Category: Q&A

In his 2023 book, “Whatever it is, I’m against it,” Brian Rosenberg sums up higher education’s aversion to change. In making his case, the Macalester College president emeritus identifies institutional barriers, such as shared governance and insular cultures, that keep higher education from addressing uncomfortable truths, like a flawed economic model and plummeting public support. He warns that this head-in-the-sand strategy will leave higher education vulnerable to a political take-down, like the one it is currently experiencing. 

Now that external forces of change, led by the Trump administration, are threatening to upend higher education as we know it, Rosenberg is far from gloating. A visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Rosenberg continues to advocate for strategies that will strengthen higher ed—those that will bend the cost curve, improve the student experience, and open up access for people who want to go to college but can’t afford it. He distinguishes this type of change from the unhelpful assaults on higher education he believes will have disastrous effects on the sector he both admires and admonishes. 

In this candid interview, Rosenberg explains how higher education got to where it is now and why this is not the time to stay neutral.  

LW: You have long advocated for change in higher education which, as you say, is very difficult to achieve. Do you think this point in time feels different?

Rosenberg: Higher education has been the most stable industry in the world for centuries. It hasn’t really needed to change in more than incremental ways, and there have been some good things about that. But when you go years and years without change because you don’t have to, you also fall into some really suboptimal practices, and sooner or later those are going to catch up with you. I think right now the pressures on higher education are so strong that incremental change just won’t do it anymore. People have been saying this for a long time, and it’s easy to think of someone like me as a boy crying wolf. But what I say to people all the time is, every once in a while, there’s a wolf. And I think we’re at that moment. 

LW: What would you say is driving the necessity for change?

Rosenberg: First, the economic model is unsustainable. The demographic trends are not on our side. And if it wasn’t clear to people a year ago, it certainly should be clear right now: people don’t like us. If there’s anything that the far left and the far right agree upon right now, it’s that they’re not particularly fans of higher education. They have different reasons, but what we’re seeing is that public discontent translates into public policy and that public policy has the potential to be extremely damaging to higher education, whether it’s an endowment tax or cuts to funding from the N.I.H. (National Institutes of Health) or limitations on what people can teach or services they can provide. 

If people liked us, it would be harder to implement those changes. But because the public regard for higher education has declined so much, we become a politically convenient punching bag, and that’s going to have real impact. If you combine economics, demographics, and public sentiment—you can throw in technology and artificial intelligence—I really do think we are at an inflection point now where same old, same old is just not going to cut it for the next five, 10, 20, 25 years.

LW: Let’s start with the economics of higher education. What needs to change there?

Rosenberg: When people say, change isn’t really necessary, the number that comes to mind for me is 56%—that is the average discount rate now at private colleges across the United States. Higher education in these places is  on sale for more than half off. If you walked into a store and you saw a sign that said everything is 60% off, you would assume it was a closeout sale.

That is the definition of an unsustainable model—when that discount is going up every year and every year you are marking down your product more and more. And sooner or later you’re going to get to 100% and be giving it away for free. So the need to bend the cost curve seems to me inarguable. We cannot continue on this economic trajectory. More people are deciding not to go to college because it’s too expensive, and more people who can afford it are still deciding not to pay it because it’s too expensive. In Boston for instance, the percentage of students in public schools who choose to go directly to college has dropped over the last decade from almost 70% to a little over 50%. In a high education state like Massachusetts, that’s staggering. 

LW: People tend to think of high tuition as the result of overspending or inefficiency. Is there truth to that? 

Rosenberg: The economic problem in higher education is not caused by climbing walls and lazy rivers, and it’s not caused by extravagant residence halls. Sure, at some institutions those are wasteful expenditures, but that’s not what is driving the increase in cost. What is driving the increase in cost overwhelmingly is personnel, which is about two-thirds of the budget. The majority of every college and university budget in the country goes toward paying people’s salaries and benefits because it has always been a very people-intensive industry. And the problem that higher education has faced is that the cost of hiring those people has gone up, but productivity hasn’t changed. It’s a fundamental economic problem called “cost disease,” where your costs of hiring people go up but you see no increased productivity.  Industries that have bent their cost curves have generally done it by increasing productivity. It’s easier to do in manufacturing than in service. If you look at things like the cost of producing an automobile adjusted for inflation, that’s actually gone down because you have so many fewer people. It’s so automated. But in higher ed, that’s not the case. 

The second largest cost driver is the physical plant. Institutions tend to have big, old physical plants that cost a fortune to maintain. They almost all have gigantic deferred maintenance budgets that they’re not really addressing. The only way to make it cheaper—and people don’t like to hear this, but it’s true—the only way to make it cheaper is to do it with fewer people and fewer buildings. And that’s very, very hard to accomplish in higher education because it’s not wastefulness as much as it is things that we prize. Things like student faculty contact are exactly the things that drive our costs. We haven’t found the right balance between doing things that we think are effective and doing things that we think are economically affordable. And so that’s the situation that the vast majority of colleges that are not places like Harvard find themselves in right now.

LW: What is at stake here if higher education does not change?

Rosenberg: I think what’s at stake is that you’re likely to see high quality higher education become a luxury good reserved for the few and much lower quality, less expensive higher education become something that most people experience. At one extreme, you have places like Harvard and Williams and they’re not going to go anywhere, but I think we run the risk of seeing a lot of very good, much less wealthy institutions go away and be replaced by institutions that are far less effective and consumer-focused. 

I’m someone who believes that essential public services are not best served when they are provided by for-profit entities because the profit motive and the motive of social good can come into conflict.  Worst case scenario is that higher education becomes taken over by for-profits and it stops being a public good and starts being a revenue source and a way to return money to shareholders. And I think that would be a disaster.

LW: The title of your book suggests you know something about resistance to change in higher education. You’ve lived it and studied it. What is your theory?

Rosenberg: If I had to boil it down to the simplest formulation, I’dborrow a phrase from Larry Bacow, who was the president at Tufts and then the president at Harvard for five years. He has said, “Virtually none of the internal actors within higher education have incentive to change it.” There’s certainly a lot of incentive for people outside of higher education—families who want to pay for college, students who want to attend college, states that want to educate more people. But inside higher education, if you think about the key actors, you have college presidents, and any college president who wants to keep their job knows that if you push for dramatic change, you’re likely looking at no-confidence votes and a short presidency.  If you want to keep your job as a college president, the easiest thing to do is not rock too many boats. Steer the boat, but don’t sharply change direction because you’re probably not going to survive. 

Boards of trustees certainly at private colleges are made up of alumni whose vision of the college is from the past more than it is the future. And so they hold on very tightly. And this is true of alumni in general. They hold on to the past version of the college that they experienced. Any college president you ask will tell you that any kind of change beyond what is very small is going to get pushback from alumni. If you’re a tenured faculty member and you have a job for life and your institution isn’t about to go under, why in the world would you change anything? You have a privilege that no other worker in the American workforce has, with the exception of federal judges. 

People often point to students, but when students push for change, it tends to be around things like political issues or better food in the dining hall. Most students don’t want the college that they enrolled in to go through disruptive change while they’re there. That’s not comfortable. The only people within the system who I think are incentivized to change it are the people who have no power to change it. I would say that’s staff, non-tenure track faculty and graduate students. They all know the system’s broken, but they have no power in the governance instruction. And so you have power located with people with no incentive to change, and you have incentive to change located with people who have no power. And that is a recipe for stasis. And of course then there are all these structural impediments like shared governance.

