Tag: career

As a visibly Muslim woman and tenured law professor, I’ve faced my share of discrimination. However, nothing prepared me for the chilling reality I encountered at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

While I was serving as co-chair of the DNC’s Interfaith Council and on the executive committee of the DNC’s Women’s Caucus, I became a victim of a violent assault at the convention. This attack laid bare the pervasive nature of Islamophobia in our society, but what followed was even more disturbing.

The complete institutional failure following my assault—manifested in the Democratic Party’s silence, my academic institutions’ indifference, the legal system’s impotence and the overall lack of support for a victim of political violence—revealed a disturbing truth: Even in spaces that champion diversity and inclusion, Muslim voices remain expendable.

As I stood in the bustling convention hall at the United Center in Chicago, holding a cloth banner that read “Stop Arming Israel,” I never imagined that my act of peaceful protest would end in violence. Yet, within moments, three white men wielding campaign signs with wooden planks inside repeatedly struck me on the head. The physical pain was immediate, but the emotional aftermath—a concussion, trauma and a profound sense of betrayal—would linger far longer.

While some organizations swiftly issued statements condemning the attack as political violence and demanding justice, the universities I am affiliated with remained silent. This institutional indifference underscores a larger problem: The disconnect between well-intentioned diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and the lived realities of Muslim faculty and staff, particularly those who are visibly Muslim, Black, Latino/a or from other minority groups.

In my years navigating academia, I’ve witnessed firsthand how corporatized, apolitical DEI programs fall short for those of us at the margins. They tend to focus on secular and liberal perspectives, emphasizing concepts like religious practices and holidays. While these are important, they fail to address the daily microaggressions and systemic biases that shape our experiences.

As one of the few tenured, visibly Muslim women in legal academia, I face an average of 500 micro- and macroaggressions annually. The mental toll of deciding which handful of incidents to address is exhausting, constantly pulling my focus from teaching, research and service. This burden of representation and advocacy weighs heavily on visibly Muslim women in academia. We’re often tokenized, expected to be the voice for all Muslims, which places an unfair burden on individuals and perpetuates the myth of a monolithic Muslim experience.

Moreover, current DEI approaches often prioritize male and Arab voices, inadvertently sidelining the perspectives of women, Black Muslims, Latino/a Muslims, Indigenous and other minority groups within the Muslim community. A panel on Islamophobia might discuss the impacts of fasting during Ramadan and the need for prayer spaces, but neglect to address the foreign policy landscape or the systemic racism and unique challenges faced by Black or Latino/a Muslims in academia.

The personal toll of traversing these spaces is immense. The constant code-switching, the exhaustion of being valued for expertise in one’s field while simultaneously unsupported when speaking about personal experiences with discrimination—it all breeds cynicism and burnout. My assault at the DNC and the subsequent lack of support from institutions I once believed in have profoundly impacted my sense of safety and belonging in academic and political spaces.

When I’ve complained about disparities and inequities, I am often met with shoulder shrugs and labeled a troublemaker. It is difficult for me to serve as a council member of the American Bar Association’s Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice while watching students being arrested, harassed and assaulted on university campuses like Yale University, Barnard College, the University of California, Berkeley, and Northwestern University, institutions run by people I once admired and trusted. The American Bar Association can do nothing but create a Task Force to Combat Islamophobia and hold webinars, doing nothing in response to the campus free speech issues other than talk about them.

Yet, we must channel this pain into constructive action. Based on my experiences, here are some recommendations for institutions looking to create more inclusive and effective anti-Islamophobia initiatives.

1. Audit Policies and Practices for Islamophobia. Review hiring and promotion practices for subtle and overt biases. Examine whether Muslim faculty are less likely to receive tenure due to research areas perceived as “controversial” or due to stereotypes about Muslim scholarship. Revise policies that marginalize Muslim faculty and fail to promote them.

2. Broaden Representation in Leadership and Curriculum. Actively recruit Muslim faculty and staff, especially visible Muslim women, and include them in leadership roles. Establish fellowships specifically for Muslim scholars to contribute to curriculum development and other initiatives.
3. Apply an Intersectional Lens to DEI Programs. Design DEI programming that addresses the unique challenges faced by visibly Muslim women, Black, Latino/a and Indigenous Muslims. Host panels that discuss both racial and religious discrimination and include speakers who can address anti-Blackness within Muslim communities as well as Islamophobia as state policy.
4. Diversify Anti-Islamophobia Training Leadership. Engage trainers from different Muslim backgrounds to lead DEI workshops. Ensure participation from all university levels to promote a comprehensive understanding of diverse Muslim experiences, and include bystander intervention training.
5. Implement Robust Reporting and Accountability Mechanisms. Establish confidential reporting for Islamophobic incidents with guaranteed follow-up. Ensure that any report of Islamophobia results in a clear process with potential outcomes such as mandated sensitivity training, formal apologies or, in severe cases, suspension. Publicize these measures to build trust within the Muslim community and ensure transparency.

Institutional leaders must step up in setting the tone for how Islamophobia is addressed on campus. They must make public, unequivocal statements condemning Islamophobia and supporting Muslim members of the academic community. They need to stop criminalizing antiwar protesters and brutalizing their own students. Allocating significant resources to anti-Islamophobia initiatives, including funding for Muslim student organizations and research on Islamophobia in academia, is crucial.

Regular policy reviews are essential to ensure protection for Muslim students and faculty from discrimination, with clear consequences for Islamophobic behavior. Promoting Muslim-led interfaith dialogue and developing robust crisis response protocols are also critical steps. As we strive for progress, it’s important to note that the burden of education and advocacy does not fall solely on the shoulders of Muslim academics. Allies in positions of power must step up, speak out and take concrete actions to create truly inclusive academic spaces.

My experience of assault at the DNC and the subsequent lack of institutional support is a harrowing reminder of how far we still have to go. It underscores the need for a comprehensive approach to combating Islamophobia that goes beyond superficial diversity initiatives and addresses the deep-seated biases in our institutions. Only by working together—Muslim and non-Muslim, faculty, staff, and administration— can we create academic environments that are truly inclusive and free from the scourge of Islamophobia. The path forward is clear, but it requires courage, commitment and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths. Are we ready to take that step?

Roughly one-third of Black medical students reported experiencing discrimination in medical school—the highest rates of any racial or ethnic group, according to a study published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“Experiences of racial and ethnic discrimination influence wellness and success in medical school and are associated with depression, burnout and increased attrition rates,” the paper said. “Emerging evidence suggests that subtle acts of racial and ethnic bias in the clinical learning environment can hinder professional identity formation among medical students from racial and ethnic minority groups. These experiences are alienating, leading to feelings of discomfort and invisibility, and require constant vigilance, potentially contributing to a deleterious learning climate.”

According to the paper, discrimination against medical students is significantly associated with their diminished personal and professional development at medical schools, where Black students especially are already underrepresented. And that has implications for the larger health-care system and workforce, which is dominated by white and Asian doctors and doesn’t represent the racial diversity of patient populations—a factor experts have long said can lead to worse health outcomes.

Of the 37,610 medical students surveyed, 48.4 percent were female, 51.6 percent were male, 6.5 percent were African American or Black, 20.7 percent were Asian, 6.5 percent were Hispanic, 56.9 percent were white, 6.4 percent were multiracial and 3 percent identified as another race or ethnicity. 

Black students and those of other racial and ethnic minority groups reported experiencing racial and ethnic discrimination more frequently than white students. 

“African American or Black students were less likely than their white counterparts to feel that medical school contributed to their development as a person and physician,” the paper concluded. “In addition, an increase in the frequency of racial and ethnic discrimination was associated with a decreased likelihood that their medical school supported their professional and personal development.”

Let’s look at Alicia’s story.

Alicia graduated from high school in 2023 with a passion for business and marketing, fueled by hands-on courses and active participation in DECA and FBLA. Like many of her peers, she enrolled at a local community college, unsure what she wanted to do. She thought “something in business,” and her parents encouraged her to take advantage of the Tennessee Promise program, which provides two years of free community college. However, with ACT scores below college level, Alicia found herself funneled into a general transfer pathway for an associate of science degree. Instead of pursuing her passions, she spent her days in remedial classes and general education courses. Frustrated and disillusioned, she began to think, “Maybe college just isn’t for me” and chose to withdraw.

But was college truly not for Alicia? Or was she trying to navigate an educational system misaligned with her interests and the demands of today’s workforce? Did she simply end up in a program that failed to nurture her potential?

The Misalignment Between Education and Workforce Needs 

Every year, thousands of Tennesseans like Alicia embark on a college journey, eager to translate their passions into fulfilling careers. Yet too many find themselves lost in a maze of irrelevant courses and unclear pathways, leading to disengagement and dropouts.

In Tennessee, 56 percent of jobs require skills training beyond high school but not necessarily a four-year degree. Many of these positions demand specialized training or credentials, such as technical certificates or associate degrees. Despite the availability of well-paying jobs, too many Tennesseans are unable to access them due to a lack of targeted education and career guidance. In May 2024 alone, Tennessee had 173,000 job openings, with the largest demand in health care, advanced manufacturing, supply chain management and construction. Yet only 49 percent of Tennesseans have access to the skills training required to work in these fields.

State programs like TN Drive to 55, TN Achieves, TN Promise and TN Reconnect have successfully increased access to postsecondary education. However, these well-intentioned initiatives often don’t meet their intended outcomes as students struggle to navigate their education and transition into in-demand careers.

