we creating that sense of belonging for Black students?

Do you end up with many students in your office still searching for that sense of belonging?

I think it can be challenging for first-year students. We see many students who are looking for a sense of belonging or just trying to figure out some of those social skills. How do I make friends? How do I maintain these relationships along with workload, with student organizations? I think the other piece is that many of our students may be very connected to their families, so this is the first time they’re away from home. Geographically, there are no HBCUs, for example, in California. So we tend to draw a lot of students from there who desire to attend an HBCU, and then they’re far from home. I think some of those pieces cause students to come in looking for, how do I create belonging? Who am I in this new space without my parents or guardians here, and how do I feel comfortable in this space?

I wonder if you’ve found similarities between working with veterans and now Black college students post-pandemic, maybe especially given your expertise with P.T.S.D.?

For sure. I would say responses to stressors and trauma are definitely existent in both populations and very similar — but also just that transition. Some of the veterans I worked with, they weren’t necessarily fully diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, but that sense of transition was challenging. It was like, no one understands me, even the people closest to me. Sometimes that mirrors our college students, where it’s like, I don’t know if my family understands me. I don’t know if my faculty members understand me. I don’t know if anyone from high school understands me. They’re left feeling lost and then isolated, thinking it’s just them, and it can lead to a spiral. So not to sound like a broken record, but I really think that idea of belonging and an authentic community is so important.

Are there other key mental health needs among Black college students today that you’re seeing but maybe aren’t getting as much attention or aren’t as well understood?

I would say the pressure is a lot, and not just the pressure of being in college, but the pressure of navigating college and also balancing that with expectations. So many of our students are high performers, and many were the salutatorian or the valedictorian during high school. And so trying to navigate that with the questions of, who am I? And who does the world want me to be as a Black human? Who does my family want me to be? Who is safe enough for me to be authentically me? They’re trying to figure these things out as they’re 18 to 22 and their executive functioning, their brains, their frontal lobes are still developing. Those tend to be some parts of the transition that we normalize and help them navigate. 

I think, culturally, some of these messages go back many generations for Black persons, such as you have to continue working hard. Even if you’re suffering, continue to push through it. So I think now we’re working to shift those narratives to help young adults consider their wellbeing. And sometimes that means resting. Sometimes that means stepping back from clubs and organizations. Sometimes that means finding a mentor on campus. It’s about finding your way home to yourself, your health, and your needs. 

And with the increases in enrollment, have you been seeing many more students coming into the counseling center?

We have absolutely seen more students coming into the counseling center, but I would say, at least at Hampton, it’s partially due to enrollment, but there are other factors. We do a fair amount of outreach, and we have also established a bereavement services program and are partnering with New York Life Foundation to try to develop an evidence-based grief program. So I think that has driven students, when they experience a loss, to the counseling center, as well. 

We also have a peer counselor program. Right now, we have about 25 undergraduate student Peer Counselors. They are called counselors, but they’re not licensed clinicians. They’re not seeing heavy-laden mental health concerns, but they are available to provide support, and they’re a great voice. Research shows that when college students have a mental health challenge, they’re likely to report that to a peer first. So peers can be a conduit to help students get to the counseling center and get engaged with a clinician if that’s what they need.

Has it been difficult to keep up with the demand for services? Did the counseling staff also need to grow?

Yes. I was really excited when our new president came on board and added two clinicians to our center. So about three years ago we added an athletics mental health specialist, and then we added an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ specialist as well. Our partnership with New York Life Foundation also allowed us to hire a bereavement support clinician, as well as a bereavement care manager. So those resources have been tremendously helpful. I think many of my colleagues in higher education, if not all, would say they still need more resources — not just in college counseling centers but in the community in general — but I will say that the resources that we have are really helpful in serving students.

Do you mean mental health resources for the wider Hampton community? 

Yes. At least in Virginia, there’s a shortage of mental health professionals. So the resources versus the demand makes it difficult to make sure that everyone is servicing folks in a timely manner.

Is it a challenge also to find clinicians within that shortage who can provide culturally sensitive care or are trained to work at an HBCU?

I think all accredited programs are expected to have a cultural competence component to them for graduate training, but taking one course is not enough. It’s also ensuring that clinicians engage in their own introspection of their values and biases, that they’re relatable, that they understand college populations, and then also understand some of the unique experiences that come with students who are drawn or enrolled at HBCUs.

Are there ways you’re hoping to expand counseling services?

I would say I have two ideas. Currently, we have SheCare wellness pods through a partnership with the Boris L. Henson Foundation and Kate Spade New York, where we’re able to offer yoga, art therapy, soundbath. It’s a great connection point for integrative wellness, but I would love to expand on that and to see us have not just an integrative wellness center, but a community and belonging-integrated wellness center that really has an intentional community component to it. I also would love to see us be able to have a component that helps service our students who are neurodivergent. That is a population we’re seeing more of in terms of trends. And so it’s important to have select spaces where those students can, again, feel a sense of community and feel a sense of belonging. 

We also share a backyard with the [Veterans Affairs] Medical Center, so my V.A. roots feel really drawn to how we could merge that center with the community and also be able to service veterans who are transitioning out or who just want or need a continued sense of belonging. 

Are there specific benefits that come to mind when you think about what the counseling centers at HBCUs are able to offer?

Many counseling centers actually put a cap on resources. So students may only be eligible for six sessions a year or 12 sessions a year. I have not chosen to move to that model. And part of that is because there’s such a big stigma that exists, particularly within the Black community, around just seeking help in general. And so if a student only gets six sessions, I might spend four of those just talking about the stigma and what it took for them to come into this space. 

I think we can be leaders in the field and in college counseling and talking about, how do you talk about that stigma? How do you eradicate that stigma? How do you normalize mental health? And then what are some of the unique challenges that this population may be experiencing, but maybe we’re not talking about? What are they seeing on social media that might be traumatic? For example, Nolan Wells, that case just came out with the grand jury’s findings. So here it’s a topic of conversation, but there might be other schools where a student might be struggling around that case. Are we creating voice for all of those pieces that students are actively experiencing?

Any other Hampton projects you want to highlight?

I’m really proud. We just hosted the Steve Fund’s 16th Young Growing and Rooted Conference. It was an all-day program, and it was the first time that they held it at an HBCU. So it was really beautiful to watch. We engaged in integrated wellness; we had breakout sessions, held healing circles, and our keynote speaker, Dr. Gina Duncan, an alumna of Hampton and Steve Fund expert, spoke about protective factors. I would love for us to continue programming with the Steve Fund, as well as with some of our other partners, to grow those spaces where we can have such dialogue and impact the campus and community.

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

College students are increasingly willing to talk about their mental health and wellbeing — but the adults in their world don’t always know what to do with that willingness. How can a college community better help students build relationships, recover from failure, take risks, and develop the skills to flourish long after graduation? 

Those questions are at the heart of the newly published “The Oxford Handbook of Well-Being in Higher Education,” co-edited at Purdue University by Beth McCuskey, the vice provost for student life, and Louis Tay, the William C. Byham Chair in Industrial-Organizational Psychology. Drawing on the work of more than 120 researchers and practitioners around the world, the handbook looks at wellbeing across the higher-ed ecosystem. LearningWell spoke with McCuskey and Tay just before the release of the handbook to discuss what today’s students need most and why wellbeing belongs at the center of a university education.

LW: What was the motivation for creating the handbook? What need is it filling in the higher education landscape, and why now?

LT: A big part of the motivation is to recognize that higher education institutions do not merely have the responsibility of educating students in terms of passing down knowledge and skills but also imparting skills for wellbeing and character development. This has, I think, been a classical way of really viewing education in the first place — it’s really the whole person. Also it answers the call for the Okanagan Charter, where really the focus has been on making sure that health and wellbeing are central. There really hasn’t been a resource that consolidates all that we know in terms of research and also practice. So we felt like this was really timely and important to do.

BM: At Purdue, like a lot of campuses for probably a good 10 years ago now, we initially tried to solve the problem by ramping up our mental health services staff on campus. But it became crystal clear that we needed to look beyond that. It really became a campus-wide initiative to look at wellbeing more holistically.

In student life, which I oversee, we were asking, how do we build our services holistically so that we’re meeting a student where they are? Everybody has concerns or problems from time to time. Not every single concern or problem needs a therapeutic mental health intervention, but a student may need somebody to talk to. Maybe it’s study-skill development or something like that that’s underpinning the need.

We built out a programmatic model called Steps to Leaps, playing off the Neil Armstrong alumni connection to campus. It focuses on five areas: overall wellbeing, leadership development, impact, networks, and grit. Louis started working with Steps to Leaps from that research angle. He helped us think through things from that lens. Post-pandemic, he suggested maybe we should write something because I’m practitioner-based, he’s research-based, and so we can approach this from both angles. He had done some work with Oxford University Press before, so he had an editorial contact. About four years ago we pitched the concept, and it fit very neatly in their handbook model. 

LW: The handbook has an ambitious scope, with more than 120 contributors and 46 chapters. How did you decide what — and whom — to include?

BM: We started off with the backdrop of overall mental health and current issues and trends. There’s also a public-health approach to student development, and we talk about staff wellbeing, faculty wellbeing, and contingent faculty wellbeing. Then we look at integration and synthesis: How do we take the theories, the different research in different spaces, and apply it in the higher-ed setting? This includes everything from Covid impact to stress and coping, friendships and wellbeing.

Then we get into interventions and programs — programs that people have launched and research or outcomes for those. And then policy and program implementation: How have different campuses done this work? There’s an example of a first-year program, basic-needs work, the Okanagan Charter, and social-emotional wellbeing through campus housing. Then we have inclusive approaches and disciplinary and global perspectives. So it’s pretty broad.

LT: There are lots of different institutions that are doing amazing work here, and Beth and I are only doing a small slice. I think it’s really important to gather ideas and learn from the best. The fun part of being editors is we really get to read everything and learn from everyone. And of course we exchange ideas as well through that process.

LW: How does the handbook handle wellbeing, and is there such a thing as a baseline? What does “wellbeing” mean in this context?

BM: We’re defining wellbeing very basically. It is flourishing — human flourishing, helping people be their best. It’s broader than supporting the students because if our base is not well, we’re asking a lot of people to make things as well as possible for others. We’ve got to look at this as an ecosystem, and I think that’s what the book does. 

LW: How would you characterize where students are now compared with 10 years ago? What are some of the features of their state of wellbeing?

BM: We’re in a very different place, and I think we’re starting to see things evolving generationally. One of the key things we’ve been noticing is that over the past decade, more students are coming in presenting challenges related to wellbeing. Surveys show that more students have anxiety and depression, and fewer of them are flourishing.

Also starting about 10 or 12 years ago, we were seeing a whole shift in how students were approaching their education. We had seen students prior to that who wanted to experience a lot of different elements, maybe changing their major a lot, maybe even overcommitting — getting involved a lot of different places. About the mid-teens, we saw this huge commitment of students to, “This is the goal” — very goal-specific and ladder-like in their approach to how they were going to accomplish that goal, which was a very different mindset.

I think the pandemic did absolutely cause some concerns. We had the learning loss, and I believe the social learning loss. If you’re managing a residence hall, for example, you see this. People can’t have a conversation about dirty socks on the floor. How do you help people have those skills to address conflict, even tiny conflicts? That generation that came to campus right after the pandemic may have lost that skill-building in high school because of learning remotely. And then there’s the technology piece. The door is wide open here in terms of where this is going.

LT: They are digital natives, so a lot of interactions nowadays are filtered or mediated through technology. It’s not merely that most people are messaging rather than calling. Now we have A.I. in the mix, too. Youth are forming relationships with A.I. agents, and there are big companies actually working on that to address loneliness. But then it comes at a cost. Are young folks actually interacting with these A.I. agents and learning unhealthy patterns because it’s a frictionless relationship where you have zero obligation to the “person?”

At the same time, we know that social relationships are foundational for wellbeing. I think one of the significant challenges for a lot of students coming into college is being able to socialize well and relate to others and even tolerate disagreement.

A lot of students are aware and very authentic about where they’re at. They are very open to receiving help and receiving guidance. They come in with a lot of strengths. They also come in with some significant challenges because of how our world is.

LW: How does the handbook suggest colleges could think beyond counseling centers when they consider student wellbeing?

