Month: October 2025

BentleyPlus

Posted on by Mollie Ames

This September, The Wall Street Journal ranked Bentley University the 12th best college in America. Its criteria included considerations such as the institution’s impact on salary and how quickly the degree will pay for itself. While pleased with the bankable metrics, leaders at the Boston-based business university will tell you their real differentiator is fostering the personal formation of their students.  

“We put a lot of emphasis on technical fluency and quantitative literacy, but what really makes the difference in the marketplace is the ability of our students to think critically, to communicate extemporaneously with comfort and poise, and to exhibit confidence, not hubris,” said Brent Chrite, President of Bentley University.

Helping students gain and demonstrate these attributes is the thinking behind BentleyPlus, a competency development program focused on encouraging experiences that lead to dispositions such as resiliency, purpose, and agency. While reflecting the business university’s high regard for the liberal arts, BentleyPlus is a separate and intentional effort to get students to understand that marketable skills are not confined to the classroom. 

BentleyPlus began as a pilot in 2021 and is now a university-wide effort combining career readiness with dimensions of wellbeing. The program involves four major pillars, starting with an introductory program where first-year students select two out of 11 competencies to work on throughout their time at Bentley. The competencies, such as ethical reasoning, leadership, and work ethic, are organized into three buckets: cognitive skills (Think), intrapersonal skills (Develop), and interpersonal skills (Act).  

Students are then encouraged to pursue co-curricular experiences that help them develop these competencies — not by adding more to their plates but by making what they’re doing more meaningful. BentleyPlus advisors meets with students three times a year to help them reflect on their experiences and articulate their value. An awards ceremony with a BentleyPlus certificate completes the program. 

While a nod to the university’s holistic pedagogy, BentleyPlus also reflects a concern, among employers nationwide, about the lack of “durable” skills in entry-level employees — everything from communication and collaboration to grit and work ethic. Another factor driving the project is the persistent emotional and mental health issues college students and recent graduates are reporting, including disengagement with work and school post-pandemic.

While a nod to the university’s holistic pedagogy, BentleyPlus also reflects a concern, among employers nationwide, about the lack of “durable” skills in entry-level employees.

As vice president of student affairs, Andrew Shepardson has his eye on all of these phenomena. He sees BentleyPlus as more evidence of the university’s long history of student-centered education. In 2014, Gallup released the groundbreaking Gallup Alumni Survey, originally known as the Gallup-Purdue Index, showing the influence of certain college experiences on career readiness and wellbeing. Shortly afterward, Bentley became one of the first schools in the country to enlist Gallup in conducting its own alumni survey. 

As with the national research, Bentley’s alumni reported higher levels of wellbeing correlated to experiences like “having professors who make me excited about learning,” “having someone who cared about me as a person,” and actively participating in extra-curricular activities.  

“That information was huge for us in terms of sending a strong message to our students and faculty,” Shepardson said. “You may be a finance major fixated on working at a hedge fund, but you would really benefit from taking a discussion-based humanities course or working on an initiative off campus.”

Shepardson said that while students regularly participate in co-curriculars, he noticed they can struggle to articulate how these experiences transfer into skills in the marketplace. He recalled one example of a senior who became flummoxed when asked in a job interview how his experience as president of a club had helped prepare him for the position he was seeking.  

“He made no connection between this significant leadership experience and what might be expected of him in the real world,” Shepardson said. 

A natural partner for BentleyPlus was the team from the Pulsifer Career Development Center, who, as front-liners, recognized the importance of curating durable skills in addition to academics. “Our career folks thought this was phenomenal,” said Lauren Hubacheck, assistant vice president for student affairs. “They said, ‘We can do all the career development work with our students, but you all are connecting tangible stories that show skills like dialogue and leadership.’”   

While focused on competency building, BentleyPlus eventually took a stronger turn towards wellbeing, as Hubacheck and Shepardson began to see this as the through line in all of the work they were doing.   

“Employers were telling us that the greatest number of leaves of absences were with entry-level employees and for wellbeing purposes,” Hubacheck said. 

In talking with his staff and colleagues around the country, Shepardson was hearing about disengaged students whose anxiety was keeping them from talking with their professors or connecting with other students.  

“It became apparent that wellbeing was the higher order,” Shepardson said. “We needed to give students a clear understanding that their ability to work on a competency was not going to be successful if they didn’t have that wellbeing piece in place right from the beginning.”

This year, BentleyPlus 2.0 was launched with its own strategic plan; a full-time associate dean, director, and assistant director; and a commitment from leadership to promote wellbeing in all aspects of university life. 

The Underlying Competency 

Rebecca Jimenez is the newly hired associate dean of wellbeing and BentleyPlus. She said she had her first “pinch me” moment when working the negative mindset table at orientation, where students were asked to select from an array of cards displaying unhelpful concepts like blame and self-doubt.  

“I said to them, ‘Let’s work on how to change that,’ and they loved it. They did the exercise with such intention. I thought, Wow, they really care about this stuff.” 