Anyone who studies change will tell you that two of the conditions that are necessary to change an organization are the right incentives and alignment, and you don’t have either in higher education. The desires and the priorities of a history department and the priorities of a college president are not necessarily going to be in any way aligned. And colleges, if you think of a metaphor, aren’t like highways. They’re like those bumper car rides that you used to go to at amusement parks, where everybody’s driving into each other and nobody goes anywhere because everybody’s driving in their own direction. That’s kind of the way decision-making at a college happens. We prioritize participation over outcomes. And that has a history that goes back more than half a century now, and it’s very hard to change when consensus and innovation don’t sit easily together because innovation by its very nature is disruptive and consensus by its very nature is not.

LW: What other things about higher ed do you think need to change that may or may not be related to the economic model but may be contributing to the decline in public sentiment or the questioning of its value?

Rosenberg: Higher education has tended to be extraordinarily insular. Just think about the typical college campus: it has sometimes literal walls between itself and the rest of the community, and it certainly has figurative walls. One of the things that needs to change is that higher education needs to start looking outward more and stop looking inward, asking itself, “What does society need?” People who teach at liberal arts colleges or research universities don’t like to hear this, but we need to be asking, “How can students get jobs?” This is for most people the largest investment they’re going to make other than maybe buying their house. Especially for first generation students, getting a job is not a luxury. It’s kind of a requirement.

I’m not saying that it all needs to be vocational, but are we teaching the right skills? Are we teaching the right competencies so that the people we are sending into the workforce are the people that employers want? Right now, the message back from employers is you’re not doing a very good job, that there’s not a great alignment between what we’re seeing in your graduates and what we want in our employees—things like creativity, being able to work in teams, resilience, adaptability. There are certain hard skills like being able to communicate well, work with numbers, work with data sets. I would describe it as a set of hard and soft skills that higher education has neglected in its focus on disciplinary expertise and on research. I mean, most college and university majors are still designed as if their graduates are going to become college professors, and that’s not what they’re doing. 

I also think about the method of instruction. There have been, at this point, countless studies that have shown that passive learning is not very effective. And yet higher education still relies very heavily on things like large lectures, when we know that students learn very little in that setting. You get a grade, you move out of the class, and then within a year, you don’t remember anything that you learned, whereas learning through doing—experiential learning—teaches you a lot more. And higher education has been incredibly slow to embrace the importance of learning-through-doing rather than learning-through-listening ,so I think the pedagogy could be improved as well. And that means that faculty members like me who were trained in a certain way have to rethink how they teach. And it’s hard to get people to do that. 

LW: Without those incentives, other than being a good person who cares about the post-graduate lives of your students, what is the motivation for professors to change their teaching? 

Rosenberg: I think the incentive is going to come from the bottom-up and not from the top-down. All of these schools now are facing incredible constraints and challenges, and you have a choice when you’re in that situation. For most schools, the incentive is survival. If you’re going to survive, then you’re going to have to offer something different than what you’re offering now. I have to believe that there are going to be some schools that take a look at a failing model and say, “All right, we have nothing to lose. We’re going to try something different.” My old AP biology teacher used to say that the nature of change is adapt, migrate or die, and migration is not a real option for colleges. But adapt or die is going to be, I think, the thing that sparks change In higher education. 

LW: You mentioned experiential learning, working in teams, some of the other high-impact practices that have proven to lead to things like wellbeing, fulfillment, and flourishing. These outcomes are also important to employers. Do you think embracing these kinds of experiences would help improve how people view higher ed?

Rosenberg: I think they would. And again, even if you look within very well-resourced institutions, there are departments that are struggling. Everybody points to the humanities. And so if you’re in a department where you’re just bleeding students, it seems to me you should be incentivized to look at what you’re doing and say, “All right, what can we do to make what we’re doing, what we’re teaching, more attractive to students?” And that would mean adopting some of those high-impact practices that we know work very well. 

We’re not talking about the French Revolution here. I think that there are things that could be done without completely blowing up the system that would begin to incorporate some of these high impact practices and conceivably could help bend the cost curve a little bit. For example, if you have more students doing group work, then maybe you don’t need quite as many TAs, or maybe you don’t need quite as many instructors because students are working in groups. So certainly, it could improve the quality, and it might actually even help with the cost.

LW: As you say, the wolf is at the door. Is there anything positive about what we are witnessing from the Trump administration in regards to changes in higher ed?  

Rosenberg: Is there anything positive here?  Sometimes it takes a major jolt to the system to change something for the better. If you’re in the habit of driving while intoxicated, and you get into an accident, and you narrowly escape with your life, maybe you say, “I’m not going to do that anymore.” And I would say higher education needs to start looking outward more and stop looking inward, asking itself, “What does society need?”

I don’t know what’s going to happen with this cut in indirect cost from the NIH, but if it stands, no university, even places like Harvard and MIT, is going to be immune. It’s certainly a message that if you don’t pay attention to the world outside the campus, sooner or later, that’s going to come back and bite you. And so if we get through this without complete disaster, maybe colleges and universities will rethink how they engage with the world beyond their campuses, do a better job of making the case for their value, and actually provide more value.  I think it’s waking people up to the fact that whether we like it or not, it’s not going to look the same in 10 years as it looks now. The question is: to what extent do we want that forced upon us? And to what extent do we want to try to have some control over that?

“The question is: to what extent do we want [change] forced upon us? And to what extent do we want to try to have some control over that?”

LW: What would you offer as suggestions to people like Vice President JD Vance who have called higher education the enemy?

Rosenberg: If in some alternative universe, someone like JD Vance were reasonable enough to actually listen to how to improve higher education, my response would be pretty simple and that is to double the Pell Grant—double the size. That is one tool that could make a major difference tomorrow. The Pell Grant has been stuck in the $6,000 to $7,000 range for decades. When it was first designed, it mostly covered the cost of college. Now, it doesn’t even come close, unless you’re talking about a community college. If you dramatically increased the Pell Grant, a) the money would be going to people who need it—lower income students and families—and b) it would make college much more accessible. I don’t believe everybody should go to college. What I believe is anyone who wants to go to college should be able to, shouldn’t be prevented by economics from not being able to. As with our infrastructure, we’ve neglected these kinds of investments because we’re so fixated in this country on low taxes.

I would also acknowledge that one major weakness is that higher education has become too ideologically uniform and that that’s not helping students. We need to figure out a way to make sure that people with all reasonable views can express them on college campuses without fear of reprisal or being shouted down. And that’s on colleges and universities. We haven’t done as good a job as we might have. That said, the answer to one form of censorship is not another form of censorship. And what we’re seeing now, in response to the soft power of students shouting down a speaker, is the hard power of the government telling you what you can and cannot teach and what you can and cannot do. That’s exactly the wrong thing. People like JD Vance and Musk talk about all the woke things that they’re rooting out. What we’re seeing now is that if you’re not on board with that particular ideology, then the law’s going to come after you. And that’s a lot scarier. 

You can say all you want about student protestors or about student demonstrators, but their power compared to the power of the state is minuscule. And right now, we’re seeing the enormous power of the state being brought to bear to shut down the open exchange of ideas on college campuses. And that is infinitely more dangerous than anything that’s come from within colleges. So I would acknowledge the failures, but I would also say that this prescription for correcting it is worse than the disease.

LW: I am guessing this is not the kind of change you talked about in your book.