BM: Holistically, psychological services are an important element in how we support wellbeing, but there are a lot of other spaces, too. How is a campus a community? How do people find their people in that community? How do people get supported in that community? That is a huge part of the work, I believe.

LT: There is a critical need not only at Purdue but across different higher education institutions at different levels. A lot of students are coming in with significant needs. Often the ratio of a provider to the number of students is quite skewed. A lot of universities are struggling to find alternatives — peer support and now even A.I. support as almost a first response to help. I think we need to be very creative in those ways to really meet this growing need and demand and, at the same time, harness students’ own willingness to talk about these things.

“I don’t think we should see students merely as recipients but also as a wonderful resource to be able to help their fellow students.”

There are other types of formats where they’re coming together, and it’s not merely one-on-one. Again, one-on-one will never go away, but there are other ways that students can feel supported if they come as a group and support one another. There is research showing that those who are actually in the position to help others, fascinatingly, also grow more and are more resilient and have greater wellbeing. I don’t think we should see students merely as recipients but also as a wonderful resource to be able to help their fellow students.

LW: Resilience and learning from failure are recurring ideas in the handbook. Are institutions — or adults generally — doing enough to help students develop those skills?

BM: This is one of the elements of Steps to Leaps: helping students recognize that everybody fails. The most successful among us have failed. It’s much more about what you do when you fail. Not that you shouldn’t be sad or angry — that’s all normal. But how do you pick up from that? What do you incorporate in your own toolkit based on that failure?

Along with the failure element is this whole idea of a linear journey —helping students see that journeys are never linear. We can have the greatest intentions to make them so, and then life happens.

Sometimes alumni stories can be so incredibly powerful for students because they’re looking for their mentors and heroes. It’s so important that they hear somebody they’ve been admiring say, “Here’s how I screwed up this class,” or “Here’s what happened in my first job and what I learned from that that helped me be successful in my second.” Normalizing is a big part of it. And higher ed is such a great place for students to learn those skills because it’s a relatively safe place to fall on your face. There are lots of resources there to help you. We’re all works in progress, and our students are absolutely works in progress.

The worst thing we could do is encourage people never to take a risk. When you take risks — even calculated, educated, well-thought-out risks — sometimes it still doesn’t work. Nobody likes to fail, but you want to make sure there’s that learning piece. The looking back is sometimes the more profound learning.

LW: What do adults misunderstand about the wellbeing concerns young people express today?

LT: There is a lot of willingness among students to seek and receive help, and a lot of desire to talk about wellbeing. I think that can often be misconstrued as students having less ambition or being too privileged. But I think that it’s a healthy pushback against what we’re doing as a society, which is this relentless pursuit of success and more. The question is: Is that really the end goal of life? Just to have more money, more status? We see that on campus here and also in the themes in our book, as researchers and practitioners are noticing it as well. I think that’s something that would be helpful for adults to recognize and perhaps have a shift in how they think about these conversations.

BM: We’re all we’re works in progress, and we appreciate that our students are absolutely works in progress. How do we help them make the most of this environment and the resources in it as they’re experimenting? So much is grounded in having that social network. You know the people that have your back, who will hand you tissues as you’re sobbing, the people who can help you think through a problem. But a network isn’t just something you take from — you are giving to your network, and that’s partly why that’s so strong. A big part of what we’re trying to expand is how do you build these skills and mindset, and we know employers want those skills in our students.

LW: You had contributors from around the world. How did the global perspective influence your thinking about wellbeing?

BM: We know that different cultures experience things differently, but sometimes we can be so U.S.-centric in how we approach things. In our society, we tend to be more “me” focused, so here wellbeing is about me. I think in some cultures it’s about “we”— looking more at the collective mindset than the individual mindset. Having that written out helps put on the table that there are other approaches in the world. The context of wellbeing in Singapore, for example, is going to be very different than it is in the States, so we’re defining wellbeing very basically as flourishing, human flourishing. Helping people be their best, culture to culture, means different things, and we have to acknowledge that, too.

LT: I had thought that a lot of what we are talking about with wellbeing was perhaps a much more Western issue. However, reading some of these chapters from other countries made me realize that this is not just an issue in North America, but a global one. Somehow, all around the world, faculty and staff and students are experiencing significant challenges, and it’s something that we all need to confront.

At the same time, there are cultural differences, too. The approach to thinking about wellbeing here might be slightly different. There’s an increasing level of destigmatization, whereas in places like East Asia, it’s still very much stigmatized to seek mental health help. It’s a global phenomenon, and addressing it requires a much more culturally sensitive approach to helping students.

LW: Was there anything that surprised you as the handbook came together?

BM: I found the lens of the different disciplines interesting as you start unpacking it: how social science might take on certain things, versus someone approaching this from a public health lens, versus a practitioner running a housing organization on campus. Each one of these elements is a source of truth for the problem at large. It’s how we honor where people are in those processes and help facilitate that whole. If we’re talking about human flourishing, the book showed us that there’s still a lot of work to do to help people be their best.

LW: How do you envision the handbook being used, and by whom?

BM: We’re looking at this as multi-use. It can absolutely support the faculty side of things. The research can be used as a textbook in certain settings. But there are also practical application components to it, so we see colleagues in areas like mine deploying these ideas and having it as a resource. If I’m wanting to look at how I improve in this space, the handbook gives some good tips about how to look at what your needs are and how to build out a collaborative model. If I’m looking at it from my lens as the senior student affairs officer, I might use the book differently. If I’m a researcher, I may use the research elements as good places to get information about who’s doing what in this space. We would like to do some sort of a symposium, a place to convene and have a good dialogue on these topics with others.

LW: Was the handbook intended to be updated in future editions?

BM: Louis and I haven’t even talked about that yet! Just the A.I. influence alone — our book does not tackle A.I. one iota because we started four years ago. This last year has been the whole copy-editing process, and in just that time things continued to evolve quickly. From the mental health side of things, I think we’re still learning about A.I. in that space. Social media is one of the elements, and it’s not all bad, though sometimes people hang their hat on that. I suspect A.I. will be very similar, where there’s going to be parts that cause problems in the wellbeing space, and there will be parts that that support wellbeing growth and development. It’s just how we deploy it. Louis has a grant that’s doing some of that work right now. So absolutely, I think there’s an opportunity to take this and run with it.

In his new book, “After the University,” Chad Wellmon answers a question many in higher education are currently asking: How did we get here? This autobiography of American higher education takes us from the European guilds and knowledge factories that inspired our current system to the modern research university that now defines it. In doing so, Wellmon reminds us that the university has always shaped and reshaped itself to serve political, social, and economic interests. His underlying concern is — at what cost to the goods of disciplined study? 

Wellmon, who is the Commonwealth Professor of English and German at the University of Virginia, writes that the recent intensity of these external pressures has made the sector almost unrecognizable to itself. Over the years, we have created what Wellmon calls “the other university,” known not by its intellectual vigor but by outputs such as earnings, workers, and research. 

Wellmon’s own reverence for, and frustration with, higher education is woven throughout the book in his personal stories: the utility of education as a means of escaping his past, his questioning of its purpose in the 2010s, and his eventual understanding that the love of knowledge itself — not necessarily the institution — is what we should hold dear. In July, Wellmon spoke with LearningWell about the book’s main messages, as well as his motivation and experience in writing it. 

LW: Let’s start with your own experience in academia, particularly at U.Va. where you’ve been witness to a lot of upheaval and changes in higher education. What were some of the things that motivated you to write “After the University”?

CW: This book turned out to be an exercise in trying to make sense of the world in which I had found myself. I grew up in a family and in a place in which the university was not a real presence, with parents and siblings who didn’t go to college. In many ways, I am a poster child for the American system of higher education. It was my way out — socioeconomically, intellectually, spiritually, materially, and geographically. That’s how I thought about the university. 

Through undergrad, graduate school, and the tenure process at U.Va., the university was just the world in which I thrived. I understood myself through it. And then in 2012, when [then-President] Teresa Sullivan was forced to resign by the Board of Visitors, I started to question that. I was standing there on the lawn that summer with my two kids. We had posters and were chanting, protesting for academic freedom, against poor governance, and for the university. And then, all of a sudden, I just stopped and thought, “Wait, what are we defending exactly?” It wasn’t a revelation. It was just befuddlement. What is this thing that I’m out here on a sultry southern afternoon protesting for? It has to be something much bigger than this person whom I don’t really know. 

That was over a decade ago, and ever since then, I’ve been thinking and writing about the university, trying to make sense of this institution. Another key experience was in August 2017. My family had just moved onto campus, when far-right neo-Nazis marched behind our house and up the U.Va. Lawn and Rotunda with tiki torches. This was also the period when I was helping to lead an effort to reform U.Va.’s undergraduate general education curriculum. It was a seven-year process. These experiences reconstituted my relationship, everybody’s relationship, with the university. 

My family and I had moved onto campus, because I had been appointed principal of Brown College, one of U.Va.’s three residential colleges, where about 300 students live together over four years in a group of dorms on the center of campus. We ate in the dining hall. Students spent a lot of time in our house, eating and hanging out. As I got to know students outside of the classroom and office hours, I encountered a completely different institution. 

All this was happening at the same time as the curriculum reform project. I quickly realized how naive I had been in assuming that if U.Va. just had a good curriculum, we [faculty] could make it the center of students’ lives again — we could reorient the institution to what we thought it was supposed to be about. But the more time I spent with these students, the more I realized that the curriculum was almost tangential to their lives at U.Va. Their lives were lived outside of the curriculum. They were lived in their dorms and managed by student affairs people and an entire institutional apparatus about which I had been totally ignorant. They led their lives outside the classroom as I had imagined it. So there was this second moment after 2012 of being disabused of how ignorant I was of the very institution to which I thought I understood.

LW: In the book, you write about the yawning gap between what we claim universities are for and what they actually do. So this gap you talk about, you saw this manifest in the students themselves?

CW: Oh, absolutely. In the book, I call it the “other university,” this completely other half — now I would say other three quarters — in which students actually led their lives and that formed them in profound ways, both good and bad. I know student affairs people who literally saved the lives of several of my students with mental health services, people who are unfailingly dedicated to the wellbeing of students but dedicated in a way that’s almost wholly separated from what the faculty and the curriculum do.

LW: This value you call “disciplined study” — which you describe as intrinsic learning, the joy of learning, the joy of reading — how has the university removed itself from that?

CW: That’s the question I tried to set out to understand. Why is it that this institution that is so obviously about education, so obviously about the life of the mind, so obviously about what I call discipline study — why is it also about none of those things and more clearly about moving up the social ladder and earning more than your parents? Why is it so obviously about the connection with labor markets? Why is it so obviously about the production of patentable knowledge and technologies? All the things that universities do or claim to do I had largely taken for granted. Of course that’s what universities do. But so many of these things pull the institution in different directions. In some instances, they’re contradictory. And so that’s what I wanted to understand. I wanted to know how this happened. I tend to think historically, so most of the book is an attempt to understand the development of this tension. 

The book goes back to the beginning of the 19th century and the rise of the German research university. My point here is that this is not the first time that universities are being called to serve other entities and competing ends. When you think of 13th-century University of Paris and its intimate but conflicted relationship with the church or 18th-century University of Göttingen in Germany and the pressure it was put under to provide revenues for a sovereign by trying to get more young English aristocrats to come from abroad to pay higher fees –– these types of conflicts are central to the history of the university. There have always been tensions between what the university has understood itself to be sustaining, which is something like the scholarly communities and scholarly inquiry, and the demands and expectations of the external entities that tend to fund these institutions. And the thing about institutions is that on the one hand, they’re sustaining these communities, these practices. But on the other hand, they do that by seeking financial support, by sustaining the material conditions that make it possible for these scholars to do the kinds of things they do. Over the past 150 to 200 years, however, these historical tensions have intensified.

“Why is it that this institution that is so obviously about education, so obviously about the life of the mind, so obviously about what I call discipline study — why is it also about none of those things?”

Some of these tensions have produced a lot of good. As the university has understood itself to be in service to the public, it has democratized knowledge and made itself more accessible. But this has also changed the institutional conditions of disciplined study and put all kinds of new pressures on the university as an institution. For example, when 19th-century Prussians directly linked the university to a job market — that job market being Prussian bureaucrats or the administrative state — everybody who was going to work in the higher ranks of the Prussian bureaucracy was required to have very high levels of education. And it was meritocratic in a way. It was, in many ways, a good thing. But what it also did is that it made the university this mechanism that was coupled with a competitive job market. 