Jimenez had been working on what she calls “wellbeing communications,” an effort to help people understand what wellbeing means in their lives and to arrive at a definition that incorporates all of its associated elements. Often confused with wellness (mindfulness and yoga), wellbeing can mean different things to different people. After extensive research, Jimenez created a new wellbeing narrative for the university that is part of the BentleyPlus strategic plan. 

“Wellbeing at Bentley is a dynamic balance of personal and community wellness, where students feel supported, connected, and empowered to flourish,” the plan now states. “It’s about caring for oneself, making intentional choices, nurturing meaningful relationships, and engaging in environments that promote joy, purpose and belonging.” 

As part of the BentleyPlus first-year program, students take a wellbeing self-assessment and develop wellbeing goals to be addressed over time with their advisors. Right now, all of the BentleyPlus advisors are student affairs professionals, but the enthusiasm they convey in working one-on-one with students has attracted the interest of other community members, including faculty.  

For Jimenez, bringing BentleyPlus into the classroom is an important next step. 

“Not only can we make wellbeing front and center in the classroom, we can help faculty connect what they are doing with wellbeing outcomes. We can help them say out loud to their students: ‘What we’re doing here is critical thinking.’” 

As with the pilot, the new version of BentleyPlus has the strong backing of career services. Staff there suggested that first-year students participate in the wellbeing self-assessment prior to a popular career development course, acknowledging that wellbeing work proceeds career prep. Perhaps most significant is the new way they encourage graduating students to consider their career choices. 

With support from BentleyPlus, they now ask: “Does the organization you are interviewing with align with who you are as a person? Do they value building relationships and connecting with others?” 

These may just be the questions today’s employers are waiting to hear. 

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

Questions and Answers with Wendy Kopp

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Wendy Kopp was fresh out of Princeton when she launched Teach For America, the premier teaching corps for college graduates hoping to change education and, with it, the world. Along the way, Kopp was able to prove that early career choice involving proximity to social challenges was the most fertile ground for strong leadership. Her proof of concept is the success of the program’s alumni — a group that includes leaders of education, social innovation, and government.  

Over 35 years later, Kopp is working to reinvigorate the national call to service among a generation jaded by the weight of the world’s problems and drawn to a culture, on and off campus, that puts “I” before “We.” Kopp, who is now the head of Teach For All, has recently launched Rising Generation, a campaign of sorts to change the perception about what constitutes a successful career and what it takes to be the kind of leader the world needs. 

The initiative aims to counter the declining participation among recent graduates in social impact jobs and the prevailing narrative that lucrative careers are the best path for our brightest students. In this interview with LearningWell, Kopp lays out the barriers and opportunities inherent in bringing today’s students into jobs that will change people’s lives, as well as their own.

LW: What was your main motivation in launching Rising Generation?

WK: For 36 years and counting, I’ve been obsessed with the question of how to inspire the next generation, first, to commit themselves to the work of Teach For America and, now, to the similar organizations across the global Teach For All network. Working alongside many others across the world, I think we all felt collectively like we were pushing a boulder up a hill in terms of inspiring the engagement we need for this work. 

In a way, I would think that it would be easier than ever to recruit this generation to commit two years to teach in under-resourced communities — to go through that kind of learning journey that gives them the capacity to tackle these systemic inequities throughout their lives. The challenges of the world — the inequities of the world — are more visible than ever. And yet, statistically speaking, more recent graduates are foregoing these opportunities and putting their energy towards, say, finance, consulting, and tech, than they did even ten years ago. I’m just constantly obsessed with that puzzle, and that was one factor.

“The ability for young people to assume professional responsibility in proximity to injustices is really crucial for developing the leadership we need in the world.” 

And then the second is the growing evidence we have across the Teach For All network about just how transformative those two years are for young people. That’s led me to believe that the ability for young people to assume professional responsibility in proximity to injustices is really crucial for developing the leadership we need in the world. 

Our research shows that through these two-year commitments to teach, these young people come to believe in their own self-efficacy and agency and come to believe even more in the potential of students and families in low-income communities. Their analysis of the issues they’re addressing shifts from thinking it’s more a technical fix — that more funding will solve the problem — to believing it’s a deeply adaptive systemic challenge. 

And their priorities shift. Across the world, 75 percent of these individuals of all different majors and career interests, who begin their two-year commitments to teach unsuspectingly, end up committing themselves to this mission long term. They’re working long term as teachers, school principals, school system administrators, social innovators, advocates, policymakers, and elected officials.

What that research shows us is that not only are we getting a different group of people who might not otherwise have engaged in this work and are staying with it but this experience is turning them into the leaders we need: people who have a sense of agency, who have a sense of possibility, who understand there’s no silver bullet solution and are committed to tackling the issues long term. 

Another factor, I have to admit, is my own kids. I have college-aged kids and, in spending time with them and their friends, I’ve learned more about their experiences and what they’re thinking about, and that gave me a sense of possibility that we could do something about this. 

I think it’s all of that. It’s seeing the challenges of recruiting the next generation to this work, understanding just how formative these kind of professional experiences are in generating the leadership we need in the world, and then finally coming to believe that we could actually do something about this problem.

