Tag: career

You have expert insights—plenty of them. You give impromptu lectures in office hours, debate podcast guests midrun and readily join boisterous debates over dinner. Maybe you’re even drafting a book that builds a careful case from your expert point of view. But when it comes time to write your own op-ed? That sharp idea can start to feel too complex, too niche or—let’s be honest—too wordy for 800 words aimed at a general audience.

That’s not a failing; it’s a feature of your training. Academics are trained to distill ideas for their peers, not for nonspecialists. You argue carefully, if not compactly. You cite meticulously, not conversationally. But public writing demands something different—skills to illuminate complex concepts in a way that an intelligent lay reader can follow, feel and act on.

Before you spend an afternoon translating your expert insight into an 800-word article you pitch to a newspaper or magazine, run your idea through this op-ed readiness test. It won’t replace compelling writing, but it may help determine whether your idea is ready to leave the seminar room and live, persuasively, on the opinion page.

1. Who cares? It’s a tough question, but not a cynical one. Just because something fascinates you doesn’t mean that it matters to the broader public. That’s not a judgment of your topic. It’s a reminder to find the resonance. What’s at stake beyond your personal experience or corner of the discipline? You don’t have to write about what’s already dominating headlines. In fact, if your idea surfaces something overlooked or offers a fresh lens, it may be exactly what public discourse needs. Urgency is not always about volume; it’s often about insight.

So ask yourself: Who, beyond academia, might find your idea clarifying, challenging or useful? Who might see their own experience differently—or see someone else’s for the first time? Who, if they read what you have to say, might think differently about something that affects their life, work, vote or values? If your answer is, “Well, maybe more people should care,” you might be onto something. But part of your task is to show them why.

2. Why now—or why always? Editors love a good news hook. If your idea connects to a breaking story, an upcoming decision or a public debate gaining steam, then run with it. But run fast. In journalism, “timely” means submitting within hours or a day or two, not weeks. If something is happening right now and you have a fresh angle, start writing.

Of course, not every op-ed needs a news peg. If your idea speaks to an enduring question or a slow-burning issue—and does so with clarity, urgency or surprising insight—it still has a shot. Just know that in an editor’s crowded inbox, a time peg can help your piece stand out. An “evergreen” op-ed may need to work harder and land stronger to compete.

3. Can you make your case by paragraph two? You don’t have to dumb down your argument, but you do have to speed it up. Public readers and their editors have strong opinions about long, slow windups. Spoiler: They don’t like them.

Try writing a working headline for your piece that’s under 60 characters. Then distill your argument in one or two crisp, compelling sentences—no acronyms, no jargon and no “hence” or “thus.” (Also, no “as Foucault reminds us.”) These sentences should appear early, ideally by the end of paragraph two. At first, this mandate can feel reductive. But being concise isn’t a betrayal of complexity. It’s a tool for focus. You’re not flattening your idea; you’re making it easy to find. If your piece needs detailed footnotes or a literature review, it’s probably not (yet) an op-ed.

4. What’s the aha? Your op-ed should offer insight that readers haven’t already heard several times this week. If your takeaway is “what you’ve heard, but with citations,” then it may still need sharpening. Some of the best pieces offer a twist such as an unexpected data point, an odd-but-illuminating comparison or a perspective that flips conventional wisdom on its head. You’re trying to make an intelligent reader think, “I hadn’t thought of that.”
5. Are you writing to connect—or to impress? You’re not writing to prove you’ve done the reading; you’re writing to help someone else think differently. Your op-ed should feel like an intelligent conversation over coffee, not a cautious explanation in a lecture hall. You don’t have to be breezy or punchy (unless that’s your style), but you should sound like a real person with a distinct voice. This isn’t about being casual for its own sake. It’s about being readable.

If your draft feels like it could be suitable for peer review, try loosening the syntax. Ask yourself: How would I say this to a smart friend who doesn’t share my training? Readers want active verbs, not hedges. When you write like someone who wants to be understood—not just cited—you don’t dilute your thinking; you make it land.

6. Will a reader remember it tomorrow? A good op-ed doesn’t just inform, it lingers. It leaves a mark, even a small one, on a reader’s thinking. That might come from a vivid image, a well-turned phrase or a question that unsettles something they thought they knew. If your argument is technically sound but leaves no lasting impression, it’s worth asking: What do I know that will stay with the reader? What might echo later, in a moment of uncertainty, over a dinner-table debate or in a voting booth?

If your idea for an op-ed makes it through these six questions, chances are it’s ready to leave the seminar room. From there, it’s all about shaping the piece—tightening the structure, sharpening the language and leading with your point. An op-ed doesn’t need to say everything you know on your topic. It just needs to make one point well, in a way that readers will remember.

Not every idea belongs on the op-ed page—but yours might. Ask the questions, trust your instincts and, when you’re ready, write it, shape it and send it.

And if you’d like more help along the way, sign up for my monthly newsletter. You’ll get notice of each new article in “The Public Scholar,” plus practical writing tips, behind-the-scenes insights from my work and inspiration from other academics finding their voice in public spaces. Your expertise is hard-won. What might happen if you shared what you know more broadly?

It is hard not to feel at least occasionally helpless these days trying to operate between the twinned pincers of a Trump administration steamrolling our democracy and an AI industry pursuing its goal of automating all means and matter of human expression.

It seems like, combined, they can take away just about anything: our grants, our international students, our jobs, our freedom.

Things get worse when those of us toiling away as laborers see those in positions of leadership at the institutions that should be bollards blocking the path of antihuman, antifreedom movements instead lying down so as to be more easily run over.

(Looking at you, Columbia University.)

Arguments about how we should consider some measure of accommodation (to fascism, to AI) abound, and some are even reasonable-sounding. These are powerful forces with their hands around the throat of our futures. Certainly no one can be blamed for doing what it takes to nudge those hands back a few millimeters so you can get enough air to breathe.

Those with the power to do so can seemingly take just about anything they want, except for one thing: your dignity.

Your dignity must be given away by an act of free will. Maybe I was naïve to think that more people would be protective of their dignity in these times, but I see so many instances of the opposite that I’m frequently stunned by the eagerness with which people are willing to hurl their dignity into the abyss for some perceived benefit.