My book traces various instances in which universities became more tightly connected to institutions or demands to which they had previously been more loosely related. Again, many of which were wonderful and good. Who is against democratizing the university? Who wants to argue that the post-World War II American system of higher education and higher education itself should be shrunk? These are some of the contradictions that just didn’t make sense to me and I tried to explore in the book. 

LW: In terms of the rise of the modern American research university, of which U.Va. is one, is this another example of the sector being tethered to something that is important but detached from its original goal? 

CW: First, I would say that I don’t know if there was an original goal. I think the modern university was some kind of settlement where the institution becomes this mediating force with scholars and knowledge on one side and the state and all these other interests on the other. And the university positioned itself as this go-between, this mediating institution. The 19th-century American research university adapted some elements of the German research university model, but with at least one very important distinction. From the beginning, the American research university cloaked itself in “democracy.” Around 1900, the first president of University of Chicago, William Rainey Harper, gives a speech in California describing the American research university as the prophet of democracy. It is not just going to work on behalf of democracy, it will embody and point the way to democracy.

In the American context, there are several things that followed. One is that the reluctance among 19th-century Germans to talk so explicitly about instrumental or useful knowledge was not a problem for the American university. University knowledge was useful knowledge. University knowledge should help to improve agriculture, help to expand the rail system, help strengthen the military. To be a democratic university was not simply to open up the doors to people who had never been allowed in the hallowed halls of Oxbridge or Berlin or Paris, but to open it to all kinds of knowledge. No knowledge was too instrumental or too useful to be kept out. 

Again, incredible goods come from these radical changes, but so, too, do new tensions, as well as an accumulation of external expectations about what universities ought to do and the ends they ought to serve. Now it’s no longer simply to be a finishing school for the sons of the aristocracy. It’s no longer just the production of elite bureaucrats. The expectation or promise universities themselves make is to sustain democracy and, eventually, to produce the knowledge required by a modern industrializing world. 

We need to recognize the expectations that have been put on universities. We expect universities to solve questions of social injustice and equity. We expect them to deliver high earning salaries to their students. We expect them to cure our grandparents and our neighbors and ourselves in hospitals. We expect them to entertain us and manage professional sports teams. 

“We need to recognize the expectations that have been put on universities.”

LW: What have we lost in all this?

CW: I don’t know if we’ve lost something in particular. Had I been born a hundred years ago, I wouldn’t have had access to the kind of higher learning that I have been blessed with. It’s crucial that we acknowledge that, because “After the University,” for me at least, is not a recovery project. We don’t need to recover something that never actually existed. The university never existed in a world in which the goods of intellectual study were freely given to for everyone.

LW: Maybe the better question might be: What aren’t we doing?

CW: I will start by talking about what I wasn’t doing. Even though I didn’t want to think of myself as writing a “what we lost” story — and I was operating on that for a while because the university continued to be this precious world for me — I couldn’t see the places and the people in which discipline study and the love of learning was alive and well. I was blind to that, which is ironic. That’s why I begin the book with my dad, who throughout his life diligently prepared for his church Bible studies. For too long, I assumed that he stood for everything that I was trying to get away from, which meant everything from non-college-educated, low-income America to his own kind of radical Christian piety.

That was what I didn’t want to be. And I never would’ve recognized him as a model reader. I saw his Bible study as just one of the many crazy things that he did. I couldn’t recognize that he actually taught me how to read. He modeled discipline study for me in a way that none of the professors I’ve ever had, none of my colleagues that I’ve ever had, have done. He wasn’t getting paid to fill his yellow legal pad with notes, to sit with five different concordances. He did it because he had to. He did it because he wanted to. He was so excited about it and loved it so much that he just wanted to share it. I couldn’t see that. I think we build and structure our lives and institutions in ways that mitigate against those kinds of possibilities — that these kinds of intellectual necessities are add-ons; they are superfluous, leisure-time activities instead of the core of who we are. And I’ve come to see that I was wrong. 

LW: One of the big questions in the book is, Can the goods of disciplined study be recognized on their own terms? Where do you come out on that? 

CW: I think so much about the structure of higher education mitigates against this. There’s dismissiveness among some university faculty — I think it’s less so now — about students who are worried about careers or worried about getting a job. Damn right they’re worried about getting a job, because we have created this system over the past 70 years in which the system of higher education is the only mechanism to a good life, or that’s what we’ve come to believe collectively — that the B.A. is the only path to a good life. But this system didn’t deliver on the equity promises that were trotted out in the early of 1960s. I think what has happened is that the expectation has become even more intense as the competition for fewer high-paying jobs has grown more intense. The tensions that were already in the university have become that much more immediate. 

Every year, when I meet a new class of undergraduate students for the first time, I know that they’re going to have these anxieties about what’s going to happen four years from now and that everything in between will be related to that anxiety. The B.A. has been made into this single pathway to the upper middle class, which in some ways is true but in a lot of ways isn’t. But maybe even more importantly, we haven’t really asked about how that affects what we claim to be doing in universities, which is educating people. We just talk about outcomes and outputs. But what about the flourishing of students and the ways in which these institutions are shaping them?

LW: If the goal is to encourage and motivate discipline study, what is it we need to do to the university? Are we trying to save the sector? Are we trying to change the sector? Are we not looking at this correctly?

CW: These were some of the many questions that I realized I was asking and had to figure out. I think in the midst of what I had done with the curriculum, being a professor, being a principal of a college, I kept thinking, “We have to fight for the university. It’s lost its core.” But as I said earlier, I don’t know if it ever had a core. But more than that, I’ve come to relate to it almost as an ethical question because each chapter I wrote, I just kept getting sadder and sadder. But then by the end, the only way I can describe it is, I felt liberated.

Being liberated through this broader understanding of realizing, Oh wait, I’m not actually fighting for the university. The university is just the most recent institutional form that the goods of higher learning and the goods of discipline study have taken. Libraries, museums, churches, monastic communities, craft shops, workshops — there are so many institutions which have nurtured and sustained the kinds of practices that I think we ought to be fighting for. For me it’s not about defending or saving “the sector” of higher education. It’s not about defending the university per se. It’s about recognizing and then fighting for the practices that I think so many of us already hold dear. The university, for the time being, is still one of the primary places that affords a certain material environment for these things, but it’s not at all, historically speaking or even now, the only place. I think for too long the university has monopolized these things. 

LW: Given that, how would you move forward within the university? 

CW: It’s not, for me at least, an excuse to detach myself from or just give up on the university. But it does motivate me and others, I hope, to try to build good and beautiful places for disciplines alongside and apart from universities — healthy institutions that shape meaningful lives. That’s a rather abstract response, but that’s where I am now. It frees me to relate to the institution in a different sort of way, because I don’t expect everything from it. 

And it helps me see what’s worth fighting for — not for particular institutional structures and interests but for the practices that give those institutions value in the first place. 

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

Starting next month, Angela Lindner will lead the LearningWell Coaliton, taking over from the capable hands of Keith Buffinton. Like Buffinton, Lindner is an engineer. She has recently retired from the University of Florida, where she was the director of the Engineering Leadership Institute and vice provost for undergraduate affairs, as well as an associate professor.

Like all organizations, the LearningWell Coalition, the publisher of LearningWell magazine, is a reflection of the people who drive its mission, and in this interview, Lindner gives us a window into how she might make her mark. She describes her body of work in student-centered education, her perspective on higher education’s most pressing problems, and what drew her to the work of the Coalition — including the memorable way she was introduced to it.

The LearningWell Coalition is a growing network of colleges and universities — large and small, public and private — dedicated to ensuring that every student is prepared to flourish in work and in life. Through collaboration, networking, and access to evidence-based practices, they help institutions create and scale initiatives and opportunities to prepare students for lifelong flourishing.

LW: Welcome to the Coalition, and congratulations on your retirement from the University of Florida! 

AL: Thank you. Yes, it’s retirement in the sense that I’m emeritus status there, and I may come back and teach a class periodically, but it’s no longer my work to do. It’s bittersweet, but I’m a big proponent of allowing the next generation to lead and do great things and make mistakes, just like we did. There’s far too many faculty who stay way too long, and it’s blocking the ability of younger people to come in and lead.

LW: It’s worth noting that you’ve been teaching at the flagship school in the state that’s been at the epicenter of recent political pressure and change. What has that been like?

AL: That’s a great starting point for a conversation about these big topics of “Where are we headed in higher education?” — especially in states like Florida. The change is rapid. In that sense, we’re going through so many changes — forced changes. At the University of Florida, our nose is right out there. We’re going through a third presidential search attempt right now as we speak, and it’s very critical to many disciplines and to faculty. It’s existential. 

I went to the College of Charleston, which is a city that cannot hide its history. And that’s the beauty of Charleston — it’s right out there, right? I left college fully believing in the liberal arts education and what that truly means, opening your mind to many different ideas, and sifting through the core values that you had from your family and your faith tradition — to be more accepting and to understand inclusion was not a bad word. 

LW: What were your pre-U.F. days like? What drew you to academia?

AL: I worked at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Ann Arbor as a chemical engineer from 1986 to 1989, followed by working as a project engineer at General Motors Corp. in Warren, Michigan from 1989 to 1991. I had an “epiphany” moment in my car on a commute home from G.M. one day: I wanted to teach and mentor undergraduate students. I was seeking a purpose higher than making profit for my company. That is when I nurtured the resolve to visit the University of Michigan’s campus to meet with two environmental engineering faculty members, who ultimately admitted me into the Ph.D. program. Ironically, given the tensions that are swirling in the U.S. Department of Education today, I was admitted to the University of Michigan with a scholarship from the D.O.E. for women pursuing doctorates in engineering. I suspect this scholarship would not be allowed today.

LW: How did you get to the University of Florida?

AL: I’ve been at the University of Florida since 1998. I chose U.F. as my career home because the faculty in the Department of Environmental Engineering Sciences, especially the chair, Dr. Joe Delfino, exhibited a strong care for their undergraduate students. I was convinced this was the best place for me to pursue my solidified purpose in undergraduate and graduate education. The moment I decided to accept U.F.’s offer was when I received a packet from Joe that included a hand-written note affixed to a sheet of paper saying, “We covered this in our faculty meeting today.” The sheet of paper had text that reminded the faculty that the student is the reason why they were at U.F. I have cherished that original piece of paper throughout my career at U.F., and it followed me into my associate dean role in the U.F. college of engineering and onto my role in the U.F. provost’s office. 

LW: What first put the LearningWell Coalition on your radar?

AL: There are seminal moments in in one’s life that they remember exactly where they were when something happened. This was one of them for me, actually. I was in my garage at home on the exercise bike back in early June 2023, listening to [former editor of Inside Higher Ed] Doug Lederman on his podcast interviewing this Rick Miller [president emeritus of Olin College]. I knew about Olin because I come out of engineering, but I was fascinated by what Rick was saying about the work of the Coalition and the core values of higher education. I immediately went into the Coalition’s website and found out how to contact them through an online form. University of Florida has a project called U.F. Quest, and it aligns so beautifully with the language that was shared in this podcast. And I’m still on the bike, and I’m writing, “How can I talk to you about becoming a member?”

Within hours I get an email response, and that week, we were on Zoom together, Rick and the executive director Keith Buffinton and I. And I just sort of laid out the whole situation we were in at the time with U.F. Quest and with our general education in the state of Florida. I left that call with a deep, profound sense of calmness that we have advocates outside of the state of Florida that will help us to tell the narrative of U.F. Quest and the transformational impacts. They get it. 

From there, it’s been just an incredible, tremendous relationship between the University of Florida and the Coalition. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of having that external validation of what we were doing. Which is why I think expanding the membership of the Coalition is so critical. 

LW: Is that one of the key priorities as you step in as E.D.?

AL: It’s one of them. And also, how do we recognize and measure the goodness of the initiatives that are going on in the member institutions? I’m excited to see the numbers double and see its role expand, not just next year, but 10 to 15 years from now, because I think it’s going to take us that long for higher education to really be able to ask the right questions — to take a good internal look at ourselves, at why higher education has lost public trust and what we should be doing to prepare the whole student for the evolving world.

LW: Let’s talk about that issue of public trust. This is a critical time in higher ed and redefining people’s expectations of it. What role can the Coalition play during this realignment?