LW: In a LinkedIn message about Rising Generation, you note that data from the Deloitte Global 2024 Gen Z and Millennial Survey showed some of those generations’ lowest–ranked considerations in deciding where to work were “its values and purpose align with my own,” “the positive impact it has upon wider society,” and “the opportunities it gives me to address social problems.” I’m guessing that was disappointing. What do you make of this, and do you think it reflects a real turn away from social impact careers? 

WK: Initially, I thought it was really surprising because there’s so much evidence that this generation cares so deeply about the challenges facing the world. I think there’s a deep concern among many, many young people that they would love to help make the world a better place. But what the latest research shows us is that they’re not thinking that the way to do that is through their jobs.

This is not a new phenomenon. The more I’ve talked to people, the more I’ve come to think of this as a societal norm. We think about our jobs like our houses. We get a job. It meets our needs, and then it’s how we do our jobs that matters — how we work with others, how we vote, and what we volunteer for that enables us to make a difference in the world. 

We need to really challenge that and help people understand that to tackle these big systemic challenges, it is going to take a whole lot of full-time, long-term work in the arena. It requires being close to the roots of the issues. It’s going to take going through the learning journey, trying things, learning from that process, and really playing the long game. 

One thing I’ve discovered is that there is such power in just naming this issue. That’s true for young people. It’s true for people at the university level. The most valuable resource in the world is the time and energy of our most educated young people, and we need to be conscious about that. We need to start thinking a whole lot more about how to make sure that their energy is tackling our biggest challenges and that these young people have the early experiences that will enable them to actually be successful in tackling those issues.

LW: We hear a lot about “sellout jobs” — this idea that our highest performing students are just being funneled into higher paying careers at the expense of doing good in the world or even deriving purpose from what they do. What do you think has led to this phenomenon? 

WK: There are so many different factors, but let’s unpack it a bit. Many believe this is an economic issue — that students are graduating with greater debt and greater financial burdens and are more worried about their financial futures. Those factors are real, but it’s not right to attribute this phenomenon to these factors.   

“Instead of thinking these four years are going to be a time of great exploration, they are met early on — sometimes as early as freshman year — with corporate recruiters.”

First, we should question the financial narratives that young people are telling themselves. If you really start talking to these students who are taking the “sellout jobs” and get your head around what they think their baseline salary requirement is, you’d be shocked. 

What the research shows is that students are far more likely to work in consulting, finance or technology if they are from an economically privileged background, so we can’t attribute this whole thing to the financial state of affairs. 

I think a really important factor is that these young people aren’t experiencing a campus culture that fosters deep intentionality and reflection on what they see as their purpose in life. What are their values? Where do they want to put their time and attention? Instead of thinking these four years are going to be a time of great exploration, they are met early on — sometimes as early as freshman year — with corporate recruiters.  

Before they can even think about it, here comes the very lucrative summer internships and then these two-year, post-college programs. There aren’t the countervailing forces on these campuses to create a culture of reflection and intentionality, and that’s a huge part of it. 

I will say there’s something that’s giving me hope in looking at the research and talking to young people about what matters to them, and that is their priority around learning and development. The corporations have convinced them that the path to rigor and learning is through working for their firms. One of the things we’re thinking about with Rising Generation is how we can help young people understand that if they want to be a civic leader in our country and in our world, they need to find their way to a professional responsibility that gives them proximity to the roots of the social challenges we face; only then will they gain the perspective, the insights, the relationships, and the credibility to ultimately make a difference against the big systemic challenges we face.

LW: Do you think this reflects a kind of “I” vs. “We” culture on college campuses? 

WK: We think a lot about that at Teach For All because we really believe that we need to shift the purpose of education from being about individual attainment to equipping young people to shape a better future — not just for themselves but for all of us. And I think if we don’t shift what happens in our classrooms to work towards that end, we won’t ultimately have the world that we’re all hoping for.

LW: How do you approach a problem like that?

WK: Well, this is how we see our work across the Teach For All network. The independent, locally led organizations in our network are working to develop what we’ve come to call “collective leadership” for ensuring all children fulfill their potential. By this, we mean we’re developing a critical mass of diverse people working around the whole ecosystem around children who are all on the same mission and who are reflecting and learning together and collaborating. As we develop this leadership, we’re orienting towards a vision of a world where all children have the education, support, and opportunity to shape a better future for themselves and all of us. We’ve recently launched the Global Institute for Shaping a Better Future to foster learning among leaders everywhere — across and beyond our network — who are committed to reshaping education in this way.

Wendy Kopp meets with students on a visit to a rural school in Yunnan Province, China. Courtesy of Teach For All.

LW: Do you get the sense that graduates feel as though they will get to contributing at some point in their lives? 

WK: Yes. We have to give young people some perspective that you can’t go spend 15 years working in a skyscraper and be confident that you can shift gears and know exactly what to do to tackle the social inequities in the world. You have to go through a deep learning journey to be able to do that.

LW: What is it that’s unique about the Teach For America and Teach For All experiences in this regard? 

WK: I think that Teach For America and the Teach For All network partners are giving young people a chance to attain that proximity. You’re in a classroom; you’re seeing the microcosm of the world and all its social issues play themselves out in your classroom, and you’re on the front line directly working with students and families and others in the community. Our theory has always been that this would create leaders for social change far beyond education because the issues you see in a classroom are so systemic and cross-sectoral in their nature. 