Understanding the Impact of Degree Pathways 

Most first-time community college students in Tennessee (76 percent) enroll in “university parallel” degrees like the associate of science or associate of arts, designed to transfer to four-year universities. These programs consist largely of general education courses, with limited opportunities to delve into specific fields of interest. However, only 15 percent of these students go on to earn a bachelor’s degree.

For those who complete an A.A. or A.S. but don’t pursue further education, the outlook is concerning. They are less likely to be employed in Tennessee and tend to earn lower wages than peers who completed an associate of applied science (A.A.S.) or technical certificate. To put it simply: An A.S. or A.A.—heavy on general education but light on practical skills—often doesn’t prepare students for today’s workforce.

An A.A.S. option, however, often yields better results. Returning to Alicia’s story, had she been advised of the A.A.S. option, her fall schedule would have included courses in business, logistics, marketing and computer applications and only one general education course. This would have been an entirely different experience for Alicia, aligning with her interests and keeping her engaged. Instead of feeling disillusioned, she might have thrived in an environment that nurtured her passions and led to a fulfilling career.

It’s time to rethink how we guide students like Alicia. By embracing innovative programs that align education with real-world opportunities, we can empower the next generation to thrive in Tennessee’s growing industries.

Building Pathways to Success 

This is where Belmont Fast Forward steps in.

The Belmont Fast Forward program bridges the gap between education and workforce demands by providing career pathways that lead to sustainable, well-paying jobs in key Tennessee industries. We focus on three core strategies: educating students about career opportunities, empowering them with needed skills and connecting them with employment opportunities. These strategies are tailored to serve three populations: high school, early college and adult learners. By addressing the needs of individuals at various stages of their education and career journeys, we provide comprehensive support to transform lives and strengthen communities.  

For high school students, early exposure to career pathways and intentional programming can make all the difference. We partner with Metro Nashville Public Schools to provide career exploration opportunities, guest speakers and field trips that help students imagine their careers across various industries and the education they need to get there. Recognizing the importance of early engagement, we fund summer courses for recent high school graduates, allowing them to begin their technical education before traditional financial aid becomes available. 

Early-college students like Alicia often face challenges transitioning into higher education. To support these students, we’ve piloted cohorts at two local community colleges, Volunteer State Community College and Nashville State Community College. These students participate in two-week college orientation boot camps featuring college readiness workshops and industry speakers. Through personalized academic advising and intentional career support, we’re helping them navigate their educational paths with confidence. 

Connecting Challenges to Solutions 

As radical champions for helping people and communities flourish, Belmont University believes it’s imperative to collaborate with educational institutions and workforce development organizations through intentional pilot programs and initiatives such as Fast Forward.

By addressing the misalignment in educational pathways, Fast Forward directly tackles the challenges faced by students navigating the complex landscape of continuing education. We provide the guidance and resources needed to pursue degrees that not only align with their interests but also meet the demands of the job market. Through targeted support and practical experience, we’re paving the way for successful careers.

It’s time for educators, policymakers, institutions and community leaders alike to rethink how we guide students like Alicia. By embracing innovative programs that align education with real-world opportunities, we can empower the next generation to thrive in Tennessee’s growing industries.

Too often, PowerPoints suck, to quote a student of mine. Why might yours? For two reasons: 1) you aren’t a graphic artist and 2) you’re trying to make them the vehicle for content, rather than structure. This essay will give you some suggestions for easy modifications that will let you put good teaching into your slides and remove your bad habits.

Your PowerPoints should be the blueprints for a lesson informed by the principles of good pedagogy. One of those principles is good scaffolding. When your students walk in, give them an overview of the organization of the class, such as:

• I. Brief review
• II. Lecture on the Columbian Exchange
• III. Primary sources: 16th-century recipes
• IV. Make a prediction: Spices

Usually, when I tell a new class to write this outline down on the first day, about half of them do so immediately, and the other half just sit there. To those others, I make it clear that I’m asking them to do it, not just suggesting it: “Like I said, you need to write this outline down in your notes, right now.”

Students, like professors, have their own pet theories about pedagogy; these are mostly wrong, and so the students may not immediately recognize the wisdom of doing as you direct them. Don’t be afraid to nudge a bit. I often explain, very briefly, the research: Knowing the organization of a class period makes it more likely that they’ll remember the material.

At the beginning of each of the sections, I insert a slide that is blank except for the title of that section—for example, “I. Review of Last Week.” This sort of simple visual signposting is a map for where you’re leading your students that day, with trail markers to help them follow you.

We all know that retrieval of past material and its interleaving with new information is crucial for learning. Both those things can be built right into your slides. Rather than launch into the day’s topic, ask students to review. Show a slide with this text: “Jot down three questions you would put on a quiz about the last class’s material.” This could even be a mini-assessment. (I call them course journal entries and number them.)

Now, rather than three students raising their hands, your whole class is actively trying to recall the material. If they are not writing, say to them, “Everyone needs to write down three things.” The next step is either asking for volunteers or a quick think-pair-share, a technique that I recommend.

The next slide is blank except for the words “II. Lecture on the Columbian Exchange.” It’s time for the lecture. Despite this word’s etymological roots (and its ultimately multimedia history), you need to avoid reading off the slides. By that I mean both you reading and the students reading. The easiest way to do this is not to put a lot of text on the slide.

Here is my rule: “No more than seven words per slide—even better, fewer than five, and even better, zero.” We’ve seen text-laden slides for decades and simply reproduced them. Several decades of cognitive psychology research—and lots of experience—tell us that these slides absolutely suck as a vehicle for learning.

When you put up a slide with lots of text, your students automatically try to read it and decide what’s important enough to note. Probably, as soon as the slide is up, you leap in and start to either read it, or, worse still, comment on it. If you talk, students are now splitting their time both reading and listening to you—and trying at the same time desperately to take notes, knowing that you likely have tons of these textually laden slides and will likely rush on to the next one before they have time to note anything. Don’t fall into the trap of saying, “I’ll provide these slides later online; no need to write this down.” They will ignore you and write anyway.

The concept of cognitive load is crucial here: Your students only have so much brainpower. If they see a wall of text and, at the same time, have to listen to you and try to process both visual and aural channels, they will retain little.

Rather than force them to both listen and read, just have them do the former. Put up a stunning visual image that is a synecdoche of your point. And. Just. Talk. “But,” you argue, “sometimes I need to put up some text!” Yes, of course. I’m a historian, and for every course I put up the following (using the colors you see here):

I come back to these sentences over and over in the class, constantly connecting the material to these 28 words. But when I first put them up on a slide, I don’t talk. I just let my students read them and reread them. I then ask them to copy the sentences down, and I give them time to do so.

Also, any time I put up more than seven words on a slide, I say out loud, “I’m going to give you a minute to parse this.” Give the students the time to read, process and perhaps even take a note. Trust me, it will take you some practice to train yourself to simply shut up for a minute and not, well, lecture.

Another thing I’ve done is to add a little countdown timer in one corner or another to remind me to wait while they are parsing the slide. (See how to do it here.) To return to the metaphor of leading your students on a hike: Every data point on your slides, every term/graph/definition/ whatever, is a rock you put in their backpacks. If you want them to finish the hike, only ask them to pick up the rocks you really want them to have at the end of the hike. The others are just dead weight on their cognitive backs.

10 Specific Recommendations

The lecture portion of your class meeting is where you’re most likely to default to tons of text or busy images, and that means it’s where you most need to use some basic graphic principles to help you make better slides and lighten your students’ cognitive load. The core idea: the best slides have less stuff on them, are visually compelling and are designed to be understood quickly. Feel free to copy examples in this annotated guide or this example, and to follow the guidelines below:

1. Include way less of everything. I’ve already said this, but it bears repeating. Use way, way less text. You can add more by talking. But also include fewer busy images. Have one great image, not lots of little, shrunken, misfit images.

Also, there is currently no law against a big white border, but there should be. Instead, make your images full-page bleeds, with text overlaid in semi-transparent boxes. (Just copy a slide from my guide or example above.) If you put up a graph or table, show only the bare necessities for labels and data points.

2. Obscure to create focus or sequence. If you don’t need students to look at parts of what might be a busy image, superimpose a little white rectangle over it, one that is either opaque or slightly transparent. (See my guide and example above.) You can also have the same image on, say, four successive slides and reveal successive parts of it.
3. Highlight things. The opposite of obscuring: Use the drawing tools in PowerPoint to draw large, transparent circles with 12-point yellow borders to point your audience toward what’s really important.
4. Use color and size in text. Let’s say you were comparing the endowments of Harvard, Yale and Princeton Universities. Rather than simply using 24-point black text to write out the three institutions and three amounts, use crimson, navy blue and orange for their names, and scale the point size proportional to the size of the endowment. Students will grasp the relative sizes that much quicker.
5. Simplify data. Do you need to describe the difference in the price of a Big Mac in three different countries? Rather than use the actual prices in U.S. dollars—which might be $4.07, $5.89 and $1.42—round the values to $4, $6 and $1.50, and put the three values in ascending order. 
6. Use sized images or icons. Just as you might change font size for emphasis, you can vary the size of images or icons to create scale.
7. Use high-resolution images. A cardinal sin in such a visual medium is using crappy, low-res images. When you use Google, select “Images,” then “Tools,” then under “Size” choose “Large.” You’ll then get only the best high-resolution images.
8. Keep things in the same spot. Every time you put a slide up that has a lot of information arranged in a certain way, your audience has to process it to make sense of it. If you present the same sort of information, keep everything laid out the same way, if possible.
9. Use less text. For real: Try to use fewer than seven words. PowerPoint is visual and perfectly complementary with your voice. No plug-ins needed. Use less text!
10. Promote interaction. That said, consider getting the free plug-in for the polling software Poll Everywhere. It’s basically a more sophisticated and adult version of Kahoot! It integrates well with PowerPoint and Google Slides—no need to leave the presentation to go to a website—and allows you to mix in interaction with your lecture.