AL: That’s a good question. A critical element of the work of the Coalition is to keep asking questions. Higher education is out of equilibrium right now and for many different reasons. Being out of equilibrium is a journey of going from order, to disorder, and reorder. Higher ed is on that path now, and the Coalition, I believe, provides this other place to discuss what we all agree is the mission of higher ed, or should be. For us, it is keeping the personal and professional development of students at the center of all we do. 

“I think with A.I. upon us, my hopeful side — which comes out most days — believes that all of this is going to force us to ask some fundamental questions: What is the purpose of higher ed? What does it mean to be an educated human?”

I think with A.I. upon us, my hopeful side — which comes out most days — believes that all of this is going to force us to ask some fundamental questions: What is the purpose of higher ed? What does it mean to be an educated human? How do we have that conversation, and agree? I believe that’s what higher ed is for — to form and shape and at least point students in a direction of being able to impact humanity and the world in positive ways. It goes back to core values. What’s our unifying principle? I do think we’re being asked that question, and I think the Coalition is going to play a major role in helping support institutions towards that goal. 

So yes, we’re in the disorder now. I can’t tell you how long it’ll last. I am confident that when we’re back in the reorder, whatever it looks like, we’re going to look back and be grateful for the disorder because there would be no other way that we would have gotten to the next place. 

LW: When we talked earlier, you mentioned the Gallup-Purdue Big Six, which correlates to lifelong wellbeing and career success. How can we continue to prioritize those pillars, like mentorship and belonging, when so much of the conversation has shifted to tangible R.O.I.? 

AL: No question some institutions of higher ed do it better than others. I come out of one of the largest public institutions in the country, which creates an environment with the biggest opportunity for nurturing the Gallup Big Six experiences. First, do they align at all, R.O.I. and the Gallup Big Six? The Big Six is implying that if you offer these experiences to undergraduate students, it means that they matter in the mission of your university. Why? Because it means that faculty’s time spent on the formation of students, with students, is valued. Pure and simple, you cannot replace any faculty member with a machine or A.I. If you were going to fulfill the Gallup Big Six, a student must know a faculty member cares about me as a person, right? That’s what’s implied with the Gallup Big Six. Taking that further, one would assume that if that is of value to the institution, then the faculty — and tenure and promotion — are evaluated based on the amount of meaningful time they spend with the students. 

The other side of this is that we would have to assume — and it’s not a correct assumption, as we’re learning in the Coalition’s faculty learning communities — that faculty know how to do these things. Many of the faculty were students who did not have access to these principles in practice. We’ve just had two years of faculty learning communities, and I would say over half of the faculty that participated said they joined so they could learn how to connect with their students — how to keep the student at the center of their teaching. That shocked me. I just thought we were, you know, picking the low hanging fruit here. So we need to coach faculty on how to do these things.

What R.O.I. implies is that money leads. That’s what’s driving everything, right? And it’s corporatizing the institution. There is great value in making sure that that the institution uses the tuition dollars and state dollars and philanthropy dollars in a responsible way. But not without leadership that guides the community in shared values, hopefully including the value of spending time with our students — which by the way, short of time for the faculty, costs nothing, right?

We need to ask the same questions that we force our students to ask themselves. Why are we here? What’s our purpose? The answers to these big questions translate into where the money flows and how we evaluate our performance. That can translate to large class sizes where students’ hearts are not engaging because you’re swimming in this water of R.O.I. and you’re being rewarded for efficiency. But I also say, from a very hopeful side, that these aren’t polar opposites here — that if you look at it from like a long game perspective, R.O.I. is very much connected to having students who come out courageous and well-spoken with communication skills, with great ideas to go up and take leadership positions. 

LW: What is the wellness environment the Coalition is looking at right now? Are there ways the Coalition could shift the conversation about wellbeing? Does it need to be shifted? 

AL: One of the more promising happenings in higher ed is that we’re seeing the language of wellbeing used much more frequently and at the drop of a hat. At the individual level, at the program level, at the institution level and national level. I am concerned that if we just run so fast with the wellbeing terminology, we don’t have a shared sense of what it means. But I’m so excited that the Coalition is trying to lasso that — to have some pillars that define wellbeing and how we measure it, assess it. I see this as incredibly positive. Our students recognize this, and what is so remarkable about these students is they are determined that their career is not going to take over their life. We never thought about those things in my generation, but they’re dogged about it, and fearless. 

LW: Tell me more about that. What are they fearless about?

AL: They are standing up for their life balance even while they’re speaking to their future employers. Here’s one example: At the University of Florida, we brought in guest speakers who were current C.E.O.s or former presidents, and students would raise their hand and ask, “Working in a national lab, tell me about what you did to promote life balance outside of work. What did you do to promote families?” One guest lecturer was the former C.E.O. of a major defense company and very traditional, and she just point blank looked at him and said, “There is no balance. If you love your work, there’s no balance.”

You should have seen the student essays writing reflections on what they heard. They excoriated that. They all wanted photos with her, but the essays were just like, “No, we’re not buying this.” The students are pressing towards a life with wellbeing, and they use terms like balance — in engineering even! Even the guys were saying, “I want to have children.” So we cannot deny this. Students lead the way, whether we admit it or not. It’ll be a very interesting clash of cultures, I think, but I find it hopeful because their force is going to be much more powerful in the end. It’s the the sum of the parts, not just a takeover.

I’m a mosaic artist, and every part has meaning in mosaic art. If you leave one out, you know it’s not there. In higher education, there is no one part that feels entirely responsible for the outcome of the student. We need to have a unifying leadership to say, “Your part is here; your part is here.” If it’s successful, we see students coming out as full, whole persons who felt like they belonged in college. That’s kind of what I’m mulling on: how to create this mosaic where every part matters and contributes.

LW: I love that metaphor. And a mosaic artist! Tell us more about yourself. What do you like to do in your free time?

AL: Well, my husband and I rescue greyhounds. Since 2000, we’ve adopted 10 former racing greyhounds, and we now have two, and they’re from Ireland. So, we’re dog people. 

I used to be a marathon runner, an ultra-marathon runner, and I still like to run, but I’m much more reasonable now, and diversified. I do a lot of gardening. And every day my hands get dirty. It’s a good balance.

I’m originally from South Carolina and still consider it my home. I’ve been in the South most of my life. I understand the South very well. Growing up in a very segregated state, I have been through many of the events that I worry are being hidden or veiled in our teaching. My hometown is Orangeburg, South Carolina, and, in 1968, I was a kid at the time of the Orangeburg Massacre on the campus of South Carolina State College [now University]. Going through a tragedy like the Massacre in such a small town becomes part of your identity, and depending on how parents were at the time, you came out of it with one perspective or another. Thank God my parents were very good at being open and transparent about what was happening at the time. 

My mom, who completed high school, grew up very poor on a farm, where her parents, with only a middle school education, were South Carolina tobacco sharecroppers. And so these are the salt of the earth kind of people. My dad went to college because of the G.I. Bill after World War II. In my childhood home, education was something that you don’t waste, and that shaped my whole way of thinking — that college was a privilege and you didn’t waste it.

I still feel this way. Education is a privilege, and this is all the more reason not only that students should not waste the opportunity but also that our institutions of higher education must deliver on their commitment to their students.

The Steve Fund is a non-profit organization that promotes the mental health and emotional wellbeing of young people, particularly those from underserved and under-resourced communities. Since its seminal report in 2016, identifying and addressing the unique mental health issues of this student population, the Steve Fund has been helping colleges, universities, and high schools strengthen cultures of belonging and build systems of care that support all students. Their Excellence in Mental Health on Campus framework has been utilized at 66 colleges and universities in 23 states, reaching over 1.1 million students. 

Part of the Steve Fund’s contribution to the field of college student mental health comes from the participation of a national network of Mental Health Experts, one of whom is Dr. Rae Lundy, the chief psychologist and director of counseling at Georgia State University. In this first article in a new content partnership series with the Steve Fund, LearningWell interviews Dr. Lundy about how her growth as a clinician aligns with the changing needs of her Black and Brown students. From her lived experience to her expansive body of work, Dr. Lundy explains why a culturally responsible framework for mental health and wellbeing is critical to helping all students flourish.  

LW: Tell us about your professional journey and how that tracks with the changing needs of students, particularly those from underserved and under-resourced communities? 

RL: I am currently at Georgia State University in Atlanta. We have about 54,000 students on six campuses. I’ve been in the role of chief psychologist and director of counseling for three years, managing psychiatry and what’s called student victim assistance. For me, and for many of my colleagues, this is a calling. I love college students. They’re in that developmental space where their identities are emerging, and they are kind of crystallizing who they are. 

I completed my training at the University of Notre Dame, where I studied identity and race, looking at how one’s racial identity serves as a buffer against discrimination. That was part of my lived experience, and I took that knowledge into my work. My first role was actually at a counseling center at a large P.W.I. (predominantly white institution), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As the only Black psychologist in the counseling center, all Black and Brown students were referred to me, and it was apparent that what I had studied in school, I was seeing in real time in terms of the concerns students were experiencing. On top of anxiety and depression, they were also experiencing issues of belonging and how the intersectionality of their identities impacted their academic functioning. It was a great training ground for this work, so after staying there several years, I went to North Carolina Central University, which was the start of a long stretch of me working at H.B.C.U.s (historically Black colleges and universities).

At North Carolina Central University, I found, like many of my fellow administrators at H.B.C.U.s, that I was carrying like five roles. My students were experiencing distress related to a number of different concerns, including financial concerns. Many of them were first-generation college students,and I felt this overwhelming need to be everything and all things to them. I was working in the counseling center, doing confidential work, but I was also doing a lot of outreach, meeting students where they were. I was an advisor for a student group. And in doing all of those things, it felt like there was this need to support mental health in a way that the institutions at the time didn’t understand. It was about stigma, which is looked at very differently today. 

The main thing we were doing is to try to get folks to have conversations about mental health. I was doing confidential one-on-one individual counseling, but really what I discovered was that expressive therapies and unique ways of reaching students were a better way of getting them to process and be open to having deeper conversations about how they were feeling. I had some tremendous success with that. We had an increase of students coming to the center. We did what we called interpersonal process groups: So maybe they didn’t want to talk about a specific thing, but they knew they needed and wanted to be around someone like my colleagues and me. 

It got me thinking about this idea I now lean into called C.R.I. — compassion, reflection, and intention. I began to share with folks that it’s okay to acknowledge and be compassionate towards yourself. We’re all compassionate towards our friends. Why would you not give yourself the same attention? This idea of C.R.I. was a way for me to have mental health in all spaces. Oftentimes, in the mental health field, we are going to our therapist location, or now we’re meeting virtually. For many college students, we need to bring down this barrier around the conversation, which is what I was really passionate and excited about. 

LW: Why was this engagement work particularly important for students, particularly those from underserved and under-resourced communities?  

RL: There is research to support that help-seeking behaviors of students, particularly those from underserved and under-resourced communities, are often psychologically and negatively reinforced. There is a sense that one might be punished for asking for help — or that it is a sign of weakness. For Black and Brown communities, asking for help can reinforce the idea that you’re not as smart as others. Did you really get here on your own? One might see why it would be more challenging to ask for support.

“For those from underserved and under-resourced communities, there is a sense that one might be punished for asking for help — or that it is a sign of weakness.”

Or if you think about it, if a student is a first-generation college student, if most in their family havenever had this experience before, who do they ask for help from? That’s true of all support in college. If you’re a first-generation college student and you’re asking about what you need to do to register for classes or find additional funding, but your parents and your grandparents have never done that, that becomes a barrier and a burden that they might internalize as something they have to handle on their own, while not really knowing what resources to turn to. That is why organizations like the Steve Fund are actively seeking to present themselves as resources for these students. 

When you talk about belonging and identity, so much of that is connected to performance, self-care, and wellness, but in some communities, you haven’t been given permission to take care of yourself because your identity is wrapped up in how much you’re doing for others. What emotional wellbeingand mental health ask of us is to be introspective, to connect, and to see what is going on internally within ourselves. Many times, Black and Brown students either haven’t been given that space, or we haven’t held space for them to do that. Another issue is exceptionalism, this idea that you’re articulate — for a Black or Brown person — or you’re smart — for a Black or Brown person. And that’s a lot to carry. 