LW: What can colleges and universities do to embrace that concept and try to help students think about the value of these early, social impact experiences? 

WK: I think this is so crucial. In the early years of Teach For America, we had so much allyship among professors and career service offices and college presidents in putting the Teach For America opportunity in front of their graduates. I think over time, we started hearing from folks that they needed to be neutral — that they couldn’t offer preferences for one job choice over another. And I’ve thought a lot about that because they’re professing neutrality, and yet honestly, they’re anything but neutral. 

A lot of people — a lot of career service offices — are encouraging young people to take more lucrative paths for a variety of reasons. There are notable exceptions. I think about Michael Crow at A.S.U., who every year invites the top few hundreds of students to his house and says, “I want you to do Teach For America.” That makes a big difference. There’s a lot that universities can do to help people think about these options that might not be as present for them, given the recruiting practices of these corporations. But by and large, that’s not our experience, and that’s very unfortunate.

LW: Finding meaning and purpose in your career has proven to lead to improved wellbeing, but you don’t hear a lot about that in corporate recruiting, I’m guessing.  

WK: This is one of the reasons we’re embarking on the Rising Generation initiative. I think we need to help young people understand — really think about — what it’s going to take for them to feel successful. I think we need to challenge the common narratives around that. There’s evidence showing that your wellbeing in the workplace is the biggest factor in your overall wellbeing. If you’re feeling the sense of purpose and connectedness to people through your work and a sense of agency and you’re able to contribute positively, that’s going to have a huge impact on your mental health. 

I think about the people I know who have done work that involves proximity to big issues and have stayed the course. They are some of the most connected, grounded, and fulfilled people I know. I think we need to help young people understand the long-term consequences of those first decisions that they make. 

LW: That’s a big part of Rising Generation, I assume. What are the ways you are going about this work?

WK: We’re really thinking about how to create a norm shift in how people think about first jobs.  

We’re organizing our work in three buckets initially. One is around data,  research, and learning — understanding how this issue is playing itself out differently across different segments of campuses and different student demographics and understanding what’s influencing young people and their job choices. We are going to pursue student-led focus groups to understand and inform the path forward. 

The second is what we’re calling University Community and Learning. We’ve found our way to so many people who are working on these university campuses, from some college presidents to career service office heads to professors and thought leaders, and all who are really focused on doing something different — who are challenging the prevailing narrative and working to foster more intentionality and reflection among students. We are aiming to bring them together and build community among them so that folks can support and inform each other and think together about how to propagate these experiments. 

The third bucket is around the options themselves because if you are a college student who doesn’t go the traditional path, it can be really hard to find your way to a job that gives you the kind of proximity you would hope for. We need to make the existing options more visible and create new ones. We think there may be some real opportunities to do that. 

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

Cultivating Purpose-Driven Leaders with Julia Macias

Posted on by Mollie Ames

To Julia Macias at Washington University in St. Louis, “leading is not about formal position.”

“Everyone,” she said, “regardless of formal status, has the potential to influence and energize others towards a common goal.” 

On this episode of Invented Here, Macias explores that concept in discussing the origins of Washington University’s George and Carol Bauer Leaders Academy, where she is the director of student leader development. She shares how the program is scaling up to help all Washington University students have integrated and immersive opportunities and become purpose-driven leaders of character and capability.

You can reach Jack Tucker, LearningWell’s strategic communications manager, at jack@learningwell.org with questions, comments, and other ideas.

Collective Wellbeing

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Faculty and staff at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Va. don’t typically have resources for new campus initiatives that aren’t absolutely necessary. 

But when students at the formerly Methodist-affiliated school requested a renewed focus on spiritual life, administrators were able to answer those prayers. Renovations began on the college’s chapel, which was empty and in disrepair, to forge a revamped, interfaith space for not only religious gatherings but meditation, lectures, and performances.

The explanation for the sudden deepening of Randolph’s pockets is a share of a $3.275 million investment from the Endeavor Foundation. The two-year grant, which started in November 2023, funded the collaboration of 13 different small liberal arts colleges to develop new ways of enhancing student mental health and wellbeing. Last month, Endeavor announced it has committed another $5.22 million to launch a second phase of the project over the next three years. 

At a time when many are counting liberal arts colleges out, questioning their focus on broad intellectual development over vocational training, Endeavor is betting on them for the same reason. Its support of Randolph and peer institutions stems from a belief that their “whole person” educational approach and close-knit, engaged communities are uniquely poised to help young people find the sense of purpose and belonging that so commonly elude them. And by working together, the theory goes, the schools may push their innovation and impact even further.

“Ultimately, our hopes were to generate initiatives that would strengthen these institutions — that would showcase the liberal arts and the power of a liberal arts in a world that’s increasingly skeptical for various reasons of its value,” said Ashley Kidd, the program director of grants and research at Endeavor.

In 2016, Endeavor first united small liberal arts colleges after noticing a trend of “really wonderful, community-engaged” schools struggling against declining enrollment and finances, Kidd said. The foundation invited presidents from some of these at-risk colleges to discuss institutional issues and other developments, and the convening became an annual tradition.