If a fundamental principle is that you have to wait a second and, um, be silent, you need to build into your lecture more of that time. This brings us to the third part of the class, in which you are quiet and students have to retrieve information and, using the principles you’ve just lectured about, grapple with it. We all want to talk and talk because we’re good at it, and we want to cover everything. Which is better, though: That they remember 5 percent of you lecturing for 90 minutes or 35 percent of you lecturing for 45 minutes?

It’s time to have the students actively process the information you’ve given them. This is where you need to build active learning into your slides. After the third slide, “Primary sources: 16th-century recipes,” I put directions up on the slide. In my example I’ve used a technique called Jigsaw, but again I also highly recommend think-pair-share. For this third part, I only use a few slides, mostly with instructions or the source they are analyzing.

Finally, let’s explore one more section of the sample PowerPoint: “Make a prediction: Spices.” In his book Small Teaching, one of my six favorite books on pedagogy, James Lang highlights the research on predictions. When you make a prediction, even on a subject you know little about, you’ll learn and remember the material better. At the end of class, either ask your students to jot down the three to five most important points to get them to process what they’ve listened to passively, or ask them to make predictions on the material they’ve not read but will for the next class. You could even then start the next class by asking them to look at their predictions in light of the reading.

Whatever you do, lightening up your slides, improving them with more intentionally chosen images and embedding into the PowerPoint a well-defined structure for your class meetings—one that includes active learning and other moments for processing and applying information—will make your teaching better. And it’ll help your PowerPoints suck less.

For many people, landing a tenure-track position is the culmination of years of work as a doctoral student. Gaining tenure itself has, of course, many benefits: a pay raise, the promise of further employment in the field and more autonomy and academic freedom. But successfully navigating the tenure process can be a challenge, as tenure has significantly decreased at institutions across the nation. In fact, as many as 75 percent of faculty positions are not tenured today.

If you are on the tenure track, what can you do to increase your odds of actually gaining tenure in this environment? While it varies somewhat by institution, we’d like to share a timeline of the steps we took that helped us successfully complete the process. Even though we both completed the tenure and promotion process at a teaching institution, we believe our advice is relevant to anyone on or thinking about the tenure track.

• First year. You need to do three key things. For starters, you should collect the documents that describe the tenure process and expectations for earning tenure at your institution. Those documents can be your contract; tenure and promotion guidelines from your department, college and university; sample tenure and promotion files; and any rubrics that apply for gaining tenure at your institution. Institutional guidelines will help you determine what counts for teaching or librarianship, scholarship, and service, and the formal requirements for each.

For example, scholarship requirements differ by institution—and sometimes by departments within the same institution—when it comes to the number and type of peer-reviewed publications that count as examples of acceptable scholarship. This information is especially important to know, as often publishing cycles can be long and completing quality research takes time.

In our case, these documents also provided information on who would be on our tenure-review committee as well as what software we were required to use throughout the process. If you must use certain types of software, make sure to talk to colleagues about any specific features or quirks within the system.

The second thing you should do in your first year is to determine how to organize evidence of your scholarly growth. Also, establish a schedule of work time to complete various tasks toward gaining tenure. The years-long process of collecting and curating evidence demonstrates you are doing what is required of your tenure-track position and doing it well.

During your first couple of months on the tenure track, ask for and review the dossiers that colleagues have submitted. That will allow you to see what a successful one looks like, as well as what expectations your department, college and university have. In fact, consider reviewing dossiers at least once a year to ensure that you are gathering the right evidence for your own file.

In our cases, we kept copies of key emails by printing them or saving them to a folder. We also made a point of regularly scheduling time each month to curate and collect evidence, input data into institutional software, and update our CVs.

We also realized that working on our materials and holding meetings with colleagues about the tenure process should be part of our normal work habits. Tenure and promotion should not be an extra task that is conducted off the clock. Instead, dedicate a couple of hours in your working week to curate data, update records and build evidence for your tenure dossier.

In addition, put a note on your calendar for when you are expected to apply for tenure—your initial appointment letter should give you an indication of when you are eligible. Bear in mind, some institutions’ tenure processes are based on calendar years and others on academic years.

The third thing you should do is to determine the level of support that you’ll receive as you navigate the process. Does your department or college offer some form of mentor support, formal or informal? Does it provide release time for you to work on your tenure dossier? Can you receive extra professional development or travel funds? Also, do you need to advocate to receive support or resources, or are they automatically granted to you? How long does the support last? To get the answers to such questions, talk with your colleagues and supervisor, explore your provost or chief academic officer’s webpage, review faculty senate documents and/or reach out to your union if your institution has one.

• Second through fourth year. These are the years when you should focus on gathering data and planning activities that help you to meet your tenure requirements. We advise you to strategically plan what conferences, professional development activities and areas of service you want to volunteer for to best meet your requirements. It can be easy to say yes to too many things, and managing your time will help you create a better work-life balance.

We also recommend using your two-year review as an opportunity to discuss your progress toward tenure and promotion with your supervisor. For example, do you need to grow in certain areas, or are you focusing too much on one? Start networking with colleagues inside and outside your institution, as you may need people to write letters of support, depending on what your institution’s requirements are. Also, keep asking colleagues about their experiences, reading other tenure dossiers and raising questions.

• Final (or fifth) year. Nine to twelve months before your tenure application due date, you should create a timeline of what you need to accomplish. Below is a sample nine-month timeline that you can modify based on your institution’s requirements and your specific needs.
  • First month. Identify your cohort members or a fellow tenure partner with whom you can work on your dossiers. This helps you be accountable, encourages reflection and provides general social-emotional support during the process. It also allows you to develop an interdisciplinary, cross-campus understanding of each other’s roles, particularly if you aren’t in the same department or college.
    • Schedule a time and space to meet that isn’t in either of your offices—it will help you focus on what you need to do that day that’s specifically for gaining tenure. Review all the institutional documents you gathered in your first year, and verify that you have the latest versions. If you have questions about information in them, reach out for answers. Create a timeline for yourself based on those documents and your established work habits, so that you meet and follow the process.
  • Second month. You should now begin organizing the evidence you’ve collected, beginning in your first year. Ensure that your activities are documented in any required software. In addition, if you are using mandatory software for your dossier, run a report to see how the report pulls the information and how many pages it is—which is especially important if you have limits on its length.
    • Last, talk with your direct supervisor—your chair or dean—about applying for tenure and promotion. During that discussion, gauge their belief in your ability to be successful in the process. This is also a suitable time to see if they recommend a category or categories for you to focus your application on—teaching or librarianship, scholarship, or service—and if they have any other general recommendations.
  • Third month. Request letters of support, and be strategic about it. Ask people who can speak to the category you plan to focus on. For example, get students to write letters to support your teaching, or identify faculty members who know your scholarship. Provide each author context for what you would like them to highlight.
    • Remember, you can ask for letters and acknowledgment of your work throughout your tenure process and later add these to your dossier. As always, make sure to follow the official and informal policies of your institution regarding internal and external letters.
  • Fourth and fifth months. Begin drafting your narratives for your dossier. They provide a summary and context about the data generated by the software and explain why the institution should want to keep you. In these months, you should also continue to collect and organize your supplemental evidence, including following up with any supporting letters requests. You will need supplemental evidence to support what you write in your narratives.
  • Sixth month. Determine a cutoff date for adding more evidence of your work in the report, as this should be near the end of the semester. In this month, you are compiling everything you need for your dossier—verifying you have your letters of support, creating your appendices structure, organizing your supplemental evidence and so on.
  • Seventh month. Continue to edit and revise your narratives and add any supplemental material you need. Depending on your institution, you may be able to ask a departmental member, writing center and/or faculty support center to review and provide feedback on your entire dossier.
  • Eighth and ninth months. Finalize the narrative portion of the report, including any revisions for content or formatting. Once you’ve turned it in, you may or may not be able to make any changes, depending on your institution’s guidelines. Finally, submit your entire dossier on time, and in compliance with your institution’s procedures.

You’ve done it—from the collection of evidence to writing the narratives to organizing supplemental evidence. Hopefully, using our advice, the process did not feel too overwhelming. Definitely, take time to relax and celebrate your work, growth and achievement demonstrated in your submission.

Then start planning for your next promotion dossier.

MANCHESTER, U.K.—Spread across three days, the World Academic Summit drew global leaders from far and wide to discuss the complexities of higher education in a changing world.

The event, put on by Times Higher Education (Inside Higher Ed’s parent company), featured more than 40 sessions on a wide range of issues including business challenges, global partnerships and research innovation. Based on observations from various panel sessions and conversations with academic leaders, CEOs and students, it’s clear that despite geographic differences, institutions around the world are grappling with similar challenges.

Shaky Business Models

While many U.S. institutions are reeling from financial challenges due to declining enrollment, a Tuesday panel comprised of leaders from Canada, England and Japan noted that pressures on university business models are widespread and often driven by factors outside their control.