Some of the most prevalent challenges you see are around anxiety. And that’s true of college students in general. But anxiety and depression manifest differently for Black and Brown students. Oftentimes, it presents as an irritable mood or what could be misinterpreted as the angry Black or Brown person. My recommendation has been for folks to ensure that we are being culturally responsive and informed as we are doing this work so that we have a good sense of: How does this particular mental health outcome manifest or look differently in varying settings? And then if we think about the concept of privilege, who gets to have emotional responses? Who gets to be expressive?  And if we think about your earlier question, you asked whether it’s okay for me to ask for help; if it’s not, then it’s probably not okay for me to appear sad. It’s probably not okay for me to appear uncomfortable.

LW: I can imagine that all of this experience was useful when you actually created a college counseling center from scratch, correct? 

RL: Yes. I was approached by the president of a smaller H.B.C.U. — Wiley College at the time, now Wiley University — in Marshall, Texas. They didn’t have a counseling center or any substantive mental health services for their students. After visiting the institution, I fell in love with the campus, with the students, and I thought, “No student should go without mental health support.” I soon discovered that Wiley was not unique. It was like many smaller institutions that just didn’t have funding. In years past, institutions may have thought they had the option of not investing in mental health. This was before universities realized that mental health is directly connected to retention. For smaller schools, retention is directly related to keeping the doors open.   

Once the link between retention and mental health was established, we were able to have open conversations around mental health, acknowledging that it’s not an afterthought or a second, third, or fourth priority when you’re thinking about academic success. If a student is not emotionally well, they can’t show up and be present in class. With that in mind, I was able to advocate for the students. I was initially a counseling center of one, and then we grew to be a fully functioning center. When I left, we had three additional staff, a training program, and a broad range of services.  

I eventually brought the knowledge gained from Wiley with me to Georgia State. I moved here for personal reasons, to become a caregiver to my elderly father. It was so interesting to end up here,which is his alma mater. 

LW: What have you found to be some of the most effective strategies to deal with the unique mental health challenges of Black and Brown students? 

NL: I believe leaning into forms of therapy and support outside of one-to-one individual counseling is particularly effective — things like group counseling, outreach experiences, ambassadorships, and opportunities for connection in what we call third spaces. We are creating other spaces outside of the classroom, outside of one’s home, that become brave and safe spaces for people to simply be and discover themselves. 

Group counseling demystifies, or challenges, the idea that I’m alone in experiencing things. Also, Black and Brown students have historically come from what we would consider collectivist cultures; these are backgrounds where you might have two or three generations living in a home. And so this idea around mental health is not just one-to-one individual counseling but also group counseling, some of which reinforces what has felt safe and healing and connecting for them in spaces that were safe,healing, and connecting before they got to college or university.

“I believe leaning into forms of therapy and support outside of one-to-one individual counseling is particularly effective.”

And then we think of expressive therapies. Movement is a beautiful way to release emotions and connect to oneself. In expressive spaces, the emphasis is not just on what clients are verbally saying but also how they are emoting. We look at somatic interventions, which really connect to the body, which again connect back to this idea of cultures where many Black and Brown communities use movement as a way to express themselves. 

I think a lot about meeting students and clients where they are. They may not be ready for traditional forms of treatment, but they are often on TikTok. Some of that information isn’t always accurate, but what if we have licensed, competent individuals who share it and can provide meaningful content onwellness strategies and wellbeing interventions? When this happens, students have agency to take in information in ways that are digestible for them. It’s true we have standardized, evidence-based treatments and a certain language within the mental health field, but by not engaging on platforms like TikTok, we miss a subset of the population in need of care, and often that population includes our Black and Brown students.

LW: That brings me to my next question. You are about to launch a new passion project, which is an app developed specifically for individuals of color. What is that all about?  

It’s called Amelia Sage, a wellbeing app for women of color. Amelia Sage combines artificial intelligence with the oversight of licensed clinicians. There will be wellness plans and daily interactions for participants to experience. And the app’s goal is to promote flourishing. I’ve been in the weeds recently, defining what it means to be well and recognizing that wellness is not without itschallenges. The work is grounded heavily in the dimensions of wellness. We look at social, intellectual, financial, and all areas of wellbeing; and within that framework, we promote whole wellbeing. We are currently finalizing details for a 14-day mental health wellness plan, and a primary goal is to share it with college students.  

All of this connects back to what the Steve Fund does by putting information and resources readily available at students’ fingertips. For good, bad, right, wrong, or indifferent — everything is at their fingertips. And so we want to make sure that what they are engaging with and really internalizing is information that’s going to help them be well and flourish.

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

In September 2025, Suzy Welch made waves with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that asks a question many, it seems, were already asking themselves: “Is Gen Z Unemployable?“

Welch is an author and professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, and widely known as the founder and C.E.O. of Becoming You Labs, a think tank and product design studio that helps disseminate Becoming You to schools and organizations around the world. Becoming You is a methodology — as well as an NYU class, a workshop series, and a best-selling book — she designed to help people land on their best-suited career path. The underlying premise of the methodology is that our purpose pathways lie at the intersection of our values, cognitive and emotional aptitudes, and economically viable interests. For the values-discovery piece, Welch invented the Values Bridge, a scientifically validated assessment that ranks individuals’ values from one to 16 and measures how fully they are living each one, or not.

Aggregate data from the Values Bridge unearthed the concern that led to Welch’s Journal article. In it, she describes discovering that the most-held values among Gen Z are: eudemonia (often referred to as self-care), voice (the expression of individuality), and non sibi (helping others). But when she surveyed a group of hiring managers about the value they most want in their employees, the answers instead prized: achievement (drive for success), workcentrism (desire for work to shape life), and scope (desire to learn and for adventure). Only 2 percent of Gen Zers — 154 out of more than 7,500 — identified the three values deemed most desirable by employers in their top five.

This priorities gap between employers and young staff gave evidence, and voice, to a common feeling among business leaders that Gen Z just didn’t seem to work all that hard. On the other hand, many praised the rising generation’s apparent sensibilities towards work-life balance and wondered aloud whether there was ever a time in which the older didn’t criticize the ways of the younger. 

In this candid interview with Welch, we zoom out to explore what motivated her work on values and how to interpret the data that continues to drive a national conversation. 

For more complete definitions of the 16 values, please see the Values Bridge index. Values discussed in this interview include the aforementioned eudemonia, voice, non sibi, achievement, workcentrism, and scope — as well as affluence (wealth), familycentrism (desire for family to shape life), and belovedness (romantic love).

LW: What inspired you to start the Values Bridge? I’m guessing it was an extension of Becoming You?

SW: Well, Becoming You is a methodology that helps students answer the question, “What should I do with my life?” It’s a 22-part methodology, and it excavates three data sets: your values, your cognitive and emotional aptitudes, and your economically viable interests. I used some of the very established psychometric instruments to help students identify their values. And while some of this work is incredibly renowned, I felt frustrated that it didn’t do exactly what I wanted. 

At the time, I was developing a new values inventory. I did this as part of my Ph.D. work. And then I set about working with psychometricians and behavioral scientists to create the Values Bridge. It was lucky I didn’t know what I didn’t know because that took about a year and a half of the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life — but worth it. I introduced it in beta to my students at NYU and immediately realized that it could so broaden and deepen their understanding of values. So we pushed forward with the tool and finished it, and then were able to release it to the general public. And then of course, it immediately started getting adopted by a lot of schools and other institutions because of its efficacy and because of the conversations that it started and because of the understanding that it opened up. 

LW: Got it. So what would you say is the big difference between what you created and what existed in terms of value assessments?  

SW: The most frustrating thing about the other values assessments is that they don’t allow people to have conflicting values: If you have values that are conflicting, one cancels out the other. And that’s just not how life is. People walk around with conflicting values. They value affluence, and they value self-care. They value achievement, and they value familycentrism. And so the Values Bridge captures and reflects back to you these conflicts and allows you to then say, “Okay, well, how am I going to resolve them?” It doesn’t negate the reality of a personal experience. So I think it’s just a very subtle instrument because it’s the newest, and I had the benefit of all the great work that’s been done in the field of values over the past 150 years to help me create a new tool.

LW: And without asking you to go through your entire Ph.D., what is so important, especially for young people, about understanding or knowing what your values are? 

SW: I think that it’s every single human being; it has no age bracket to it. We all do better by understanding our values because our values are our whys. They are why we do things. And so I think the more we understand why we do things or why we want to do things, the better we operate in the world — the more compassionate self-awareness we can have, but also the more compassionate self-awareness we can have of others. I mean, the name of the tool is the Values Bridge. The idea of it is to build bridges so that people can talk to each other about their values. We have to stop judging each other. The Values Bridge is completely agnostic. It’s like, if you’re not hurting anybody, your values are your values to live. 

But also, to be quite practical about it, you need to know your values so you can figure out what to do with your life. The premise of the Becoming You methodology is that the most aligned career is one that’s at the intersection of your values, your aptitudes, and your interests. So I have a singular purpose with this process, which is to get you to the right job. And you need to know your values because to work in a field or to have a job that doesn’t align with your values is actually quite a painful thing. It’s kind of a dull ache. And anybody who’s done it can tell you, “Yeah, it hurt.” I don’t want anybody to be in that kind of job. That’s what it’s all about.

“You need to know your values because to work in a field or to have a job that doesn’t align with your values is actually quite a painful thing. It’s kind of a dull ache.”

LW: The op-ed you wrote on the top values of Gen Z was definitely a conversation-starter. Do you often get put on the spot to explain Gen Z and why they are the way they are?

SW: I do. And I say it’s not my area. I’m always asked, “Oh, can you please explain why Gen Z has eudemonia as their number one value?” And I say, “I have no idea.” My hypothesis is just like yours: They went through the pandemic. They found out that anything could fall out the bottom at any time. They decided they didn’t want to postpone joy. They decided they didn’t like the bargain their parents had that you waited to have joy. And they said, “We vote no.” That’s my theory. It’s a hypothesis, but I am not saying this in any way as an authority. My area of focus is not values formation; it’s values expression. I don’t try to figure out why you are the way you are. I take you as you are and say, “Given that, what should you do with your life?”

LW: One of the both really interesting and also challenging pieces about the top three values for Gen Z, I could see, is that they have voice and eudemonia — and then they also have non sibi, or wanting to help people.

SW: And those are not in conflict.

LW: They’re not?

SW: They’re not in conflict. The problem is when number four is affluence, as it typically is. Taking care of yourself, having a lot of individuality, and helping other people — on a one-to-one basis — are completely doable all in the same hour, with no conflict whatsoever. It’s then, again, when you get affluence and achievement up there in the top five, too. Even if achievement keeps coming up with Gen Z — which it appears to be in early, early, early data — it’s going to bump into eudemonia. It may be rising, but it’s still going to hit a ceiling when it hits eudemonia because really there’s a big conflict between achievement and self-care.

LW: Remind me, do other generations, older generations, share eudemonia and voice, or are those very specific to Gen Z?

SW: It’s not very specific to Gen Z, but it’s absolutely age correlated. The older you get, the lower eudemonia goes. By the time you get to my generation, eudemonia is peripheral — in the bottom five. You can almost draw a line; every generation, eudemonia goes slightly down. Same thing with voice. Non sibi is a generally strong American value. It’s very high across all generations. 

LW: With the Gen Z findings, did you find people’s reactions leaned more toward “Why is Gen Z like this? How do we fix them?” versus “They’re telling us something; let’s find out what it is”? 

SW: When I talk to business leaders, which I do a lot as a board member and a person who is in the corporate world, they are not surprised by the data findings. They say, “This is what we’re experiencing.” And then, depending on the hiring power of the company, they have different reactions. 

If they’re Goldman Sachs or if they’re Meta, they say, “This is not our problem because we get this 2 percent [of Gen Z with achievement, workcentrism, and scope in their top five values]. Those are our people. They want to work for us, and it’s easy for us to find them.” Some companies have less hiring power. They don’t have as good brands. They’ve had financial troubles. They want the 2 percent, but they can’t get them, and they express frustration. Then there are other companies that have no hiring power, and they are like, “Well, this is just a problem that individual managers are going to have to handle on a one-by-one basis.”

Gen Z’s reaction to the data was varied. There were some Gen Z people who said things like, “Why would I want the values of the older generations? Why would I want the values of hiring managers? I don’t like their lives. I don’t like what they’ve done to the world.” But some Gen Zers see the results, and they see themselves, and they think, “Oh God, this is tough because I do have affluence at number four or I do have achievement at number five. What am I going to do about this?” And that’s a real conversation. 

