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The Jed Foundation at 25

Posted on June 18, 2024January 21, 2026 by Dana Humphrey

The Jed Foundation (JED) annual gala in New York City never fails to impress. The beautifully choreographed event at Cipriani’s in Lower Manhattan draws participants of all kinds, from celebrities and well-heeled patrons to behavioral health advocates and young people from across the country. But behind the production and couture is a non-profit start-up with a remarkable influence on the mental health and well-being of high school and college students — and one of the country’s most significant and little-known success stories.

This year’s gala was particularly inspirational, breaking records in attendance and fundraising while featuring personalities such as TV anchor Savannah Sellers and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who bestowed a lifetime achievement award on his friend and former college classmate, Phillip Satow. The gala honored the twenty-fifth year of the country’s leading non-profit dedicated to protecting emotional health and preventing suicide in young people, as well as the retirement of Satow, its co-founder, who has moved from Chairman of the Board of Directors to Chairman Emeritus and Board member.

Phil and Donna Satow launched The Jed Foundation in 2000 in acknowledgement of the life and sudden death of their youngest child, Jed, who died by suicide two years earlier when he was a student at the University of Arizona. What the Satows chose to do with their unimaginable grief would change how colleges and universities view their role in protecting their students from tragedies such as Jed’s.

JED’s work in the past twenty-five years has not only provided an evidence-based model for suicide prevention, it has brought to the surface the important and sensitive truth that, for many, the college years are the most developmentally challenging of their lives.

In accepting his award, Satow told the story of when, shortly after Jed’s death, the president of his son’s university asked him and his wife Donna the question that would lead to the launch of the Foundation. “What can I do to improve the safety of my 30,000 students?” Satow, who was already a highly successful pharmaceutical executive, responded in the best way he knew how: he and Donna devoted themselves to finding an answer to the question.

Satow’s first “kitchen cabinet” was made up of medical professionals, suicide prevention experts, and business colleagues. After years of raising awareness and developing JED’s Comprehensive Approach to Mental Health Promotion and Suicide Prevention for Colleges and Universities, the organization began offering JED Campus. Launched in 2013, the program engages colleges and universities in collaborative work with a dedicated JED Campus Advisor over the course of four years. After conducting an initial needs assessment, the Campus Advisor draws on the data to create a strategic plan with actionable opportunities that span seven domains: develop life skills; promote social connectedness; identify students at risk; increase help-seeking behavior; provide mental health and substance misuse services; follow crisis-management procedures; and promote means safety.

In April 2024, JED published an impact report detailing improvements to student mental health at schools that completed JED Campus titled A Decade of Improving College Mental Health Systems: JED Campus Impact Report. A decade of data (2013 to 2023) from JED Campus schools and the Healthy Minds Network survey were analyzed and found schools that completed JED Campus saw statistically significant improvements in student mental health at the end of the program. Students at participating institutions were 25% less likely to report a suicide attempt, 13% less likely to report suicide planning, and 10% less likely to report suicidal ideation. Students whose schools make more progress on their JED strategic plans are more likely to demonstrate improvement.

JED Campus is now in over 450 colleges and universities in the United States, reaching 5.6 million students, with the core of its programming expanding into high schools and school districts throughout the country. In 2022, JED received a $15 million grant from Mackenzie Scott, which Satow hopes will triple the number of students it reaches over the next several years, someday reaching more than 50 percent of colleges and universities. JED has recently doubled its staff from 40 to 95 to cover its expanding programming, which includes webinars and trainings, original research and reports, consulting services, public awareness campaigns, youth mental health resources, and policy, advocacy, and government relations work on the local, state, and federal levels.

Shortly after the gala, Satow spoke with LearningWell about these accomplishments, including living up to expectations, proving the organization’s impact, and finally being able to answer the University of Arizona president’s question.

LearningWell: Did you believe back in 2000 that the Jed Foundation would grow to this size and scope?

Phillip Satow: In many ways, yes. This was a hope that I had after I lost my son, when I thought about how many other kids were in similar situations and how many other families would be affected by a loss like ours. And here was a college president, obviously a very bright man, and he had no constructive idea what to do. And it dawned on me that we could have an incredible impact if we could establish a safety net under thousands of kids across so many campuses.

Shortly after Jed died, I brought together a number of experts and posed the question that I was asked by Jed’s college president. They responded by suggesting the applicability of a model, sourced from the U.S. Air Force and published in The British Medical Journal, with outcome data that showed it actually reduced suicide. So we had a model with evidence, and when we first started, one of the things we thought about was how broad our approach should be. Should we think horizontally or vertically? Should we bring this information to one school at a time, or should we bring awareness to all campuses in the United States and let them know a prevention model like this could really work to reduce suicide on their campuses? We ended up going horizontal, and even though we were small, we wanted to make sure that as many college counseling centers we could get to would have this information. I really did have that dream.

It would be very hard for many presidents not to feel obligated to call on JED, because we know we can indeed make a difference on their campuses.

LW: For a non-profit, JED is very entrepreneurial. You started outside of higher education and now serve so many colleges and universities and high schools. Do you ever think about how what you built can be applied in other scenarios?

PS: I do, often. The idea for the model was far-sighted in many ways. In boundaried communities, you have leadership in a position to say, “Here is our policy that I am asking you to follow.” If you look at suicide in general in the United States, so many occur in boundaried communities like prisons and large health care systems. I believe there is something to our model that allows it to be applied more broadly than in colleges or in other academic spaces. We now consult with corporations and other organizations like national fraternities and even professional sports organizations.

LW: What were some of the big milestones for you in JED’s 25-year history?

PS: I think there were a few things that really changed our growth trajectory. The decision to put “boots on the ground” made a big difference. At first, we put our model out there, but it was up to the schools to implement it. Over time, we decided it was important to have people assigned to schools and committees formed that we could collaborate with. That became the JED Campus program. Another major milestone for us came about due to the pandemic, which of course made things difficult for us, as for everyone, but it did bring the JED message alive – that mental health was an important priority for schools. And the third area that really distinguishes us is our data collection effort. We have an extraordinary amount of data that we can continuously display as evidence of our impact. From the beginning, we were always looking to collect support data for our impact framework. I think that’s what sets us apart.

LW: When did you feel as though you had an answer to the question Jed’s college president asked you?

PS: We had a subjective feeling as we were rolling out the JED Campus program into hundreds of schools but in the last couple of years there’s been real evidence of this. The American Council on Education released a survey in 2021 that showed that over 70% of college presidents reported that student mental health was their number one priority. Our impact report really shows how the needle has moved. Students at JED schools were 25% less likely to report a suicide attempt. This is all real data that shows how much has changed since 2000.

LW: What directions do you see JED going in now?

PS: There’s much more to do in the college space. I think that, with the data we have, it would be very hard for many presidents not to feel obligated to call on JED, because we know we can indeed make a difference on their campuses. There are also around over 20,000 high schools in the United States, and we have a lot of work to do there. We’ve just launched a partnership with AASA, The Superintendents Association, with the goal to help many K-12 school districts implement a comprehensive approach to mental health and suicide prevention

I think we will end up expanding significantly, but at the same time, we don’t want our success to hamper us. I know from my business career that if you take on too much, you may not do anything very well. And when we’re talking about kids’ lives, you’ve got to do everything superbly. So, I think the real challenge will be how we successfully assure high quality control in all those thousands of high schools and colleges. I don’t think anyone wants to see JED, as we continue to expand, be an organization of hundreds of employees. We’ll need to use the latest technology in every way possible in order to provide excellent support in each school we serve.

LW: What do you think has been the secret to JED’ success?PS: First of all, it’s the people, starting with John MacPhee, our CEO for 12 years. Also our medical and clinical personnel, and of course, our excellent development department. We have also used leverage very well to scale our work – our partnership with AASA, The Superintendents Association, is an example. We are not just doing this one-school-at-a-time, and that has really benefited us. And the last thing would be our focus on outcomes data. Most organizations in the mental health field don’t have the data to prove that what they’re doing works. I think the fact that I came from the pharmaceutical industry (as did John) was helpful in that regard. We know that, in the health care world,you can’t promote anything that doesn’t have data to support it. I think that’s been a highly important concept that has been transferred to our work at the Jed Foundation.

A Joyful Enterprise

Posted on May 21, 2024January 21, 2026 by Dana Humphrey

Professor Tarek Masoud found his work the object of dissent across the political aisle earlier this year when he organized a Middle East Dialogues series featuring voices on both sides of the Israel-Palestine debate. In six one-on-one conversations, Masoud, the Director of the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School, invited figures with opposing but similarly divisive politics to explain and defend their stances.

None of Masoud’s guests may be strangers to controversy, and neither is he. Reproving posts and concerned colleagues didn’t dissuade Masoud, whose choice to examine unpopular opinions on stage mirrors his teaching philosophy in the classroom. His experience leading students in intense, often tense debate and his belief they appreciate it nonetheless led him to write an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled “Students Aren’t the Obstacle to Open Debate at Harvard.” He goes on: “It is us: faculty and administrators who are too afraid—of random people on social media, hard-core activists, irritable alumni, assorted ‘friends’ of Harvard—to allow a culture of open debate and dialogue to flourish.”

So how does the expert on democracy and governance in the Middle East approach concerns about student safety and belonging in the classroom, while encouraging pupils to confront topics and opinions they disapprove, even despise? Unease about pervasive mental health challenges on college campuses has fed debate over whether exposing students to objectionable content facilitates wellbeing by cultivating resilience, or puts them in harm’s way by leaving them feeling unsupported and disrespected. With LearningWell, Masoud discusses challenging students through argument, empowering them the same way, and his overriding conviction that learning, in all its discomfort, poses “some of the most joyful activities in the human experience.”

On LinkedIn, you posted about how the classroom should feel more like the gym than like home — that universities should be encouraging student discomfort, as opposed to a commonly talked about value, which is belonging. Can school be a gym where you also belong?

I think school can absolutely be a gym where you belong. It can be a place of very rigorous inquiry that you nonetheless feel a very deep attachment to and feel deeply connected to. But the connection of the student to the community should be based on the right foundation. It should be based on the fact that we are here as a community of learners and teachers, who are engaged in this very difficult but very fruitful task of expanding the limits of human knowledge, testing what it is we think we know against what it is that others think they know. I want people to belong to Harvard. I want people to feel that they are home at Harvard, but not because we’re part of something called “Club Harvard,” not just because we’re the random people who happen to get lucky to be chosen by admissions officers, but because we are people who have this very deep commitment to this very important value of dedicating all of our energies to the task of open and honest inquiry.

In your own classroom, are there ways you try to foster both of those things, discomfort and belonging, with student mental health in mind?

I think I have a high degree of confidence in my students. And I think student mental health is extremely important. And we as instructors obviously need to be very careful that what we’re doing is strengthening our students and not weakening them. I’m constantly thinking and rethinking about how I’m teaching to make sure that I’m not putting students in situations where their mental health is at risk. I strive not to put things in the conversation that are gratuitous and that aren’t going to serve any educational purpose except to shock and cause people to feel uncomfortable in ways that don’t advance the learning mission. So for me, the kind of uncomfortable position I might put my students in would be to read somebody whose views they don’t agree with.

I teach in graduate school, which is also a little bit different. The teaching environment I’m in is one where sometimes I wish my students would think about my mental health because I will get very vigorous and rigorous pushback. I might say something that I think is completely anodyne, and some student will, in a very sharp way, show me all of the ways in which it reflects some less than noble aspect of my positionality. But in all of these places, we need to remind everybody that this is an institution of learning. And if I, Harvard, am prioritizing your comfort and I am making it possible for you to avoid discomfort and not strengthening you so that you can face discomfort and defeat it, then I’m not doing my job for you. You’re paying me an inordinate amount of money, and my job is to make sure that you come out of this place much stronger and much smarter. And I guess what I’m saying is there’s no way of avoiding, then, the discomfort. And what I think the institution needs to do is really help our students learn to manage discomfort, to transcend discomfort, and even to seek it out in the rest of their lives because they know that’s how they get stronger.