Bill Flanagan, president of the University of Alberta, said that shortly after he stepped into his role in 2020, his institution was hit with steep funding cuts from the provincial government. Flanagan had to scramble to find roughly $84 million (in U.S. dollars) worth of cost savings.

The university was forced to restructure, he said, making cuts over a period of two years in a process that emphasized the retention of faculty and academic staff jobs. But given the depth of the challenge, “there was no service at the university that was not touched,” he said.

He also cited the impact of the loss of international students, now that Canada has restricted the number it is allowing into the country. Flanagan suggested that “Ottawa [the capital] is doing everything it can to drive away” such students, a matter he chalked up to political tensions over migration and housing shortages in Canada. Those bitter conversations, he said, will ultimately harm higher ed’s bottom line.

While raising tuition is one option to offset financial issues (and a lever the University of Alberta pulled), it comes with its own challenges.

At the University of Tokyo, a roughly $654-a-year tuition hike for undergraduate programs was met with student protests and media scrutiny when it was announced this fall, executive director and vice president Kunihiro Ohta said.

Global South’s Growing Influence

Does the future of international partnerships lie in the Global South? Duncan Ivison, president and vice chancellor of the University of Manchester, which hosted the summit, believes so.

In a main-stage interview on Monday, Ivison said the next wave of entrepreneurs and scientists will likely hail from Africa and Southeast Asia, noting that they are navigating global challenges “with a fraction of the resources” that Western nations have to respond to crises.

Because of such innovation and resilience, Ivison said, he is eyeing partnerships in Africa and the Middle East.

“My hunch is that we’re going to learn more from engaging with the global universities of the South, frankly, than we will … by signing yet another agreement with Harvard or MIT,” he said.

Ivison also expressed concern that governments may take what he cast as shortsighted positions on collaborative partnerships with institutions in countries that have been historically antagonistic or in competition with one another, arguing that universities needed to have a “long view.”

In a panel discussion on Tuesday, European research leaders discussed the future of the bloc’s influence as a research superpower. Evelyn Welch, the president and vice chancellor at the University of Bristol, mentioned the institution’s partnership with the University of South Africa to coordinate the African Charter, a coalition of signatories across the continent and Europe, North and South America that aims to create equitable research partnerships with institutions in the Global South.

Imposing a medical model of a university is “problematic for new or young higher education sectors,” Welch said. “We should be open to the challenge of finding new ways to do research and teaching. Saying everyone should occupy the same space as Paris in the 14th century isn’t right.”

Campus Tensions Have No Borders

Campuses across the world have been roiled by pro-Palestinian protests, and Manchester’s was no different. The first sessions hadn’t even begun Monday when protesters blocked access to the event’s registration, holding a banner that read, “1 year of Gaza Genocide” and “Israel out of academia.” They also disrupted a main-stage conversation with U.K. Department of Education skills minister Jacqui Smith and demonstrated outside receptions and other gatherings of conference attendees.

The first day of the conference, Monday, Oct. 7, marked the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s attack on Israel.

With dozens of universities from more than 30 countries in attendance, pro-Palestinian protesters saw an opportunity to address multiple institutions, one student told Inside Higher Ed.

Police officers fell to the ground in a tussle with protesters on the first day, but the scene ended without arrests. In one instance, students were allowed roughly 10 minutes to speak before being removed by campus security.

Some attendees told Inside Higher Ed the tolerance for protests was a function of British academia, with demonstrators being given time to make their points before being removed.

Josh Moody/Inside Higher Ed

Some attendees were visibly frustrated, while others voiced their support for the protesters.

“What’s happening in Gaza is atrocious,” Tyrone Pretorious, rector and vice chancellor of the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, told Inside Higher Ed as he observed a protest.

Numerous speakers also referenced the protests during speeches and panels, often highlighting the importance of engaging in hard conversations as a foundational tenet of academia.

“It is a very difficult day in our community for many people,” Ivison, the Manchester vice chancellor, said at one session. “The intensification of the conflict in the Middle East has impacted thousands, not only in the Middle East, but in our city and in our country. So I just wanted to acknowledge that the pain and suffering that’s been felt by all sorts of members of our community is real. We all, I think, hope for peace.”

Ivison added that protest is an outlet for those struggling on a painful anniversary.

“I’m grateful for your patience, but today is a day that many people are hurting and suffering,” Ivison said Monday.

As I write, I am on a flight home from spending a couple of days at Harvey Mudd College, where I was honored to deliver one of the talks as part of the Bruce J. Nelson Distinguished Speaker series, this year themed on “Learning in the Age of AI.”

The first speaker in the series was Sal Khan of Khan Academy, who was once named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. The next speaker, in about a month’s time, is Emily Bender, the linguist and AI researcher who was named one of the 100 most influential people in AI by Time magazine.

Sal Khan, Emily Bender and me, a former non-tenure-track lecturer/instructor at a handful of different institutions, a nonholder of his Ph.D. who does not have a direct line to Bill Gates in his phone contacts.

I’m thinking about how this wouldn’t have happened without Inside Higher Ed co-founder Doug Lederman.

If you didn’t see this week’s announcement, after 20 years, Doug Lederman is stepping away from Inside Higher Ed, an act following the departure of Scott Jaschik in July 2023 that now leaves the publication in the hands of the next generation of leadership.

In Doug’s announcement, he shares the origin story of IHE. While editors at The Chronicle of Higher Education, he and Scott felt like there were important aspects of the world of higher education that were not being covered, voices going unheard, and they wanted to see if there was an audience for these untold stories.

Starting a new journalistic media venture is never a good idea in terms of the odds of success, so it is worth a moment to pause and reflect on the audacity of a two-person team thinking they might be able to carve out a space alongside a legacy publication like The Chronicle.

Mission accomplished. I seriously doubt that Doug and Scott considered the potential of creating something that would have a life and legacy beyond them at the moment of launch, but this is exactly what they’ve done.

As one of the voices that had previously been unheard, I want to personally say thank you. Blogging at IHE has literally transformed my life. It became the vehicle through which I was allowed to explore my labor and my approach to writing pedagogy, a place to work out the concerns that had previously existed only in my head, a place to share thoughts with an audience that in turn supplied additional fuel and fodder for my own thinking.

It exposed my ideas to editors who wanted to know if I had a book (or two) in me. It exposed my ideas to others wrestling with the challenge of teaching and learning who now invite me to come and share thoughts on that worthy struggle in community with each other.

It gave me the confidence to believe that I could leave the profession I love (teaching) but continue that work in other contexts that have ultimately proved incredibly fulfilling.

Reflecting on my origin story as a contributor to IHE, I can’t help but observe how casual, how natural it was. Needing a temporary stand-in when he was relocating for a new position, my friend John Griswold (Oronte Churm) asked me to fill in at his blog space.

Sure, why not? After a few months, when Churm returned, Doug asked me if I wanted to launch my own space, and also, what would I like to call it?

I hit on “Just Visiting,” thinking of “just” in terms of both “only” and “that which is right.” It was meant to reflect my status as perpetual “visiting” contingent faculty inside of higher education and my attempt to say things I believe to be true. I have never asked Doug or Scott why they decided to give me a chance, but I think it was probably a choice consistent with their founding values, a desire to give voice to a perspective less likely to be heard.

To me, the fundamental value they were enacting was curiosity, and I can think of no better animating force for a publication that covers higher education.

I am tempted to say that I was grateful to be left alone to do what I had to do, but that’s not accurate. It’s true that Doug and Scott gave me enormous latitude to write toward my own sources of interest, but this latitude was not indifference and was instead a form of support, a belief in the power and benefits of letting people be curious.

Indeed, on the occasions when I wrote something that caused consternation and resulted in emails of complaint in their inboxes, I was always supported, even when they may have disagreed with me.

I look at the long roster of journalists—too many to mention—who have done such good work at IHE who have gone on to work elsewhere both in journalism and higher education writ large, and the scope of the legacy of the publication’s founders expands further.

And dare I say that the range of coverage at The Chronicle has significantly expanded over the last 20 years, perhaps thanks to IHE nipping at its heels for a couple of decades? IHE will always be an alternative to a legacy publication like The Chronicle, but alternatives are extremely important in a sector that benefits from as many different voices being heard as possible.

I was pleased to note the headline on Doug’s farewell, “Changing of the Guard at ‘Inside Higher Ed.’” A changing of the guard suggests a desire to maintain the continuity of and protect what came before. Of course, part of that continuity was a constant search for how to better serve the audience, so it’s not as though the new leadership will be standing pat.

In the announcement, Doug says that he’s “looking forward to the next career chapter,” where he can try to fix some of this industry’s problems. This is very good news for higher education indeed.

So, thank you, Doug, and I think we all look forward to whatever you do next.

A Centre County Court judge has delayed an effort to remove Pennsylvania State University trustee Barry Fenchak, who is suing Penn State for allegedly refusing to hand over details about endowment investment management fees despite multiple requests.

Fenchak, who is an alumni-elected trustee and an investment adviser, has clashed with the board over rising endowment management fees and asked for more information, which he argues is necessary to carry out his fiduciary duties. Fellow board members are seeking to oust Fenchak, arguing that he violated the Board’s Code of Conduct.

Penn State has not specified Fenchak’s alleged infraction. 

But court records show that Fenchak, who is bald, made a joke to a female employee about how he can’t wear baseball caps because his wife said such headwear makes him look like “a penis with a hat on.” Court records note he made the joke after receiving a Penn State cap as a gift at a board event and was referencing the PG-rated movie A League of Their Own.