I don’t believe people should try to repress their values. I think that’s very painful. I don’t think that people should not be who they are. At the same time, sometimes when I have students who are really conflicted, I say, “Is there a possibility you look at your life as seasons, where maybe you are going to be in a season where values that are not your top values are going to be more expressed?” But look, I can’t tell them what to do. The only ones who I could really give strong advice to were my own four children, but even with them, it was a dialogue. 

LW: There’s something that feels sort of aspirational about values. So, if my values are X, Y, and Z, does that mean that I actually fulfill those in the way that I act?

SW: Actually, this is a point I should have made earlier — thank you for jogging my brain on it — which is that one of the things that I really wanted to do is test what your values are and how much you’re living them. That is one of the most important pieces of data the Values Bridge gives you. We give you your authenticity gap score.

Here’s an example: Scope is the value of how much action you want, how much activity, how much learning, how much growth, how much travel, how much adventure. What we see all the time is that women in their 30s and 40s who have high scope have a huge authenticity gap. It can be 90 percent. And what’s the reason? Typically, these are your childbearing years, and when you are raising little children, you just don’t get to have a lot of action and activity and travel and adventure and learning. You’re not able to express your scope. You’re going to do it later, and you know that. Sometimes the kids go away, and your authenticity gap closes. 

So for all of the people who take the Values Bridge, you do get those gaps. A lot of times my students will get back their results, and they’ll see that eudemonia is their top value, and they’ll see a gigantic authenticity gap. And then they’ll see achievement is down at number eight, and it has no authenticity gap because they’re fully expressing it. In fact, sometimes they have a negative authenticity gap because they’re overexpressing it. So one of the things I like about the tool is that it’s like a report card. It’s almost like a doctor’s report on how much you’re living each value. And a lot of times my students are not as shocked about their rank-order values as they are about their authenticity gaps. Because they look at it, and they go, “Oh no, this is absolutely a self-portrait. This is exactly where I’m feeling pain.”

“One of the things I like about the tool is that it’s like a report card. It’s almost like a doctor’s report on how much you’re living each value.”

LW: You have an idea of what your values might be, but once you’re faced with the fact that you’re not fulfilling them, that could be very distressing.

SW: Yes, it can be distressing, and then illuminating. They want to know how to fix it. I can’t tell you the number of times — this happens to me every single class — the kids get their results back, and then at the break, there’s a stampede of young women down the stairs because what they’re all getting is voice as a top value and an authenticity gap of 60-plus percent. And they’re like, “I am clearly not using my voice.” I’ve seen students literally in tears saying, “This is putting words and numbers to my daily experience.” It’s very poignant. And my female students say to me, “Can you please teach a class on how I can have no authenticity gap with my voice?” And I say, “I wish I could.” Right now, I’m teaching as many classes as you can humanly teach. But we’re trying to create curricular materials so that we can walk them through that process.

LW: Bridging authenticity gaps almost feels like a class that is life in some ways.

SW: Yeah, it is. I often say, “Welcome to life.” I say it all the time when they talk to me about their gaps and their disconnects. There’s this function where you can check a box and your values come up next to your partners — because many of my students are married, because I teach MBAs. And then they do it, and their partner takes it, and they see where their gaps are. And they say, “Well, I have belovedness at number one, and my partner’s belovedness is at number 16.” And I say, “Welcome to life.” This is the work of our life.

LW: So from the hiring perspective, is it possible that a hiring manager who thinks they most want achievement and workcentrism actually has a favorite employee whose top values are eudemonia and voice? But maybe with an authenticity gap? I wonder if those kinds of things have come up for you.

SW: They come up all the time because we work with so many companies. It’s very, very interesting to see how the Values Bridge is being used in organizations. And look, some of it’s kind of out of our control. Companies take it, and they use it as they want. Some companies use it as a team building exercise. People can just learn about each other’s values so that they can have more compassionate awareness of each other and more words to speak to each other. 

But definitely, we see, all the time, organizations using it to hire. Many times, people who are coming to my company take it, and I see their values as part of the interview process. But for me, it’s always just a conversation. I would never say, “Oh, I’m not taking somebody because their top value is X.” 

LW: Do you think that what different hiring managers look for might vary depending on the industry that they’re in?

SW: I don’t think so. Not with values. Maybe between nonprofit and for-profit. But in any for-profit environment, hiring managers generally want people who want to win and work hard.

LW: What do you think this all means for the future of work? It sounds like at top companies, they’re going to hire who they’re going to hire. For the rest of Gen Z and for the rest of the companies, how might things change? Will Gen Z not be hired? 

SW: Oh, I don’t know. Look, regardless of their values, Gen Z’s having a very hard time being hired right now. I was just at the Wall Street Journal the other day going over the data with them. This is a tough job market. And values may be playing a role in it, but there’s a decrease in entry-level jobs, and there’s an increase in the amount of experience that is being expected for entry-level jobs. This is not about values. And how this plays out, I don’t know. 

I think we’re in a great moment of holding our breaths because if you have 10 economists in the room, five think that A.I. is going to actually start creating many more jobs and this great flourishing; and the other five are going to say we’re going to be working three days a week and most people will not be employed and we’re going to have to go to universal income. There’s no accepted narrative about what’s about to happen. The jury’s out.

LW: And for people working in colleges, do you find that this values work is impacting their job? Or how do you guide them in terms of what students today need to be prepared for?

SW: We’re just so amazed by the interest in the Values Bridge at the college level. Every kid entering Wharton is taking the Values Bridge. This is a new thing. It’s beautiful. And there are many other schools — 170 schools or something like that — right now using the Values Bridge with undergraduates to create a common language, to build bridges. 

Look, career offices are trying to get kids into jobs that make sense, and the Values Bridge is another tool for them. More than ever, given the price of college, parents are saying, “My kid’s got to have a job coming out.” So I think any tool that can help kids figure out what their job paths should be and help kids get employed coming out of college is going to get a good hard look by colleges. And I think, more than just the Values Bridge, colleges are interested in the entire Becoming You methodology because values are not enough. If you just get a job based on your values, but you don’t have the aptitudes or the interests, it’s not as sustainable. 

LW: Right. Well, I like the idea, too, of creating this language for students. So if they’re all coming in and taking this test, they can then have conversations about it outside of class. It might just come up, and it contributes to their knowing better what they want and what they don’t want. 

SW: I know. And what you seek when you are in any kind of community, like a college community, is a common language — a shared language that increases compassion instead of polarization. I love it when I see my students using language to talk to each other, and it’s just fun. It excites me because it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing.

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

Despite battling a double-bout of Covid-19 and strep throat, Destiny Barletta is smiling when she joins our Zoom call. The director of alumnae connections at Wellesley College even dressed up for the occasion, sporting a lime houndstooth blazer (and summoning the signature pantsuits of her institution’s most famous graduate, Hillary Clinton). There’s very little, apparently, that could keep Barletta from talking about her work supporting the professional development of Wellesley alumnae.  

LW: I thought we could start by talking about your title — the director of alumnae connections. What exactly does that entail? 

DB: So that entails thinking about career education in terms of alums and their careers, much in the way that many career centers work with students — exploration, industry advising, and support around very functional things, like cover letters and application materials and interviewing. All of those kinds of conversations that we have with students, we also have with alums, but tailored to where alums are in their careers — all the way from those second destination roles to thinking about what an active retirement might look like. 

Reentry to the workforce after a break for some kind of caregiving is something that happens a lot. Wellesley is a women’s college, so that is an important part of many conversations. And then we’re also thinking about opportunities and programs for alums to connect with students as a part of career exploration. So, how can alums be a valuable resource for lived professional experience for students? 

LW: Was yours a role that always existed at Wellesley? Or at what point did you all decide to dig more into the alumnae piece?

DB: This did not always exist at Wellesley. About 10 years ago, the career center at Wellesley was reimagined and became what now we call Career Education. And at that time, with a very generous gift from an alum, we began to offer career advising for alums for their whole careers. So at that point in time, this role came into existence.

LW: Do you know what the thinking was behind that decision to invest more in alumnae engagement?

DB: It was a commitment to the idea that graduation isn’t a stopping point for an intentional career journey. We do such good work around experiential learning to help students see that their professional identities, in a variety of ways, are integrated into their broader life experience, and it’s not just one thread that you can pull out that then stops the moment you graduate. So if we are doing our work really well, students graduate and see their career journey is just that — a journey. It’s something that you continue to tend to and navigate, as you build skills, build experiences, build connections, and explore. 

“If we are doing our work really well, students graduate and see their career journey is just that — a journey.”

And so that ability to continue to connect with Wellesley around networking and advising becomes really important. And we appreciate that requires an investment. It’s an investment in staffing and in training and in funds. But it also helps our students to see that when we say that this is ongoing work, we mean that. We’re here through the duration of that, and your fellow people in your Wellesley community are here for that.

LW: I like that because I imagine with Wellesley grads, who are so high performing, there could be a lot of that feeling like, “My first job needs to be my last.” Do you find that’s a pretty common sentiment?

DB: Yes, that is very true — true of Wellesley students and grads, but also more broadly. There is this sense that what comes on the other side of graduation needs to be right. You need to get it right. And helping graduates think about what does “right” mean for them, that is a values question. But also, what we know about the future of work is that having a flexible, skills-based approach that is grounded in some really solid experiential learning can prepare grads for a variety of first destination roles, with this kind of underlying assumption that there isn’t a single “right” thing. There is just a thing that is going to utilize skills and experiences you’ve built and provide you with additional opportunities for meaning and growth so that you have a sense that what comes next is also important.

LW: Do you see trends in terms of the age or stage of alumnae who come to you most often?

DB: We do. So we think of engagement in two ways: individual advising appointments and then participation in a webinar, an event, a cohort, programming. In terms of appointments, probably 60 percent are 10 years out or less, and then about 40 percent are folks who are further along in their career. Engagement in programming, events, webinars, cohorts tends to be a bit more even across class years. 

But we do see, in terms of advising, now that our model of engaging with alums throughout their whole career has been in place for a decade, our appointments are increasing. Because as you continue to have students who know, as they graduate, that this is an opportunity that remains available to them, they continue to engage. 

LW: What about trends in industry or profession? Are there certain jobs you see alumnae come to you for help getting?

DB: I mean, there are trends for Wellesley students broadly, and our alum data tracks mostly with our first destination data in terms of industry. But we do see a five-years-out uptick, when many alums are entering a career transition: “I thought I was going to do X, and now I realize that is not the path I’m interested in pursuing. So what am I thinking of next?” You see it almost like clockwork. And while that uncertainty is hard, the ability to seek more intention than just checking a box and climbing a ladder is, in and of itself, a really positive thing.

LW: You mentioned individual advising as one key service. Are there others that you think of as being most impactful or popular?

DB: We do a yearly webinar series, which generally features alum panels with conversations about what it looks like to work in certain industries — human resources, environmental impact, patient-facing healthcare, biotech, consulting, all of these kinds of different industries. And so that gives alums an opportunity to hear from other alums working at various stages in their career and in various roles in a broader industry and then to continue to connect with those alums for career resources. 

We also offer a program based on the Design Your Life program out of Stanford for alums who are in a place of transition and want to be in an alumnae cohort as they use that Design Your Life framework. The sessions are led by our alumnae career advisors, and we do those twice a year in a series. This is the fifth year, and participants find it very helpful. They bring a certain shared experience of their Wellesley time, which creates a foundation that feels safe and can be very generative. 

“They bring a certain shared experience of their Wellesley time, which creates a foundation that feels safe and can be very generative.”

LW: Do a lot of alumnae come to you with questions around changes in the workplace or for guidance around technology and A.I.-type skill building?

DB: We definitely do talk about upskilling. Because how people are thinking about skill development is shifting — I think rightfully so — in terms of the idea that you go in this kind of linear or vertical fashion, and then sometimes you need to stop and build a new skill, and then you continue up. It really is a much more fluid and ongoing approach. And you’re always thinking about: What are your skills? What are your experiences? What tools do you need to onboard? And then those tools offboard, and something else comes along. 

It’s been really interesting. So much of just the career space is teaming with conversations about A.I. You can’t escape it. But one of the threads that’s coming through is the power of a really solid liberal arts education that helps as a foundation for navigating all of these changes. And we definitely see that’s true. 