You touched on this in terms of graduate school versus undergraduate, but do you think that this approach would be effective, or come with different risks, at a school that isn’t Harvard and struggles more with things like retention and completion?

First of all, in any institution, we as faculty need to be in touch with our students as persons and not just as disembodied brains into which we’re pouring information and with which we are having arguments. We always have to be attuned to our students as persons. And I probably have, in many cases I know I have, over the course of my career gone too far and had students say, “I felt that you were pushing too hard on me or not respecting me as a person.” So we should never allow the situation to get to that point. I would be distressed if somebody interpreted my call to center learning and debate and argumentation as somehow being a call to ignore the fact that we’re teaching human beings, and human beings have emotional reactions to things.

The point is I want our students to come away with a feeling that they have a great deal of power. And there are arguments out there that they might deem to be harmful, that have caused them to conclude that they don’t have a lot of respect for the holders of those arguments. But you have a lot of power and a lot of strength to confront those arguments. And so I just want our students to develop a powerful sense of their own efficacy that is born fundamentally from the fact that these are super highflying and bright people.

And in terms of empowering students intellectually and otherwise, is that coming back to the idea that instead of being something that turns people away, this kind of debate could actually boost people’s interest in their own education?

So that’s the theory. I’ll also just tell you some empirics. A few years ago, I had some undergraduates take my class and ask to meet me. And I was fairly certain that what I was going to be told was that there was a feeling of a lack of safety in my classroom because I really do try to engage in rigorous argument and get people to argue with each other. And these students never agreed with anything I said. So I met with them. “So how are you finding the class?” And the ringleader said, “Oh, this is our favorite class. You are the only professor we’ve had at Harvard who is not afraid of us.” And I said, “Well, actually, I’m quite afraid of you. I just am not very smart, and I have low impulse control.”

“I want our students to come away with a feeling that they have a great deal of power.”

I really do feel that our students want to be treated as adults and that means disagreeing with them sometimes. I really do have that belief, as long as they understand that the professor’s goal—this is very important— as long as they understand the professor’s goal is not to preach some gospel, rather to teach them and to make them stronger. So I think one thing students definitely get out of my classes is they’re like, “Tarek Massoud is not trying to convince me of anything. He is not trying to convince me of what he thinks.” In fact, I would be horrified if my students came out of my class as little copies of Tarek Masoud, spouting Tarek Masoud-isms. What the students, I think, come away from my class believing, and I do say this always, is that “What Tarek wants me to do is really know why I think what I think and to be able to defend my position.” And so I’m trying to make you the best version of yourself. I’m not trying to make you a version of me. And it doesn’t come out of any kind of strategy. None of this is terribly theorized in advance. It’s just kind of who I am. It’s why I got into academia. I got into academia in part because I’m not sure of what I know, in part because I love to argue, in part because everything I’ve ever learned, I learned by first arguing with it.

Your comment about students enjoying this kind of debate more than people might expect reminds me of the article that you wrote for The Wall Street Journal. In that article, you place the responsibility more on faculty and administration, rather than students, for not cultivating these debates. I wonder, for other faculty who are interested but maybe hesitant, do you have advice for how they can establish these kinds of dialogues in their classrooms?

Look, I think it’s not easy. And I would certainly not say that every faculty member needs to do that. But my view is that those of us who do want to foster this space for open debate and inquiry should not find the administration of the university to be an obstacle to that. What I don’t want the administration of the university to do is tell us to do anything. I would not like the email from the administration of the university that says, “You must now foster debate on this.” I think we’re a heterodox enough institution that there are those of us who want to do that. And there are others who would prefer to have more comity in their classrooms in order to maximize the possibility that people learn. We teach different classes, different things, et cetera. So my plea is really for administrators to help those of us who want to expand the space for debate and discourse on campus, but not to say that everybody needs to be like me. I think that would not be a recipe for a healthy institution.

“I’m trying to make you the best version of yourself. I’m not trying to make you a version of me.”

And for faculty who are interested in leaning more into this kind of debate or dialogue, you mentioned taking a personal approach to it. What do you mean by that?

I think, again, about the things that I mentioned earlier, number one being you can’t just foster this culture of debate without being attentive to your students as persons. And so you have to have that front of mind. The other point I would make is that one must also have a sense of humor. And I do think that one of the ways in which I am lucky is that I don’t take myself too seriously. Somebody wrote about me that I had a Midwestern sense of humor. It’s actually an Egyptian sense of humor. And I do think that helps, as well, because it reminds students that we are actually engaged in a very joyful enterprise. And we are among — “we” being people attached to universities, not just people attached to Harvard University — we are some of the most fortunate people in the world, engaged in what should be some of the most joyful activities in the human experience. And just reminding ourselves of that, from time to time, with smiles on our faces, with periodic reflections on how lucky we are to be in communion with each other, I think, is also helpful.

Have you also encountered students who don’t like this culture of dialogue or have negative feedback about it? How do you help them through that discomfort?

Without question. Typically, it will express itself in the following way, this discomfort with dialogue. It will express itself with students being aggrieved that I platformed a certain position that they believe is unworthy of being even discussed at Harvard. It comes from actually quite a noble place that our students have very deep commitments to conceptions of what is just and what is right. And it grieves them when they see a professor who’s a figure that they should respect at a place like Harvard, no less, who is platforming these views or who is making people read these views that they believe should be consigned to the ash heap of history.

And what I try to convince my students of is that I’m not platforming the views so much as I’m platforming them. I’m trying to give the student the opportunity to develop the most powerful arsenal against these arguments that they find to be unworthy. I’m starting from the premise that I believe you, the student, have valid reasons for thinking that this is unworthy. I want you to bring them to my class because there are other people, by the way, who don’t know, and you may convince them. Or, in the process of trying to convince them, you may detect where there are some gaps in your knowledge or argumentation. You either fill them, or you’ll change your mind. There isn’t a way in which this is bad for us, if our goal is to expand our knowledge, to become smarter, to know why it is we hold certain views.

What do you think about the perception that so-called “Wokeism” has radicalized this generation of students more than those before it?

I really don’t like the term “Wokeism” because it doesn’t take seriously the constellation of very deeply held values that I think animate a lot of our students and indeed our colleagues. And I think these values have been quite a constant presence throughout the academy. I saw a whole front page of The Crimson from the 1960s, and it literally could have been written today. I mean, did they use the term “structural racism”? I don’t think so. But they talked about the phenomenon, and the students were very angry and wanted the curriculum to be revised in ways that our students today say. So I don’t feel that this is a new phenomenon that has emerged out of the inundation of the students with a particular set of newfangled ideas. These are very deeply held ideas that emerge from, frankly, a kind of liberal belief in the primacy and value of humans and individuals. And I think it’s part of what makes students such a joy to interact with because they’re motivated by these ideas that are quite valorous.

What has changed, probably, is there is more of a sense of the university and the classroom as a place for the playing out of public conflict and the classroom as a kind of public space in which people are taking stances and positions that will be or are public, as opposed to part of a private learning experience. Part of it is the move in our culture where everybody thinks of themselves now as a brand, as a social media presence, as an influencer. And so consequently, if all of this is happening in public, it’s much harder to change my view. I have always argued, “Look, the very best technology for increasing the quality of our pedagogy is not using clickers in the classroom or some newfangled program that tracks students doing this or that. It’s having a small class size.” And that is the original safe space. Because a small class size is where we can first develop the relationships to each other as persons that make it possible for people to venture with difficult and maybe even sometimes heterodox arguments. And it’s also small enough that the feeling of embarrassment and the imperative of winning and defeating one’s opponents is minimized.

“Be Prepared to Be Lucky”

Posted on May 14, 2024January 21, 2026 by Dana Humphrey

As graduates consider the next chapter of their lives, a new book provides inspiration and guidance through the unfolding story of a career well spent. Paul Grogan was a student at Williams College when the anti-Vietnam and civil rights movements set the pathway for his life and career. “What, if anything, can I do about this?” said his younger self. Mentors, who saw something in him he couldn’t see, encouraged him to become a “change agent.” It was a term that was unfamiliar to him at the time but one he would live to embody in his fifty years in public service.

In “Be Prepared to be Lucky,” Grogan imparts lessons about leadership, mentorship, and agency as relevant today as they were when he and his co-author Kathryn Merchant were both young graduates working to make a difference in the world. Among his many roles, Grogan has been a political staffer, a CEO of a national nonprofit, and a giant in philanthropy. His career is capped by his presidency of the Boston Foundation, one of the nation’s oldest and, arguably, most successful community foundations, providing a unique combination of policy and philanthropy that has shaped what Boston is today.

Readers follow along as Grogan tells the story of his ambitious career: a combination of opportunity, intentionality, and grit. From navigating the emotional politics of the desegregation of the Boston public schools; to building public/private partnerships to save American cities in the 1970’s and 80’s; to helping heal the town/gown tensions between Harvard and Boston, Grogan provides powerful examples of how to make a positive impact on your community, and in turn, how to live a meaningful, fulfilling life.

MM: Paul, you’ve spent your whole career devoted to public and community service and this book has so many lessons about that from your decades of experience. But let’s start by talking about the young Paul. You went to high school in a very small town, Clinton, New York, and then went off to Williams College. How did your college experience influence your career choices?

PG: My father was a lifelong educator — a public school teacher and administrator throughout his career — so I had a lifelong interest in education and education policy. And then two giant phenomena, the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement, brought me to that path of service. Growing up in a very small town with zero diversity, I was not anywhere close to these issues except through the nightly newscast. It was a religion in our family to sit down and watch at least one of the national newscasts, and I continued that habit throughout college. Obviously, the news was just devastating for much of that period. It led me to ask, “What, if anything, can I do about this?”

A pivotal conversation I had was with an uncle of mine who was a dear counselor throughout my early adult life. He said to me in one of our long talks, “It really sounds to me like you ought to think about being a change agent.” I had never heard that term, but we talked about it, and I came to understand what it meant. It was not just reading the newspapers as a knowledgeable person or voting as an involved citizen. I wanted to do more than that. And I was excited about that prospect.

MM: What experiences in college helped you develop that part of yourself?

PG: We had a number of quite powerful faculty student committees at Williams in those days, and I ran for office and was elected chairman of one of them. We took a proposal to one of our meetings with the faculty as a whole to stop grading creative writing courses as a limited experiment. But Williams is a conservative place, and this was quite a debate which ultimately occurred in front of the entire faculty of the college. It took place in a hall, one of these double decker halls with a balcony going all the way around. Some of the faculty were down on the floor and many of them were up above me, and I had not said anything in the discussion, which was not going terribly well. Finally, the chairman of the committee, a psychology professor, leaned over and whispered, “If you don’t speak, this is going down.” So I gave a speech. It went extraordinarily well, and the faculty went from a unanimous no vote to a unanimous yes on the proposal. I think it was one of my first brushes with public speaking that mattered and seeing that we came back with something and won the day, that was a tremendous experience for me.

MM: Were there other people – like your uncle – who believed in you back then?