The worst examples are found in the members of Donald Trump’s cabinet, who are occasionally tasked with a public performance of sycophantic fealty to their dear leader. It is amazing to see accomplished people treat the president of the United States like a toddler in need of a level of affirmation that would make Stuart Smalley blush. I think I understand the motives of these people: They are wielding power at a level that allows them to literally remake society or even the world.

If it is your life’s goal to shield chemical companies from the financial responsibility of cleaning up the “forever chemicals” that cause cancer and miscarriages—which The New York Times reports is the apparent mission of some monster named Steven Cook—maybe it’s worth it to slather Trump in praise.

But the decision to jettison one’s dignity made by the New York Times writer who looked at these displays and decided they are an example of leadership via reality television host rather than aspiring authoritarian is tougher for me to figure. While the article correctly identifies some of the lies conveyed during the spectacle, the overall tone is more of a “can you believe he’s getting away with this shit?” approach, rather than a “shouldn’t we be concerned he’s getting away with this shit?” approach, which would be far more accurate to the occasion.

I can believe he’s getting away with it when the paper of record continually covers Trump like a novel spectacle practicing unusual politics rather than an authoritarian.

I don’t know how one maintains their dignity when writing a story about Trump deploying the United States military in the nation’s capital that gives any credence to a “crackdown on crime” given that this is transparently BS, and yet the Times reflexively characterizes what is happening as a “crackdown” (see here, here and here), rather than, I don’t know, an “occupation.”

In other jettisoning of dignity for strategic gain news, I have been, to a degree, sympathetic to the pre–Trump II stance of Vanderbilt chancellor Daniel Diermeier and WashU chancellor Andrew D. Martin’s views of higher ed reform anchored in institutional neutrality.

I disagreed with that view as a matter of principle and policy approach, but this is a debate over principles.

Now that we find ourselves in the midst of the overt Trump II attempts to destroy the independence of higher education institutions, I found their answers to a series of questions from The Chronicle’s Megan Zahneis about an apparent dispute between them and Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber about higher ed’s stance in relationship to Trump astounding as a performance of willed ignorance.

These answers would make Hogan’s Heroes’ Sergeant Schultz proud: “I know nothing! I see nothing.”

Earlier in the interview, both chancellors make it clear that they are seeing a benefit to their institutions in the current climate, potentially enrolling more students who have been turned off by the turbulence being visited on their elite university brethren of the Northeast.

They have apparently decided that they now have an advantage in the competitive market of higher education by their willingness to wink at an authoritarian push.

Speaking of their fellow institutional leaders, Diermeier says there that there has been “no despising or disrespect or hatred among the sets of colleagues we’ve been engaged with,” and while I’m not a colleague of these gentlemen, let me publicly register my strong disrespect for their performative cluelessness in the interview.

Let me also suggest I can’t imagine someone who respects themselves following that path, and I’m grateful to the institutional leaders like Christopher Eisgruber who are willing to express reality.

I don’t know what the future holds. It’s possible that WashU and Vanderbilt are positioning themselves as the favored elite institutions of the authoritarian regime, ready to hoover up that federal cash that Trump is threatening to withhold from the schools that will not bend to his will.

I’m genuinely curious if that scenario is worth one’s dignity.

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The one week my Yale graduate Anthropology 101 class spent studying Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men felt like a glass of cool water on a hot summer day. Learning about her scholarship and her refusal to accept the way her white colleagues recentered whiteness through their research on nonwhite people reminded me of the anthropologists who first led me to the discipline.

But the fact that Hurston was the sole Black woman anthropologist whose work we studied suggested that she was the only Black woman anthropologist whose work was worthy of the ivory tower. As if she was the only Black person committed to using the tools of anthropology to create knowledge about the people relegated to the Global South in ways that are mutually beneficial to the researcher and their interlocutors. Hurston’s singular inclusion in my graduate training paired with the general exclusion of Black and brown scholars aimed to pacify the problematics of anthropology without upending the infrastructure of a discipline that is in crisis.

As my graduate school years continued, I grew increasingly disillusioned by the idea of a career in academia. Even though I had come to terms with a definition and practice of anthropology that felt useful, identifying as an anthropologist myself felt wrong. How could I proudly claim affinity to a discipline that knowingly promulgated the othering of Black and brown people around the world and within the discipline itself? The answer would come through my research on Black Capitalists, and through my own experience beyond grad school as a Black entrepreneur and Wall Street professional.

My experience as a Ghanaian American on Wall Street at Goldman Sachs and JPMorganChase exposed me to the ways in which Black people use the tools of capitalism to create new outcomes centered on collective thriving. They led me to my definition of what it means to be a Black Capitalist: a Black person who is a strategic participant in capitalism with the intention to benefit from the political economy in order to create social good. What they were doing was complicated, contradictory and, for many, oxymoronic.

To many, to be a Black Capitalist is to be in an identity crisis. Black studies scholars I’ve spoken to have gone so far as to say, “Black Capitalists don’t exist!” or “It’s impossible for any good to come from capitalism!” I’m usually taken aback by such rebuttals. Because if the Black people I spent hours talking to who identified themselves as Black Capitalists don’t actually exist in real life, are they fictions of my imagination? And is my own experience invalid? Black Capitalists are as real as the version of capitalism we experience today that aims to entrap us all. Black Capitalists are merely trying to get free and help others do the same while facets of society attempt to place limits on how they can narrate, and ultimately live, their own lives.

Surely, one’s ability to disavow capitalism depends on what continent they are on, or come from. For the Black Capitalists I’ve spoken to who are from Africa, for example, it’s neither a matter of loving capitalism nor wanting to dismantle it. Living in and through capitalism is the reality of trying to build a life in countries that imperialist capitalist forces have already destroyed and continue to exploit. If they are to live their later years comfortably in their homeland, leaving it in the meantime is a requirement. And hustling in the Western world to achieve this dream is so often the method. So for them, much like it was for my mother, who emigrated to America from Ghana with the haunting knowledge that her family was counting on her and that “failure was not an option,” the question becomes: For our own collective thriving, how do we game a system that was founded on us as its pawns?