Rosenberg: That Dear Colleague letter from the DOE, I’ve never seen anything like that come from any agency of any government in my entire life — state, local, federal. It read like an editorial in the New York Post. I mean, it was crazy—not just in terms of  its language, but its interpretation of the law was also just completely wacky. In some ways, it was directly inconsistent with the Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action, where Justice Roberts said, for example, that schools could use the students’ essays to make judgments about their life experiences. It went way beyond what was a fairly narrow ruling about affirmative action and admissions. I have yet to see a legal expert, right or left wing, that says this is actually supported by the law. There’s nothing about it that’s helpful. It’s just a standard playbook: overreach and scare people. And it’s a standard authoritarian playbook. What you get is a lot of what historians have called anticipatory obedience. People obey without you having to force them to do it because they’re scared. We’re seeing a lot of that right now. It’s a very effective way of exerting control when you can’t actually do what you’re threatening to do, but just the threat causes people to cower and to change what they’re doing. 

LW: Are you disappointed in the way that higher ed leadership has responded?

Rosenberg: The short answer is yes, I’m disappointed. But I do understand. I’m sympathetic to the notion that we should become more neutral. It’s probably true that higher education over the last decade has gotten too embroiled in political issues. I don’t think that’s entirely unreasonable because I think it coincided with the rise of Trump and so many actual or proposed policies that go against everything that higher education is supposed to stand for. That led higher education to get much more politically active and opened it up to a lot of these attacks.

“I believe that more leaders have an obligation to speak about what parts of the university we will not compromise on.”

I’m also sympathetic to the fear of reprisal. If you’re a college president and you’re dependent upon the legislature for funding, you don’t want to do harm to your institution. But having said all that, we need to have a different response. This goes back to something called the Kalven Report from the University of Chicago in 1967, which talks about institutional neutrality. It says the exception to that is when society or some segments of society propose or do things that threaten the mission of the university. In these instances, you have an obligation to speak—not an option, an obligation. And I really believe that we’re at that point now. I believe that more leaders have an obligation to speak about what parts of the university we will not compromise on and we will fight for and what things being done to our students in particular are unjust.  

I am sympathetic to the caution, but I’m also somewhat disappointed in it. I think that one of the things you learn when you’re in a schoolyard is if you keep getting punched in the nose by a bully, they’re going to keep punching you until you punch back. If you think that someone like Donald Trump or Elon Musk is going to stop punching you because you hide behind neutrality, you haven’t been paying attention. 

The spring semester at the City University of New York (CUNY) brings a fresh approach to a perennial problem. CUNY’s new Transfer Initiative enables students currently transferring for Fall 2025 to move anywhere within the system without sacrificing credits towards their major. The key is an automated process that shows them how their existing credits transfer immediately upon acceptance. 

The new initiative helps students avoid losing credit, time, and money when moving from associate’s to bachelor’s degree programs within the 25-college system. It is a culmination of a number of strategies at CUNY aimed directly at benefiting students, the majority of whom are low-income and/or first-generation. The person driving much of this innovation is Alicia M. Alvero, CUNY’s Interim Executive Vice Chancellor and University Provost. A first-generation American trained in Organizational Behavior Management, Alvero has the heart and the head to make systemic change at the country’s largest urban university. 

From streamlining advising to harnessing generative AI, Alvero is helping the colleges strengthen how they support students, particularly with factors such as time-to-degree and career alignment, which affect their financial well-being. In this interview with LearningWell, she discusses her own trajectory in higher ed, how those experiences helped guide her work in CUNY’s central office, and how organizational change can benefit the people who need it the most.  

LW: You wear a number of hats at CUNY. Tell me a little bit about your trajectory there and, in your own words, what the job entails.

Alvero: So I started in CUNY at Queens College as a faculty member of Organizational Behavior Management in 2003. And during that time, I was doing a lot of consulting work for organizations on both leadership training and improving workflow and efficiencies within businesses. And as with all faculty, once you get tenured, you get administrative responsibilities. And so sure enough, I ended up with administrative responsibilities and started to realize that all of these skills I was teaching to outside organizations, I could apply in-house to the psychology department, which at the time was the largest department. 

We would have a lot of students who would get denied graduation because they took a wrong course. And I thought, that’s a crazy time to find that out, when you’re applying for graduation. And so I started to think, how do we improve our advisement system within the department to eliminate that? That is, how do we get that information to students right away? How do we create work or course schedules that really meet the needs of our students? 

We’d get complaints from students saying, “I took this course, but it’s only offered Tuesday/Thursday, and it conflicts with another course that I need to graduate.” So I started really looking at how we were doing the work and then meeting the needs of the students. How do I ensure the right faculty, especially the part-time faculty, get assigned to courses for which they’re experts? We’d create a schedule and then try to fill all the adjuncts, but sometimes at the day and time of the course that aligned with their expertise, they were unavailable. And I thought that was a silly reason to lose this wonderful person.

And so I started making some changes in the department. I guess it started getting recognized by the college and the president and the provost. And they started saying, “Can you do this for the entire college?” And that was really my introduction to what it could be like to be an administrator for college. Then I became the Associate Provost for Academic and Faculty Affairs. Then our provost was retiring, and so it was announced that I’d be the interim. But before stepping into the role, our now former Executive Vice Chancellor University Provost, Wendy Hensel, was coming from Georgia State, and she reached out to me and said, “I really need somebody on my team who understands CUNY faculty, understands the system, because I’m an outsider.” And that’s how I came to the central office. I said I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to do what I love at a much larger scale. So I became a Vice Chancellor of Academic and Faculty Affairs for two-and-a-half years, and now I’m the Interim University Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor. 

LW: If you could identify one main priority of your work, is that to better facilitate a supportive, or student-friendly, way for students to get from entrance to success throughout their degrees?

Alvero: Yes, but it’s also about taking a holistic approach. It’s not just about making the process student-friendly. It’s about ensuring that our technologies, platforms, and policies are truly designed to support student success. Are our systems integrated in a way that makes life easier for students? For example, when a student transfers, does their information seamlessly transfer with them, or are they required to fill out unnecessary paperwork, even within CUNY?

We examine every step of the student experience—from entry to graduation—including the technologies we use, the policies in place, and the human factors like academic advisement. Gaps in policy can hinder student success, and some existing policies may not be functioning as intended. Additionally, students often receive contradictory information when moving between institutions, and we need to eliminate that confusion.

Our goal is to streamline information—through technology, well-designed policies, and well-trained advisors—so that students can make informed academic decisions and receive the right support at the right time. We shouldn’t wait until a student drops out to intervene. Instead, we should leverage predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to identify and support struggling students early on. It’s about a comprehensive, proactive approach, rather than a single initiative.

LW: And why would you say this support is particularly important at CUNY, which primarily serves first-gen and low-income students?

Alvero: The majority of our students don’t have the benefit of an expert in their home to guide them through the college process. When someone in a family has gone to college, they often understand—at least to some degree—what it takes to be successful. Most of our students don’t have that resource. And while attending college doesn’t automatically make someone an expert, any level of insight or support from someone who has navigated the system can make a significant difference.

Without that guidance, many of our students are left to advocate for themselves. But how can they effectively do that if they don’t even know the steps? That’s why it’s so critical for us, as a system, to proactively remove obstacles and provide the support they need, rather than expecting them to figure it out on their own.

LW: Could you give me an example of what some of those specific measures or supports look like? 