Penn State’s 36-member board was expected to vote to expel Fenchak in a special meeting Thursday. Now a judge’s order has stopped that process as his lawsuit against Penn State plays out.

When asked for comment, a university spokesperson wrote by email: “We are reviewing the judge’s decision and determining next steps.”

Wednesday’s court injunction marks the second legal setback for Penn State in recent weeks, as the university is also being sued by trustee Anthony Lubrano. He alleges fellow trustees launched a retaliatory investigation into him for speaking out on Penn State financial issues and board decision-making and requested the university foot the bill for his legal defense in the process.

Earlier this month, a judge ruled that Penn State must pay Lubrano’s legal fees.

University of Washington biochemist David Baker has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in “computational protein design.”

He will receive half of the $1.1 million prize; the other half will be split between Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind, who won for “protein structure prediction.”

According to the Nobel announcement, Baker succeeded in using amino acids to design a completely new kind of protein in 2003, which has led to the creation of a whole range of new proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines and more.

The Nobel committee praised him for developing “computerized methods for achieving what many people believed was impossible: creating proteins that did not previously exist and which, in many cases, have entirely new functions.”

When Baker got the call Wednesday morning, he was asleep. “My wife promptly started screaming, so I had a little hard time hearing,” he said. “But then they got the news across.”

He said he was honored to share the prize with Hassabis and Jumper.

“There’s always been two sides to the protein folding problem going from sequence to structure and then back from structure to sequence,” Baker said. “And I think it’s neat that there’s a Noble Prize for them together.”

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded Princeton University professor emeritus John Hopfield, along with Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto, the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”

Hopfield, 91, used tools from physics to develop an associative memory that can store and recreate patterns, known as the Hopfield network, according to the press release.

British-born Hinton, 76, an early pioneer of artificial intelligence, used the Hopfield network to create a different kind of machine that can learn to recognize characteristic properties in data.

“This year’s two Nobel Laureates in physics have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning,” the academy said in a statement.

Hinton made news last year when he quit his job at Google so he could speak more freely about the dangers of AI—which he did during a press call after the prize was announced.

“We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us,” he said by phone to the Nobel press conference, Reuters reported. “It’s going to be wonderful in many respects, in areas like healthcare. But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences. Particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”

Hopfield and Hinton will split the $1.1 million prize.

A May 2024 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab found a majority of college students identified balancing academics with personal, family and financial responsibilities as their greatest stressor.

Officials at the University of South Carolina saw this in real time, as a share of students would lose their state-awarded merit scholarships each year because their grades faltered or they didn’t complete the required credit load needed to maintain the award. Adviser-led outreach has helped enroll learners in summer courses to ensure students meet requirements and stay on track to graduate.

Over the past three years, the intervention has helped thousands of students retain their scholarships and re-enroll for the fall term.

Scholars at risk: Each year, the state of South Carolina awards high school students merit scholarships based on their residency and their academic standing, which they can apply to an eligible South Carolina higher education institution. The top awards—the Legislative Incentives for Future Excellence Scholarship and the Palmetto Fellows Scholarship—provide students up to $20,000 and $29,200 over four years, respectively.

To maintain eligibility for both awards, students must maintain at least a 3.0 grade point average and complete 30 credit hours per academic year.

“The high cost of higher education and the academic requirements for retaining scholarships can create significant barriers for students at risk of losing their financial aid,” says Mike Dial, associate director of undergraduate academic advising. “Internal data shows that, without intervention, these students are less likely to continue their education.”

Among students who started in 2015, only 73 percent who lost their scholarships persisted to a second year, compared to 96 percent of first-year students who retained their scholarships. Graduation rates, similarly, were much lower for those who lost their scholarships (53 percent) than for those who retained them past their first year (89 percent).

Starting in 2021, the University Advising Center (UAC) partnered with the Office of Financial Aid and Scholarships (OFAS) to implement the Scholarship Risk Intervention program to help students hang on to their financial aid.

Put in practice: Each May, the financial aid office provides advisers with a list of at-risk students, identified based on their insufficient GPA, credit hours or both. From there, advisers create cases in the campus advising software, which are assigned to the student’s academic adviser. The adviser will then review the student’s case and which scholarship they’re receiving to see if it’s feasible for the student to meet eligibility criteria during the summer term, before the official scholarship review by the financial aid office.

If it looks like a student can bridge the gap during the summer, an adviser will reach out via email, text or phone calls. Once the student engages, advisers partner with students to identify strategies to make up the deficit, such as enrolling in a course that plays to the student’s strengths or balancing the number of credits a student takes to not hinder their GPA further.

What’s different: The initiative hinges on the cooperation between UAC and OFAS, breaking down silos to aid student retention and completion.

“This collaboration provides a holistic approach to student support, helping them understand how their academic choices directly affect their financial aid,” Dial says. “Advisers now play an active role in helping students retain their scholarships.”

A recent study by Tyton Partners found that, while many students want to discuss financial issues with their advisers (48 percent), advisers are less likely to consider financial issues an essential topic to discuss (30 percent).

The impact: The initiative has been largely successful, improving retention and scholarship eligibility for students who engage with advisers.

From March 2021 to August 2024, 5,650 unique students were flagged as at-risk, with a total of 6,634 flags created. Around three in 10 at-risk students were students of color, and a similar number were first-generation students.

About half (55 percent) of these students had a conversation with an adviser about their options, and 61 percent of these students enrolled in a summer session, compared to 38 percent of students who did not have contact with an adviser. Forty-six percent of students who discussed plans with their adviser retained their aid, and 91 percent who had discussions with advisers returned to the institution in the fall.

Spring 2024 data, specifically, found 55 percent of students (n=1,676) engaged with an adviser, 80 percent enrolled in a summer course, 59 percent retained their scholarships and 95 percent retained into the fall semester.

“The findings further illustrate the critical role of advisors in guiding students through the complexities of financial aid requirements, encouraging retention, and improving academic performance,” according to a university report.

Seeking stories from campus leaders, faculty members and staff for our Student Success focus. Share here.

To the editor:

In “The End of the Academy?” (September 19, 2024), Mark A. Boyer rightfully calls attention to the dangers of performative, one-sided activism in academia—activism that prioritizes symbolism over substantive change. The same dynamic is playing out in the halls of Congress, where the conversation around antisemitism has devolved into political posturing and talking points instead of meaningful action. If we are to make real progress in combating antisemitism on college campuses and beyond, we must be wary of those who merely pay lip service to combating antisemitism without proposing or supporting concrete, effective measures.

In contrast to symbolic gestures, leaders like Senator Bob Casey and Congressman Dan Goldman understand that fighting hate requires sustained effort and resources. Their proposed Showing Up for Students Act, which aims to bolster the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, represents a genuine effort to combat discrimination on college campuses. Fully funding this vital agency is critical for effectively investigating and addressing incidents of bias. Yet, recent attempts by Republican lawmakers to slash its funding actively hinder efforts to create safer, more inclusive campuses for all students.

Beyond legislative actions, universities themselves have a critical role to play in combating hate. We must encourage institutions to increase their capacity to protect all students from bullying, harassment, and threats, while fostering a culture of respect and understanding.

Central to this effort is helping students navigate the intellectual challenges inherent in higher education. Boyer emphasizes the need for campuses to maintain dialogue and embrace a diversity of perspectives. Universities should equip students with the tools to engage critically and empathetically with diverse viewpoints. The Nexus Task Force’s Campus Guide to Identifying Antisemitism in a Time of Perplexity provides a resource for differentiating between antisemitic threats and legitimate political expression.

Colleges and universities must take proactive steps that genuinely address antisemitism and promote a culture of respect on our college campuses. To do this, they need robust support from policymakers who understand that the safety and intellectual growth of students should not be sacrificed to partisan agendas. By addressing the root causes of intolerance and equipping our students with the tools for constructive dialogue, we can create campuses – and ultimately, a society – free from the scourge of antisemitism and all forms of bigotry. Let’s call on our elected officials to move beyond rhetoric and embrace these practical, substantive measures. If we are serious about combating hate in all its forms, this is the path we must take.

–Kevin Rachlin
Washington Director, The Nexus Leadership Project

If you’ve ever attended graduate school, you probably have a list of things you wish your program had done better—or at least differently. Some of them may have been identifiable when you were there, while others might have become more apparent years later.

A case in point: It is only now, as a full professor, that I see how essential it is that graduate programs require that students publish at least one piece, preferably related to their research, in a respected national media outlet geared to a general audience. During my doctoral program, I had no way of knowing how important that can be. In fact, some people immediately bristle at this proposition, especially since it is so outside of the traditional configuration of how graduate school unfolds. Yet the merits are many, and I will explain seven key reasons why.

1. It’s essential to know how to successfully translate ideas for more general consumption. Anything worth researching and learning about is worth sharing and passing along in digestible ways so other people can gain insight and inspiration. And it’s the “Who cares?” factor that’s most important. Readers need and want—and deserve—to know why they should care about what you’re writing. They need to understand why it matters.

For example, how might your research on the water crisis impact public policy? Or, how might you make your expertise on tourism matter to both corporate executives to make the case for more responsible development and to average citizens who love to travel and want to do so more responsibly? Or, how does poetry impact people’s ability to read more effectively? Moreover, how does the overreliance on family caregivers affect physical and mental health as well as family dynamics?