LW: Do you see a throughline between your career services work with alumane and a generally more engaged culture of alumane, either with students or with each other? 

DB: Wellesley does have a very strong alumane network. I also think there is a sense of being motivated toward sharing and generosity because people often remember a time of uncertainty, of vulnerability. And it’s such an opportunity for people who felt, in their own experience, that there was an opening for support, for guidance, for information, when they see that they’re now in a place to provide that. 

And it gives a sense of perspective, especially in this moment. This is a challenging time for students to be graduating into the workforce, and having that voice of alums who have gone before can provide a sense of perspective: “I graduated in ‘08 when the collapse happened and what I came into also felt really challenging.” Just this ability to see that others have navigated different, but also challenging, experiences in a way that was ultimately successful for them can create a support line that is important for students who are graduating, and then also for the alums.

LW: Do you think that culture is also strengthened or unique in some ways because Wellesley is a women’s college?

DB: I do. There seems to be this kind of structure when conversations happen within a Wellesley context that you have the expectation that you will be seen and heard, and you don’t have to fight for that, which is really powerful.

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

Like many educators during the pandemic, Kevin R. McClure felt the burnout. Faculty members were juggling research and leadership responsibilities, teaching and helping students, while navigating their own personal issues and watching colleagues struggle. As chair of the Department of Educational Leadership at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, he began writing and speaking about these challenges and the coinciding tide of resignations. Institutional leaders and journalists tuned in for insight into why so many employees were disengaging — and what colleges could do differently to retain their people.

Those conversations culminated in “The Caring University: Reimagining the Higher Education Workplace After the Great Resignation” (2025), a book that argues burnout is not an individual failure but a signal of deeper organizational problems. His research on college leadership, workplace culture, and organizational care helps campus leaders to build institutions where doing meaningful work isn’t to their own people’s detriment. 

LearningWell connected with McClure to discuss what it looks like when a university takes steps to prioritize its employees and the difference that effort makes in engagement. 

LW: Let’s start by looking at what it means for a university to be a caring institution. Why are we talking about this for higher education in a way that differs from, say, a grocery store chain?

KM: Higher education has not done a great job of prioritizing the wellbeing of staff and faculty. That’s not to say that it is worse than other industries per se, but we aren’t knocking it out of the park. Based on data that I collected through interviews with over 150 staff, faculty, and leaders across the country, what I heard over and over again was this question about whether or not this is a place that really cares about me. There was a feeling that they were expendable — that their health came second or third to other priorities that the institution had — and it was willing, in some cases, to sacrifice the health of some employees. This was particularly evident during the pandemic. We’d see a certain kind of comfort with the idea that we’re just going to lose people and either not replace them and absorb some of those cost savings or just repost the position expecting that people will line up to take it — a kind of churn and burn.

As I was doing these interviews, I heard a fair amount of pain from people on a regular basis. These are institutions that are dedicated to human growth and development, and we should be the world leader as employers. There was a time where we had the ability to point to indicators that we are leaders in certain regards, and that’s harder to claim today. And so it’s really an invitation for those of us that work in higher ed — those of us who are leaders in higher ed — to say we can do better than this. 

“There was a feeling that they were expendable — that their health came second or third to other priorities that the institution had.”

LW: What did the great resignation look like in higher ed, and what did it reveal about universities as a workplace?

KM: We certainly saw a number of people who left, and there was pretty heavy recruitment of people into ed tech as kind of an adjacent industry selling products and services to higher education. And we saw a number of people looking for places better aligned with their values or places where they might get slightly better pay or slightly more flexibility. And so similar to other parts of the great resignation, it wasn’t necessarily people leaving work all together so much as it was this kind of great shakeup of people moving jobs. 

The part that makes it somewhat unique is that higher education employees don’t always have a ton of mobility options. They may be in a particular field where there are only a handful of jobs open in a given year, and their ability to just move somewhere else is quite limited. A fraction of them have job security through a tenure system, which only actually works out to about a quarter of faculty. So in higher education, a great resignation looks a little different because of these other dynamics at play. The question becomes: What are we as an institution going to do differently to attract and keep really talented people? And very often, the answer was that there wasn’t much of anything happening in response to that. 

LW: Your book makes a strong case that employee wellbeing is foundational to student wellness and institutional success. What does that look like on campus? How do students and the whole school benefit when faculty are happier and doing well?

KM: When you look at some of the things that we know about student success, they include things like sense of belonging, a sense of mattering, doing work that is meaningful, feeling included, and getting engaged in the life of the institution. They’re all concepts that have a similar if not identical concept when it comes to retaining and attracting employees. And it’s because a lot of these things are just base-level, fundamental components of what humans need in order to be healthy and thrive. As we’ve had all these conversations about student success, I’ve been trying to point out the fact that these are all things that are good for employees as well. We don’t have to just think of them as things for students. What this book is trying to do is to push us to not necessarily think in terms of specific populations but to say we are a community of learners, and we ought to be thinking across the entire organization about some of these things. And if we do that, I think we are going to see downstream benefits and outcomes for students.  

You know, students are smart and perceptive, and they pick up on when an institution is thinly staffed and when faculty and staff seem really stressed. They’re able to pick up on P.R. spin and prestige games that institutions play. And they have an awareness, I think, of an institution where things are imbalanced, and they can feel it really acutely when somebody leaves — when they lose a mentor or someone on campus that has been important to them. And so if we think about foundational conditions for a community to do well and to be well, we need to say instead that this is something that’s good for everybody. 

LW: You’re clear that care isn’t a matter of band-aid solutions like extra wellness days. What does institutional care look like when it’s embedded in policies and structures beyond encouraging people to, say, make sure they get out and take a walk?

KM: Institutions have often relied on that more individualized type of response to challenging workplace conditions: Don’t overwork. Don’t say yes to too many things. As you put it, go take a walk. We’ve put a lot of onus on individuals to navigate through this themselves, and my argument is not necessarily that we should throw out self-care. Everybody should be thinking about the choices that they’re making.

But when you look at the root causes of some of these workplace problems, they are often structural and cultural — a reflection of choices that we make across the organization, our strategic planning, and the priorities that we set. When we set goals, we need to ask how they are going to affect our people and what additional capacity we are asking of them as a result. It means looking at some of our practices and policies and whether they’re really designed for the realities of living, breathing humans with caregiving responsibilities and health limitations. Oftentimes, our practices and policies are designed for people that are robots or don’t have any kind of demands of a body.

LW: In the book, you critique the idea of the “ideal worker” in higher education — the myth of the teacher constantly available to be a life-changing mentor for students. How does this myth of “The Giving Tree” professor affect not only employees but also the learning environments we create for students?

KM: There is a real need for us to be thinking about workload and establishing some real guardrails to prevent that sort of thing from happening. Yes, it’s up to people on their own to parse out how they should be handling these things. But often we’ve got reward and recognition systems that are based on the idea that the more productive and performative that you are, the more likely you are to be recognized, so there’s kind of an inbuilt incentive for people to go above and beyond. We don’t want to take away incentives for honoring work that is good and valuable to the institution. But we also don’t want to suggest that just because someone is setting some healthy boundaries on what they take on that they are considered someone who’s not pulling their weight.

“We don’t want to suggest that just because someone is setting some healthy boundaries on what they take on that they are considered someone who’s not pulling their weight.”

LW: It’s hard to determine what an appropriate level of engagement is — how much to put yourself out there and pull your weight — particularly when we’re talking about supporting students and colleagues. Is there a way the university could be better involved in modeling expectations?

KM: Of course there’s some nuance with this, and it gets a little bit complex, but I do think that there is a role to be played by leaders in modeling what this can look like. When there’s an opportunity for any of us in leadership roles to show what a healthy boundary looks like for newer people that are coming in, it makes it a little bit easier for them to make that choice — to not feel like they’re going against the grain — because this is the norm. If we as leaders have a situation where someone is clearly overwhelmed, we need to take some steps to help and say, “Hey, you’ve got too many students that you’re mentoring right now. Our norm is closer to eight, and we see that you’ve got 15. Let’s figure out a system so that we can better distribute this so it’s not entirely on your shoulders.”

LW: What makes it harder is that it’s personal. Employees aren’t building widgets. They’re investing time in helping colleagues or developing a young person in their field looking for guidance.

KM: All of it’s very personal. The reality is that most of us are people who got into this work because we really believe it’s important. It’s meaningful to us. So much of our scholarly work is collaborative, and we have commitments and obligations to other people. It feels very hard sometimes to pull back on that because it feels like you’re risking some of those relationships or failing to show up for people you care about. 

But again, there’s a real role in setting healthy expectations — expectations for people who are seeking promotion, for example, that aren’t over the moon, but reasonable. 

LW: Higher education tends to be good at measuring enrollment, retention, and revenue. How could institutions think differently about measuring wellbeing — for employees and students — and following through?

KM: A basic level is we probably should be collecting more data that better gets at the employee experience. Right now, we do very little of this beyond a periodic employee engagement survey. There might be some exit interviews that happen as someone leaves, but even that can be very sporadic. And so the bar right now is quite low in terms of what we do. Anything that we do above that is going to be a step in the right direction. Then, once we better understand who our employees are and what their experience is on the job, we can make sure we’ve got capacity to analyze that data and that it doesn’t just sit on a shelf.

“People have to start believing that this is a system worth investing in.”

We have at our disposal at colleges and universities people who are trained in social science research, and there’s no reason why we couldn’t be figuring out some better ways of designing studies to better understand the employee experience and improvements that we can make. Too often institutions collect data, but then they don’t act on it. And then people lose faith that this is a process that’s going to lead to change, and then they opt out of doing it in the future. People have to start believing that this is a system worth investing in.

LW: Do you have some examples of universities doing it well?

KM: Almost every positive example in the book begins with some type of data collection effort. They are starting from a position of: “Let’s get a better handle on what the problem is — specific to our institution, our culture — and then let’s design something that speaks specifically to us.” 

One of the issues that I flag in the book is about the lack of career advancement and career pathways. There’s a great example from Miami University in Ohio where a marketing communications department had lost a significant number of people. They began with an employee culture survey, and through that, they identified that the biggest issue was people felt like there wasn’t room to grow, particularly people that were not interested in being supervisors. From that, they designed a new career pathway model — one for people that wanted to supervise and one for folks that didn’t. There is another example at the University of Louisville that identified the need to pay better attention to the employee experience. They now have a dedicated staff that is working on better onboarding, better recognition systems, better employee training, and I think that has been a smashing success. 

LW: It’s such a time of change right now. Are there already new things you wish you could add or adjust in the book?

KM: I feel like I should write an epilogue! We’re in a moment that makes all of this more complicated. I mean, how do you show care for people that are coming to join your faculty from other countries, when it doesn’t feel like the door is quite as open or students that have come here to study are being detained? 

Politically speaking, we have institutions that have had sources of revenue disrupted or cut, so they have less to work with. It’s very difficult to try to pursue a model of organizational care at the same time that you’re laying people off. We have spaces where there’s real challenges with enrollment decline. 

A lot of this is not symbolic or hypothetical anymore, and we will see the consequences of that over time. That’s the world we live in right now, and those of us still in it are trying to do the very good work with students, and remain hopeful.

Visions of Morocco often conjure vast deserts and bustling cities. Al Akhawayn University, quietly tucked in among the Middle Atlas Mountains, is more likely to be covered in a dusting of snow than sand. The surprises don’t end there. 

Since 1995, A.U.I. has led with an American style of liberal arts education that is different from every other university in the country. The idea came out of a partnership between two monarchs — King Hassan II of Morocco and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia — who also inspired the university’s name “Al Akhawayn,” meaning “two brothers” in Arabic.

That founding emphasis on connection and mutual support — global and local — remains. Current President Amine Bensaid has been building out a particularly robust approach to student affairs based on helping students, struggling with wellbeing much like in the U.S., develop meaningful relationships with both each other and the world.

With LearningWell, Bensaid talks about pioneering and preserving the liberal arts core, while adapting to the unique needs of his students — and the country.

LW: I’m interested in how the liberal arts model came to A.U.I. and to Morocco. Could you tell us more about that?

AB: The vision for an American-model university in Morocco is something that late King Hassan II had, in the late 70s or 80s, I believe. The rest of the education landscape in Morocco is all modeled after the French system, so the general idea was to have a pilot, or just an experiment, in Morocco for an American-model university. And then when he finally got to do it — that was in the early 90s — it was clear that it would violate a number of things in Moroccan law on higher education with respect to pedagogical norms and governance. 