So how are Black Capitalists using the tools of capitalism to create new outcomes that allow them to secure the bag and the people they care for? Their methods are as diverse as Black people themselves. But the common denominator between all of their practices is a focus on communal uplift.

Some are strategizing throughout key industries within corporate America to develop sustainable initiatives that subversively promote diversity, equity and inclusion—especially in the wake of its demise. Some are leveraging grassroots approaches to build community-forward real estate clubs that make the dream of homeownership and passive income possible through the resources—money, credit, knowledge and social connections—that are shared among members.

Others are teaching aspiring entrepreneurs in their community the fundamentals of effective entrepreneurship and shepherding them through the process of collectively buying successful small businesses formerly owned by white entrepreneurs. Some are using the skills they developed during their tenures on Wall Street to create investment firms on the African continent to help grow pan-African businesses focused on health care, technology and agriculture that generate value for the African consumer. Some of the companies these Black Capitalists are building are worth millions of dollars—even billions. Irrespective of the spaces Black Capitalists occupy, their impact in Black communities globally is invaluable in the fight to close the racial wealth gap that has Black people lagging behind across key wealth indicators including homeownership, small business ownership and financial health.

But their existence is unnerving to both Black and white people alike, for very different reasons. For many Black people, the very idea of a Black Capitalist makes their toes curl, because when you’ve been on the wrong side of capitalism for so long—as its most valued commodity but never its greatest beneficiary—it’s hard to believe that another relationship to capitalism, or a more equitable version of it on our journey to collective liberation, is even possible.

And for white people invested in upholding the racial hierarchy that shapes social, political and economic life, they worry and wonder what they are set to lose when Black people are organized and move as one unified body in an economic system that nurtures individualism. Both perspectives reveal the underlying truth that money and our obsession with it is a culture of its own. And this revelation presents a growing problem society has created but has yet to solve: What do we do when money becomes the dominant culture in a society wherein most people don’t have enough of it to live?

In the face of paralyzing social anxiety about the expansiveness of Black life, anthropology’s superpower lies in its ability to use evidence from the human experience to upend our social scripts and create space for us to dream up new ways of being that are both scalable and sustainable. I realized that being a Black Capitalist and being a Black anthropologist were both seen as oxymorons. I now gravitate toward the spirit of Zora Neale Hurston and other exceptional Black anthropologists. I learned that I can be a different kind of anthropologist who uses the tools of anthropology, like ethnography, oral histories and participant observation, to tell new stories about Black life that are restorative, hopeful and reflective of the power Black people carry.

But even so, my existence as a Black anthropologist is unnerving to “scholars” who benefit from and are invested in perpetuating the harms of traditional anthropology. To raise the standard of knowledge production to ensure it is created in community with those who play a role in developing it threatens the validity of how scholars have traditionally conducted research and the scholarship that is held in high esteem. It’s damning enough that anthropology is like a snake eating its tail. My presence is the proverbial pain in the discipline’s side—a reminder of the work that is needed to transform the discipline, and realize what anthropology can be, but has yet to become.

Earlier this month, higher education policy leaders from all 50 states gathered in Minneapolis for the 2025 State Higher Education Executive Officers Higher Education Policy Conference. During a plenary session on the future of learning and work and its implications for higher education, Aneesh Raman, chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn, reflected on the growing need for people to be able to easily build and showcase their skills.

In response to this need, the avenues for learning have expanded, with high numbers of Americans now completing career-relevant training and skill-building through MOOCs, microcredentials and short-term certificates, as well as a growing number of students completing postsecondary coursework while in high school through dual enrollment.

The time for pontificating about the implications for higher education is past; what’s needed now is a pragmatic examination of our long-standing practices to ask, how do we evolve to keep up? We find it prudent and compelling to begin at the beginning—that is, with the learning-evaluation process (aka credit-evaluation process), as it stands to either help integrate more Americans into higher education or serve to push them out.

A 2024 survey of adult Americans conducted by Public Agenda for Sova and the Beyond Transfer Policy Advisory Board found, for example, that nearly four in 10 respondents attempted to transfer some type of credit toward a college credential. This included credit earned through traditional college enrollment and from nontraditional avenues, such as from trade/vocational school, from industry certification and from work or military experience. Of those who tried to transfer credit, 65 percent reported one or more negative experiences, including having to repeat prior courses, feeling limited in where they could enroll based on how their prior learning was counted and running out of financial aid when their prior learning was not counted. Worse, 16 percent gave up on earning a college credential altogether because the process of transferring credit was too difficult.

What if that process were drastically improved? The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning’s research on adult learners finds that 84 percent of likely enrollees and 55 percent of those less likely to enroll agree that the ability to receive credit for their work and life experience would have a strong influence on their college enrollment plans. Recognizing the untapped potential for both learners and institutions, we are working with a distinguished group of college and university leaders, accreditors, policy researchers and advocates who form the Learning Evaluation and Recognition for the Next Generation (LEARN) Commission to identify ways to improve learning mobility and promote credential completion.

With support from the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers and Sova, the LEARN Commission has been analyzing the available research to better understand the limitations of and challenges within current learning evaluation approaches, finding that:

• Learning-evaluation decision-making is a highly manual and time-intensive process that involves many campus professionals, including back-office staff such as registrars and transcript evaluators and academic personnel such as deans and faculty.
• Across institutions, there is high variability in who performs reviews; what information and criteria are used in decision-making; how decisions are communicated, recorded and analyzed; and how long the process takes.
• Along with this variability, most evaluation decisions are opaque, with little data used, criteria established or transparency baked in to help campus stakeholders understand how these decisions are working for learners.
• While there have been substantial efforts to identify course equivalencies, develop articulation agreements and create frameworks for credit for prior learning to make learning evaluation more transparent and consistent, the data and technology infrastructure to support the work remain woefully underdeveloped. Without adequate data documenting date of assessment and aligned learning outcomes, credit for prior learning is often dismissed in the transfer process; for example, a 2024 survey by AACRAO found that 54 percent of its member institutions do not accept credit for prior learning awarded at a prior institution.