PG: Yes, and it was so important, particularly in college where, if you’re intimidated by the whole experience, not sure of yourself, you wonder how you’re going to do and you think you’re probably not going to do very well. Certainly, that was confirmed by the grades I got my freshman year: horrendous. But in fact, you almost always know more than you think you do, and other people see things in you that you may not see in yourself. In this case, there were two history professors who took an interest in me — I couldn’t have told you why, but they did. And they became my mentors through the rest of college and early in my career. I gained a new level of confidence as a result. They pushed me to do an honors thesis, which I had not thought of before, which became my first book, and it just put me on a higher, more ambitious path.

MM: Kathy, what’s your take on that?

KM: I just want to add that things can be very different depending on where you go to school. I went to a very large public university – there are 40,000 people who go to Indiana University in Bloomington — and finding a mentor is like hunting for a drop of water in a rainstorm. I think the point of encouragement here is also: Don’t wait for a mentor to find you – go looking for one.

MM: Why did you choose the title Be Prepared to be Lucky?

PG: “Be prepared to be lucky” is an adaptation of my favorite quote that originated in 1949 with E.B. White, the famed essayist and poet. He was talking to a young man who was about to go to New York City to make his fortune. White said to him, “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.” And the first time I heard that, which I think was in college, it just stunned me as a unique insight into how the world really works. It wasn’t just good luck, it wasn’t bad luck. It was an acknowledgement of a complex process, which is not controllable, but which can be harvested in a certain way. And so we adopted that and we tried to apply it. Certainly, if I look at my career, I can see time after time where being alert, being watchful for opportunities, led to great things, not every time, but often enough to really justify that kind of state of mind.

“You almost always know more than you think you do, and other people see things in you that you may not see in yourself.”

MM: If I’m understanding the interpretation, it’s a combination of luck, fate, and being open to opportunities that may come your way. And it’s about agency too, correct?

KM: The agency part is really important. When Paul and I were both still very young in our careers, we were often given responsibilities that were way beyond what we were probably qualified to do. As we say in the book, “always say yes, even when you want to say no, and then you’ll open up opportunities for yourself.”

PG: I call it “the virtue of hanging around.”

MM: There’s a lot that you thread through the story of your career: working for two city mayors, running the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), resolving town/gown issues between Harvard and Boston, and then transforming the Boston Foundation – you mention the importance of ambition, leadership, and courage. What are some other big lessons from all these experiences?

PG: I think just about everything you’re asking about has to do with how ambitious you want to be in the world. Certainly, the social and community service world is full of wonderful organizations doing great work. Much of that work though, is confined to a small space because those institutions lack the resources to take their idea to scale. The people I attracted to work with me, we wanted real impact at scale. We didn’t just want to feel good about having helped some people. We wanted to look at some of these institutions that were greatly important in the lives of people and say, how could this be different? How could we be doing much more than we are currently doing?

MM: I love that point. As a message to young people, focusing on impact is different than just developing your purpose or working on something you care about – it is actually working towards outcomes. You seemed to reach a lot of outcomes through partnerships. Can you give some examples?

PG: One example is when I got into the housing field. When you looked at the landscape, you had federal housing programs, state housing programs, and local housing programs, and they were not coordinated in any way or were directed at a particular narrow goal. Everybody had their own idea about it. But we managed to put together a new partnership, which became a permanent institution called the Boston Housing Partnership and had as its aim fostering collective and cross-sector efforts to improve the housing situation. Then to execute, you have to figure out how to get everybody credited for their support and participation. Particularly in the public sector realm with elected officials, they need to get credit for doing good things. And that’s where the non-politicians have to be attentive to their political partners, not by being political or partisan, but by understanding that politicians are dealing with a different kind of accountability than regular citizens. And there has to be a sophistication about making it rewarding and accountable for elected officials.

Many of the politicians that we were dealing with around the country had a zero sum mentality. They assumed that if a “such and such” nonprofit was getting their name in the paper in a positive way, then that would take away from the opportunity for the elected official to get recognized. What we were able to demonstrate after a period of time was that these partnerships were a way to add value that wasn’t there before. So you didn’t have to take something away from somebody in order to get their cooperation.

MM: Speaking of partnerships and politics, tell us more about your experience at Harvard.

PG: Sure. Well, as we all know, Harvard is sort of the college and university capital of the United States, the pinnacle of higher education. But the whole Boston area or indeed New England is populated with just an enormous number of institutions of higher education. So it’s a big issue for the future of Boston and for the region. And despite the importance of those institutions and the need to make sure that they are going to be healthy going forward, the relationships that should have developed between the colleges and universities and cities and state government, and the corporate sector for that matter, really hadn’t developed before the turn of the last century. They were out of sync with the reality of it or they didn’t acknowledge how important these relationships were. So relationships that should have existed — strong, cooperative, knowledgeable relationships between government and higher ed, for instance — were just truncated in some way until there were problems.

One set of problems, but not the only one, is the whole question of land and value. Because when institutions of higher education get land, it comes off the tax rolls and gets used primarily for the higher ed community. So that’s where there is the kind of thinking that if this land is going to go to the universities, it’s going to be taken away from the community. And, particularly in the low-and moderate-income neighborhoods, there was a real fear that people were going to be forced out of their homes by the rising value of the real estate. So there was one particular transaction where the university was trying to acquire a very large plot of land in Allston, which is a neighborhood of Boston, to create a major new science and technology district.

This was hung up for years because the city was refusing to approve the sale of this land, which was held by a railroad company. And it was just stuck as the years went by and the university didn’t seem to have the wherewithal to do anything about it, which you’d think is so odd. These institutions are so big and powerful. But in Harvard’s case, they really hadn’t made any real effort to understand the local political scene in order to engage people who might help them. But that finally did happen. A couple of very active Harvard trustees went to the president of Harvard and said, we have got to have a capacity developed here at the university to relate to the mayor (then Thomas Menino), to relate to folks who are going to be important to this process. Knowing I had a long-standing relationship with the mayor, Harvard asked me to help with this and I built a department focused entirely on external issues like this. After that, the meetings just went to a different level of seriousness and purpose, and with relative ease, we secured the approval.

MM: Here’s a question from the last chapter of the book. Why would you encourage students to go into either public service or community work, besides just it being a good thing to do?

PG: Well, again, I come back to this word impact and a sense of what you want your life to be about. Are you going to be a change agent? To be willing to dwell on those questions with trusted friends, advisors, and family members is a very important thing to do if you have friends and family who are willing to do that. So I think that’s a big piece of it in terms of why do it, it really has to do with what you want your life to be about. Senator John McCain was very fond of saying “believe in something larger than yourself.”

I think this is really fundamental. I’ve met too many people throughout my life who have been very successful in conventional terms but have just a sad feeling that they haven’t done anything that’s really helped anybody else or been an effort to lift someone else up. It is a uniquely satisfying thing to do and it makes society healthier at the same time. So I think it does come down to that kind of existential construct you decide to devote your finite resources to.

KM: An important point to add to that is that working in public service doesn’t have to be forever. If you have other things that you want to do, the skillset that you acquire working in those sectors are increasingly attractive to the corporate world. The opportunity to make partnerships and the fungibility of being able to move from one sector to another throughout a career is very valuable.

MM: My last question is related to the fact that a lot of the impact that you have made in your career was largely based on listening to the other side. That appears to be a very big problem right now. Is there any advice that either of you would give to the graduates of today on that?

PG: I think everybody should move to Massachusetts. That’s the fastest way to reduce polarization.

MM: Well, Massachusetts does have an out-migration problem, so that would be good.

PG: I’m only half kidding. We have a huge stake in the immigration outcome. It’s not something that would just be nice, it’s something that is absolutely essential. If we don’t do a better job of attracting young people and convincing people not to leave the state, things are going to be very dire in Massachusetts. And one of the positive things about Massachusetts bears directly on the ability to do the kind of partnerships that we’ve been discussing — the lack of polarization. There are conflicts, but they don’t involve the bitter, divisive, and hateful politics that we see in city, county, and state after state. Our elected officials of whatever party seem to find a way to work together, although they too need to be more ambitious than we’re being. But it is a fundamentally different environment.

KM: Call me a Pollyanna, but I think that what we’re experiencing right now, this too shall pass. We’re now old enough that we’ve seen cycles and waves of this over time where there’s divisiveness and an inability to listen and act together, and then that calms down and we can get more things done. So I really don’t know how to stop what’s going on right now. It’s alarming. Very scary. It seems worse than it’s ever been, but every moment that’s been like this seems worse than it’s ever been. I am going to borrow Paul’s phrase, we need to practice defiant optimism.

Happiness, Gen Z style

Posted on April 23, 2024January 21, 2026 by Dana Humphrey

This month, Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation released a report examining happiness among Generation Z (12- to 26-year-olds), highlighting key drivers of Gen Z’s happiness. The survey revealed that while 73% of Gen Z-ers consider themselves happy (somewhat or very), the percentage declines substantially as they reach adulthood. The report identified the strongest predictors of happiness to be: a sense of purpose in school and work, positive social connections, and having enough time to sleep and relax. We asked Stephanie Marken, the senior partner of Gallup’s education division, to explain the findings and their implications.

LearningWell: The research reveals that the most influential driver of Gen Z’s happiness is their sense of purpose at school and work. However, just 48% of Gen Z-ers enrolled in middle or high school feel motivated to go to school, and only 52% feel they do something interesting every day. What does that say about curriculum and school-based experiences?

Stephanie Marken: We know from our research at Gallup, that many students are less engaged in their schoolwork as they progress through schooling. We anticipate much of this is that students are unfortunately not specializing in topics that excite them as they progress through their educational experiences. We need more relevant, applied experiences in the K12 student experience to further engage and excite students about what they’re learning and how it will prepare them for the real world.

LW: The report also shows a relationship between love and support and happiness, which perhaps isn’t surprising. Combined with the finding on a sense of purpose, do you see a reflection of previous Gallup work in the wellbeing area, specifically the Alumni Survey and the Forging Pathways to Purposeful Work study at Bates College. It seems that a sense of purpose and supportive relationships are key drivers of wellbeing across groups.

SM: Supportive relationships are difference makers. In our prior, related research we find students who have a mentor and feel cared about as a person are more likely to be engaged in their work upon postsecondary completion and more likely to thrive in their wellbeing. We all need support, but given staggering mental health needs among Gen Z members nationally, we need that more than ever. This will only become increasingly important as this current generation continues to struggle with mounting mental health needs.

LW: The report shows that Gen Z’s sense of love and support declines as they age. It seems like there is a turning point around 18-21, when typically young people would be leaving the house they grew up in, considered to be adults. Is this a pattern that is typical during this age range or is there something specific about Gen Z in that they are experiencing a decline in feelings of support and connection as they get older, more so than previous generations?

SM: We know that launching into the “real world”, whether that be from high school into the workforce, or high school into college, is a very stressful and complicated experience for many students. We should always expect students to report emotional stress, anxiety and worry during this difficult time. However, we also need to make sure they have a net to catch them when they struggle—mentors, and people in their postsecondary pathway and workplace—can be that net. This also reminds us that we need to prepare Gen Z members with resilience building activities and experiences early on in their development so that they can bounce back when they experience these setbacks and challenging times (because they will inevitably come).

LW: The report also finds that feelings of significance and purpose decline as Gen Z gets older. Survey items like “My life matters” and “My life has direction” go from 69% and 85% for 12-14 year olds to 55% and 65% for 24-26 year olds, respectively. Is that replicating a pattern that you’ve seen in previous years or in previous generations? Do you have any hypotheses about why that may be happening?

SM: Unfortunately, we don’t have historic data on these important questions so we cannot compare generation to generation on these particular items, but we do know that this generation craves purpose in their workplace in a way that we do not find for prior generations. In their workplace, Gen Z workers, as an example, are seeing opportunities at work to learn and grow and looking for opportunities to work at organizations that make a difference. This crave for purpose, impact and significance shows up in these important data, as well as other research we’ve conducted.