Over the following years, Endeavor awarded various presidents small to mid-size grants to tackle discrete projects on their campuses. Toward the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, though, the foundation approached the larger group with a proposition: to form a collaborative of their schools with a focus on one issue of their choice.  

“The conversation turned to: ‘What do you really all need? And if we were to invest a larger sum of money in something that was a collaborative project or two, what would be the primary initiative or initiatives on your plate?’” said Lori Collins-Hall, who was involved at that point as interim president of Sterling College in Craftsbury Common, Vt. 

“The presidents very quickly gelled around student mental health and wellness, and from there, the collaborative was born,” she said. 

13 colleges from Maine to New Mexico, Ohio to North Carolina, signed on to join what has since been named the Endeavor Lab Colleges (E.L.C.) Collaborative. Collins-Hall also left her post at Sterling and became the E.L.C.’s project director. Beyond Sterling and Randolph, the initial member institutions included Antioch College; Bennington College; Blackburn College; Northland College; Prescott College; St. John’s College, Annapolis; St. John’s College, Santa Fe; Unity Environmental University; Warren Wilson College; and Wells College. 

Not all would make it. Wells and Northland have since closed, while Unity Environmental left the collaborative after structural shifts, including an emphasis on remote learning, meant it no longer shared the profile of the other member schools. 

Bennington College in Bennington, Vt. was particularly influential in the presidents’ decision to coalesce around wellbeing. Shortly before choosing this focus, the leaders had heard from Bennington President Laura Walker on the results of a study she commissioned to assess student needs and institutional gaps around mental health on her campus. That report, Walker said, “became kind of the foundation for not only our work at Bennington but also the work of the Endeavor project.”

“The presidents very quickly gelled around student mental health and wellness, and from there, the collaborative was born.”

Next, the presidents agreed on four areas to direct their collective and respective institutional energies: infusing curricula with wellbeing-related content; helping students explore their sense of purpose and meaning; creating experiential learning opportunities, especially in nature; and enhancing clinical and nonclinical services, like counseling and peer support.

The majority of the first Endeavor grant went towards compensating faculty and staff, who came from all levels across the institutions, in their joint work to determine the best ways of approaching and executing the collaborative’s priorities. The remaining money was split among the schools for practical capacity building according to distinct institutional needs. 

Randolph dedicated funds to not only the redesign of its chapel but the addition of a comprehensive telehealth service, TimelyCare, as well as mental health training and professional development for staff. A minor in contemplative studies, an interdisciplinary field exploring the human contemplative experience, also took off.

Bennington, meanwhile, invested in the renovation of its fitness center and a revamp of the first-year career preparation course. The college’s standing interest in the arts also inspired a pilot course combining art engagement with mental health processing.

“It was a wonderful mix,” Bennington’s President Walker said of the class. “The students reported they had increased motivation, reduced isolation, and positive changes to mental health. And because so many of our students are artists and creative, it also gave them the sense that they had power to change people’s lives and their mental health through their art.”

For both Randolph and Bennington, another perk of the Endeavor partnership has been the ability to leverage the funds to raise money from other sources. By pointing to dollars already secured for, say, bolstering interfaith programming at the chapel or building out career services, the schools have garnered even more support for their efforts.  

By the end of phase one, the collaborative’s ideative efforts had resulted in the transformation of the initial four priorities into five fine-tuned initiatives to guide future work: Cultivating Curricular Review and Innovation, Building Models of Community Care and Resilience, Center for Purposeful Life and Work, Mapping Belonging, and Nature Rx.

Mapping Belonging and Nature Rx evolved from the commitment to experiential learning, where Mapping Belonging uses reimagined campus maps to cultivate student belonging to the place and its history, while Nature Rx helps connect students to the school’s outdoor spaces.

Unlike phase one, when colleges might use their individual funding to pursue whichever of the priorities was most compelling to them, this next stage will urge every school to tackle each of the five initiatives. According to the president of Randolph, Sue Ott Rowlands, this part of the new grant is especially important. 

“We’re not just going to pick and choose what we do,” she said. “We’re going to commit to all of the five areas, and that’s going to push us — make us really expand our engagement and thinking and open up a lot of opportunities for our students.”

Also in the second phase, the collaborative efforts of the colleges will continue to grow. Currently, a working group of faculty from across the participating schools is spearheading each of the five initiatives, while the chief academic officers of every college also work together.

Part of the mission of the working groups is to devise a way of assessing the impact of their particular initiative. On a larger scale, each institution will measure how the whole of the Endeavor-funded work is affecting campus by conducting pre- and post-surveys on student wellbeing, as well as that of faculty and staff.

Despite the colleges’ limitations resources-wise, Bennington President Laura Walker said she’s been excited to have access to the wealth of “real talent” on their other campuses. “I think one of the best things about this project has been the collaboration among colleges and the support group,” she explained.

Collins-Hall said she thinks most participating faculty and staff have been similarly “jazzed” to work together and come to meetings. “I have people who have been doing this for two years on a biweekly schedule who are excited to be back for year three. That doesn’t happen with any committees in higher education.”