Alvero: For example, when a student transfers from one school to another, they often have to make a decision about which school they should go to. And there’s this misconception that, “Well, all 60 credits from my associate’s degree will transfer.” That is true. All 60 credits will transfer, but it’s how they transfer that makes the difference. Even if you’re transferring from accounting to accounting, credits that you thought would count towards the accounting degree could end up transferring as electives. That’s not useful. And so I bring this up because as a student, if I apply and get accepted to two schools, I should be going where the majority of my major credits are going to apply towards that major. But students often have to make this decision completely in the dark. 

We just automated that entire process. So now, say a student applies to three schools and gets accepted to two of them. They log into their account and see how each school will accept every one of their credits. That’s very powerful information. And the moment they’re admitted, it’s triggered, before they even commit to a school. Oftentimes, students used to accept admission and still not know this information because there was a delay in somebody getting it to them. So this is one example of support through information that helps make a well-informed decision.

LW: I imagine many students, from a financial perspective, may not have the luxury of saying, “Oh, well that course won’t add to my degree from a credential perspective, but it was fun.” They have to be really focused, right?

Alvero: Absolutely. And for students on financial aid, they lose their aid because aid is based off of a certain number of credits. So if you’re spending time taking credits that aren’t going to count, you already used the aid for those courses. And so whether it’s wasted dollars out of pocket or wasted financial aid dollars, what happens when you run out of aid and you can’t afford to pay out-of-pocket and now you can’t complete your degree because you took too many courses that wouldn’t apply?

We estimated that we’ll be saving students $1,220 with the new transfer initiative because of the average number of wasted credits for our students, which is in line with the national average.

“What happens when you run out of aid and you can’t afford to pay out-of-pocket and now you can’t complete your degree because you took too many courses that wouldn’t apply?”

LW: How about teaching and learning innovations? What are you working on inside the classroom?

Alvero: I’ll give a very obvious answer, but it is a priority, and it’s artificial intelligence. There’s just so much potential and so much that we’re exploring, and faculty are really very excited about ways in which they can use artificial intelligence to help their teaching, help students learn, but also teach students how to use AI, a skillset they’re going to need in the workforce. 

We recently asked faculty to submit proposals for creative ways of embedding artificial intelligence within their general education courses. And we received well over, I think, 40 applicant requests. We received more requests than we could grant because we provide faculty with a stipend. We want them to report back after the semester about how it went. Did they see a change in student learning outcomes? We want to know if we should be working with faculty to embed these strategies throughout, whether it’s within our math courses or English courses, where we see students struggle. We’ve not recovered since the pandemic with the learning loss, and students are really struggling in those gateway courses. And so not surprisingly, a lot of faculty are trying creative solutions in the classroom to try to improve student learning outcomes.

LW: There is evidence that avoiding remedial classes and going straight into regular classwork tends to have better outcomes for students. Do you think AI could be a tool to help students get up to speed? 

Alvero: CUNY actually moved away from traditional remedial classes for the very reason you mentioned. Instead, we now use a co-requisite model, where students who need extra support are placed in regular classes but with additional hours of support built in. So for example, if a course is usually three hours a week, this one might be five or six hours. In those extra hours, there are opportunities to use generative AI. Let me give you an example: A professor might provide slides to the students, and since CUNY has a license with Microsoft, students can access a tool called Microsoft Co-Pilot, which is a secure AI chatbot that requires a CUNY login. A student could use the tool to say, “Take these slides and create a 10-question multiple-choice quiz for me.” The goal is to help students use these tools to master the material. Of course, we also need to teach students critical thinking skills so they can spot errors, including those that might come from AI. But by using Co-Pilot and other tools we have secure university licenses, we minimize issues like AI hallucinations because the information is based on the class slides, not something random from a public AI platform. That’s just one example of how AI can be used in the co-requisite model to help students learn.

LW:. How are you guys thinking about student well-being? Do you see people, particularly from your seat in the central office, focusing on or investing in these issues?

Alvero: Absolutely, it is definitely at the forefront of most all of our conversations. We work closely with the university student senate so that we have a direct line of communication and they can express student concerns, but it’s about creating a really supportive and safe environment for our students. And how that’s defined—what those needs are—will vary from student to student. For financial well-being, it’s not just about ensuring that they have their basic needs met. It’s also, how do we provide them with financial literacy? Because getting a degree is great, but if they don’t come out with that degree understanding finances and how to manage them to help break that cycle, that’s on us, in my opinion. So we think about it in every single aspect—ensuring basic needs are met, ensuring if anything should happen to a student where they don’t feel safe that they have resources when they need them.

Of course, mental health is really important, but so is academic support, financial assistance, and access to basic needs. We have a program called CUNY Cares, which is based in the Bronx. It’s a one-stop shop where students can go to see all the benefits they qualify for in New York City, instead of having to go from agency to agency. It’s been incredibly impactful for our students because they have someone there to help them navigate this complicated process. They get guidance on things like, “Do I qualify? How do I get all of these services I might be eligible for?” The truth is, many of our students are eligible for far more services than they actually receive.

LW: CUNY is a very pluralistic environment. How do you make people feel welcome wherever they come from, particularly in today’s political climate? 

Alvero: CUNY offers a number of resources to support students from all backgrounds. For example, we have an office specifically for undocumented immigrant students, where they can get help with finding relevant support, both within CUNY and externally. Every campus has a dedicated contact to guide them through the process.

We also have a college language immersion program that’s open to anyone in the community interested in learning English. It not only helps with language skills but also provides college readiness, acting as a pipeline for students to move forward. This approach is really woven into the fabric of who we are as an institution.

LW: How about your focus on helping students connect with careers? Are you thinking, in addition to salary and similar benefits, about the importance of students finding purpose and meaning in their profession?

Alvero: Oh, absolutely. And this is another example of the holistic view. The way I see this, it’s not just about connecting them to the right career. It’s helping them from the beginning figure out the right career choice for them. And so in my dream, which is something I am planning to bring to fruition, students could have one place to really explore CUNY from A to Z. For career exploration, they could figure out what appeals to them, what might they do, and then be connected to what programs exist within CUNY. Because if I enroll at one CUNY school, they’re not going to have every single major. Maybe I realize that for what I’m aspiring to, I’m in the wrong CUNY school. Maybe I should have started somewhere else. How can we help students navigate that? 

And as I’m navigating what programs exist within CUNY academically, what internships opportunities are there? How can we connect students directly to our career partner industries? We’re doing a lot of work with that and integrating career milestones into academic degree maps. Currently, most degree maps are just, “Take these courses in this order if you want to graduate in X amount of time.” But what are the career milestones at different points in time? So it’s this holistic view of exploring careers, academic programs, and career milestones all within one place.

LW: Clearly advising takes a number of different forms at CUNY. How important is that? 

Alvero: CUNY now officially has a Senior University Director of Academic Advisement Initiatives that can help. The colleges are craving this. They’re all trying to do their very best, but until now, we haven’t shared best practices. How can we connect all of the advisors? We have an Academic Advisement Council. Every college has their Director of Academic Advisement, so they are at the forefront of these discussions.

The schools all have their own culture, their own things that their academic advisors must learn and navigate, but there’s also a level of consistency, especially with really critical information: the general education curriculum, appeals processes, how transfer works. These are things that are universal to all the colleges. So rather than having them spend time designing training, how can we serve in that capacity to provide really robust training and provide resources that are universal to all of them, so everybody’s on the same page with some of the foundational, critical information? 

LW: You seem to me like a very humble person, but that sounds like something you made happen?

Alvero: I don’t want credit. It’s a team effort. 