Qualitative research examining credit-evaluation processes across public two- and four-year institutions in California found that these factors create many pain points for learners. For one, students can experience unacceptable wait times—in some cases as long as 24 weeks—before receiving evaluation decisions. When decisions are not finalized prior to registration deadlines, students can end up in the wrong classes, take classes out of sequence or end up extending their time to graduation.

In addition to adverse impacts on students, MDRC research illuminates challenges that faculty and staff experience due to the highly manual nature of current processes. As colleges face dwindling dollars and real personnel capacity constraints, the status quo becomes unsustainable and untenable. Yet, we are hopeful that the thoughtful application of technology—including AI—can help slingshot institutions forward.

For example, institutions like Arizona State University and the City University of New York are leading the way in integrating technology to improve the student experience. The ASU Transfer Guide and CUNY’s Transfer Explorer democratize course equivalency information, “making it easy to see how course credits and prior learning experiences will transfer and count.” Further, researchers at UC Berkeley are studying how to leverage the plethora of data available—including course catalog descriptions, course articulation agreements and student enrollment data—to analyze existing course equivalencies and provide recommendations for additional courses that could be deemed equivalent. Such advances stand to reduce the staff burden for institutions while preserving academic quality.

While such solutions are not yet widely implemented, there is strong interest due to their high value proposition. A recent AACRAO survey on AI in credit mobility found that while just 15 percent of respondents report currently using AI for credit mobility, 94 percent of respondents acknowledge the technology’s potential to positively transform credit-evaluation processes. And just this year, a cohort of institutions across the country came together to pioneer new AI-enabled credit mobility technology under the AI Transfer and Articulation Infrastructure Network.

As the LEARN Commission continues to assess how institutions, systems of higher education and policymakers can improve learning evaluation, we believe that increased attention to improving course data and technology infrastructure is warranted and that a set of principles can guide a new approach to credit evaluation. Based on our emerging sense of the needs and opportunities in the field, we offer some guiding principles below:

1. Shift away from interrogating course minutiae to center learning outcomes in learning evaluation. Rather than fixating on factors like mode of instruction or grading basis, we must focus on the learning outcomes. To do so, we must improve course data in a number of ways, including adding learning outcomes to course syllabi and catalog descriptions and capturing existing equivalencies in databases where they can be easily referenced and applied.
2. Provide students with reliable, timely information on the degree applicability of their courses and prior learning, including a rationale when prior learning is not accepted or applied. Institutions can leverage available technology to automate existing articulation rules, recommend new equivalencies and generate timely evaluation reports for students. This can create more efficient advising workflows, empower learners with reliable information and refocus faculty time to other essential work (see No.3).

3. Use student outcomes data to improve the learning evaluation process. Right now, the default is that all prior learning is manually vetted against existing courses. But what if we shifted that focus to analyzing student outcomes data to understand whether students can be successful in subsequent learning if their credits are transferred and applied? In addition, institutions should regularly review course transfer, applicability and student success data at the department and institution level to identify areas for improvement—including in the design of curricular pathways, student supports and classroom pedagogy.
4. Overhaul how learning is transcripted and how transcripts are shared. We can shorten the time involved on the front end of credit-evaluation processes by shifting away from manual transcript review to machine-readable transcripts and electronic transcript transmittal. When accepting and applying prior learning—be it high school dual-enrollment credit, credit for prior learning or a course transferred from another institution—document that learning in the transcript as a course (or, as a competency for competency-based programs) to promote its future transferability.
5. Leverage available technology to help learners and workers make informed decisions to reach their end goals. In the realm of learning evaluation, this can be facilitated by integrating course data and equivalency systems with degree-modeling software to enable learners and advisers to identify the best path to a credential that minimizes the amount of learning that’s left on the table.

In these ways, we can redesign learning evaluation processes to accelerate students’ pathways and generate meaningful value in the changing landscape of learning and work. Through the LEARN Commission, we will continue to refine this vision and identify clear actionable steps. Stay tuned for the release of our full set of recommendations this fall and join the conversation at #BeyondTransfer.

As U.S. higher education enters one of the most perilous times in its history, an internal threat makes it even more vulnerable—the ever-widening chasm between administrators and faculty. In the last three decades, budget pressures at larger universities have led administrators to shift faculty ranks toward contingent appointments with near-poverty wages, no benefits and little opportunity for advancement.

At research universities, the remaining tenure-track faculty positions have become hypercompetitive, with faculty having to publish far more than they did in the 1980s to obtain tenure and promotion. Pressure on these faculty to obtain large grants continues to mount in a funding environment that is now uncertain and even chaotic. At other universities, faculty ranks in general have shrunk, leading to increased workloads and larger class sizes, alongside shifts to more online offerings to meet student demand.

On the administrative side, the tenure of senior leaders is also shrinking, leading to increased leadership turnover. New leaders come in with change agendas to fix some prior unaddressed issue or manage significant budget deficits or other operational inefficiencies. In this environment, faculty disillusionment is high, as is disengagement. It is all too easy for administrators to treat faculty as expendable resources, forgetting that there is a human component to leadership and fostering distrust between these two critical groups of campus leaders.

But as external threats come to campuses, a divided campus will not be well prepared to fend off attacks aimed at weakening institutional autonomy. Administrators on many campuses find themselves unable to speak openly about their objections to current federal or state policies due to institutional neutrality stances or concerns about political blowback; at the same time, we have seen faculty organizations and unions step out in front to defend academic freedom and institutional autonomy. In this context, how can these two groups come together to restore trust, re-engage all stakeholders and build productive working relationships?

We write this from the perspectives of a longtime faculty leader and faculty champion who has published on the problems of deprofessionalizing the faculty and a longtime administrator who started as a faculty member and moved up the ranks to a chancellor position by working with faculty to solve campus challenges. We have worked together over the years from our respective vantage points, publishing tools and resources that are geared toward fostering clarity, communication and collaboration in the face of a rapidly changing environment. We know that the faculty/administrative divides will not serve the academy in this current crisis. But we have seen examples of ways that both groups can come together.