2. Writing for a general audience will change what you write for the better. When you write for the larger public, you have to avoid jargon and communicate in a way that others can understand and appreciate without prior knowledge about your specific field. We must essentially communicate that way when we teach, and it is a valuable lesson to know how to do that in writing, too. Publishing in nonacademic outlets enhances your repertoire, versatility and fluency. Don’t be surprised that it helps you better express ideas when you teach, as well.
3. Writing for a national media outlet will reshape and improve your writing process and practice. Most outlets want pithy, snappy, substantive pieces that run between 600 and 1,000 words for a newspaper op-ed and about 1,000 to 1,500 for articles in magazines or other outlets. Learning how to write concise yet cogent pieces that are densely packed with key insights, richly nuanced and layered, and that invite readers to self-reflect can be deeply challenging yet also supremely rewarding.

When I was in college and graduate school, I had two terrible tendencies: I overwrote everything, and I procrastinated. Every paper I turned in was longer than it needed to be, and I was one of those annoying people who tested the boundaries of fonts and margins. A tyranny of perfectionism weighed heavily on me, and as I see it now, some of my waiting to the last minute was a warped way to deal with fear and impostor syndrome. If I didn’t do as well as I knew I could on something, I could attribute it to not devoting endless time to it. I know I’m certainly not alone as an academic who struggled with those two tendencies at one time or another. Procrastination and long-winded writing are basic love languages in academia. But they don’t serve us well.

Many years later, when I started to want to write for a much larger audience through the national media, those habits had to change. I got comfortable with the rhythms of writing in a way that’s more edited, that tells things more plainly yet, arguably, much more elegantly and creatively as well. And I now meet deadlines with far greater ease.

4. Submitting work to a national media outlet is good practice for developing a thick skin. In order to maintain writing and publishing momentum, you must be able to deal with rejection and criticism. When you submit an article for publication to a popular media outlet and it wants to publish it, someone there might get back to you in as little as a few hours or within a few weeks. It’s generally a far more streamlined process than submitting work to scholarly journals for example.

That swift pace is advantageous for several reasons. First, knowing so quickly where things stand puts you in a great position to either have your work out in a timely fashion or to know sooner that you should try and send it elsewhere. Second, you learn to regularly deal with failure and to keep pitching your work regardless, and the act of doing so can help you value and protect your work. Finally, such a quick turnaround time with an acceptance also means that editors want changes fast. That can motivate you to meet a deadline and help you stay less attached to your every word and idea. The key is to keep your work moving on an assembly line of your own making.

Not only must you deal with pointed feedback from an editor, but having your work available to many more eyeballs means that more people might critique it. Whereas a scholarly article may garner zero to 100 reads over a lifetime, a single article in the popular media may attract thousands or millions of viewers in a day. That can be exciting or daunting, depending on your perspective. But, in general, writing and publishing involve you in a larger conversation, and the possibility of so many more people interacting with your ideas is a good thing. It does necessitate letting go of perfectionism and embracing ideas in progress.

5. Publishing in a well-read outlet can be transformative for your career. Vibrancy and aliveness come from crafting shorter pieces for a wider and more diverse audience. The energy of ideas in those articles can ignite curiosity and connection that leads readers to reach out. Writing for a national media outlet can give you exposure among new audiences, expand your networks and even present opportunities for scholarship, teaching and service you had never imagined. One of the most fulfilling aspects of writing for a larger audience is hearing from people across the world with comments, questions and invitations. I’ve received emails from academics, senior administrators at other colleges and universities, average citizens, and everyone in between.

As a result of writing for the general public, I’ve been invited to speak, facilitate workshops, serve on dissertation committees, participate in webinars and conferences organized by institutions in several other countries, and author chapters in anthologies. I’ve been interviewed on television, radio and podcasts. A literary agent even offered to represent me because she liked an article I wrote.

6. Public scholarship and mentorship reinforce each other. Whether by choice or by circumstance, many people finish graduate school and do not go into academic jobs, and many others transition out of academia to pursue other lines of work. So it makes sense for graduate students to have the preparation and experience to write for a general audience.

Of course, for that to happen, senior faculty will need to know the ropes of how best to navigate this different writing landscape, so they can then mentor graduate students to successfully do this. While some may presume it is much easier to write and publish for a general audience, a good number of faculty members may find themselves surprised by the multitude of different challenges involved. It would be a positive step to see funding and other institutional support flow in the direction of professional development for these endeavors.

7. Publishing outside of the traditional constructs and confines of academia can ultimately benefit higher education. At a time when higher education institutions are under constant scrutiny and attack, and when the public is questioning if anything of worth, value and practical application is happening within these structures, it makes sense for faculty members to communicate with a larger circle and to write for the greater good. It also behooves us to mentor and encourage graduate students to do this regularly. At its best, engaging in public scholarship helps build bridges and increases trust between colleges and universities and their constituencies.

“Write a brief history of your relationship to digital technologies, including social media.”

This is a diagnostic prompt I have been giving students for a decade or so, first only in composition classes, now in most first-year classes that I teach. In addition to helping me learn how each student writes, I use this prompt to learn about students’ changing relationships to technology. It was in this way that I initially learned about Snapchat and streaks, or the fact that many of my students first opened social media accounts at a sleepover in elementary school, unbeknownst to their parents. Too many of them recall their first incident of being bullied—or of bullying—in a group text in middle school, and most tell me that they get their news from social media, especially Instagram and TikTok.

In the aftermath of this assignment, together we create a set of communal best practices for the use of technological devices in the classroom, taking differing needs and accommodations into account. The related conversations that follow, around new and emergent technologies, wind through entire semesters.

This is because the ways students are growing up, and their day-to day-lives, are changing at such a rapid clip that without such conversations to bridge us, we might as well be speaking to one another using smoke signals. Just as higher education once made the shift, however unevenly, to integrating writing practices and training across the curriculum—an effect largely of postwar shifts toward increased democratization and diversification of colleges—so too it’s time to make the case for digital literacy across the curriculum in higher education.

Librarians have already been doing this work, often unacknowledged, for years, but those of us in classrooms need to highlight the cause and collectively join forces. We need a set of principles developed by instructors from different disciplines and all kinds of institutions that can be integrated into professional development training nationwide and continually cultivated over time.

Many of the same basic tenets of what are known as Writing Across the Curriculum programs could be applied to this new realm, like the importance of self-reflection on behaviors and practices (what that opening writing prompt elicits), the emphasis on teaching the whole student (which means delving more deeply into how students are now spending so much of their time), and the attention to differing expectations and norms depending on discipline, genre and context—something that could effectively be applied to the intake, creation and dissemination of information and story in all kinds of online modalities.

It’s 2024, and the majority of U.S. teens own iPhones and are on social media daily, many self-reporting they use various platforms “almost constantly.” This is where most of the adult public, including the professoriate, also spends at least some of their time, to socialize, elicit or share opinions and information, and, just as often, air grievances. While conversations around technology and education have typically focused on legislation and top-down policies, often induced by panic, these are ultimately stopgap, inadequate solutions to a complete reshaping of the world as we know it. There continues to be little sustained, deliberate professional development or training for professors teaching students whose experiences of the world are increasingly tied to the digital spheres in which so much of their social, educational and professional lives take place.

In colleges across the country, these shifts started long before COVID. I have witnessed professors around me scrambling, often on their own, to figure out best practices for integrating digital tools into their classrooms, or teaching students appropriate ways to find, evaluate and use online sources. For example, is Wikipedia a suitable resource? Both students and the professors I train ask me this question nearly every semester. What makes matters so complicated is not only that context and use matters, but that the answer has changed over time. How should cellphone and other tech use be treated in the classroom? Ask 10 professors, get 10 different answers.

One of the central issues seems to be that professors themselves have little background or training in understanding the history and development, including the design and use, of various online platforms and technologies. Consequently, as with teaching writing, they may feel unequipped and fearful. (Consider, for example, the recent, and continued, widespread panic around ChatGPT.)

It’s no wonder: Technology is changing at a propulsive clip, and no individual besides those working in the tech industry—or, for that matter, those working in digital studies—could be well expected to keep up while continuing with their professional obligations. This is why we professors, with support from our administrations, need to band together and create a new movement, using the highly successful Writing Across the Curriculum movement as a model, to introduce Digital Literacy Across the Curriculum.

It’s not as though we need to start from scratch. The Stanford History Education Group, for example, created its Civic Online Reasoning curriculum in 2014. It has free resources for educators, in secondary schools and beyond, invested in teaching students to diligently look for and evaluate all kinds of online sources. A colleague recently told me about Courageous RI, a media literacy program run by the University of Rhode Island and the Media Education Lab. These are just two of many programs, which have often been independently created as a reaction to the current crisis around using and understanding technology in education.

Most educators well know the problems such an integrative curriculum would be responding to: Things like the rapid spread of misinformation and disinformation, an already urgent issue set to magnify with the integration of more artificial intelligence models; an alarming mental health crisis; and, perhaps least often highlighted and most difficult to address, a general lack of awareness and reflection on where and how digital technologies and tools might best fit into our lives.

The effects of technology are not foregone conclusions. Instead, technology consists of tools that can be shaped to work for the missions many higher education institutions have long set for themselves. We just have to be more intentional about making those connections.

Professors should not be expected to face every new shift in technology—small revolutions within a major revolution—on their own, particularly when so many are now working as contingent laborers and when most have experienced reduced resources and supports. These are not changes we can confront alone, and asking support service units across colleges and universities, like libraries and technology labs, to shoulder the burden is unfair and marginalizes the problem. We already have the WAC model we can look to as we similarly seek to integrate digital literacy across the curriculum: Let’s use it.