On the first two Sundays in October, the American Council on Education ran a full-page ad in the New York Times targeting both presidential candidates with the tagline “Higher Education Builds America.”  In what was both a PR campaign and a policy brief, the ACE ad was part of a larger effort to promote higher education’s economic value within a bipartisan message meant to withstand either election outcome.  Now that the candidate less likely to embrace their agenda heads to the White House, ACE continues the fight with renewed vigor. 

The face of the campaign is ACE president Ted Mitchell, but the person in charge of it is  Nick Anderson, former long-time higher education reporter for the Washington Post, now ACE’s vice president for higher education partnerships and improvement.  As a former journalist who has observed the highs and lows of a sector considered the bedrock of the American dream, Anderson does not seem defeated or discouraged by the political situation. More than most, he knows that higher education isn’t going anywhere. 

While this may be true, innovation in higher education is something Anderson says is part of the campaign’s message. But messaging is different than policymaking, and it remains to be seen how ACE’s left-of-center advocacy agenda performs in the Republican legislative lock-down. In its open letter to candidates, ACE laid out  a set of priorities that include increasing federal aid for students and research, repealing the taxability of scholarships, reforming the endowment excise tax, and improving the visa process to better support international students. 

As the non-profit’s government affairs professionals work the agenda on Capitol Hill, Anderson and his colleagues will be in forums, and on social and traditional media, getting policymakers and thought leaders to look at the bigger picture.  

Here is an excerpt of our interview for LearningWell.

LW:  Let’s start at the beginning.  What motivated ACE’s new campaign? 

We started the campaign a little before September when we were thinking about what to say to the presidential candidates.  We wanted to articulate some core principles.  We wanted to say to the campaigns: “This is who we are, this is what we do, and here’s what we’d like you to look at when you take office.” 

It’s been a rough year for higher education.  Arguably, it’s been a rough few years for higher education and yet, here we are, definitely wanting to be part of the conversation – the policy conversation and the political conversation and we’re not going away.  Higher education has been part of the country since the beginning, for all of our flaws.  We have grown with the country and helped the country grow.  And now in the 21^st century, we’re here to help it grow some more. In September, we wrote an open letter to the candidates – which was the basis for the New York Times ad – that articulated this vision of our history and our connection to America with a strong message that whoever wins the election we are ready to work with you. 

LW: What is it you hope to communicate through the campaign? 

From a message perspective, we wanted to draw the big picture for folks. We wanted to step away from the controversies of the moment – and there will always be controversies – and remind people that higher education is simply part of the American story. It has been here from the beginning. Thomas Jefferson went to William and Mary and founded the University of Virginia. Abraham Lincoln signed the Land Grant Act that created land grant institutions throughout the country.  There’s the establishment of the HBCU’s, the national enterprise of the community college movement, the GI Bill, the Higher Education Act of 1965, the Pell Grant and on and on. This historical through line of higher education is something we need to really emphasize to President Trump now and to Congress.  

We are not a sector that sprang up yesterday. We are here and we have always been here. When you talk about national security, when you talk about public health and medicine and lifesaving medical breakthroughs, when you talk about the regional economies of this country and the national economy, we have always built America and we will keep on building.  These are the kind of big picture messages we want to advance because, frankly, that often gets lost in the public narrative.

“We have always been part of the American story”

LW: Is ACE concerned about the election of Trump and the anti-higher education rhetoric his campaign employed? 

The rhetoric around the campaign season can get pretty heated, but there are campaigns and then there is governing.  We’ll see what all this means.  Trump hasn’t taken office yet. The new Congress hasn’t been sworn in. We are extending our hand to every national leader from the president to the Senate majority leader, the Senate minority leader, the House speaker, the House minority leader. We obviously will stand up for ourselves but wherever there is opportunity for advancing, we will advance. 

Regarding the attack on higher ed, I would say we are big enough to weather critiques. If there are people outside or inside of higher ed who are labeling us as “woke” or “elitist” or any particular adjective, we have to reckon with that. What does that mean? I would argue that we can absorb those critiques and evolve and take necessary steps if need be, but, more importantly, we need to simply be there and listen so that people understand that higher ed is hearing them. We have to avoid being defensive. We are institutions that promote, elevate and value the marketplace of ideas and political debate. As such, we have to be big enough to absorb any criticism and listen to it.  At the same time, we have to continue to promote our values.  We value academic freedom.  We value free speech. And we value institutional autonomy. 

LW: As part of the campaign, you acknowledge the need for change along with the value that higher ed brings.  What are some examples of that?

We have real work to do on the affordability front. I think it’s two things at the same time. There’s plenty of data that shows that college opportunities are affordable and available in many ways and we need to do a better job at communicating that. We are champions of access and champions of policies that promote affordability. We are champions of the Pell Grant. We are champions of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which had a disastrous year, but it’s now on the road to getting better. 

We want very much to promote the message that college is affordable, and yet we know that there are things that must be done to make it more affordable to more people and to have the value of college be elevated so that families, when they’re thinking about making a significant investment of money, and time, that they think it’s worth it. 

I also want to be crystal clear that what we’re saying here is meant to be maximally inclusive and has relevance for those who choose not to go to college.  Your life could have many paths that intersect with college at different points.  Our fixation with the education of 18 to 22 year olds is well grounded because we all care about our children and their emergence as adults in the economy and in their communities. But that traditional pathway has been shown many times to be too narrow to define what higher education is. There are a lot of people who intersect with higher education after age 25, and we need to capture that in our conception of who we are.

LW: What changes to do you see coming?

The sector is really a vast field of institutions and I think there’s a real value in partnerships between different types of institutions – community colleges and research universities, for example. Universities are an obvious example of fertile ground for partnerships and coalitions that would bring home to average folks that, “Hey, I’ve got college everywhere available to me. It’s not just that distant state flagship or those private universities off on the coast somewhere.”  Promoting community colleges and the wonderful work that they do and their accessibility is critical to that. But promoting the linkages between colleges that can be very different is really essential as well. 

We also have to promote different modalities.  Online education is here to stay. It’s not the enemy, it’s part of our fabric right now. I think the pandemic accelerated that and raised some questions about how it fits with residential higher education, but there’s no question that online higher education is real and important and potentially a crucial area for higher education to expand access to more Americans. There’s also a really important movement of credit for prior learning that we are very interested in helping to integrate into our thinking about higher education.  Innovation is part of higher education. To go back to my theme, I want to emphasize to the thought leaders and policymakers the vastness of who higher education is, what higher education is. 

LW: You have covered higher education for many years.  What is your observation about the state of higher education today? 

I literally covered higher ed directly for the Washington Post for 12 years. And every one of those years there were burning issues that were perceived in some way as an existential crisis for higher ed.  And in the last decade there have been plenty of crises of the moment. Certainly Covid was an existential crisis. There were crises related to “Me too” scandals and questions about sexual misconduct and sexual assault on college campuses that were really crucial to acknowledging the age-old problems of securing safety for students and creating an environment free of harassment and free of intimidation. The last year seemed to have very acute challenges, with the protests (over the war in Gaza) and the congressional hearings, but it’s not the first time that colleges have been rocked by challenges.

LW: What excites you about this new role?

I spent a couple of decades covering education and now I’m fighting for it. That, for me, is a wonderful pivot. There’s a lot of work to do. People in this country care about the American dream and getting ahead. And I think they also care about the free exchange of ideas and all those good things that higher education provides for us.  