Here we offer some suggestions for leaders—faculty and administrative—from our experiences working with hundreds of campuses. We call for administrators to take the first step in reaching out, repairing and rebuilding where trust and relationships have been broken. But we also call on faculty to ask what they can do in response or how they might “lead up.” If one group extends an olive branch, and if there is to be hope for a different future, the other must accept it. Both parties must also hold one another accountable as relationships are renewed, trust is rebuilt and bridges across the chasm are constructed.

1. Empower and support faculty leadership. Studies have shown that administrators can help support faculty in having a voice and assuming an active leadership role. Mentoring faculty on how the institution operates, sending faculty to leadership development opportunities, rewarding faculty who step into significant leadership or shared governance roles, providing summer stipends to work on projects, and offering course releases for active faculty leadership can all empower faculty to play a greater leadership role on campus.
2. Strengthen shared governance structures. Over the last three decades, shared governance has been hollowed out on many campuses. Rebuilding it will require examining processes, policies and structures that enable faculty to contribute meaningfully to campus decision and policymaking. A strong shared governance system is a way to ensure that external groups are less able to divide and conquer, to commandeer the curriculum, the student experience and other key areas of campus work. And ensuring that faculty have avenues to exert their leadership with governing boards can help ensure that board members hear from and understand faculty perspectives and concerns.
3. Clearly delineate administrative and faculty roles and responsibilities with respect to decision-making, authority and accountability. Strengthening shared governance means including faculty in more than advisory capacities when budgets, organizational structures or operations that affect them are slated for major changes. Put more decisions back in faculty hands, explain situations and ask for input, and include faculty in more important and strategic decisions on campus. Viewpoints may be at odds, and boards and administrators do have important fiduciary responsibilities, but these do not preclude engaging stakeholders in the decision-making process.

4. Establish and grow your own leadership programs aimed at faculty. One of the best ways to ensure that faculty can play a leadership role on campus and off is to offer an annual leadership program for faculty. Costs can be relatively low for grow-your-own programs that rely on more senior and experienced faculty to serve as facilitators and trainers. Empowering senior faculty to train newer faculty on the campus operations and broader higher education landscape can lead to more proactive succession planning for key campus committees and leadership roles.
5. Consider using a shared leadership approach to clearly involve multiple people and perspectives in decision-making. Beyond leadership development, consider using more formal structures associated with collaborative or shared leadership. This may help campuses create more inclusive and transparent processes for decision-making, especially when a variety of constituents are involved in or impacted by the changes.
6. Have regular sessions for faculty and administrators to interact outside shared governance. Occasional lemonade or iced tea gatherings, Zoom social hours, annual community forums and the like can ensure that faculty and administrators get to know each other as people, not just positions. It may also be helpful to have periodic focused workshops or retreats for faculty and administrators on key change issues. These events can be led by external expert facilitators who can help create space for difficult dialogue.
7. Acknowledge the wrongs and correct the course. When trust is broken, administrators should listen to concerns and be prepared to make adjustments and change course to address those concerns, and faculty should take the opportunity to collaboratively engage. That doesn’t necessarily mean going backward, but going forward in ways that involve a two-way dialogue to address concerns. For example, administrators need to be open about the need to strengthen faculty job security, pay and autonomy, while faculty need to recognize the competing pressures administrators are facing. Ensuring a strong faculty is a key component of a robust system of higher education, which is what is needed to ward off external threats. Somewhere in between lies the solution.

While these may seem like long-term strategies in the midst of a crisis, this crisis is going to last years, so investing in and empowering the faculty will pay off. Faculty have critical voices that can productively shape the change agenda, if given the opportunity to use them.

Working in journalism left Inside Higher Ed’s co-founder Doug Lederman little time to read for anything but information, so last summer, when he stepped away from 90-hour workweeks, he told me he wanted to watch less Netflix. I said, “Friend, you came to the right place.” Recommending reading is pretty much the only area where I can make solid contributions these days.

I started Doug out with things I knew he’d like. Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding was an early favorite. I moved him along to Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins, The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, James (Percival Everett, not Henry), Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings and loaded him onto the Louise Penny train.

But just before I headed to D.C. last March for his official farewell party, I assigned him a novel I’d been wanting to reread and liked the idea of book-clubbing with him: John Williams’s beautiful and heartbreaking Stoner. I’ve often given Doug a hard time about—well, everything—but especially the fact that he’s never actually been in higher ed. He’s only peered in from outside with a reporter’s magnifying glass, exposing our flaws and fault lines, doing his essential duty as a journalist.

When Doug asked me to work with him as a thought partner to create a newsletter for upper-level administrators, he wanted to bring tough love to leaders. He confessed to having a case of the fuck-its, disappointed that higher ed has been so slow to change and unwilling to take responsibility for some missteps. As we know, disappointment can only come from love, and is much harder for recipients to bear.

I responded in my typically tactful fashion, asking him, “Who the fuck are you to have a case of the fuck-its? Do not speak to me of the fuck-its! Have you had to read millions of pages of academic monographs? Have you heard academics complain that their names were too small on book covers? Have you denied thousands of qualified applicants admission to their dream college, or sat through interminable Faculty Senate meetings group-copyediting policies? Have you taught classes that flop or graduate students who just can’t?”

In other words, I told the co-founder of IHE he had little idea what it was like to be in higher ed, especially from the perspective of a faculty or staff member. Given his role and prominence in the industry, Doug’s attention is always sought after, a high-value treat. In our world, he is beef jerky, not a Milk-Bone.

I thought it time for him to use his leisure reading to get a deeper understanding of what it’s like to be a regular professor. Not an oversize character like Morris Zapp (my old boss, Stanley) or even Lucky Hank Devereaux (or Lucky Jim).

Stoner follows the fictional life and career of an English professor at the University of Missouri in the early part of the last century. Early in the novel, and just before the sinking of the Lusitania, the sharpest of a group of three young academics asks his fellows, “Have you gentlemen ever considered the question of the true nature of the University?”

Mr. Stoner “sees it as a great repository, like a library or a whorehouse, where men come of their free will and select that which will complete them, where all work together like little bees in a common hive.” Mr. Finch, with his “simple mind,” sees it as “a kind of spiritual sulphur-and-molasses that you administer every fall to get the little bastards through another winter.” Finch goes on, naturally, to become a dean.