Research shows students who have at least one connection to campus are more likely to persist, retain and complete a college degree, particularly students from historically marginalized or less privileged backgrounds. Students who feel connected to their institution are also more likely to have better mental well-being, as well.

Mentorship is one way colleges and universities facilitate intentional relationship-building, but not every student has someone they can turn to for support while at college. A 2021 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed, conducted by College Pulse, found nearly half of students couldn’t identify a mentor who could give them advice on navigating college and planning for after college.

An additional challenge is preparing faculty and staff members to serve as part of a student’s support system, because some campus community members feel less confident in their role as a mentor.

In this episode of Voices of Student Success, host Ashley Mowreader speaks with Elon University’s Peter Felten, executive director of the Center for Engaged Learning, and Emily Krechel, director of new student programs. Felten and Krechel serve as members on the Mentoring Initiatives Design Team. The two discuss the role of relationships in student success and how Elon stakeholders look to create a relationship-rich university community.

An edited version of the podcast appears below.

Inside Higher Ed: Peter, you’ve done a lot of work around relationships in higher ed. Can you paint a broad picture about the role of mentorship, and these relationships in student success in general?

Felten: There’s decades and decades and decades of research that says the quality of relationships students form with peers, with staff and with faculty are really foundational for their learning, their well-being, their sense of belonging, their persistence, their success—all the good stuff that happens with undergraduate education. We’ve known that for decades and decades.

What we’re trying to do at Elon, and a lot of institutions are trying to do the same sort of thing, is create really relationship-rich environments where students can connect with lots of different people in lots of different ways, in the classroom and outside the classroom, so that they have the kind of connections, and the kind of supports that are going to support them in thriving.

Inside Higher Ed: Emily, you work with first-year students, specifically. How do mentorship and relationships play into the first year and that transitional period?

Krechel: What we’ve noticed is that, when students start to form relationships early, they’ve discovered they have a greater connection, not just to the institution, but to the environment that they’re within. They feel a part of the community.

I know different people have different feelings around the term “sense of belonging,” but really it’s that sense of connection that helps students feel like, “I can thrive here.”

So the sooner that we can help students create connections, not just with their peers, but with all those staff and faculty and peer leaders or peer mentors, the quicker we can do that and help them establish a foundation of community, the quicker that students are going to feel adjusted and transitioned into the institution, which leads to higher retention rates, or at least students thinking, “I can stick it out, I’m going to keep trying, I’m going to keep going because I have one friend, or I’ve connected with this staff member. I feel connected to my faculty, my classrooms, so they’re inspiring me to feel a sense of ownership of my experience, but also this connection to my community, and thus the institution and wanting to persist.”

Inside Higher Ed: It sounds like a really simple scenario: We just need students to meet people and like them and feel like they belong somewhere. But it’s not so simple. What are some of those barriers; what are the things that hinder student relationships and connections?

Krechel: That’s a great question, and it’s something that I think every institution is trying to figure out—how do we reduce the barriers to those connections? I think it’s about creating pathways.

Working in orientation, what can we do during orientation that helps inspire students to connect? And that is changing, and how orientation professionals do that work. If you look at the different research on students today, they don’t necessarily want to be programmed anymore, so these formal get-to-know-you programs, or you’re telling me what to do, that’s not necessarily the best move for an institution to help them build community. Rather, creating these informal experiences where students can be side by side, engaging in an activity that they have thus chosen to do.

We do in our orientation program a lot of social programming in which, here are multiple options, choose what you would like to engage in, or choose to just hang out and play games or hang out and talk. What we want you to do is just come out of your room, as opposed to just being a recluse and staying indoors; come out and at least engage and [try] to do multiple different types of activities. Things for those really extroverted people to do, to video games or esports opportunities or board games. Things that are going to be in a loud environment, and things that are going to be more in a personal, small group environment. Trying to cater to multiple different styles of engagement for our students and creating those spaces and places, that’s one way that we’ve tried to do it.

I think those connection points have been lost in students’ experiences over the last couple of years because of COVID and telling people to stay indoors, to not engage with other people. How do we kind of re-establish people’s skill sets around, how do I make friends? How do I go up to somebody new and introduce myself?

One other method that we do specifically in orientation is work with orientation leaders to help them see themselves as those bridge builders and give them the skill set to say, “When you put on your orientation leader shirt, you are basically imbued with a superpower of connection.” People are expecting you to connect with them and go up and introduce yourself to them. They’re like, “Oh, that’s just what an OL [orientation leader] does.” It helps, for them, remove some of the barriers that “maybe I’m shy, maybe that’s just not who I am. I hate networking.” But then I put on this OLK shirt, and I enter in this peer leader role, and I now feel more empowered to engage students and then thus help them connect and build bridges with one another. So kind of tackling it from multiple angles at the early stages in the student’s journey.

Felten: One of the barriers I see in the research, and in the research colleagues and I have done interviewing students around the country, especially [among] first-generation college students, is this sense that everybody else knows how to do college, everybody else has it figured out, and I’m alone in struggling. I’m alone in feeling like I’m not sure if I fit. I’m not sure how to do these things.

When you feel like that, when you feel like you’re alone, like everybody else has figured out, sometimes you feel like an impostor. What you’re most likely to do is isolate yourself even more. You’re never going to admit to people that you’re an impostor, right? So what you do is you stay disconnected. You don’t ask for help; you don’t connect with professors or with peers or staff or anything like this.

This is a barrier we see really strongly, especially in first-gen students. I think one of the things we need to do—whether it’s through an orientation like Emily coordinates at Elon for residential students, or it’s at a community college where none of the students live on campus—is help students recognize that it’s normal, it’s regular to have questions, to have doubts, to have concerns, and that successful students have appropriate help-seeking behaviors. Successful students take the risk to connect with a peer and say hi to somebody or something like that. That’s not a sign that you’re doing it wrong. That’s a sign that you’re going to be successful.

Inside Higher Ed: We see equity gaps in mentorship, specifically where students … have never had a formal mentor in their lives. I wonder if we could talk about that iteration of belonging and connection as well, finding that older mentor, peer, faculty, staff member who you want to connect with and not really knowing how to navigate that situation.

Felten: One of the things we’re trying to do at Elon—and I think lots of institutions are trying to do—is create this environment where students have lots of connections and lots of relationships. We know that a program can assign the student to mentor, Emily is now my mentor, and sometimes that works well, but real mentoring relationships are more organic than that. They’re more human than that. The best thing we can do is create lots of connections and then encourage everybody to try to move them into mentoring.

But we need to recognize that often students whose parents went to university or something like this, have expectations that this is what’s going to happen. First-generation students often have gotten to higher education because they’re so good at working on their own. They’ve often internalized this message that what you need to do to be successful in college is to work on your own. They don’t often seek out relationships, because they don’t value them. And it’s not that there’s something wrong with the students, it’s because they’re so persistent and so successful working individually.

I think the first thing we need to do is teach all our students, help all our students understand that relationships and mentors are going to help you succeed. They’re going to help you thrive academically and personally. And then we have to help teach them strategies. As a professor, I say come to office hours, and only until I had a child at college, and she’s like, “How do you do office hours?” did it occur to me that students might not know what it means to go to office hours.

Finally, I think we have to help students be brave enough to do this. We can offer them all these opportunities, but just as a human, it’s scary sometimes to go to that office and actually knock on the door. So helping them value relationships and mentors, understand some strategies and then develop the courage to actually act.

Krechel: I’ll go a step further and talk a little more about the Mentoring Design Team here at Elon.

We created a framework entitled Mentoring and Meaningful Relationships, where we define seven relationships that students, faculty and staff can have or be [in] one of those relationships. Maybe I’m a teacher, I’m an adviser, I’m a supervisor. How do we help folks apply mentoring skills to all of those different relationships?

Mentoring is happening across meaningful relationships. We often think about, [a] mentor is this one individual who is the penultimate goal of a relationship, in which I’m going to feel like they are changing my life in some way, shape or form. It’s this thing that I’m striving for. Whereas, if we look at meaningful relationships across the board and helping folks establish some mentoring skill sets in which they can apply them, then everyone benefits across the board. Recognizing that different types of relationships, mentoring can exist in some way, shape or form, and helping folks see themselves as a potential mentor for not just students, but also staff and faculty on our campuses.

So that person who is cleaning the library at night when students are studying, who stops and says, “Hey, how’s it going?” to students, they can see themselves building meaningful relationships and creating an environment that is relationship-rich, where students feel seen, they feel like people care about them, no matter the role in which they’re engaging with another human on campus, that everyone on campus buys in to this idea that we’re creating a relationship-rich environment in which I can apply mentoring to all of the different relationships that I have with students and my colleagues as well.

Inside Higher Ed: I love the idea that mentorship isn’t a one-to-one relationship. It’s a cohort, it’s a community, it’s everybody looking to improve their fellow community member. I wonder if you can speak about the tenets of good mentorship. What does it mean to be a good mentor to students, in this idea that anybody and everybody should be mentoring?

Felten: One of the concepts we use at Elon quite a lot comes from a scholar, Brad Johnson, who writes about mentoring, and he talks about what students need, and what humans need is not a single mentor, but a constellation of mentors, a set of people who can support them and challenge them in different ways. And Brad’s research shows that that’s what people tend to have instead of single mentor.