LW: Many young people in Gen Z report that they don’t get enough sleep and don’t have enough time to relax during the week, which are stronger predictors of happiness than physical or financial safety. Are there policies that workplaces or schools could implement to allow for their employees and students to have more time to unwind during the week, which would potentially have great impact on their happiness, thriving and wellbeing?

SM: We know that technology, and our relationship with technology, is having an impact here. We see a lot of students struggling to manage their relationship with technology—not necessarily social media itself, but sometimes with social media—and that technology can make sleep, restful sleep, and positive sleep habits challenging. We need to teach young people—and older people too—these tools, so that they can detach and reset as we all need to do in order to sleep restfully.

LW: There is a substantial piece of the report dedicated to social media, and related to that, comparison with others. The survey found that social comparisons have a clear negative relationship with happiness. 40% of happy Gen Z-ers say they often or always compare themselves to others, compared to 55% of those who are not happy. And 12–15-year-olds who spend more than 3 hours per day on social media were two times as likely to exhibit symptoms of depression and anxiety. Those two findings are clearly related. Could you speak to those findings? SM: It’s a great question. The comparison with others is a really critical and concerning finding—we know that social media is a tool that can allow for that comparison which is problematic. Many people who are tuning to social media are comparing their every day to someone else’s best day and that can cause a lot of self-hatred and sadness for many who feel like they are insufficient.

“Embrace Your Freedom”

Posted on April 23, 2024January 21, 2026 by Dana Humphrey

Philip Glotzbach’s new book Embrace Your Freedom: Winning Strategies to Succeed in College and Life has as many lessons as it does audiences. As its title implies, it is written primarily for graduating high school students anxiously hovering between post-admissions and their first year of college, but it also speaks to their parents, who will undoubtedly read along, with advice about letting go that is not always easy to hear. Those in the field will connect themes such as “why are you going to college?” and “fall in love with your fallback school“ with some of the biggest challenges in higher education today such as skyrocketing tuition, inflated rankings, and student wellbeing.

With a non-didactic tone, Glotzbach combines the experience and authority of a college president with the hindsight and candor of one who no longer holds the title. His advice to first-year students on making the most of this seminal period has a fair share of practical information, as well as wisdom rooted in philosophy, developmental theory, and political science. As he writes plainly about personal responsibility and pride in achievement, he reminds students we are all shouldered by our communities. Perhaps most distinctive is Glotzbach’s message about freedom itself, something students may first take to be about the absence of external controls, but which the book quickly clarifies as the joy that comes from setting and reaching goals that align with who you are as a person. His book is available for pre-order now (Simon & Schuster, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Post Hill Press, etc.); its publication date is July 9, 2024.

You have been in academia for decades and a college president for seventeen years. What motivated you to write this book and what are your hopes and dreams for it?

I wrote it, frankly, as a labor of love. Over my career, my greatest pleasure came in seeing how undergraduates develop both intellectually and personally over those four years. It was especially satisfying to see that transformation reflected through the joy in their parents’ eyes. This book came out of talks that I gave to new students and parents every year at Skidmore in which I offered my best advice about how to realize this promise of a college education. Following those talks, I would repeatedly get asked for copies of my remarks – which I never really had available to share in any formal way. So, I knew I wanted to capture those exchanges in some fashion.

In the book, I approach that same audience in a conversational way – not to preach at them or talk down to them, but to talk directly to them in a way that is accessible. At the same time, I wanted to have enough substantive content in the book so that, if a college decided to use it as the common read for the incoming class, faculty members could actually enjoy teaching it. It isn’t just, “Hey, here’s how to do your laundry.” Frankly, I’d love for people to review Embrace Your Freedom and say, “This book should be required reading for all new students.”

You have many important messages in the book, but what would you say is the overarching theme?

I’ve always believed that what students most need coming into college is just to pause and think about where they are at this stage of their life and how to take charge of moving forward toward where they want to go. That’s a major theme that recurs throughout: You’re in charge; you’re responsible for your life. What does that mean? You’re responsible both for what you think and for what you do. I’ve always thought those ideas are very important for new students to consider.

I think they’re even more important today for a couple of reasons. So many students go through such a frenzy getting into college. It’s just such an anxiety-producing experience with too many thinking that if they didn’t get into their first choice school their life is over. What I am trying to encourage young people to do is look beyond all that, come through to the other side of that angst, and embrace what’s about to happen to them – and a lot of it is going to be very positive. But this is a very anxiety-ridden generation. They have been really closely engaged with their parents (or their parents have been engaged with them). Their parents have probably organized their lives in a very directed way over the years, and with all the right intentions. Given this background, and particularly coming out of COVID – which really threw a monkey wrench into their educational process – I think that the messages in this book are especially important for this generation.

“Going to college should be an intentional project – not just the expected next step after high school.”

Now, all of a sudden, they’re away at college. What are they supposed to do? And how are they going to do it! I remind them that they are in charge of their life, even if so many cultural and social forces have been telling them that they’re not – even if people have been telling them that they’re victims. Ultimately, they have to take charge of their own life if they’re going to realize the opportunities that are before them. This book makes that case and offers a lot of practical guidance about just how to do so. It suggests ways to deal with the sometimes scary aspects of that freedom.

Given what you’re saying, it is not surprising that you wrote the book for both students and parents. Do you also have a strong message for them?

The two chapters for parents are, first, how to partner with your student and, second, how to let go. And I’ll come back to those chapters in a moment. I’ve always intended to include parents in this book because, when I was giving those talks at Skidmore, they were sitting there too. I very much wanted them to hear what I said to the students. Now I want parents to read all the student chapters, because they tell a coherent story about what their students should be focussed on as undergraduates: understanding some key concepts (like freedom, liberal education, etc.), making big plans, following through to execute those plans, taking good risks, understanding the ethical dimension of their lives, and winning a “victory for humanity.” Parents have always had an enormous investment in their kids’ lives, but even more so today. One crucial role they can play now is to reinforce these ideas with their kids.

And of course, today’s parents have their own questions. How do they navigate the (probably) unfamiliar landscape of their kid’s college? How should they engage with all those different people who are there to try to help their student, without being overly intrusive in their kid’s life? I try to help them think through these issues, in the context of partnering with their student. It may sound paradoxical to say partner and then let go, but the idea is for their partnership with their child to evolve – to take a new form that’s more appropriate for the relationship they will have post-college. So, one of the most important chapters is about letting go and how to do it, while acknowledging that it’s not easy.

For one thing, we all know that college is enormously expensive. Many parents are literally mortgaging their lives to pay for it, and they want to make sure that this train isn’t going to go off the tracks. And what if it does? Parents are in closer communication with their kids today than in the past. So, if their student is having trouble, they’re likely to hear about it. How should they react to that situation? What’s their appropriate role? Part of what I’m saying in the parent section is, “Give them the space to handle their own problems to learn from those experiences.” But there are times when it is appropriate for parents to become more active in working with the school. I give some very practical advice here as well, such as: “Contact the school at an appropriate organizational level. I.e., don’t call their professors; don’t call their roommate’s parents or the RA in their residence hall.” The primary message is: “Don’t get between your student and the people they should be working with on a day-to-day basis.”

Can you explain the title “Embrace your Freedom” – it’s not what most people, particularly students, would think, is it?

For the traditional age student, when you go off to college, all of a sudden you have a lot more freedom or autonomy than you did even a few months ago. But becoming a mature, fully-functioning adult doesn’t happen automatically…or overnight. There’s a lot you have to learn and go through. And so my contention in this book is that if you start off thinking about some of these ideas – beginning with the concept of freedom – you will be better positioned to do the work of becoming a mature adult.

“You’re in charge; you’re responsible for your life. What does that mean?”

That’s why I talk about two different ways of interpreting freedom – beginning with the “negative interpretation,” which is just the absence of constraints. Which is our typical way of looking at it, right? Freedom means nobody’s telling me what to do. Well, that’s fine; it’s important. But the more meaningful and mature concept of freedom is what I call the “positive interpretation,” which is freedom as self-regulation. It requires taking charge of yourself and deciding what you want to do and how you do it, which is more difficult than just throwing off the constraints of your earlier life.

In the book, I quote the Eastern European physician and poet Miroslav Holub, who says that “a marathon runner is more free than a vagabond, and a cosmonaut than a sage in a state of levitation.” To be a marathon runner, you have to devote yourself to an extended program of intense training and preparation to get ready to run your race. It requires a whole lot of self-regulation. But when you get to the point where you actually can run 26.2 miles, you experience a level of freedom or ability that you never would’ve had if you hadn’t put in all that work. And the second part of this message is that you’re necessarily doing this in the context of a community. You can’t do these things alone. And that fact, in turn, entails certain obligations to that community.

The notion of embracing your freedom really has to include this positive sense of freedom. And as you go through the book, that idea recurs as a motif. Every time I talk about taking charge of this or that aspect of your life, it’s another example of embracing your freedom. So again, it’s moving beyond the limited conception of freedom in which you no longer have anybody to tell you what to do, and finding out what it is that you want to do. What are your goals? What are you trying to get out of this college experience? Then what do you need to do to accomplish those objectives? What sequence of events has to occur? And, by the way, what does all that have to do with your decisions about drinking and sex and other aspects of your life (e.g., eating well and getting enough sleep)? How do those choices affect your ability to do the things you most want to do?

I also say to the students, “Look, you don’t have to have all the answers right away. You don’t need to have worked out all your big plans in your first year – and certainly not in your first semester/quarter. And be prepared to change your mind as you go along. But do start thinking about all this from day one. In Chapter 9, “Begin Now!” – which I think is one of the most important ones – I urge students to realize that their college career begins on that very first day. Not next semester or quarter. Not next year. That’s a good moment to begin thinking about where you want this journey to take you.

One of the most vivid ways to do so is to envision yourself at your college commencement, the beginning of the next phase of your adult life. At that point, as you look back over your undergraduate career – and as people are asking you questions about how you’ve spent your time – what will you be proud of? What might you regret? What will you have done to gain the maximum benefit from this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?

One of the questions you ask students upfront is “Why are you going to college at all?” – what are you getting at here?

Going to college should be an intentional project – not just the expected next step after high school. So ask, “Okay, just why am I going to college? What do I hope to get out of it – especially given what it’s going to cost in time, energy, and money? How do I expect my college education to help me move to the next step in my life?” Again, it’s not at all necessary – or likely! or even desirable! – to have all the answers at this point. And whatever answers you might have are likely to change. But it really helps focus your mind to ask these questions – and to realize that there are other options (e.g., a gap year, military service, volunteer service, trade school, and many others). Let’s be clear: I’m not in the least trying to discourage anyone from going to college. But they will be much more likely to succeed – to come away feeling proud of what they’ve accomplished – if they do it on purpose.

Why do you begin, in Chapter 1, with liberal education?

This book emphasizes the various dimensions of what an undergrad career should offer to students. The first chapter talks about the power of becoming broadly educated. For one thing, this outcome is enormously important if one is to thrive in the professional world today’s graduates will be entering. I include several stories of students I have known whose life pathways illustrate this point. For example, one young man who initially wanted to be a writer ended up working on the New York Times’ digital site as a senior software engineer. Today he’s running his own software company. He didn’t study computer science in college, and he certainly didn’t think about it as a potential career. But he gained a broad liberal education, and above all he learned how to keep learning.

My argument is that in the context of today’s professional world, the more narrow your course of studies in college, the shorter its shelf life. Because when you get out there, the professional world is going to continue changing. It’s evolving at a pace that is hard for any of us to wrap our heads around. So, you have to be intellectually flexible. You have to be able to access – and synthesize – knowledge and information from a variety of areas. And once again, you have to be able to continue learning.