As a result, a separate law that would govern the university was created in the form of a Royal Dahir. In that royal decree, in the preamble, it was almost like he saw September 11th coming: He wanted the university to graduate a different breed of graduates who would be ready, willing, able to contribute to mutual understanding between different civilizations. We were not only going to do a university based on the American model but specifically a liberal arts and sciences kind of university. 

So that’s really where the whole thing came from. It felt like a little bit of a vision for a monarch that saw that there was this system that could give better results for the kind of transformation that he was imagining.

LW: And maybe with that, your work around student life is also really unique, right? What goes into that approach?

 AB: Historically, the model for student life in Moroccan public universities has been inspired by the model in French public universities, where it’s not designed to play a role in student success and identity. In Moroccan public universities, typical student life consists mostly of housing and meals, with housing provided to a relatively small percentage — maybe 10 to 20 percent of the student population. At A.U.I., about 85 percent of students live on campus; campus life and student activities make up a significant part of a student’s college years. By design, it is meant to be immersive and provide a transformational experience. A.U.I. also brings some of the learning even closer to the dorms through living and learning communities — for example, for first-year students. Today, many private universities in Morocco do offer student activities — in a way probably inspired more by A.U.I. than by the French model — in addition to housing and dining, although they’re still not on an immersive and transformational model where student life is at the heart of the university experience.

LW: How did you get so invested in the student affairs and residential life piece?

AB: The investment is really in the convergence between student affairs and academic affairs to provide an integrated transformational experience that makes a difference in the life of the student. So the short answer is we were looking to have an impact where it was most needed, which really is just being true to A.U.I.’s mission. The long answer has to do with A.U.I.’s history and journey.

A few years after A.U.I. started, it came to feel important to further institutionalize its practices and for some third party to make an external evaluation regarding A.U.I.’s mission of implementing the American liberal arts model in Morocco and the benefits it sought for its students. So A.U.I. embarked on NECHE’s process of accreditation, which was a process of seven years, and we received our first accreditation in 2017. In 2018, when the thinking started towards a new strategic plan, the reflection was: ‘Okay, well A.U.I. has now delivered on its mission because NECHE has certified that we have done what we were supposed to do.’ The question then became: ‘Okay, so what do we now do?’

Considering A.U.I.’s history and DNA, the answer came very naturally: ‘Let’s use what we’ve learned to contribute to Morocco’s human development efforts. Let’s capitalize on our experience to act as a living lab to address one of our country’s challenges.’ The colleagues who were working on this came back with a proposal: The economic situation in Morocco included a highly respectable G.D.P. growth of about 3.5 percent per year on average over 20 years. But socio-economically, it had not created enough jobs. 

And especially, there was a challenge of unemployment among young graduates. The team further suggested: ‘Considering the fast pace of change in the world of jobs and employers, shouldn’t we also be concerned at A.U.I. about what would happen to our graduates if employers start asking more for technical skills than for general education? So why don’t we extend our liberal arts and sciences model to extend our definition of student success as including career success?’

But then a group of faculty said, ‘Well, you guys want to take young Moroccans, and you want to work with them in order to adapt to the fast pace of change of the job market. But you don’t realize that for the past few years, we feel that these students of the new generation themselves have been changing!’ Some were saying, ‘Things I’ve done with my students that have worked well for 20 years now no longer work as well. I feel like they are different “breed” as students.’   

And so the team working on strategic planning went out and did some more desk research, and that’s when we — I, for one! — discovered the concept of Gen Z for the first time. So the team came back saying, ‘Yes, this generation may be different and what the colleagues are saying may be deeper than we think, and here are characteristics of this new generation. And by the way, there is an elephant in the room, which is the wellbeing mental health of this generation.’

“It was like, ‘Oh my God! We’re starting to see what was already happening in the U.S.!'”

So we decided then that we were going to further extend our model. In addition to augmenting our liberal arts model with a layer we refer to as career success — we called it, actually, R.O.I., return on investment — we’ll add another layer that we called V.O.I., value on investment, or student fulfillment. We decided to work with our student and find ways together that, by the time they graduate, will better equip them to pursue fulfilled lives. We became very excited about these strategic choices. The only trick is that our board approved this in February 2020 to go into effect starting fall 2020, and then we were hit by COVID in March 2020.

LW: Ah, so what ended up happening to life on campus? Were you fully remote during that time? 

AB: When we learned about the wellbeing challenges facing Gen Z, we were initially not seeing anything on campus in relationship to that. The only reason we started looking at this is because the faculty were saying they seem different in their teaching and learning. But we had no challenges with wellbeing whatsoever, and no challenges with mental health. A.U.I. is the only university in Morocco that, since 1999, hired a psychiatrist on a part-time basis for student support. But that was it; there was no mental health issue at all, and certainly not the issue we were reading about in the U.S. studies. 

But when COVID hit, yes, students were away for a semester, and then they came back in the fall of 2020. And when they came back, everything seemed to have changed. So what we were reading about that we were not seeing, we now started seeing. We had one student suicide, albeit not on campus. We had a waiting list to see psychologists that was about five or six weeks. So it was like, ‘Oh my God! We’re starting to see what was already happening in the U.S.!’

And so while our strategic project was forward-looking and aimed at ensuring that by the time our students graduate, they’re more resilient and better trained to pursue their fulfillment, they had a problem here and now! And we had to find the solutions, and the solutions that we discovered from universities in the U.S., we really did not think were adapted to us because they were just too expensive and not scalable for us. As we understood it at the time, the ratio of number of students to number of psychological counselors was key. For us, there were two or three challenges with that. One of them was that the Moroccan culture was such that it was a little bit taboo to actually go see a psychologist; two, it’s still too expensive. We were thinking, if we go the ‘American’ way, then by the time our students graduate, they would be dependent on a service they cannot afford once they leave the university.

So we started looking for something else. We decided to develop what we called the holistic strategy that is based more on prevention. (But, still, we hired two more psychologists ourselves and another part-time psychiatrist, and we brought down the waiting time on the waiting list to 48 hours. Now we don’t have any waiting list at all.) And we started working on this holistic strategy with sleep and sports and nutrition and substance abuse, thinking that we were going to speak to the emergency with the counselors but that we needed to do more work for a more fundamental solution. 

LW: Did you ever anticipate that student wellbeing would become such a big part of your work? How do you feel about it now?

 AB: I have an easy answer: No. I didn’t think at all that this was going to be a part of my work! But I believe that we have a critical mass of colleagues who are really passionate about the education that they try to offer. And as a result, from that perspective, I’m not surprised we got into this. Because with the parameters of the current equation, we believe we have to do this because it’s the right thing to do. In the same way that if there’s a problem with employment, you would do something about it, well, you have to do something about this challenge. And it’s deeper. And we feel it’s more in resonance with the spirit of the liberal arts tradition that, if you really want to make a difference — a meaningful difference — then you cannot afford to ignore this. And it’s a wicked problem. I mean, it’s not an easy one. So no, I did not expect it at all. But in retrospect, I believe it’s part of what we have to do if we’re sincere about the kind of difference that we want to make. 

LW: Post-pandemic, what does ensuring students get that “value on investment” look like? What are the priorities from the V.O.I. perspective?

AB: We have decided to work on four pillars. One is to work with our students on purposefulness.* You probably know about all the research that you’re more resilient when you have a purpose. Two is working on what we refer to as meaningful relationships. You know this long Harvard study on what makes a good life? So it turns out that the parameter that makes the biggest difference is these meaningful relationships or friendships. And so that’s our second pillar.

Our third pillar is about giving or generosity. Since 2004, A.U.I. has had service learning as a requirement. We were developing student skills and we were trying to give back, but we had not thought of it as really benefiting students’ mental health or wellbeing. We’ve now discovered we can also use it to loosen the grip of the ego and self-interest and shift the attention away from the self. 

“We decided that we were going to learn how to partner with our new generation of students.”

And the last pillar is about an observation, but then we were told that there was also some research for this: Our observation was that in Morocco, we were in a societal transition whereby parents did not seem to be as invested in educating their children. Traditionally, most moms did not work, but now both parents are working and have very little time for the children. And when they have some time for their children, they seem to spend it trying to become friends as opposed to educating. And similarly, when many of our faculty who are my age went to school, the neighborhood was also part of education — the neighbors would see behavior from a kid and would say, ‘No, you do this; you don’t do that.’ Similar things could be said about school.

So the feeling was that these components that went into a child’s education were weakening. And in parallel, our surveys of our students showed that on average, our students spent 40 to 60 percent of their time on social media. So it was like two phenomena happening in parallel — that on the one hand, they had weaker ties with their own environment and culture, and on the other hand, they were living in some kind of culture not tightly coupled with what they were living in physically. 

And so our assumption at the time was that, well, with this lack of cultural anchoring, one may be less resilient and more fragile. And as a result, we decided that we were going to offer an anchor, and that’s what we call the ‘cultural grounding.’ 

So these are the four pillars: purpose, meaningful relationships, giving, and cultural anchoring. Our assumption there — it’s a big assumption — is that if we work on these four things and our students get better on these four things during the four years or so that they spend with us, then that would improve their readiness for fulfillment.

LW: How do you go about helping them with those four pillars? Are there required activities? How do you tackle each one?

AB: So maybe there is one more element I should share with you. When we were finishing the work on our strategic plan in early 2020, we asked ourselves the question: What kind of relationship do we want to have vis-a-vis each stakeholder of the university? And the consensus was that vis-a-vis our students, we wanted to serve them the same way we serve our own children.

And so when we thought we were done, and we presented to students and said, ‘Here’s the kind of relationship we mean to have with you,’ then almost with one voice, consistently, they would say, ‘Oh, thank you. You’re so sweet, but no thank you.’ And we were like, ‘Okay, what kind of relationship would you like to have?’ They would say, ‘We already have a pair of parents, so thank you, but the relationship we would like a relationship is that of being a “partner.”’

So we decided that we were going to learn how to partner with our new generation of students. A.U.I. has had a student government from day one, but we decided to create another representative body of students that we call the Student Leadership Council, which is made up of the presidents of each club and association. We have over a hundred clubs, so it’s a large thing. The idea was that we were going to learn how to partner through that — through students who were closer to other students day to day. 

And the relationship to your question is that we took the entire V.O.I. strategy to this council. So we already had some ideas. For example, we started the work on purposefulness before we establlished this council. We adopted the human-centered design thinking. We started initially with the graduating cohort because we did not want them to leave without doing it. And then we included it in the work that we do for career preparation. And then we included it in our first-year experience and courses for academic success.

But at some point, we brought it to the students and we said, ‘Here’s our strategy. Here’re our four pillars. Here’s something that we’ve already done, but here is what we have not done.’ So they started working on the meaningful relationships. And so they made a plan, and they identified things that we had never thought about. So one of the things they came up with, for example, is that they feel that developing these kinds of relationships has happened for them more when they were working in teams on challenging academic projects. 

For the generosity and giving, we had almost 20 years of work on service learning, but now we were also trying to see how it could be used to contribute to wellbeing. And then for cultural anchoring, we found it more challenging. So we decided to move ahead with some actions while we keep working on the strategy for that. So the something that we did was, starting last year, we decided to offer our students an opportunity to discover our country through the different genres of music in different regions of Morocco. So we had a composer give a semester-long course on this, where over the course of the semester, he actually brought in different bands from different regions of Morocco, and they would talk about the history, the cultural aspect. But at the same time, they would actually play; they would perform. It was interesting, and it looks like the students liked it a lot. We’re now enriching that with a focus on deeper values in our culture and the way they can contribute to strengthening ethical leadership in our students.

LW: Have you been able to find partnership with other institutions along the way as your plans develop and change?

AB: Indeed! You know you sometimes think you’re the only one running into a challenge, and then you discover: ‘There are people like me out there.’ It’s so delightful and so exciting when you do! So just to say, our connections among colleagues and institutions in the U.S. who have similar passions and are acting on them, I believe, have been — I was going to say instrumental, but not just instrumental — a blessing. 

*The Path to Purpose initiative is A.U.I.’s four-year, campus-wide effort to help students reflect on and develop their sense of purpose. You can read more about it through the LearningWell Coalition. 

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.