But he also shows that, actually, that’s liberating. It’s empowering for mentors, because then, as a faculty member, if I’m working with a student in undergraduate research, I don’t have to be all things to this student. I am their undergraduate research mentor, and I can support them in professional development and in thinking about themselves as a student and as a person, but they might have aspects of their lives that are far beyond my expertise or my knowledge, and I’m not the right person to be their mentor there. So helping students and helping all of us see that single mentoring relationships are good, but even more powerful as a constellation, [that] can be really helpful for everybody involved.

Krechel: To help folks work on the skills related to mentoring, we created four foundational competencies that can be utilized to create trainings, to create experiences for students and peer leaders, peer mentors, staff and faculty mentors, or just anybody who is interested in bolstering their mentoring skill set.

We created these four foundational competencies, the first one being cultivating empowered relationships with others. Thinking about, how am I actively listening? How do I build those skill sets? How am I working with folks to help them solve problems, help them reflect, clarifying the information they’re sharing with me to make sure I fully understand and helping? Then finding the solutions in those relationships.

The second one is supporting growth and learning. How do I help somebody set goals? How do I give feedback in an effective way?

The third one is developing a critical consciousness: emotional intelligence, self-awareness, understanding my implicit biases so I can engage more effectively in these relationships.

The last one is enhancing your own interpersonal skills. How do I make sure that I can be clear in my communication? How can I have intentionality within my interactions with people, the networking skill sets? How do I make sure that I have the ability to build trust in a relationship?

Those four skill sets help us establish a foundation of workshops. We did a LinkedIn learning pathway in which … we curated three different videos in each of those sections, where we had a pilot program with staff and faculty, where they went in and watched these videos in LinkedIn Learning to develop those skill sets. Then we had communities of practices in which they then engaged with one another to talk about the skill sets that they were learning and the videos that they were learning.

They found it really meaningful, both to watch the videos and be able to do that in their own time, but then have the ability to come together and have a discussion about things that they were having challenges with, whether that was around giving feedback—that was a hot topic. How do I give effective feedback?

Or, “I’m trying to work with this student and really empower them to work through this conflict scenario, and I don’t know if I’m being most effective.” So receiving feedback from their peers on how to do that more effectively, being able to define these four buckets and then have multiple skill sets underneath them, have really helped us think about how we might curate staff and faculty training, but also peer leader training, peer mentor training, which I think is essential because students are connecting with their peers more than they’re going to connect with faculty and staff.

So how can we help peers of students and figure out what are those skill sets that I need to then, maybe even be a more effective friend? Maybe I’m not their big [sister] in a sorority or a leader in a student organization, but this is my friend who is struggling, and so how can I apply some of these mentoring skill sets to help them work through this situation? I think that took us a little bit of time to define those four buckets, but we started with defining the key skill sets that I kind of talked about in each of those and then we themed them into those four competency areas.

Inside Higher Ed: The faculty and staff role has grown over the past decade-plus to include a lot of different things, and one of those is caring for students. Some will feel very drained by that, like, “This is a lot, I’m being asked to do more with less.” What kind of encouragement or advice would you share with somebody who’s like, “I want to do this, but I just don’t know how I can do that on top of everything else”?

Felten: This is such an important question, because we can’t just burn up staff and faculty in the service of student success. We need to have faculty, staff and student success.

There’s a wonderful new book by a scholar at the University of Wisconsin [at Madison], Xueli Wang, called Delivering Promise, and she says, “We need to be students first and educators first.”

I think the first thing I’d say to my faculty colleagues is that, how you teach can connect students with each other and with others at the university in really powerful ways. The connections don’t all have to be with you. Again, you can create an environment, you can create a set of relationships among peers that are really educationally purposeful and also emotionally supportive just in your teaching. That’s thing one: It doesn’t have to be one-on-one.

The second thing is, I think too often, faculty don’t fully understand all the resources at the university that can support students. It’s difficult if a student is in your office and they’re upset, they’re worried where their next meal is going to come from, or where they’re going to sleep tonight, or about a family member’s mental health or something like this. That’s really hard. That is also not your responsibility as a faculty member to solve.

But almost every college or university has staff and resources to do that work. So how do I help my students connect with those resources so that they can get the support they need, so they can thrive in my class? Because if we see this as entirely on us as individuals to do all of the work, we’re not going to be able to support our students very well because we don’t have enough expertise and enough resources, and we’re just going to burn ourselves out.

Krechel: Absolutely. That’s definitely a piece of feedback we heard loud and clear from our staff when we were looking into this more … that few people are feeling, “You’re asking me to do more” when, in fact, we’re not asking folks to do more. We’re just asking them to apply these mentoring skill sets to their everyday work. Ninety-five percent of people on a college campus are working with people. And so how can we apply these things to our colleagues? If I’m working in an advancement office, to the donors that I’m trying to engage, if I work in admissions to the prospective students and their families?

Felten: Emily reminded me of one of the studies … related to faculty, but I think it’s really powerful for all of us to think about in higher education. It’s from scholars at Arizona State University. The question in this paper is, does it matter if professors in very large enrollment first-year biology courses know students’ names?

What they find is that what matters is that students believe the professor cares to know their name. When a student believes the professor in the course cares to know their name, the student’s more likely to persist through struggle. They’re more likely to ask for help. They’re more likely to be successful in the course. This doesn’t turn F students into A students, but it’s a small thing, and it’s also an attainable thing. Because I don’t have to memorize 400 students’ names, but I can convey to my students that they matter to me as individuals, that I want to support and challenge them, and I think any of us in any role can do that same sort of thing, create that sort of environment where students feel welcomed enough that they’re willing to take a risk and ask for help.

Inside Higher Ed: It’s not about getting it right 100 percent of the time, it’s about trying to get it right 100 percent of the time.

Felten: And having students recognize that you’re trying and we all try.

Inside Higher Ed: I want to learn more about what’s going on at Elon with mentoring. We’ve talked a little bit about some of the different work and initiatives you’re both leading, but tell me what else is happening on campus.

Krechel: Through the work of the Mentoring Design Team, we recognize that mentoring is happening in a lot of different places across campus, whether it’s this small peer-to-peer mentor program in a specific department all the way through research with a faculty mentor; it’s happening everywhere. I think what we are now trying to do is harness that energy and create a shared language and shared understanding of what that means and how that can happen on our campus.

The Mentoring Design Team … worked for two years to uncover where mentoring is happening across campus, uncover where meaningful relationships are being established and cultivated and nurtured, to then be able to launch some pilot work.

We had some pilots last year, which explored different pathways to mentoring. We had a mentorship program called Phoenix Mentors; it was designed for first-year students who were— One of the metrics in our retention data is that students who don’t have anyone else from their high school attending Elon are less likely to be retained at Elon. So we were targeting that student population to help, very intentionally, connect them with an upper-class student leader.

We created mentoring learning outcomes in the first-year experience. We had a graduate student pilot doing this type of work within their graduate student orientation programs.

One of the big things is thinking about the infrastructure. We had a teacher-scholar statement for our faculty, which talked about the ethos of what it means to be a faculty member at Elon. This is a statement that faculty really buy in to and really dictates how they are engaging with students and with each other, and how they’re approaching their teaching in the classrooms and outside the classroom. It said “mentoring” in multiple places. And a lot of people actually refer to it as the teacher-scholar-mentor statement, but it was not the teacher-scholar-mentor statement when you looked at it online; it was the teacher-scholar statement.

This is something that faculty use in their unit ones and their P and T [promotion and tenure], and so the Academic Council actually worked with a subset of our committee to make that officially the Teacher-Scholar-Mentor Statement. We’re looking at other places where we can shift infrastructure, or just how we go about doing things, the culture of our campus.

After two years of work with the Mentoring Design Team, we wrote a report, which had numerous recommendations, specifically thinking about, how do we shift culture, how do we create an infrastructure that can sustain this mentoring and meaningful relationships work? Currently that report is sitting with our president and our provost, who are continuing to look through what is the feasibility of this, and where can we start? They are identifying the path forward with that report of this juncture.

But that doesn’t mean the work has stopped. Like I said, mentoring and meaningful relationship work is already here. We just created a framework to help define that more clearly, and there’s advocacy work to continue creating additional pathways and a different additional capacity across the institution to continue deepening that work that is already happening.

Inside Higher Ed: What’s something that you’re looking forward to with this next evolution of mentorship at Elon?

Krechel: A shared language. When I think mentoring, everyone has their own definition of mentoring. And there is in the scholarship definitions of what mentoring is. We, a small group of faculty and staff, did the ACE study in which they defined mentoring. Different people don’t see themselves within those definitions, though, and that’s why we looked at a more broad framework that defined mentoring and meaningful relationships with seven different relationships, where we can hopefully have folks see themselves more clearly in the work and how they fit into it, so we can have a culture across the institution where everyone feels like, “This is a part of my job. This is a part of what I do at Elon. This is just what Elon is.” It’s where everyone feels like they can cultivate and enhance environment that is rich with collegiality, rich with relationships that are intentional and meaningful for both students and then the faculty and staff as well.

Felten: Yes, and helping our students understand that they have agency in this, and they’re absolutely essential in building those kinds of meaningful relationships with faculty, with staff and with peers. Because I think sometimes students aren’t sure you know what to do, aren’t quite confident how to do college. So how do we help them see that they really have a huge role to play in making their own education really powerful and really connected like this, but also their peers? And actually, they can help me as a professor, make this class better by engaging more deeply in all this. And they can help Emily make orientation better by contributing, whether they’re an orientation leader or just a regular student.

I think the more we all see that connections and relationships are at the heart of education, the easier it is for all of us to make those kinds of connections, to do our work and to be well as we’re doing it.