In sum, the traditional skills you learn in a liberal education will set you up for life: critical thinking, reading, drawing upon different areas of knowledge, understanding how different areas of inquiry create knowledge in their own ways, appreciating what different cultures have to teach us and valuing the humanity of people who might present as being different from us, developing your creative imagination and the capacity to communicate effectively, and so on.

“Colleges and universities don’t just create personal good. They also create social good.”

Another idea I emphasize is the value of studying a subject – choosing a major, minor, or concentration – that inspires your passion. If passion drives what you’re doing, you’re more likely to excel. Studies have shown that students who choose a major based on their interests do better in college (and they do better in the rest of their lives, as well!), as opposed to students who choose a major just because they think it’s going to get them a well-paying job. Choose a course of study based on your interests so you can really get into it and get the most out of it. Be fortified with the complementary capacity to think broadly. Then you’ll be prepared for whatever the professional world throws at you.

You talk in the book about the responsibility of becoming a good citizen as part of a student’s education. That’s not always the first thing today’s students are hearing from their administrations.

As a college or university president, it’s easy to succumb to the temptation of saying “let me tell you about the great jobs our graduates are getting.” That’s not unimportant. Sure, we want our students to be gainfully employed. But if that’s all we are saying, we’re ignoring the other critical goal of a college education, which is why the second half of Chapter 1 addresses the topic of citizenship. And why I quote Thomas Dewey who wrote, “Democracy needs to be reborn every generation. And education is its midwife.”

Colleges and universities don’t just create personal good. They also create social good. The people who graduate from colleges and universities in this country become citizens of our democracy, often leading citizens in both private and public life. And, in fact, the intellectual abilities and knowledge that position a graduate to thrive as a professional are precisely the same as those required to function as an informed, caring, and responsible citizen. We need them to do so today, perhaps more than ever before. So, as I’m advising students to become intentional stewards of their own education; I am also challenging them to educate themselves to become effective citizens of our democracy.

And what does that mean? You should be able to participate in political discussions in a constructive way, including listening actively to what someone else is saying, and not just shouting across the room at them. You should be intentional about accessing good sources of information. You need to know what it would take to change your mind on a given political topic. And college should be the best place to develop those skills. If you look at the mission statements of most colleges and universities, you’re likely to find some reference to responsible citizenship or leadership. But that doesn’t mean those values are automatically prominent in the experience of their students.

So, what I’m saying to students is, “Yes, it’s really important that you prepare yourself for the professional world. But it’s equally important – and in some ways, even more important – that you prepare yourself to be an informed, caring, responsible citizen. And you may have to do that work yourself. Your college or university may not show you what you have to do. But if you pay attention to what I’m talking about in the book, you will be well positioned to claim that part of your college education as well. You will graduate as someone well prepared to participate as an effective, caring, responsible, informed citizen of our democratic republic.”

You have two chapters dedicated to wellbeing – one on the body and one on the mind – and it also seems to be a theme woven throughout the book. What are some big takeaways there?

One of the places where I really expanded the book (beyond those original talks) was in thinking about the notion of wellbeing. I have no illusions that any book for new students will “fix” all their problems or guarantee they won’t make some mistakes along the way. That’s just part of what happens at this stage of our lives. What I am trying to do, however, is first, to provide as much science-based information as I can about a range of topics relating to physical and mental wellbeing. And second, to encourage students to use this information to make good choices as much as they can…and to get help when they need it.

I also bring up the subject of happiness. There’s been no shortage of commentary about happiness in popular culture, and it’s very much on the minds of today’s students. But it’s so important to realize that genuine happiness – as opposed to, say, pleasure – is elusive. If you pursue it, it’s likely to run away from you. And you’re not going to catch it. The way we become truly happy is by finding a purpose in life and doing meaningful work with other people. That’s how we make it possible for happiness to find us. So that’s why I encourage college students to think in those terms – to find a cause to embrace (along with their freedom). Chapter 8, specifically, talks about giving back and paying it forward. I tell them that, as a college graduate, you’ll be part of approximately 40% of the American population who has a bachelor’s degree. Only 40%. That alway sounds like a pretty small number to me. And if you look to the world at large, there are about 8 billion people out there, and probably fewer than 10% have a college degree. This means you’re in a position of privilege – not entitlement, but privilege – just by virtue of having this opportunity. So my challenge to students is: “What are you going to do with it?” Or, as I asked before (quoting Horace Mann), “What ‘victory for humanity’ are you going to win?” This is a question all of us should consider, but it’s particularly relevant for college students. If we go to college to realize both personal and social goods, then it’s incumbent upon us to ask: “What am I prepared to do to leave the world a better place than I found it?”

Digging Deep with David McGhee

Posted on February 8, 2024January 21, 2026 by Dana Humphrey

David McGhee has an interesting way of looking at the world. In talking with the Chief Executive Officer of the Steve Fund, it is clear he strives to see beyond popular narratives and predetermined judgements. In his new role, he hopes to bring together “unlikely allies and unusual suspects” to continue to address the issues to which he has dedicated his career – poverty, equity, and the flourishing of young people.

The Steve Fund is the nation’s leading organization focused on supporting the mental health and emotional wellbeing of young people of color. McGhee believes his previous work in government, community service, and philanthropy prepared him well for this work which he calls “the crisis of our time.” Since its founding in 2014, The Steve Fund has been a major influencer in higher education’s ability to understand better the determinants of mental health issues in young people of color and their unique help-seeking behaviors, with research and recommendations such as the Equity in Mental Health Framework, which they created with the Jed Foundation.

McGhee plans to strengthen the organization’s commitment to transformational change by focusing on outcomes as opposed to outputs, the former being the more sustainable result. To get there, he wants to expand the Steve Fund’s partnerships with people and organizations that he says need to be part of the conversation but may not have been invited in. He talks of enabling a set of conditions that make any strategy possible. It is an approach that McGhee learned early on as a young black man navigating poverty on his way to achieving his own personal outcomes.

Marjorie Malpiede: What was your career trajectory before coming to the Steve Fund?

David McGhee: My background is primarily in philanthropy. It really set the direction for the course of my career. After earning my undergraduate degree in public administration and public policy, I set out to work in the nonprofit and government sectors focusing on child wellbeing and also influencing public policy. Having come from concentrated poverty myself, I bring to this work a commitment to transformational change so that opportunity becomes systemic, not random or transactional. This is where my passion lies.

Early on, I was an intern in the executive office of Michigan’s first female governor, Jennifer Granholm. I had an opportunity to meet the governor, and we were in her office, and I remembered something she had on her wall. It was a receipt from a lawn care service she had employed when she was running for Governor and the lawn care provider had written on it, “Don’t forget the little people” and she framed it. I was just an intern, but I actually believed I had the most important job in the executive office. From 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM every single day my job was to open every piece of mail addressed to the governor, read it, either route it to their proper department or craft a response on behalf of the governor. That job helped me develop an understanding of rural poverty as opposed to urban poverty. I knew what urban poverty was. That was my lived experience. But this helped me understand residents’ concerns throughout the entire state, which in many ways is applicable across the country. Those things really stuck with me.

Following my internship, I was offered a job with the governor which I respectfully declined. Many people thought that I was crazy but I came back to my local community in Detroit to work at Big Brothers Big Sisters and I did that for seven years. In the neighborhood I grew up in, if you wanted out, you either played sports or you sold drugs. I had had the opportunity to go to college and it was important for young kids in my neighborhood to see that. From there I had an opportunity to work for a member of Congress and I learned a lot. I knew the amount of money that sat in the federal government and how hard it was to trickle down. I knew what nonprofits needed. And then I found my sweet spot in philanthropy. I worked seven and a half years in private foundations, and spent about a year and a half in family foundations, working for a high net-worth family in Seattle, Washington.

MM: Now that you are at the Steve Fund, what are your main priorities?

DM: The Steve Fund exists to promote the mental health and emotional wellbeing for our young people, and, in our case, young people of color. I’ve also layered in not only promoting, but really protecting the mental health and emotional wellbeing of this population. And we do so in three ways. One is by transforming environments. We know young people will occupy environments, whether it’s college campuses, or employer partners, or the community. How do we make sure that we can support the transformation of environments so young people feel as if they belong? Two, we provide resources and skill-building to ensure that families, caregivers, and young people themselves actually have the tools and resources to navigate this life at this moment. And then lastly, we shape the field by normalizing the conversation around mental health. How are we removing the stigma around it?

My job is to strengthen these assets by creating a set of enabling conditions that are really ensuring that there’s organizational efficiency and effectiveness. We are one organization in this entire ecosystem contributing to the overall mental health and emotional wellbeing. So how do I make sure that we can manage every aspect of our organization towards a unified whole and achieve the results through performance efforts? How do we commit to organizational learning and agility? We need to be flexible. We need to be nimble and responsive in this moment.

I think the term diversity has become so politicized that we need to ask the question in a different way: Is there any population that faces a disadvantage in achieving what this institution sets out to achieve?

And then importantly, how are we catalyzing and supporting strategic partnerships? How are we bringing together unusual suspects and unlikely allies? How do we establish, encourage, and engage in partnerships that build continuity, otherwise unattainable on our own? And this to me means being willing to go into places other organizations may not be willing to go, to have conversations other organizations may not be willing to have, and to have those conversations with different audiences that some people may shy away from.

MM: What, in your opinion, are some of the things young people of color need in order to thrive in these environments?

DM: What do I believe young people need? If there was a magic wand that I had, then I could identify a handful of things that would contribute to better outcomes – but I might start with agency, readiness and connection. I think young people would benefit from agency to be able to make decisions on their own to feel empowered. I think they need to be prepared to take advantage of opportunities presented to them, and I also think that the environments they go into need to be ready. I fundamentally believe that when we want to work towards the power of achieving outcomes, they’re achieved in one of five ways. Either change behavior, shift attitudes, create better conditions, improve knowledge, or equip people with more skills. If a young person enters an environment that has prioritized these things, at least some of these things, I think that they are set up for success.

To really understand this better, we are continuing to rely on one of our strengths – and that is to use survey research to examine the attitudes of both students and families. We think it’s an important time to ask these questions coming out of the pandemic and the post affirmative action decision. It also allows us to explore different issues within different population groups that maybe we hadn’t thought of before. For example, I’ve become fascinated by the lack of data – or at least what I’ve been exposed to – around student athletes. Have we thought through what it might mean for a young person whose skills and gifts and talents have earned them a college scholarship, but they now find themselves in a campus environment that’s totally different from the environment that they were reared in? What does it mean for an inner city Chicago student to now be at the University of North Dakota? Just using that as an example, or vice versa. What does it mean for a standout high school student in Iowa to find themselves in New York City? Some of it is different by race for sure, but some of it is also situational.

Another area that’s rarely explored is the different generational issues among students of color. There’s some first-generation college students whose families see this as such a phenomenal opportunity that a lot of the skills and the resources and support they have are beyond measure, right? However, depending on your environment, there’s a level of stress and anxiety for non-first generation college students. What if I’m a fifth generation college student and everyone in my family had a history of performing at Yale and then I’m here and my experience is not quite the same?

I think this notion of “unusual suspects and unlikely allies” can start with identifying the person you think is less likely to contribute to this conversation and creating a reason why they can contribute to the conversation.

MM: You strike me as someone who looks beyond the obvious or the commonly accepted. Would you say that’s true?