But they are both wrong, claims the character named Masters. The university ”is an asylum …. a rest home, for the infirm, the aged, the discontent, the otherwise incompetent.” His self-diagnosis: ”I’m too bright for the world, and I won’t keep my mouth shut about it.” He concludes, ”But bad as we are, we’re better than those on the outside, in the muck, the poor bastards of the world. We do no harm, we say what we want, and we get paid for it.”

The book, published in 1965, presents characters that feel so current and vibrant you can imagine having a cocktail with them. In the times we now find ourselves, Stoner may become popular again—but not for all the right reasons.

I have friends who have long said they’re done reading things by dead white men. When Doug and I were in college, that was pretty much the entire curriculum, with the exception of the 19th century gals, an Emily Dickinson here, a Frederick Douglass there. This reluctance is understandable, given how long the canon excluded previously silenced voices. Yet, I don’t discriminate. Stoner offers profound insights into institutional structures that persist today.

These thoughts were on my mind as I finished my reread just before our flight to D.C. to celebrate Doug’s retirement next chapter, where institutional structures of a different kind awaited us in marble and glass.

We had half a day before the event and my husband, Toby, and I wanted to be tourists. It had not been my intention to speed-walk through four museums in five hours. (Toby could spend hours in front of one painting, but he loves me and is a good sport.)

My childhood consisted of trips downstate to see grandparents in New York City, which often involved visits to museums. A favorite was the one that hosted the squid and the whale. Unconsciously, I bought into the primate visions described by Donna Haraway about hierarchies—her critique of how science museums construct narratives of power and evolution that shape our understanding.

Fifty years later, I was eager to see what had changed. We started at Natural History, moved on to American History, then African American, and ended up at the Holocaust. In March 2025, this journey was not, it won’t surprise you to learn, an uplifting experience. The museums, like higher education itself, told a complex story of American identity that is now under dire threat.

I sped through to parse the presentation. How did the curators choose to tell the stories, some of which I know well, and which, as an adult, I would always prefer to read? Since I began my career publishing books in American history at Oxford University Press, I’ve imbibed a decent amount of quality scholarship.

When I became an acquisitions editor at Duke University Press in 1991, I was intrigued by the work of scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, Mari Matsuda, Derrick Bell and other theorists who used narrative to examine how our legal system perpetuated structural inequalities. Most people weren’t reading law journals back then, and it took a while for those ideas to make it into the mainstream

Academe cranked open the curriculum to face historical truths not always self-evident: We are a country built on a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. At times we fell short of the mark, but the arc of the universe is long, and we were taught the direction in which it bends.

Except. The rise to power documented in that last somber building we visited reads to me like a blueprint for what’s happening today. Before I could remember not knowing it, my father drilled into me that what it means to be a Jew is there’s always someone who wants to put you in an oven. That was made tangible by the numbers I saw tattooed on the arm of Great-Grandpa Max.

How much longer will busloads of boisterous students milling around these repositories of culture be able to learn our history? When will the whitewashing take hold so that the ideas contained in the curators’ vision—in the works we’ve published since the latter part of the last century—are mummified?

One of many chilling moments: coming on a small story I knew from the film Who Will Write Our History? Historian Emanuel Ringelblum organized Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1939 to document unprecedented actions. He collected materials, placed them in milk cans and buried them throughout the city. The archive known as the Oneg Shabbat is housed in Jerusalem at Yad Vashem.

It was impossible in March not to feel that my colleagues at IHE and other media outlets are busting their butts at a similar task: chronicling the last days of an era of inclusion.

How long before these exhibits come down, replaced by gold toilets in buildings repurposed for hotels and casinos?

Just as the bright shining moment of Camelot disappeared for a previous generation, many of us already look back on Hamilton with nostalgia. A too-quick tour of museums in our nation’s capital filled me with love for America and the things that made us great. When I left, all I felt was grief. What happens if we don’t rise to today’s challenge?

This sobering experience in D.C. brought me back to my conversation with Doug about higher education’s resistance to change. A reading of Stoner should not feel as resonant and familiar as it does. Little about faculty structure and the ethos of academe has evolved in the last century.

Walking through those endangered halls of American memory, what Doug has long been saying to leaders is urgent: We need more than just better storytelling about higher education—we need to fundamentally reimagine it. And we need to do it now.

The buried milk cans of our moment will someday be unearthed. The articles, reports and assessments documenting higher education’s struggles will serve as testimony to what we did—or failed to do—in this critical period. My only hope is that they’ll reveal how colleges and universities finally broke free from institutional inertia to continue to do the work of educating our citizenry toward truth and justice for all.

Note: This reflection was published March 22, 2025, as an issue of The Sandbox. I wanted to share it as part of my new column here for two reasons (and with apologies to subscribers). First, if you’ve been reading the news, you’ll see that I wish I’d been wrong. Just a week after this first came out, the dismantling began. And now we’re seeing a scrubbing of our nation’s history in essential cultural institutions and not just in D.C.

Also, I got a ton of responses from readers thanking me for putting them onto Stoner. So now, you’re welcome, friends.

The country’s roughly 600 Hispanic-serving institutions are in peril of losing hundreds of millions of dollars annually from the federal government, after the Department of Justice said it won’t defend the program against a lawsuit alleging the way HSIs are currently defined is unconstitutional. The suit challenges the requirement that a college or university’s undergraduate population must be at least a quarter Hispanic to receive HSI funding.

U.S. solicitor general D. John Sauer wrote to House Speaker Mike Johnson July 25 that the DOJ “has determined that those provisions violate the equal-protection component of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.” Federal law requires DOJ officers to notify Congress when they decide to refrain from defending a law on the grounds that it’s unconstitutional.

Citing the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that banned affirmative action in student admissions, Sauer wrote that “the Supreme Court has explained that ‘[o]utright racial balancing’ is ‘patently unconstitutional’” and said “its precedents make clear that the government lacks any legitimate interest in differentiating among universities based on whether ‘a specified number of seats in each class’ are occupied by ‘individuals from the preferred ethnic groups.’” 