At Randolph, one of the unexpected challenges of Endeavor’s support has been acclimating faculty and staff to the idea that there are now resources to pursue projects that were once off the table — that they no longer need to stretch every dollar to the extent they might have before.

“It was a very interesting process to say, ‘No, wait, we can do that. We have Endeavor funds to help us with that,” President Ott Rowlands said.

Now she’s telling her team: “Think a little bigger.”

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

Looking to Michigan

Posted on by Mollie Ames

When asked about the state of higher education in America today, University of Michigan’s president, Domenico Grasso, is unabashedly ambitious about what needs to be done and who needs to do it. “As the most comprehensive and distinguished university in the world, the University of Michigan bears a profound responsibility not only to lead in scholarship and innovation but also to serve as a thoughtful compass in challenging times,” he wrote in a recent white paper. 

Grasso is leading Look to Michigan, a multi-faceted, multi-year mega-plan that is at once a capital campaign, media blitz, and strategic realignment aimed at optimizing Michigan’s inner and outer strengths. With five priorities, including the establishment of the American Dialogue Center, Look to Michigan assumes a leading role in demonstrating to the American public why higher education is such a valuable asset at a time of diminished support and extreme politicization. As the title suggests, Michigan asks, “If not us, then who?” 

Launching such a bold, public agenda may seem unusual for a president serving in an interim capacity, but Grasso vowed he was never going to be just a placeholder when he took over the role from former President Santa Ono. Grasso is the former chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, a branch of Michigan that serves largely first-generation students. He’s a staunch believer in the life-changing power of higher education.  

As a Michigan alum, and a rabid Wolverines football fan, Grasso is as comfortable talking about Michigan’s waste production during home football games as he is running the Prez Quiz during T.V. timeouts, when students answer trivia questions to win U-M swag. In this interview with LearningWell, President Grasso offers his perspective on the many issues he and his peers are dealing with and why he believes the best defense is a good offense. 

LW: As a Michigan alumnus and a chancellor here for many years, how did you feel when you were chosen to be president of the University of Michigan? 

DG: I would first say that I was surprised because I did not expect it. And I did not seek it. But of course, it was an honor because Michigan is, in my mind, the best university in the world. We have 110 programs in the top 10. We have a world-class medical center that’s unrivaled. We have an athletic enterprise that is second to none as well, and all that is together under one roof with three campuses that have different missions and constituencies. It’s just a terrific place.

LW: Speaking of the three campuses, U.M.-Dearborn, which you oversaw as chancellor, is very different from Ann Arbor. Have your experiences at Dearborn influenced your new role? 

DG: One of the things that I experienced at Dearborn is that it has a very close-knit family of students, faculty, and staff. Everyone is super nice. They are not internally competitive with one another. They come from modest means; they are authentic and are there to improve their lives. Many of them are very humble while also having a great deal of talent, and that always impressed me. 

The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor is a very high-powered school. There is a lot of, I would say, energy on this campus that we all benefit from, but I’m trying to bring some of the values — the empathy, the family-like interactions — I witnessed at Dearborn here to this campus.  

LW: I read your LinkedIn post with a message to your students about civility and kindness. Is that part of what you are talking about?

DG: I am a staunch advocate of the First Amendment, and I’ve said that in multiple places. But being a staunch advocate of the First Amendment doesn’t mean that we have to give up our kindness and civility in exercising our First Amendment rights. This is one of the things that I would like to bring to campus: the ability to talk across differences and perspectives in a way that we are truly trying to reach common ground and not just trying to preserve our own particular views.

LW: How do you go about doing that? 

DG: It’s not easy. I think that the first thing to do is to model it. I have a lot of people around me with very strong opinions. How I interact with them models how to interact with people that may have differing opinions from you. Before this semester, a number of my senior staff and I met with every single Jewish group that we could find in southeastern Michigan. And we also met with every single Muslim and Arab American group, all part of an effort to encourage a peaceful and collaborative reentry into the fall semester. 

So far it seems to have paid dividends because we have not had a lot of the acrimony that we had on this campus in the past. People want to be heard. They want to express their opinions, and they want to be taken seriously. And that’s what we’re trying to do. For me, it’s about this concept of intellectual empathy: trying to understand other people’s perspective. Not just tolerate it but to really understand it. You want them to find their voice but also have open ears.  

LW: You are hitting the ground running with the announcement of the Look to Michigan campaign. What is that all about? 

DG: We have our $7 billion capital campaign, which we recently launched, and a strategic vision we are now calling Look to Michigan, which is consistent with our capital campaign but different. 

There are five pillars of Look to Michigan. The first is transformative education: the need to deliver life-changing education focused on students’ agency and purpose, empowering them to lead with integrity, intellectual empathy, and rational thought. The second is human health and wellbeing, which has to do with all sorts of things for which Michigan is so well known, from health equity to cutting-edge medical care and transformative medicine. 

The third one is civic engagement and democracy. Here, we are launching a civil discourse center, tentatively called the American Dialogue Center. The fourth pillar is energy and climate change, and the fifth is advanced technologies — everything from AI to nanotechnology. We’re investing $1 billion over 10 years — a hundred million dollars a year — in these initiatives. This isn’t a check-the-box to get everything done in a year or two. This has a 10-year shelf life, and we’re only in year two. It’s a vision that spans a decade and is centered on these core initiatives.