DM: Yes, though it is not to suggest that I’m right, but I actually think it comes from my experience: one, having to navigate poverty, because I always had to find another way. I just naturally had to find another way. But then it also came from my decade or so in philanthropy. Many philanthropic organizations throughout history were complicit or had simply gone along with current conditions. But many of our nation’s wealthiest foundations and their respective namesakes built their wealth by defying the odds — by not going with the status quo. Henry Ford said, “Many, many moons ago, if I would’ve asked the people what they wanted, they would’ve told me a faster horse.”

How do we strike the right balance between, “yep, this is what’s presented. This is the status quo” to have we thought about, have we considered, there’s also a layer beneath that? If we don’t dig, we run the risk of not getting the full story. I think this notion of “unusual suspects and unlikely allies” can start with identifying the person you think is less likely to contribute to this conversation and creating a reason why they can contribute to the conversation.

MM: Are you hopeful we can bring different viewpoints together in these polarizing times?

DM: One of the best leaders that I’ve ever known and worked for, a woman by the name of Tanya Allen, would often give this analogy around 70, 20, 10, especially when it came to coalition building and alliances. It was this notion of 70% of the things that we want for children, even if we’re on a different perspective or different side of the aisle, we can agree on. There may be 20%, depending on the day or the context, that we’ll never agree on, right? And there may be 10% that’s negotiable depending on what the conditions are. The problem is – oftentimes we start at the 20% as opposed to starting at the 70%.

MM: Issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) obviously impact the mental health of young people of color. What is your opinion on the way this is being debated in higher ed today?

DM: I actually don’t think it’s a diversity issue that we need to solve. I actually think it’s a disparities issue, because the minority today could be the new majority tomorrow. I think the term diversity has become so politicized that we need to ask the question in a different way: Is there any population that faces a disadvantage in achieving what this institution sets out to achieve? In a college environment that exists to provide a high quality education, is there any population here that suffers from some type of disparity in their ability to receive that? And can we get to a place where we agree on minimizing those conditions?

To learn more about the Steve Fund, visit stevefund.org

Questions and Answers with Dr. Zainab Okolo

Posted on November 30, 2023January 21, 2026 by Dana Humphrey

In May of this year, Dr. Zainab Okolo became Senior Vice President of Policy, Advocacy, and Government Relations at the Jed Foundation, the nation’s leading nonprofit that protects emotional health and prevents suicide for teens and young adults. It was not just a new job for Okolo, who had previously led the Lumina Foundation’s work in student mental health, it was an inaugural position for the Jed Foundation which has moved from being a memorial initiative for a beloved son to the leading suicide prevention program in college mental health, to a national and international advocate for wellbeing strategies that support young people. The arrival of Okolo signals both the rising importance of external policies in youth mental health and college mental health, and the organization’s own expansion into public affairs.

When Okolo, Ed.D., LCMFT, who is a licensed therapist, led Lumina’s student mental health portfolio as a strategy officer, she designed and established the foundation’s mental health partnerships and investments while advising key stakeholders, including the U.S. Department of Education (ED), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO), the American Council on Education (ACE), and the Steve Fund.

She will now lead JED’s growing Advocacy and Government Relations function, leveraging key relationships with external networks to strengthen the organization’s national and state-level presence in advocating for new federal, state, and local support for a comprehensive approach to mental health and suicide prevention. Okolo led the Jed Foundation’s first policy national summit in October of this year which resulted in the foundation’s new Youth Mental Health Policy Strategies.

LW: This was a big move both for you and JED. How do you feel several months into the job?

ZO: Oh, it feels full circle. I feel very fortunate as a marriage and family therapist for over a decade and having worked in higher education and those finding those two passions intersecting – — I feel very lucky. I’ve only been with Jed now for six months and we’ve made some incredible strides, but as I tell my team, I’m building on 20 plus years of just fantastic work that JED has done with institutions, with high schools, with other private sector entities so I’m building on a very solid foundation and I feel very fortunate to have this ground to build on. I also feel really energized that there’s a constant sense of urgency when it comes to mental health work and advocacy; when you’re watching the data, when you’re watching the news, when you’re specifically focused on youth, there’s always a sense of urgency. There’s always a drive to create the solve sooner rather than later. Because what our suicide trends and rates are telling us is that there is an urgent need. And for me, for as long as my career and time will allow, my goal is to create impact and change to bring suicide to zero. And I’m glad that I work at an organization that also has that as its North Star mission.

LW: The new position signals an expansion of JED’s work. Do you feel this was a natural evolution?

ZO: I do think that the pivot towards having an inaugural position focused specifically on policy, advocacy and government relations was really just a nod to the time that Jed found itself in within the national landscape. As you know, Jed Foundation has been a mental health advocacy organization that has been around for two decades now, focused on youth mental health and suicide prevention. And a lot of the work that Jed did was specifically targeted at ensuring colleges and universities had the appropriate programming and supports to serve youth mental health, resources and needs.

Jed has since expanded into working within high schools, and it’s done a lot of work to inform the ways mental health services are provided even in elementary schools, so across the K-20 pipeline. But Jed did all of this under the then existing stigma around mental health. So again, think 20 years ago when this started, when the Satow family unfortunately lost their son Jed to suicide, this was at the height of us turning a blind eye to what we already knew were challenges around youth mental health and the conversations that we just weren’t willing to have as a nation. Now, fast-forward to the pandemic exacerbating a lot of those preexisting needs and demanding that we have systemic approaches in which we are strategically looking at ways to scale programs like Jed Campus. It only made sense for Jed to bring someone in that could help them think through some of that planning and engage state and federal level actors and make considerations for what it looks like to appropriately inform policy. Before I came on, we had what as “a coalition of the willing,” that took on some of this work, but having a separate portfolio for it I think was just about timing and again, watching what the nation really needed.

“I think we take for granted the job that stigma did on our college campuses on the topics of mental health and suicide prevention.”

LW: In what ways will the organization work on policy and with what stakeholders?

ZO: I might start with funding. From my work at Lumina, and now at Jed, the question is where does investment in mental health go? And where will that investment make impact in the larger work in terms of increasing access to mental health resources or helping to solve for the rising rates of suicide amongst younger and younger citizens? One of the things that we have to make consideration for is how we sustain programming nationally. We’ve had conversations with Department of Education, we’ve had conversations with the Department of Health and Human Services. Beyond that, we’ve also thought about research. What are the indicators that we’re looking for to determine success within mental health programming and implementation? We’ve had conversations with SAMHSA, we’ve had conversations with the CDC, we’ve also had conversations with state level folks so when I think about policy, I think not only about federal policy and the national landscape, I think about our, our many little countries, AKA our states.

I say that because there is huge variation in how states invest in mental health and what they choose to invest in. Some states have done a lot of work around increasing programmatic functions and presence like Jed on college campuses and within institutions, while others have leaned heavily into bringing in teletherapy supports to their campuses where it made sense, like in New Jersey, for example.

It feels like a moment of opportunity where it is all hands on deck and everyone has a role to play in making sure that the way we look at mental health is from a collective bargaining approach and that it is seamless in its implementation.

LW: Regarding COVID funds, is there a sense that there’s an appetite for making sure that whatever we invested in mental health, particularly on big state institution campuses, will continue in some fashion? Is this a concern?

ZO: I think that that’s an opportunity. I think there’s an opportunity for there to be additional investments in mental health, particularly within states. And not just limited to state institutions, but also private institutions, community colleges especially, and even minority serving institutions. I do think though that the funding that’s coming from governors who have had a chance to call out separate budgets for mental health, that’s what we’re really watching closely and seeing how those budgets within states have made impact and driven forward some of the mental health initiatives by state. Because of those investments, JED has collaborated with the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) to create a mental health learning community whereby states figure out how to go about investing that funding, how to make impact within their state, how to read and then interpret the data around the needs of youth within their state and what partnerships were appropriate to make now that they had some additional funding to support that work that they’re doing. That partnership in particular that we have with SHEEO will help us inform future investments. So my biggest priority is making sure that when we do have funding, that we know what to do with it and we know what’s working within the nation. Otherwise, we run the threat of not being able to appropriately defend what we’re investing in and how impactful those dollars really can be.

LW: Drawing on all of the work you’ve done in mental health, what would you say are the most important things we need to work on?

ZO: I think first about two things. One is messaging and the other is representation. Messaging first. I think we take for granted the job that stigma did on our college campuses on the topics of mental health and suicide prevention. It stopped a lot of work that could have been going on before we had a real crisis on our hands. And so what I never want to ever see happen again to us as a nation is where we get silent about our very basic human needs, which include mental health. It was almost like we were daring to say to each other at one point that the pandemic happened, get over it, let’s move forward. And we know what the data told us about the enrollment crisis, and we knew about what youth were saying about not wanting to return to business as usual. The CDC’s release of data that had suicide rates as low as 10 years old and the second leading cause of death for 10 year olds in 2022 – what that taught us was that we can’t afford to not have these conversations consistently and invariably. We can’t afford to talk student success or student persistence or completion without first considering mental health and the necessary supports.

I think that then we can start to talk about sustainability and implementation. If I had a magic wand, both financial and otherwise, I would double or triple the current practitioner workforce right now. There is such a shortage when it comes to ensuring that there are enough practitioners to meet the demand that we’re now finally tuning our ears to hear. And then within that demand, ensuring that there’s appropriate representation, not only representation in terms of diversity, equitable representation of diverse, racially diverse practitioners on all college campuses, but also diversity in modality. A psychiatrist versus a therapist versus a social worker have very different functions in the same way that if you broke your leg, you wouldn’t just go to CVS. You would want a specialist to help you with perhaps your very unique challenge.

I think the other piece that we can expand on as well is how we go about training non-mental health practitioners to recognize when students or youth need help, making training the trainer models more consistent. And we have a few frameworks that exist in the ether, but making sure that they’re consistently available across college campuses is critical because what we’re hearing from faculty and staff alike is that not only do they want to be able to help students, they want to be able to serve them appropriately, but they need the appropriate training and they need to know where to go themselves when they need help. So those are some of the issues we need to invest time and money in.

LW: Fundamental to JED’s work has been equity and access topped by the Equity in Mental Health Framework. Where does that work stand now?

ZO: Back in 2000 when JED was established, one of the first priorities was to ensure that the work that we were doing was equitable and accessible to all students. In 2017, building upon our existing comprehensive approach, we developed the equity and mental health framework in partnership with the Steve Fund, which provides recommendations and implementation strategies to colleges and universities to better support the mental health of students of color. And the way this shows up in the work that we do every day with college campuses is we do pre and post assessments. And within the pre-assessment work that we do, we always ask schools specific things, such as what representation looks like on their campus, how they feel best poised to serve students of color and students with intersecting identities including LGTQIA students, for example, what does it look like in terms of leadership and advocacy? Is there diversity there and how does that play into the mental health of students of color?

We’ve made this a priority because of what we know from the data. Students of color are disproportionately impacted when it comes to mental health because of some of the systemic barriers that they already face outside of the college campus such asbeing more likely to be first generation students and not having a plethora of firsthand role modeling on their college campuses unless they choose to go to an HBCU or another MSI. And so we wanted to make sure that when we thought about the work that we’re doing, that this was baked into all of it and if we remain that thoughtful, then all students benefit from those strategies. And it has definitely remained a key part and a key focus of our work. The other thing that I’ll mention is more recently we’ve had to double down on that commitment given some of the challenges that we’ve seen play out over the last year or so, the SCOTUS decision and the striking down of affirmative action, looking at certain Senate bills within Texas and Florida, for example, that struck down DEI initiatives, some of which directly impact the programs and the folks that we work with on campuses. So we are waving a flag that the journey towards equity and equality across a couple of different facets is not over. And when it comes to mental health, we have to be bringing that to the forefront and calling it out if we are serious about serving all students with equity and fidelity.