The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative outlet, first reported on the letter Friday. The DOJ subsequently provided Inside Higher Ed with the letter but gave no further comment or interviews.

The Free Beacon wrote that “the letter likely spells the end for the HSI grants, which the Trump administration is now taking steps to wind down.” The Education Department wrote in an email, “We can confirm the Free Beacon’s reporting,” but didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed an interview or answer further written questions. 

Just because the executive branch has given up defending the program doesn’t necessarily mean it’s over—or that the group Students for Fair Admissions and the state of Tennessee have won the lawsuit they filed in June. The Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities moved to intervene in the case late last month, asking U.S. District Court judge Katherine A. Crytzer to add the group as a defendant. She has yet to rule, but the Education Department and education secretary Linda McMahon, the current defendants, didn’t oppose this intervention. 

The legal complaint from Students for Fair Admissions and Tennessee  asks Crytzer to declare the program’s ethnicity-based requirements unconstitutional, but not necessarily to end the program altogether. Students for Fair Admissions is the group whose suits against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill yielded the 2023 Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action in admissions. In the suit over the HSI program, that group and Tennessee’s attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, now argue that the admissions ruling means Tennessee colleges and universities can’t use affirmative action to increase Hispanic student enrollments in order to qualify for HSI funding. 

Deborah Santiago, co-founder and chief executive officer of Excelencia in Education, which promotes Latino student success, said Friday that the Education Department in June “opened a competition to award grants for this fiscal year for HSIs.”

“There are proposals to the Department of Education right now that they said they were going to allocate,” Santiago said, noting that the program was set to dole out more than $350 million this fiscal year—money that institutions use for faculty development, facilities and other purposes. 

“The program doesn’t require that any of the money go to Hispanics at all,” she said. For a college or university to qualify for the program, at least half of the student body must be low-income, in addition to the requirement that a quarter be Hispanic. 

“The value of a program like this has really been investing in institutions that have a high concentration of low-income, first generation students,” Santiago said. 

The higher education sector is navigating an era of rapid change. Shifting demographics, declining traditional enrollment and evolving workforce needs are redefining the value proposition for universities. Coupled with budget and staffing pressures, it can seem daunting to university leaders to understand how to begin the transformation that universities are being asked to undertake.

Workforce-relevant credentials, such as microcredentials, certificates and industry-aligned badges, are emerging as strategic tools to expand institutional reach, respond to employer demand and deliver measurable career impact for learners. These can be delivered separately from your degree curriculum, embedded within the degree pathway or both.

Universities face stagnant enrollments, skepticism about ROI and mounting pressure to innovate. Traditional degree pathways alone are no longer enough to address these headwinds. This blueprint provides university leaders with a road map to implement credentialing initiatives that align with market demand, institutional mission and long-term sustainability.

The Why: Building the Case Internally

Building the internal case to expend the time and energy to realign curricular offerings can be daunting at times of resource scarcity. But the reality is that from an enrollment perspective, it’s simply good planning to be looking ahead and identifying new markets for your institution. And the population that holds the most promise of growth for higher education today is the adult learner—a segment that is growing fast.

These students are often midcareer professionals, job changers or individuals seeking rapid upskilling. They may already have a bachelor’s degree or a workforce credential, or they may be a part of the 43.1 million learners with some credit but no degree. Of those, 37.6 million represent working-age adults under the age of 65. These learners will value short, targeted, career-aligned learning experiences that fit into busy lives. How are you identifying and connecting with these learners and who are the employer partners that you can engage with?

By integrating stackable, workforce-relevant credentials into academic offerings, institutions can diversify revenue, attract new learners and showcase agility in meeting labor market needs. Graduates gain targeted skills, boosting employability and alumni engagement. Their success positions the university as a trusted partner for every career stage.

How to Start

Exploring innovative credentialing is a great tool in your strategic enrollment management planning toolbox. Such initiatives can be supportive of your enrollment goals and also provide some answers to the public questions around the ROI for their tuition dollars. You might be well on your way on the journey to strengthening the connection between learning and the workforce, or you might be just beginning. The reality is that educational institutions may already have some of the building blocks in place, and a slight shift in how you package and document your educational programs could put you on the right path.

While any credential could be industry-aligned, it might be easiest to begin with smaller, incremental credentials, either independently or aligned to current degree programs. For adult learners, short, skill-based and industry-aligned programs offer an immediate career payoff while potentially stacking toward degrees.

A well-designed workforce offering needs to be aligned with industry-trusted credentials and certifications and should ultimately layer with your traditional academic programs and offer a clear connection to employment-relevant skills. Investing in this work today will create short-term enrollment gains and help you to build long-term relationships with learners and employers who will turn to you again and again to meet their upskilling needs. These will also speak to your undergraduate degree learners (and their parents) by creating a direct link to return on investment.

Build a Cross-Campus Team

To successfully build new innovative credentials requires a collaborative approach, the creation of a planning team that aligns academic, enrollment, tech, marketing and employer-engagement strategies holistically. At a minimum, this includes faculty, the registrar’s office, enrollment management, your continuing-education division, education technology and your finance officer.

A second layer to support learner success should also include advising, student services and career services. Chosen well, this team will be key to help ensure that you maintain compliance with accreditation or governance requirements in addition to designing an attractive and relevant program. Building the internal case across the campus with these leaders will help you to create the buy-in required to balance innovation and agility with compliance.

Aligning Credentials With Institutional Mission

Any workforce credentials offered by an institution should support and complement, not compete with, existing degree pathways. To ensure this alignment, consider embedding programs within academic departments and continuing education units. Be sure to involve faculty early to ensure rigor, buy-in and shared governance.

And don’t forget to map credentials to degree pathways for seamless learner progression. Make it easy for an adult learner to become a lifelong learner. Innovative credentials can serve as entry ramps to degree programs, be embedded into degrees or stand alone. Start with pilots and focus on high-demand, high-return fields.

Consider Technology

Ultimately, when making learning and credential platform decisions, you should seek to prioritize interoperable, learner-centered technologies that enhance the portability of records and improve coordination across institutions. Digital solutions that prioritize transparency, accuracy and accessibility help to create a more connected and responsive learning ecosystem, ensuring that learners can move seamlessly through their educational and career pathways, with their achievements recognized and understood wherever they go.