LW: These are not just internally facing initiatives. This is also a public campaign, correct? 

DG: Absolutely. One of the main focuses of the Look to Michigan campaign is to regain the public’s trust in higher education. The University of Michigan was founded in the public interest in 1817, and it’s remained there ever since. A lot of schools have been struggling to make a case as compelling as ours in this regard, but here it is in our institutional D.N.A. 

“The United States of America is the greatest country in the world, in large part because we have the world’s greatest universities. If we do anything to threaten that, we’re threatening the future of the United States.”

The Look to Michigan campaign is also a media campaign. This month, we’re going to have full-pageads in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the Atlantic, and other publications — digital, print, audio, social media. And it’s going to explain that we are committed to the public interest and why that matters to every citizen in this country.  

The United States of America is the greatest country in the world, in large part because we have the world’s greatest universities. If we do anything to threaten that, we’re threatening the future of the United States, and we have to make that point very clear. Some of my colleagues at Princeton and Harvard are saying the same thing, but this is Michigan’s chance to move into the passing lane and to be the leader in reacquiring the public trust in the mission and purpose of higher education. 

We have 7,000 faculty members. I want each one of them to consider themselves public intellectuals and ambassadors for this cause. I want them to explain their work to the general public in terms everyone can understand. They have to be able to translate what we do in a way that a farmer in Nebraska, a textile worker in New England, or an office worker in the southwest will understand. As part of the campaign, we’re going to use digital storytelling to connect to the public good and explain why Michigan is so special — unique — in this area. 

LW: Does it help your message that you are such a highly regarded public university?  

DG: We are a public university, but I want us to stop using that as a qualifier because I don’t want us to be the best public university in the country or in the world. I want us to be the best university in the world that is in the public interest.  

LW: How much of this is to fend against what’s going on in Washington? Or is it more of a long time coming?

DG: I think it’s the latter. In certain ways, it is a defense against criticism that has been directed at higher education. But we should have been doing this whether it was Trump or Obama or whoever in the White House. I think we need to have a better social contract with the American people as to why higher education is so valuable, so worthwhile, and so worthy of investment and trust. The erosion of it started many, many years ago — well before MAGA. I watched this happen, and I thought it was devastating for universities and for America, and I thought that Michigan was well-positioned to take the lead on reversing this trend.  

LW: That’s a lot to take on for an interim president.

DG: I told the board of regents right at the start that I was not going to be just a placeholder. Either we were going to move the university forward or I wasn’t interested in the job, and everybody agreed with that.

LW: I am guessing that the “attack on science” is not going over well at Michigan.  

DG: No. We are a very science-focused school, and a lot of great things have come out of the University of Michigan. Science comes from “scientia,” which is the Latin word for knowledge, and it’s hard to argue against wanting to obtain knowledge. I know people think there are different views of it, but the whole scientific method — the Enlightenment — was all designed to help us improve the human condition, not to determine the human condition. For us to walk away from that at this point in time would be devastating for the future of humanity.

LW: Is it difficult to keep everyone on campus calm among such uncertainty in higher ed? 

DG: Everybody is concerned about the future because every time we open up a newspaper or a website, another school, or another nine schools, is in the hot seat. Everybody is a little bit on pins and needles, but I don’t want that to influence our commitment to who we are and to what we do.

LW: You’ve been a Wolverine for a long time as both a student and administrator. Now that you are head of the pack, are you having some fun as well?  

DG: It’s a lot of work — an enormous amount of work — and it is all-consuming, but it is also so much fun. As graduates — my wife Susan is a graduate three times over — we have such a sense of love and affection for this university, and it is terrific to be here in this position. It’s surreal, and it’s just been a wonderful experience. 

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

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History, Mission, and Character

Posted on by Mollie Ames

The week Charlie Kirk was killed on a campus across the country, a group of undergraduate researchers at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Penn. used their Friday meeting to talk about peace.

To guide their conversation, they turned to the records of students who came before them — who grappled with different controversies, but ones that similarly shaped their young lives and emerging beliefs. In 1960s editions of Seton Hill’s century-old newspaper, The Setonian, these archivists-in-training discovered voices both in support and rejection of the war in Vietnam. They analyzed photographs of their predecessors in protest, carrying signs insisting “Apathy Kills,” as well as an op-ed from the bipartisan National Student Committee for the Defense of Vietnam, which decried its radical peers and their “irresponsible opposition to our country’s policy in Vietnam.”

The past may not be prescriptive, and Vietnam-era editorials may not offer a how-to guide for peace in 2025, but there are lessons to be learned from shared history. That’s the idea behind Seton Hill’s new character education initiative, of which exploring The Setonian archives is one key part. The institution-wide endeavor centers efforts to derive and promote the values and virtues the Catholic liberal arts university was built on. That pursuit, its organizers hope, can strengthen students’ individual intellectual and personal development, while uniting the broader campus in collective understanding.