Mindful Unrest

Posted on November 30, 2023January 21, 2026 by Dana Humphrey

When your house is burning, it feels like the whole world is on fire. That is how one student described her experience since October 7, when the heated protests and divisive debates over the war in Gaza erupted on her campus and on campuses across the country. For many students like her, the conflict is personal, it is political, and it is tangled up in all the things she is already struggling with: finding her identity, navigating friendships, and striving to retain intellectual curiosity while also feeling really angry.

For higher education, the Israel-Hamas war has rocked its own foundation, exposing not just elephants in the room but real wooly mammoths like the definition of free speech, the role of the presidential pulpit in geopolitical events, and the degree to which institutions tolerate or enable extreme political views. All of these issues relate to the overall wellbeing of students and of campus communities, issues that have emerged as important priorities for colleges and universities given the rates of anxiety and depression students, and faculty and staff, have been reporting.

It would seem there would be no better time for campuses to be working on those elements that we know help humans flourish, such as empathy, civility, community and self-awareness. But very little of that is cutting through the vitriol, blame, and anger that are unavoidably replayed on non-silenced screens. How can higher education use this moment in time, and others before it, to understand some of what is happening and to begin to heal through the power of its own resources and assets? LearningWell asked a number of people what they think. Here is our first guest interview.

Gene Beresin, MD, MA, is executive director of The Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), a full professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School (HMS), and senior educator in child and adolescent psychiatry at MGH.

LW: What is your reaction to the way the conflict in the Middle East is playing out on college campuses?

GB: Colleges are places that can raise issues that are highly controversial, that involve conflict, that generate high levels of emotion and that require civil conversations. We want college campuses to be places where students feel safe enough to speak their minds, to disagree in ways that are interesting, that engage them. The problem in this particular instance with the war between Israel and Hamas is that I don’t think that there has been sufficient attention given to how to deal with conflict.

We try to teach our younger kids social emotional learning, principles of wellbeing, controlling our own emotions such as rage, shame, humiliation, passion, and in ways which are helpful. But what’s happened here in my view is that lines are being drawn in the sand. The students have been taking sides. And even though the leadership of many colleges have said, “we want this to be a safe place, and that there’s no room for terrorism or hatred or brutal behavior,” I have not heard much at all about principles of conflict resolution. It seems to me that students on both sides of the issue need to understand that there’s tremendous power to resolving conflict and dealing with conflict. And there are principles, for example, of noting the appreciation of differences, of acceptance, of tolerance, and the ability to love and respect each other despite our disagreements. But that does not seem to be happening. I’ve heard a lot about free speech. I’ve heard a lot about the right to express your own opinions. I’ve heard a lot of platitudes, but I have not heard anything about principles.

LW: How would these principles apply on college campuses today where disagreement appears to be the only thing people are focused on?

GB: We need to hold open conversations and active listening to both points of view. If we take a pedantic view of this and we look at history, both the Palestinians and the Jewish people in that region, both groups of people have been conquered, oppressed, displaced and brutalized by outside influences. If you look at it, there’s a lot in common between the Palestinian people and the Jewish people and we should take a step back and appreciate both points of view.

“I’ve heard a lot about free speech. I’ve heard a lot about the right to express your own opinions. I’ve heard a lot of platitudes, but I have not heard anything about principles.”

Principle two is avoid being judgmental. When one is a subject of criticism or rage or a personal affront from a mental health standpoint, there’s the risk of feeling blamed, devalued, shamed, humiliated. When on the defensive, the impulse is to counterattack. It basically fires up the amygdala and the fight or flight response, and it doesn’t generate oxytocin, which is the kind of neurochemical that brings us together.

Another principle is having frequent conversations that are under control. Many of the protests that I’ve seen have not been well controlled. They’ve been people screaming at each other. We’re not going to get anywhere by screaming at each other. We’re not going to resolve conflict. Another principle is learning to apologize. If I’ve offended you, if you’ve offended me, there’s tremendous power in apologizing for lashing out, for attacking another point of view. And what do you have to lose? Nothing really. You have a lot to gain by seeing what’s in common and by making one’s own reparations. I think that’s another principle of conflict resolution that I have not seen much of at all.

Violence should, in every case, not be tolerated. Not tolerated in the Middle East, not tolerated in the United States, not tolerated on college campuses. And violence, I mean in word as well as in deed. Name-calling, attacking personally, ruthless behavior should be unacceptable.

I think another principle is that the solution to this problem is not going to be easy, and it’s not one side giving into another or one side being right or one side being wrong. It’s complicated, it’s nuanced. It requires accountability. You don’t resolve a conflict like this by a win or a loss. You resolve it in a way that leaves some things unresolved by demonstration of empathy, putting yourself in the other person’s shoes. I have not heard much at all from anyone including administrations or studentprotesters, about empathically understanding what the other side has endured. I can’t stress it enough. If the students can’t empathize with the impact of these horrifying events, if they can’t see that the trauma that’s happened to virtually everyone is extraordinarily traumatic, extraordinarily sad, extraordinarily dehumanizing, then we’re not going to get anywhere.

We want our kids from toddlerhood through young adulthood and beyond to understand principles of having civil conversations. And for the most part, these have not been civilized. So is there demonstration of respect? When you’re all fired up, you don’t demonstrate respect. And when you don’t demonstrate respect, you foster trauma, you foster distrust, dishonesty in some sense, and saying things that are hurtful and traumatic to other people. We should be able to respect differences. We try to teach our young children to take turns, to use the golden rule, to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I don’t see much of that. I’m getting back to basics here. Basics that are psychological principles and principles of conversation and understanding that we want to teach kids from toddlerhood through adulthood.

Another principle of civil conversations is telling stories. What we’ve learned from all of our major scriptures, whether it’s the Quran or the Torah or the Bible, is that every scripture in the world lives through narratives and I think people can really begin to listen to each other through stories and through narratives. One of the reasons why all the scriptures have been built upon narratives is because narratives generate not only emotions, but questions about trajectories, about lives, about family, about loss, about trauma.

LW: What do you think about this from a mental health perspective?

GB: The bottom line is that this insoluble situation, this inflammatory situation is not only traumatizing, but breeds depression, anxiety, stress, and in some cases, hopelessness, loneliness, and suicidal thinking. I mean, it has all the elements of inflaming the mental health crisis that our college students are already undergoing.

Stages of rage and trauma and high levels of emotion are not good for physical, emotional, or mental health. They fire up the immune system. They affect our sleep. They change our hormonal systems. They suppress the releases of oxytocin that makes us feel together and connected. So they have physiological effects that are dangerous. They have mental health effects that are dangerous, and they foster social disconnection, which I think is very detrimental for students on college campuses. So neurophysiologically, emotionally, and behaviorally and psychologically, these kinds of vitriolic demonstrations are not conducive to mental health. One can still express one’s point of view in a powerful way and not take a beating physically, mentally, emotionally, behaviorally.

Look, anger is a normal response. Anger prepares us for fight or flight. It’s a normal emotion. But when anger is extreme, when anger becomes laced with rage and hate, it is uncontrollable, and it clouds our cognition. It clouds our thinking. It clouds our ability to engage with others, and it puts us in an attack mode. So I think one of the other things that I would welcome is for not just students, but everyone involved in this very difficult and traumatic situation, is to use principles of anger management. If we can cool our jets, we’re in a much better place to actually talkwith each other and have civil conversations and have some kind of conflict resolution. And what this means is knowing when you’re angry and knowing when you’re coming from a place of anger rather than a more neutral emotional state.

Identifying your triggers for anger is really important. We all know road rage – the car that cuts us off, we want to just kind of slam into it. But we don’t do it. It’s okay to have impulses and angry impulses, but it’s not okay to act out on it. And one has toidentify one’s triggers. A lot of times the triggers here are identification with one’s cultural heritage, but that doesn’t necessarily mean attacking the other person. And a third principle of anger management is controlling your thoughts. Yes, we’re feeling angry. Yes, we’re feeling hateful. Yes, we’re feeling that we’ve got to do something, but it’s like one of my favorite supervisors said to me once, “A lot of times when you’re doing therapy, don’t just do something, sit there.” And I don’t see people just sitting there. I don’t see people sitting there and taking things in and processing it without impulsively blurting things out.

LW: How do you think colleges and universities should react?

GB: I think the role of the leadership should be to provide and empower different segments on campus to actually promote these principles, so we need faculty and student training in conflict resolution, civil conversations, and anger management. Secondly, this is not a “one-off.” As a child, you learn things in places of worship, in the boys and girls club, in the community, in the home, on the playground. We need stakeholders on campus to communicate these principles in reinforcing ways. The dorm leaders, the heads of our student mental health service, the dean of wellbeing, our clubs, our athletic teams, our coaches to all engage in some way in modeling civilized behavior because what we are seeing now is not civilized.

It’s not as though we need to have an assembly or a meeting at the student center and have a debate and then we’re done. No, it’s not one and done. These are ongoing conversations that need to occur with dignity and with respect and with thoughtfulness and kindness and compassion and empathy in multiple different forums so that they can reinforce each other. The leadership of colleges can say, “Look, there are no simple solutions.” Not many presidents have said this. “There are no simple solutions. But let’s try to turn things around.”

Let’s not let rage and hate lead to what we’re seeing in the Middle East with tragedy and loss of life. Let’s try to make our campus a model of civility. Let’s have multiple places in which we can communicate with each other respectfully in a calm fashion, present opposing points of view, agree to disagree, bring in history, bring in culture, bring in personal narratives, bring in spiritual narratives. And let’s do it differently. Do we want to replicate this? Do we want to perpetuate a stalemate, or do we want to do something that actually brings us to a higher level of empathy and understanding?

Every Student, Everywhere

Posted on November 16, 2023January 21, 2026 by Alfredo Gago

Loren Muwonge has lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin all her life. A senior in high school, Loren’s passion for the future of her city is as striking as her résumé. In addition to being a star student in the top percentile of her graduating class, Loren is the district 2 representative for the Milwaukee County Youth Commission, where she promotes civic engagement and provides a student perspective to policymakers charged with advancing educational and racial equity among Milwaukee youth. She is also a member of the Student Enrichment Program for Underrepresented Professions (StEP-UP) at the Medical College of Wisconsin; a Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America (LEDA) scholar at Princeton; and an active volunteer for her church’s community outreach programs. In October, she spoke at a national policy summit on young adult mental health sponsored by the Jed Foundation.

When Loren speaks about what compelled her to advocate for education reform, equity and inclusion, and mental wellbeing on the national stage, she emphasizes the local roots of her activism. A 2018 study by the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program found that Milwaukee had the highest “black-white segregation” of any American metropolitan area. This modern reality is largely due to decades of redlining, the discriminatory practice of denying loans and services to certain neighborhoods classified as “hazardous” to investment—the effects of which Loren has personally witnessed. As a Youth Commissioner, her initiatives include addressing and repairing the harm wrought by redlining in Milwaukee, as well as education reform, equitable resource distribution, and mental and behavioral healthcare access for low-income youth and students of color.

During her Youth Commission’s swearing-in ceremony, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who himself served on the county’s first-ever youth commission, remarked of the initiative, “Too often young voices go unheard; their problems, they go unaddressed, and a vicious cycle of disengagement and neglect perpetuates the problems that we see each day.”

In hearing her story, it is clear that Loren’s voice, and those she amplifies, will not go unheard.

LearningWell had the privilege to interview Loren Muwonge, and the following is a summary of our conversation.

LearningWell: What would you like LearningWell readers to know about your background and how you began your advocacy journey?

