My summers in higher education no longer look like my junior faculty days, and this summer in particular delivered more than I bargained for. Probabilistically speaking, a tornado was not on my bingo card.

But I am not going to dwell there. Just as a confluence of rapidly changing parameters on campus - budget short falls and cascading realities, another voluntary separation program, academic restructuring, and one of my best collaborators leaving for another role - had piled up, a tornado arrived as a wicked cherry on top.

But two things, entirely unrelated to the tumult of higher education and the precarious status of my roof, landed for me at exactly the right time.

First, Ted Lasso returned for its final season. I have not watched it yet, but it has flooded my social media this week, and I am grateful for that. (I am also grateful for how well my socials algorithm served me here). One Ted-ism I love is his advice for people filled with self-doubt who still try to operate through an appreciative lens: “Be curious, not judgmental.”

Another thing I love about the show is the holistic context in which a fairly generic plot unfolds. That context is what matters and makes this show brilliant, and it is exactly what we tend to neglect in our own lives. The plot unfolds as the context develops, not the other way around. So you get to choose how you manage things, and as Ted would say, sometimes when you work hard, you get lucky.

And then there is the scene where Ted accepts a challenge from Rupert, the villain, former owner of his football club and ex-husband to his boss, Rebecca. If you want to understand why this scene matters, you need to watch it yourself.

Especially when he starts his monologue, “You know, Rupert, guys have underestimated me my entire life.” I have never identified with a television moment more than this very moment.

Then Jeff Tweedy showed up in my Substack feed this week, by way of an interview with Tara Schuster, in which he delivered an instant classic: “Be a participant in making a world that is worth saving.”

Tweedy leads Wilco, my all-time most important band. I discovered them in college, in the 1990s, when I was assigned to review their album Being There for our campus radio station. I heard “Sunken Treasure” and was hooked. I have seen Wilco in concert more than any other band, and Jeff solo as well.

Jeff is also an addict who has been sober for decades, and he is open about it. He respects the work that goes into the mental and physical habits it takes to be honest with oneself.

I appreciate his experience, in the sense that Appreciative Inquiry uses the word - deep, authentic appreciation for a person’s worth, qualities, and experiences. I am not an addict, but I have worked with plenty of people who are, and with plenty of their family members, and that has given me a real depth of appreciation.

I have my own experience of a life lived without joy akin to Mr. Lasso, and I work daily on the mental and physical habits it takes to do what is right, and what is joyful, as a person and as a leader. Mindset matters.

But Tweedy kept returning to joy in that interview - why are we so willing to sacrifice one of our most instinctive emotions? Instead, it needs to be channeled into something worth being joyful about. That line hit hard: “Be a participant in making a world that is worth saving.” