Category: Perspectives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LW: What have we lost in all this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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