Muwonge: I come from a redlined area in Wisconsin, one of the most segregated places in the nation. So, it’s really obvious and sometimes discouraging to see how that segregation manifests in my community, where some neighborhoods look better than others, and the areas that look worse and have fewer opportunities are the ones that are predominantly populated by minorities and people of color. That has led a lot of my advocacy work—seeing how redlining affects quality of life for residents, such as low-income communities having worse air quality than their suburban counterparts.

LearningWell: How did your advocacy work begin to include student mental health?

Muwonge: I’m very inspired by Fred Hampton [of the Black Panther Party]. I was impressed and inspired by Hampton’s efforts to improve the success of his community by creating a free breakfast program for school children. I looked at my community, my peers, and their needs and I began to identify that my community can’t truly thrive without accounting for the mental health of the students. And for me, it really just became a matter of, okay, right now there is a need to improve mental health, especially in my district, in relation to the pandemic and the rising crime that we’re seeing with school shootings. I realized the best way that I could help was accounting for the mental health of my community by directly listening to the concerns of my peers.

LearningWell: Why is it important for education policymakers, administrators, and faculty to hear student perspectives on mental health and wellbeing?

“While everyone who pursues higher education has worked hard to be there, not everybody has been adequately supported to thrive in that place.”

Muwonge: We are the people directly affected by education policy, and while professionals may be able to look at data to assess trends—they might even spend time in the classroom, proctoring, observing—they can’t experience it firsthand. The data doesn’t replace the firsthand experience of being a student at this moment in time. We live in an evolving nation, with new factors affecting education, such as A.I., the rise in school shootings, and the student experience during the pandemic. It would be to their benefit if policymakers would talk to those directly affected, since we can provide feedback, voice our concerns, and give a human perspective that the data can’t.

LearningWell: Based on your K-12 experience, do you believe that student wellbeing is a priority in American education?

Muwonge: I do not believe that student wellbeing is a priority in American public schools. There are many aspects to that issue, including the hours that teachers are working. I believe that teachers in America are undervalued, and they’re not given adequate support, whether it be for school supplies, resources, or fair pay. And I think that truly seeps into the education that students receive, because teachers don’t have enough time to account for factors such as wellbeing, especially since there are many parameters set in place that make it difficult for teachers to help and intervene. And then there are limits on their time; they have so much curricular content to get through, and they’re not being adequately supported themselves.

LearningWell: Much of LearningWell’s audience is involved in higher education. What would you like them to know about the student experience? As you prepare to head to college, what do you hope to see on campus in terms of mental health, equity and inclusion, or student wellbeing?

Muwonge: I’d like them to account for the fact that while everyone who pursues higher education has worked hard to be there, not everybody has been adequately supported to thrive in that place. And it’s important to consider the fact that many people may not have the necessary K-12 education that they need to succeed in higher education. They may not have the financial support that they need to thrive, whether they struggle with tuition costs or just being able to afford groceries, transportation, or visiting family back home if they attend college out of state. Again, everybody’s worked hard to be there, but not everybody’s being adequately supported to thrive. What I hope to see when I get to college is financial freedom, financial security for myself and my peers. I’d like to see universities place an emphasis on requiring all students to pursue an internship or some sort of professional experience within their college education, because analyzing the statistics of our nation right now, a college education in most cases isn’t enough. Many colleges do have access to different internship opportunities, but not all students utilize them or even know about those programs. If colleges were encouraging or even requiring students to gain exposure in their fields, I believe it would help set their students up for success.

LearningWell: You’re now a high school senior in the midst of the college application process. Do you anticipate that institutions’ mental health programs and resources will have any bearing on your college decision?

Muwonge: A lack of mental health services would be extremely deterring. I’ve done some research into wellbeing resources, and it has weeded out certain colleges. If I find that they aren’t able to adequately support and account for my and my peers’ mental health, especially when you’re considering out-of-state colleges where you won’t have in-state insurance, or you won’t have family close by, it affects the decision. If you are low-income, it may not be as easy to afford mental health services, and it’s important for me to go to a university that will accommodate that. If I’m investing into this university for my education, I’d like to see that what I invest is going to serve me and my peers.

LearningWell: Do you plan on continuing your advocacy work when you go to college?

Muwonge: I’m intentional about making a home somewhere that has convenient transportation and is a walkable city. That way I’m able to contribute to different communities and local organizations, so that I can continue serving in a way that is bigger than myself and bigger than my college campus.

Q&A with Marcus Hotaling, Director of the Eppler-Wolff Counseling Center at Union College and President of AUCCCD

Posted on August 22, 2023January 21, 2026 by Alfredo Gago

In March 2023, the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors (AUCCCD) released a policy paper that provides a foundation for structuring how higher education can approach mental health support. “Navigating a Path Forward for Mental Health Services in Higher Education” lays out some of the issues facing the field, including staff burnout and turnover, misallocation of resources, lack of coordination between campus stakeholders, ineffective or incongruous treatment models and the proliferation of third-party vendors. The paper offers some recommendations for addressing these concerns with an overarching theme that campus stakeholders must work together to create a realistic, agreed-upon, campus-wide approach–and then act on that plan with consistent messaging and communication to all constituents. This month, LearningWell (LW) magazine interviewed Dr. Marcus Hotaling, director of the Eppler-Wolff Counseling Center at Union College and president of the AUCCCD, to discuss the paper and “the path forward.”

LW: The AUCCCD recently published a paper that lays out a path forward for college mental health services amid high rates of mental health concerns and help-seeking among college students, and at the same time, increased burnout and dissatisfaction among counselors. What led the AUCCCD to develop this paper?

MH: I think we’ve all been feeling the burnout for some years. Every year, up until the pandemic, my counseling center was seeing increased utilization—more students and more sessions. And while more students is understandable, we continuously saw more sessions with the same amount of staff, going above the national standard of about 65% face-to-face time for counselor. When I became president of AUCCCD in 2021, we had started to look at themes as to why people were leaving. We have 895 active members. In that first year, 81 of our members left for various reasons. Burnout was a huge factor, due to, in large part, getting pressure from all directions. You’re getting pressure from the students who want to be seen right away. You’re getting pressure from parents calling you. And then you’re getting pressure from the higher-ups who are getting called by parents or faculty members.

We also looked at where these counselors were going. The majority of them, two thirds, left the field of higher education and went into private practice. And there were two factors that led to that. The first was salary—you can make more in private practice. Some people went to the local hospitals and the salary is $50,000 more than their institution was paying. And the second reason was that, when you’re in private practice and you’re full, you just say, “I’m sorry, I’m not accepting new patients.” You can’t do that in a college setting. So, we started to look at the burnout piece and how higher ed and counseling can work together to try to resolve this problem.

LW: What were your goals in issuing this paper? What was it meant to convey?

MH: We didn’t want to just say, “Colleges, you just need to hire more people,” because we know that’s not realistic. But what is realistic is everybody coming to the table and saying, “What services do we want to offer?” Let’s all be on the same page; let’s all have the same messaging around that, and then let’s actually do that. Because, in the counseling center, we can develop whatever service model we want, but if admissions or faculty or someone else is telling a student they could be seen six times a week, that’s not helpful. If we have people saying there are session limits when we don’t have session limits, that’s not helpful.

It’s important for counseling center leadership and student affairs leadership, and presidents, to come up with a plan of action to determine, based on the staffing we have, what we can provide. There needs to be a plan of action.

LW: The paper points out that colleges are making decisions about the service delivery model based on meeting the volume of demand, rather than taking an outcomes-based approach. Why, in your view, are institutions approaching mental health care that way?

MH: I think part of it is that, for the most part, it’s really just fallen onto the counseling center staff to say what we need to do. And the reality is, that can be really hard when you don’t have the opportunity to step back and try something different or think about how it can be done differently.

I’m going to use my center as an example. There was one day that I opened up the schedule and there were just tons of appointments. And I said to my associate director, “Look, I’m seeing your schedule today. That’s not healthy. Your last patient is getting nothing from you. You’re exhausted.” So, we sat down over a school break and looked at how to change things. Everything was on the table. And that takes time, and it takes trust. We did get some pushback from our staff, but the approach was to give it a shot until the end of the year. And if it didn’t work, we’d change it again.

The reason why the usual approach is all over the place is that we’re just trying to meet the demand. And it’s like a dam that’s breaking where we plug one hole, and then all of a sudden there’s another hole over here. It’s still coming in; the water’s still flowing. And how many fingers do I have to plug these holes? And it’s only when you can take that step back that you can come up with a new way of doing things.

The demand is so high and you’re just trying to bail water out of the boat before you can actually sit down and plan. And that’s what we were trying to say in this paper: Do the planning, take the initiative to sit down with your leadership and say, “What can I do? What do you want? What does this school want to offer?” And we will work around that with the current staff. And maybe we’ll need to grow staff in the future.

But we are starting to see the numbers fall. One of the positives that came out of the pandemic is that states are starting to look at patients being able to cross over state lines for care. Clinicians are also more comfortable using telehealth and teletherapy. So, if you’ve been working with somebody for a long time, rather than saying, “Go see somebody at college because you’re two hours away,” counselors can continue to see their patients. So, the numbers are falling a little bit, but a little bit from a flood is still a flood.

“Do the planning, take the initiative to sit down with your leadership and say, “What can I do? What do you want? What does this school want to offer?”

LW: You point out that there is a mismatch of expectations, like having admissions promote a certain number of sessions that does not align with the reality of what can be offered. But even if you fix that inconsistency in messaging, do you think there’s also a cultural expectation that students, when they get to college, are going to be cared for in this way and they’re going to have access to therapy? And if so, is there going to be a difficulty in pushing back against that cultural expectation?

MH: Absolutely. Look, students are paying a lot of money to go to college, and with that comes a certain level of expectation across the board. When it comes to the expectations that parents have or families have, we also need to move away from the normalcy that every student is going to get through in four years. And that taking some time off isn’t a bad thing if you’re making good use of that time by working on yourself and getting healthy, so that when you come back, you’re going to be in a better place.

LW: So many issues, like leaves of absence as you suggest, involve more of a public health approach. What is the role of the counseling center in this approach?

MH: This whole thing is a public health problem. And I say that not to remove our responsibility or the individual responsibility of the students or counseling center. There are two reasons I say this is a public health problem. One, counseling centers and mental health for the past 20 years has been pushing for parity. We should be treated just like physical health. Let’s reduce the stigma. And it worked and that’s good. And then you have a challenging outside world. There’s war, there’s political unrest, a recession, a pandemic, school shootings. All these things create anxiety. On top of that, we have these expectations, real or imagined, that everybody else’s life is perfect, which we can see on their Instagram reel.

So, for a public health approach, yes, the community needs to do better about addressing gun violence and addressing systemic racism. But once they’re on our campuses, we can give students the tools to stay happy and healthy, while also recognizing that [every person is] going to have bad days.

We also need to help our constituents around campus recognize when somebody actually needs therapy versus when they might just need empathy or a listening ear. We need to help faculty and staff understand that referring a student to counseling is not the first thing you do. The first thing to do is say, “Are you okay? What do you need? I’m so sorry.”

These are public health approaches that are very, very simple and need no training from a mental health professional. All of us on a college campus can be approaching this from a public health perspective. It’s a public health issue, and now we need to be using our public health solutions.

LW: All of this – counseling staff wellbeing, policies and procedures and service delivery–its all about overall student health, correct?

MH: Absolutely. Because if we’re not healthy, how are we helping anybody?

And evidence shows that students who utilize mental health services are retained and graduate at a higher percentage than those who don’t receive mental health care. And in theory, those are the students that are most at risk—the ones that are unhappy, the ones that have a mental health diagnosis. In a National Association of Mental Illness report, 64% of students that are no longer enrolled in higher ed list mental health as the main reason. So, it’s about student success as well.