Literature professor Sarah Marsh, who is also the director of university curriculum, began spearheading Seton Hill’s entry into character education last year. She was inspired, she said, by a growing recognition that the purpose of higher education should encompass “making people,” rather than simply transferring degrees. From there, the direction for a character project at Seton Hill fell into place, given the strong sense of institutional identity she said already grounds school and student life. “Many universities have missions,” Marsh said. “Ours is present in the day-to-day.”

Seton Hill’s lasting mission stems from its unique origins as a project of a Catholic order of women religious, the Sisters of Charity. This congregation was founded in the early 19th century by Elizabeth Ann Seton — the first American-born saint for whom Seton Hill was named — and was devoted to spiritual as well as humanitarian work, particularly in service of the poor, education, and medical care. In 1882, what became the Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill purchased the plot where Seton Hill University now sits, using it to educate younger pupils before launching a junior and then four-year college for women by 1918. 

A century later, Seton Hill is a coeducational university home to around 2,000 students of any (or no) denomination, yet loyal to the Catholic social values that started it all. “Anytime we’re having a conversation about curriculum, anytime we’re having a conversation about student wellbeing, anytime we’re having a conversation about student life, we are talking about the history and the charism of the Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill,” Marsh said. 

“You feel a deeper connection in knowing and understanding who you are, how you’ve been formed, and the people who have come before you.”

A charism, Marsh clarified, is a set of values or “spiritual gifts” that the Sisters of Charity, who are still active, strive to embody in their vocational life. For those at Seton Hill, these gifts are expressed by four pillars — welcoming, learning, celebrating, and serving — that guide their work in the world and the university to this day.

In 2024, the pillars took on new meaning when Marsh decided to make them the crux of her vision for character education at Seton Hill. Awarded a $50,000 Capacity-Building grant from the Educating Character Initiative (E.C.I.) at Wake Forest University, she assembled a team of interdisciplinary faculty and staff to devise a unique definition of character education for the university. The succinct, one-page document that came out of their year’s work outlines how each of the institutional pillars reflects different character virtues. 

The pillar of welcoming, they write, refers to the virtue of hospitality, which involves a “conviction of the fundamental, and therefore equal, dignity of every human being.” The pillar of learning refers to humility and wisdom, virtues that allow people to recognize the limits of what they can know, as well as their personal biases. Celebrating refers to gratitude for others and life itself. Serving refers to prudence, or the translation of wisdom into practice to promote good.

With the clarity of these definitions, Marsh expanded the project further, applying for a second round of support from the E.C.I. This one, secured in July 2025, is an Institutional Impact grant of $438,000 to convert the character concepts Marsh and her colleagues developed into practice. Over the next three years, this process will feature two main initiatives: incorporating a series of character education courses into the required curriculum and enlisting students to pioneer research into the student newspaper archives.

The added coursework will form a “vertical pathway,” Marsh said, with one character education class for each grade level. For the youngest students, the First Year Seminar will introduce them to the fundamentals of character education and the Seton Hill mission. For sophomores, another pre-existing course called Faith, Religion, and Society will be infused with character theory to, Marsh said, “make students more aware of the virtues that they are practicing as they work through the content of that particular class.”

As for the subsequent two, higher-level courses, they have not yet been realized. When they are, juniors will take one called Setonian Mission, offering a more advanced understanding of the institutional virtues and taught by interdisciplinary faculty. Finally, seniors will engage in a Setonian Seminar, which Marsh called “a liberal arts capstone” to consider the purpose of their education and its translation to professional life. 

But even as this coursework emphasizes the virtues Marsh worked hard to pin down, she is sensitive to the idea that they intend to control or limit students’ thoughts or behaviors. “We’re not trying to create a person who votes in a particular way. We’re not trying to create a person who worships in a particular way,” she said. “We are trying to create the kind of person who has made commitments based on an authentic and rigorous experience of some fundamental things that we think are true about being human.”

A key part of this work is to help students find out who they are and who they want to be; that’s where exploring the student newspaper archives comes in. University archivist Casey Bowser, who is leading this research alongside Marsh, said the newspaper is an ideal point of reference for institutional character because it is the richest source of student voices. “It really defines a culture of our community in a way that almost few other records do,” she said. 

Seven undergraduates have embarked on the archival project, wherein the first semester offers training in how to use the newspaper archives and the second lets them pursue an original research question about character. As the students use the paper to ask how and why character has appeared at Seton Hill, they are also exercising the institutional intellectual virtues, like the humility to accept what they cannot know. Moreover, at a moment when student interest in the modern-day student newspaper has been waning, they will consider how to refresh the content and the value of journalism more broadly. 

According to Bowser, engaging with the archives has already left her research interns more energized about the legacy of not only The Setonian but the institution as a whole. “It’s almost like your own family,” she said. “You feel a deeper connection in knowing and understanding who you are, how you’ve been formed, and the people who have come before you.”

That sense of connection to the past, Bowser said, has also been powering students’ express desire to do justice to the publication going forward. In fact, the research project will culminate in the production of a governing document to guide the future of the paper — by drawing from its history. 

“It’s meant to be a bridge,” Marsh said, “between what we have done before and what we are doing next.”

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