Given his background, Dr. Estevan Garcia might be considered an unusual member of a college president’s cabinet. But as Dartmouth’s new Chief Health and Wellness Officer, the physician and public health expert works directly with President Sian Beilock on an issue she has made a well-publicized priority in her first year in office – protecting the mental health of students, faculty and staff. Garcia, who is a pediatrician specializing in emergency medicine, came to Dartmouth from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health where he helped led the effort to address the behavioral health crisis in emergency departments during the pandemic.

It is now Garcia’s job to lead Beilock’s health and wellbeing agenda, most specifically through the implementation of the school’s comprehensive strategic mental health plan called the “Commitment to Care.”  The origins of the plan predate Garcia’s arrival and was informed by a collaboration with the Jed Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting emotional health and preventing suicide in young people. Beginning in 2020, the Dartmouth community lost several students, including by suicide, as the pandemic eclipsed college life.

Four years later, the Jed Foundation featured Dartmouth as a success story in its impact report and Garcia is now focused on the longer term outcome data that will provide a more precise evaluation of their recent work.  He views the plan as a pathway to a wellness culture at Dartmouth that prioritizes self-care, community care and mental health innovation. With an increased staff and budget behind him, Garcia is addressing a number of wellbeing issues often associated with elite institutions, particularly ones like Dartmouth, located in remote areas with less community resources.  These include the stress of perfectionism among high-performing students and the lingering lack of belonging many students feel, particularly those with mental health issues and/or those with diverse identities. As the fall semester brings new and familiar challenges to students’ wellbeing, Dr. Garcia is ready and at the table.

LW: What was the thinking behind having a new position in this area reporting directly to President Beilock?

EG: I think her vision for the role was to elevate student mental health and wellness as a high priority but also to bring under one umbrella campus-wide health and wellbeing. Part of my portfolio is faculty and staff health and wellness so it was important to President Beilock to have that direct communication on all of the activities in this area across campus.

LW: How has your background in public health prepared you and/or motivated you to take on the position of Chief Health and Wellness officer at a college? 

EG: What brought me to this work came from what I saw in emergency departments during, and predating COVID, with adolescents and young adults in crisis. To me, that was really shocking.  When I started in the Department of Public Health {in Massachusetts} I partnered with the Mass Department of Mental Health through the community behavioral health programs, providing options that would divert the mental health crisis from emergency departments when appropriate.  I spent those two years heavily involved in the work we were doing to create an actual road map for behavioral health in Massachusetts. 

My background is in emergency medicine.  I useasthma as an example of the way we look at illness in the emergency department.  You would come to the emergency department after you had gone through your asthma action plan – “I’m a green, I’m a yellow, I’m a red,” — here’s how I step up my care so by the time you came to us, you had exhausted your plan.  Westarted to view behavioral health in the same way.  “I’m at home fighting with my parents, or “I’m depressed, I can’t leave my room” or “I’m in crisis, potentially I’m suicidal” – all of those scenarios have varying degrees of illness and severity.  Ifwe treated them all as emergencies, we would be failing our patientsand our ability to manage true crisis and emergencies.

LW: Do you have a similar strategy around health and wellbeing that you are utilizing at Dartmouth?

EG: When I first came here, it was important to explain to my colleagues what we mean by health and wellness because not everyone understands this. One of the things I did was develop a pyramid that shows the different degrees of mental health needs. The base of the pyramid is the 70% of the students we have here – very successful, high achieving – experiencing the stress that comes with that.  There’s another 20 to 25% who could use some clinical support.  The final piece at the top of the pyramid is the group of students who were most clinically concerning, potentially suicidal, and these are the student we need to act quickly to support and get into the appropriatesetting. 

The goal of this kind of structure is to understand that much of what we do is at the base – that 70% of our students need easy access to services and almost no barriers to the many wellness activities we should be providing across campus. The idea is that college is the right timeto experiment with wellness and to build your portfolio of activities and support strategieswhen you are successful – when you are at the base – so you can manage the challenges that will come your way.  You will be more prepared when you fail a test, or break up with your girlfriend, or have other challenges– all the things that challenge yourequilibrium andcould push you into crisis.

“College is the right timeto experiment with wellness and to build your portfolio of activities and support strategies when you are successful –- so you can manage the challenges that will come your way.”  

For the 20 to 25% in the middle, we have clinical  supports that help themmanage their illness, while also providing access to wellness activities.  With the smaller group, my job is to really help identify them as their situation evolves and get them the support that they need, and this can be a protective setting in a hospital if that’s necessary.  And it is really important that we don’t make them feel that they are alone.  You have to care enough about the students that require services outside of the college to partner with them – to give them time away, with support, and then bring them back with the appropriate accommodations. This is how I see my job.

LW: What have been some of your early priorities?

EG: President Beilock has recently completedher first year as presidentbut was very involved in the creation of the strategic plan for mental health and wellness before that. I would say the majority ofmy work since I came to Dartmouthhas been to implement that plan.  It has multipledeliverables and my job was to take that on and run with it, delivering on health and wellness as a priority for the president and for the campus.

Part of those deliverables involved new permanent staffpositions – across ourstudent health and wellness divisions.  It was really a huge investment by the college and we had to make sure those were the right positions and we were utilizing them in the right way.  

The Dartmouth community has faced several challenges since I arrived.  I think it is helpful to have a clinician at the table.  Health and wellness staff arenot enforcers, but supporters.  We arevery much there to support students, and help them engage in tough conversations. I think partnering with students has been one of the strongest game changers for me personally. I worked with them before as patients but now they are really partners to me in the work we are doing around health and wellness.

LW: What was the history behind the Commitment to Care plan?

EG: When Covid started, we (in reference to Dartmouth) were doing the best we could, but clearly it was very isolating on this campus and colleges across the country. It was not your normal college experience by far here and of course everywhere.  Beginningin 2020, we had several student deaths including bysuicide, and it was clear they needed to address what was happening.  In the summer of 2021, they brought the Jed Foundation in and that led to a major mental health review –  campus visits, survey data, all of that.  Additionally, the provost at the time set up a steering committee to work on an all-Dartmouth strategic plan on health and wellbeing from May 2023 to September 2023, that was the foundation of the Commitment to Care. It was across all campuses – undergrad, grad schools, professional schools. 

What makes it unique is that it is very stakeholder-driven, very student-driven and the result is this multi-year, campus-wide engagement with actual deliverables. What I found interesting when I first came to campus, folks would introduce themselves – students, staff, faculty – and they would say “I was on the committee for mental health” or “I was on the committee for health promotion.”

LW: What are the elements of the plan?  

There are five pillars to the plan which drive the many activities and initiatives that we are working on.  (From materials): Center wellbeing in all we do both inside and outside of academics; Create an inclusive community to foster mental health and well-being for students with diverse lived experiences; Equip students with the resources and skills to navigate both success and failure with strength and confidence; Proactively address mental illness to aid students in reaching their goals; Invest in innovative applications of evidence-based approaches to respond to changing environments and needs.

It is a very broad approach involving all aspects of the college.  Regarding the second pillar, we pride ourselves on attracting first generation students and students with diverse lived experiences, and it is important for us to center those lived experiences in what happens on campus, particularly here in rural New Hampshire. This includes how we address mental health and wellness and creating a sense of belonging.

President Beilock was clear that focusing on wellbeing is critical to a successfulacademic career. One of the key pillars for us is helping students navigate success and failure, this is number three.  There is an understanding that our students are incredibly driven. They are gifted and they are used to being at the top. They are not used to failure. But failure is part of succeeding and it is how you pick yourself up and move forward that is important.  We call it normalizing life.