Building the Adult Learner Pipeline

As in any new program, you must do your research. Review your institution’s most recent environmental scan to support prioritization of your best opportunities. If that scan is not current or doesn’t include market intelligence that leverages labor market analytics and employer feedback, you will need to collect that information to ensure offerings are demand-driven.

• Outreach and messaging. Frequently, the effectiveness of the institution’s communications with prospective and current students comes under scrutiny: the quality of technology, the delivery modes, timing, the content and the coordination. Prepare for these concerns by outlining what the college is currently doing and who the stakeholders are. Messaging for innovative credentials will be inherently different than messaging for a degree. Promote credentials as high-value, low-barrier entry points for upskilling or career change.
• Leveraging partnerships. Consider your service area and inventory your partnerships. Collaborate with employers, workforce boards and government agencies to co-design, fund or endorse programs. Convene regional advisory councils to keep offerings aligned with workforce trends. It is important that these relationships are current and agile so that credentials can respond to shifting workforce needs in real time. Explore grants, workforce investment funds and employer cost-sharing opportunities that may help defray your costs and those of your learners.

• Developing support structures. All learners need support, which might need to look somewhat different for adult learners than your traditional degree support. Offer advising, prior learning assessment and flexible credit pathways to maximize learner success.
• Considering assessment and data collection. Nationally, there is a call for more transparency and more data that proves ROI. This means that more data collection from learners up front and better tracking of outcomes will be required. Data collection in the workforce credential space will give you valuable experience that you can apply to your degree programs as federal student aid requirements shift toward proving workforce outcomes.

A Call to Action for Institutional Leaders

Universities that strategically embrace workforce-relevant credentials will not only meet the needs of today’s learners but also strengthen employer partnerships and stand out in a crowded market. It’s more than launching new programs. It’s about reimagining the university as a future-facing institution that delivers lifelong value. The time to act is now: Start small, scale smart and lead with vision.

A little more than a year ago, I was appointed interim dean of my college. My predecessor had left us abruptly, and as a former school chair and senior associate dean, I was a predictable choice. Here are some recommendations based on this unexpected journey.

Before You Even Begin

Ask your provost to add the option of applying for the dean position to your appointment letter, just in case. I did but soon determined I would not be a candidate. I had become too much of an insider over the prior 13 years to be the improvement agent I thought my college needed. In my experience, external hires are better at bringing about critical change because they arrive without a set reputation and entrenched expectations. The fact that several colleagues encouraged me to apply for the position made clear to me that many people wanted things to stay the same. Many of them seemed to say, “We know you, and we know you won’t rock the boat.”

Seek the Fellowship of Staff

As an interim dean, more so than a full-term dean, you quickly need to earn the respect and goodwill of the college staff, associate deans, chairs and directors. I received buy-in by acknowledging that the continued success of the college didn’t depend on me as “decider in chief,” but on the hands-on collaboration from everyone. Send clear signals that “it’s the team, not the dean.”

‘Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost’

I participated in a formal orientation for new administrators by the University System of Georgia about legal, organizational and leadership matters. Other than that, I was mostly left to my own devices, especially when it came to prioritizing among the numerous events and meetings to which a dean gets invited. I ended up wandering into events at which I was the only dean, but ironically this earned me much fortuitous appreciation. When requesting a meeting with a newly elected Faculty Senate leader, they told me my kind of outreach was unheard-of. We had a great convo over a double espresso, and I learned loads about faculty concerns and hopes.

Seek the Fellowship of Other Deans

Deans operate at the intersection between senior leadership and department chair, and being wedged in the middle makes for good collegial collaboration. My fellow deans communicated swiftly and reliably and shared draft documents, and we often managed to speak with a common voice on issues. I reciprocated their support by creating a fancy name (“Veritable Decanalia”) for our monthly social gatherings at a hotel bar.

Don’t Be Interim

Don’t think of yourself as a placeholder who just keeps the trains running. You are, in fact, the dean, and it’s OK to improve upon your predecessor’s strategies. While you should think twice about too many radical changes (for example, to your college’s reporting structure), feel free to add your own signature. In my case, the signature moves had to do with a focus on student success. For example, two months after taking charge, I adjusted existing budget priorities based on recent data and moved 40 percent of new funding to support graduate education. I also convinced the college advisory board members to become a “giving board” and help fund additional need-based dean’s scholarships for undergraduate students.

Finally, I surprised everyone by organizing a Year of the Liberal Arts at my STEM-focused university. Such activities can amplify your college’s reputation, and more so when nobody expects this level of activity while an interim person is dean. And they signal to prospective dean candidates that your college is a vibrant place they might want to join.

And: Be Interim

Does that sound contradictory? Well, the temporary nature of your appointment can increase the success of your successor if you take care of essential housekeeping items before they arrive. Your successor should not, as one of their first actions, be obliged to impose a spending freeze on a department whose chair overspent by several hundred thousand dollars, and they should not have to press a unit into a memorandum of understanding to return to their contractually mandated (but clandestinely lowered) teaching load. It’s easier for you to repair such matters, and the new dean can begin their work without turning into Draco, the enforcer.

Over all, heed Gandalf’s advice from The Lord of the Rings for your interim appointment: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” If being constantly reminded of the limited nature of the position bothers you, don’t go for this kind of job. My appointment as interim dean was announced at the same time as the timeline and details for the search committee to replace me; the search process ran simultaneously with my daily work, and an eager staff member changed the nameplate outside my office door two weeks before I moved out. So it goes.

If you enjoy, for a window of six months to one year, improving the conditions within which students, staff and faculty may thrive, jump at the chance. Your rewards include a steep learning curve and a better understanding of your own institution and higher education in general.

Of course, while you are on this exhilarating journey of servant leadership, start planning early on for the time after your appointment ends. I admit to having a momentary feeling of relief about moving out of a position that included, especially since January 2025, more political and budgetary emergencies than I had bargained for. But I was just as swiftly persuaded to support my new dean by remaining part of the college leadership team, albeit in an appointment that honored what I had recently learned.