Regarding wellness services, we have made significant gains here.  One of the first things I did was to move wellness to be a separate divisionwith a director reporting to me.  Our health services are really top notch and I wanted wellness to be on equal footing.  Additionally, we are arural community sometimes makingrecruitment difficult.  To better meet the needs of our students, we needed to find ways of extending and diversifying our services.  We partnered with a tele therapycompany, that gives us 24/7 behavioral health support for students and that made a big difference in accessibility when our team was not in the office.  We have several hundred students who have engaged with the service.  We have unlimited access to 30 minutes therapy slots any time of day or night and will beexpanding that to 50 minutes for those who need it.

The addition of the tele service didn’t lower our need for in-person services but it enabled other students to access therapy who might have been uncomfortable doing so before.  We know that a quarter of our students utilize our mental health services and that is similar across our student groups.  That is a significant point since historically, underrepresented students seek help less frequently. 

And the other piece – which I think is one of the harder ones – is thinking about data analysis and evidence-based approaches to make sure that what we are doing is impactful. This is really important because as we are delivering on a lot of these initiatives, we need to know what is helpful and not helpful and then redirect our time, energy and resources accordingly.

LW: You have said that some of your work is inside as well as outside the classroom.  What has been your experience there?

EG: There are a few tracks to this work, one involving academic policies and calendars that students have said would be meaningful to them in terms of reducing their stress levels over academics.  There’s also some interesting things faculty are doing in their classrooms by integrating mindfulness techniques in their academic disciplines including physiology and languages.   These are just some of the ways we are partnering with academic leadership, and I will say it does make a difference now that we are at the table.

As part of his listening tour, Matt vandenBerg, the new president of Ohio Wesleyan University, created a YouTube and TikTok video of himself not listening to a legendary superstition that stepping on a seal outside of University Hall would bring bad luck. In the hilarious parody, vandenBerg cautiously steps, then stomps, dances, and jump-jacks on the seal before he is beset by a series of calamities that have him appearing at a university function sporting tattered clothes and a black eye. 

@ohiowesleyan

POV: your university president decides to test fate and steps on the seal – bad luck level: Presidential Edition!

♬ original sound – Ohio Wesleyan University

There is much to unpack here. First, it takes a certain level of confidence for a new president to humble (vandenBerg might say “humiliate”) himself in front of his students, and on their own medium at that. It is also refreshing to see a college president bringing some levity to a position that, certainly of late, is not perceived as being much fun. His inauguration on April 19 was another opportunity to depart from the implied rules. In referring to Paul Revere’s famous ride on the same date, vandenBerg evoked a rebellious spirit in laying out nine new initiatives the school would be taking on, including partnerships with the community and other institutions that would increase access and affordability. In his speech, vandenBerg rejected a number of “unhelpful” conventions in higher education – the idea that faculty and administrators are naturally at odds, that host communities are either competitive with or overly-reliant on their university partners, and, perhaps most importantly, that the liberal arts are for the fortunate few and will not bring the kind of return on investment Americans are looking for in a college degree. 

In our interview, President vandenBerg talks about that speech, as well as what drew him to Delaware, Ohio, how he plans to distinguish OWU’s mission from “what everyone else promises,” and what new college presidents might learn from the public’s current frustration with higher education. 

LearningWell: You were most recently at Presbyterian College in South Carolina. What made you leave there and come to OWU? 

MV: My family and I were committed to staying at Presbyterian College for a good number of years, but serendipity hits in your life at times, and for us, serendipity hit in the form of an old friend calling me to say, “I know you’re not looking for a new job opportunity. I just need you to pick up the phone and listen.” This friend happened to be leading the search for the presidency of Ohio Wesleyan University, and I realized that from that short conversation with her, I didn’t just want to know more about Ohio Wesleyan; I needed to know more.

So much of the spirit of the institution, its situation in the higher education landscape, and its aspirations resonated with me. But I also thought it might bring some important enhancements to the life of my family. After a consultation with my wife, I decided to throw my hat in the ring, and the rest is history. 

We had some trepidation, but in the end, moving my family to Delaware, Ohio, was a no-brainer, primarily for three reasons. Number one, the people. The students, faculty, staff, trustees, alumni, and the community members that we met were really special. They wanted to do big things. Together, we were going to be able to do transformative work to elevate and amplify a tremendous institution. 

Number two, the community. The city of Delaware, in Delaware County, loves its university. It was evident to us at first blush. There’s been a bedrock of trust built over decades between the institution and the community. That stands in stark contrast to where a lot of small, private, residential liberal arts institutions are situated. They are often in struggling communities and are the sole anchor that is relied upon to drive the local economy, to bring all of the artistic and humanistic enhancement to the community. That’s simply not the case with Ohio Wesleyan University and the city of Delaware and Delaware County. This is a healthy place looking to go from great to phenomenal, and that is always a charge that I get excited about. 

The third thing that got me so excited to come here was the transformative impact that OWU has on the lives of young people. I believe that in higher education we often focus on the transaction: How much does it cost? What degree do you graduate with? What is your first-year salary? Are you seeing that immediate return on investment? To me, if done well, higher education is not a transaction. It is a transition into adulthood, and it is supposed to be transformative. Ohio Wesleyan University intrinsically understands that. It’s baked into the ethos of this place. They’ve got 40,000 success stories to showcase that impact. So, that’s how I went from not looking for another position to realizing the calling of my life was to come to this spot in Ohio. 

LW: You recently had your inauguration. Tell me a little bit about what you said that day. What was most important for you to lay out in terms of your vision for the school?

MV: We wanted to be rebellious in terms of what an inauguration actually is. They are often kind of boring, stuffy — too focused on the new person getting the job. I believe that an inauguration should be an inflection point in an institution’s trajectory. It should be an opportunity to celebrate the past and everything that brought us to where we are. It should be a chance to grapple earnestly and honestly with the challenges and opportunities that we have today. And then it should also be a way to galvanize ourselves around an exciting future. 

If you’re a college president and you’re not leveraging the concerns and criticisms for self-reflection and self-improvement, you’re missing a big opportunity. 

That day, we made the case that we need to seek and secure distinction in this overcrowded higher education landscape. We were pretty direct in tackling that head-on. Not only will we not thrive in the future if we don’t figure out what it is that makes us distinctive, but we’re also doing a tremendous disservice to students and families by not pointing out the meaningful differences between institutions. We all tend to sell ourselves the same way using the same tired cliches: “Come here because we have small class sizes, faculty who really care about you and who know your name. We have tight-knit communities. We have beautiful campuses. We have successful alumni. We’ll give you a job or an internship. You’ll learn how to apply what you’re learning in the classroom to an external context.” Those are things that every institution is saying right now, and it can contribute to this sense of white noise that students and their families have when they go on different campus tours.

I want Ohio Wesleyan University to be able to answer the question of what makes us truly unique. The title of my inaugural address is “What’s in the Water?” — What is it about Ohio Wesleyan that we offer to students that they can’t or don’t or won’t get anywhere else? And how do we channel our energy, our resources, and our focus in the same direction so that our unique, meaningful, defensible value proposition truly shines? 

We invoked the spirit of 1842, our founding year, and we connected that to the historic spirit of the day on which the inauguration actually occurred. It was April 19^th — the day of Paul Revere’s ride and the day of the Battles of Lexington and Concord.  That day sparked the American Revolution. So, we invoked the spirit of rebellion of that day to discuss how OWU began and to proclaim with confidence and joy where we were going. 

In 1842, a local Methodist minister went door-to- door, just like Paul Revere did, to rally the countryside in a call to do something important and in service to a greater purpose. That was a fun message to deliver, but it had a serious undertone. The idea was to apply a sense of rebellion to the way we move forward, and that means categorically rejecting all of the things in higher education that are broken, all the things that we think are supposed to be truisms but that are absolutely not. For example, the understanding that faculty and administrators are supposed to be at odds with each other — we categorically reject that notion. The idea that the liberal arts are not inherently valuable as an educational model, that they don’t lead to good careers, that they are a poor choice if you’re looking for return on investment. We categorically reject those notions. And lastly, we wanted to showcase that at OWU, we don’t just talk about things; we do them. Our love language is action. We made nine significant announcements that day, and they all boil down to three different things. One is investing in people, especially our students, faculty and staff; two is building community, especially through investments in our infrastructure; and three is changing lives through innovative partnerships. 

LW: Can we talk a little more about that third goal? 

MV: Establishing partnerships is a big part of what we want to do. We want to radically expand affordability and accessibility and build equitable pathways that help students get to where they want to go in their lives. We want to deliver on the student’s timetable, not necessarily just higher education’s timetable. So, we announced a few new ways of doing just that. 

Columbus State Community College is the major two-year institution in central Ohio. Together, we launched a powerful three-part partnership to help community college students realize that there is a viable pathway for them to a four-year degree at a liberal arts institution. The first component of our partnership is called “Preferred Pathway.” It’s fairly common for community college students to want to pursue a bachelor’s degree once they graduate. The problem is that, at many institutions, their credits don’t always fully transfer and they don’t maintain their hardfought status in their major.  They are promised this two-year pathway to a bachelor’s degree, and then they discover that it’s going to take them longer and cost them more to graduate than they were told. It can feel to them like a bait-and-switch. Moreover, for a lot of students, including those transferring in from a community college, just the idea of going to a private liberal arts college can sound expensive – perhaps even out of reach, financially. We knew we could improve that experience for students. In partnership with about 25 different professors, we hand-built transparent, hassle-free two-year pathways for students across 20 different majors. It’s the most comprehensive pathway program that Columbus State has among national liberal arts universities.

The second part of the partnership attacks the real and perceived cost issue, head-on. For up to 25 students with at least a 3.5 GPA at Columbus State, we have a tuition match program, so they actually pay the Columbus State tuition rate to attend and complete their Ohio Wesleyan University degree. The tuition match program means that students now not only have the logistical means to succeed, but they now have extraordinary financial support as well. No other university, public or private, can match that commitment.

We want to democratize access to the transformative benefits of a liberal arts education.

The third part of our partnership addresses a vexing national issue – and certainly one that affects our region as well. It’s the looming teacher shortage and the dearth of people entering the teaching profession. We don’t think that we can solve that problem on our own, but one of the things that we can do is begin to reduce the barriers to entry for people who do have an interest in the teaching profession. How do we encourage those students who feel a calling toward this work to get their credentials and degrees without saddling them with crippling debt?

In partnership with our local Delaware County school systems and Columbus State, we found a new way to deliver extraordinary value and encourage more teachers to enter the system. Using the College Credit Plus program in Ohio, students in their junior year of high school are able to earn credit toward their associate degree from Columbus State. By the time they graduate from high school, they get not only a high school diploma, but also an associate degree, and then they can jump seamlessly into Ohio Wesleyan University and complete their bachelor’s and teaching certificate in just two years. This program cuts the time to completion in half and reduces their costs dramatically. 

Another partnership, the Delaware County Promise, is a great example of our vision for the future. Delaware County is considered the healthiest, wealthiest, and fastest-growing county in the state of Ohio, and the unfortunate truth is that not everyone participates equally in that prosperity. We can prove over and over again that higher education is the great social mobility agent, but a lot of people who are from disadvantaged backgrounds, even in Delaware County, don’t think about going to their local liberal arts college, because they dismiss it as being out of reach. This was one of the earliest problems I remember thinking about when I came here. I started talking with city and county leaders, and we came up with an exciting program to tackle that problem, which we announced at the inauguration. “If you are from Delaware County or go to school in Delaware County, and you earn a 3.5 GPA in high school and your family makes $100,000 a year or less, you can now go to Ohio Wesleyan University absolutely tuition-free.” We worked out a way, through our own investments in financial aid, to make that possible and then partnered with the community and the Delaware County Foundation to make it happen. 

Ultimately, what we really want to do is to democratize access to the transformative benefits of a liberal arts education. We want to be able to reach anyone for whom the liberal arts can be a life-changer. We want a student’s personal choice to determine where they attend college, rather than financial barriers, social constraints, self-confidence constraints, or other challenges. We want personal choice and fit, as decided by the individual, to be the ultimate determinant. 

LW: Major change, as opposed to tradition, is not something we often associate with higher education. What are your thoughts on that?

MV: Higher education certainly features some significant strengths. For example, shared governance, academic freedom, and free speech strengthen what we do and how we do it. But we can improve in some areas.  Among our relative weaknesses is our sense of toxic egalitarianism — the idea that we have to do everything with the same amount of effort, that we can’t give anything we do more attention unless we give an equal measure of attention and investment to everything else. Most people who start a business, or run a business, understand that that is no way to succeed. We need to know our distinctive value proposition and make disciplined and strategic decisions accordingly.

Moreover, higher education has tended to have an incremental approach to mustering its way through challenges by adding a few programs here or there, adding a few more students, and reducing operating expenses a little bit. My abiding notion is that this moment in our history is not a time for incremental strategies alone. We should be thinking about continuous improvement — how we can be better and better at what we do — but if we don’t start breaking some of the implied rules about what higher education is and what it is supposed to be, we are going to miss the mark as our society – and students’ needs – continue to change at unprecedented levels.

LW: Do people ask you why you wanted to become a college president at a time when higher education, and presidents in particular, are under such scrutiny? 

MV: The presidency of a college can be a hard job, no doubt, as I said to a group of aspiring vice presidents and presidents in Washington, D.C., last week. I told them, “If you’re thinking about a presidency simply because it gives you a fancier title, because the pay is better, because you think people will respect you more, or because you receive more visibility, this job will eat you alive.” 

One underrated quality of liberal arts institutions is that we’re fundamentally good for democracy.

You have to want to do this work because it’s a calling. I’ve known I wanted to do this job since I was 20 years old. I know that is an oddly specific sense of vocation for a 20-year-old to have, but I have always believed in the value of higher education and particularly in the power of liberal arts colleges to transform lives. I don’t think liberal arts colleges are for everyone, but I do think they are for a lot more students than who currently realize it. That is what gets me out of bed in the morning. Religious connotations aside, I see myself as a liberal arts evangelist, helping to bring the word of what we do to more people who would benefit enormously from this important educational philosophy and delivery model.

One underrated quality of liberal arts institutions is that we’re fundamentally good for democracy. We promote and engender in our students an appreciation for civic participation, free speech, intellectual inquiry, and service to others. And in these fractious times, we think it’s critical for our institutions to serve as an antidote for the deficits we see in our society’s discourse. Our educational approach is uniquely effective at training students to engage in constructive dialogue, especially amidst disagreement and difference. We believe that more people need to learn how to be productively engaged citizens who understand how their government works and who can work to address problems in ways that bring others together, rather than in ways that exacerbate divides. In the coming months, OWU will seek to amplify its role in that vital work. We think it’s essential to our democratic republic. And that work is just one more example of the vital role of higher education.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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?”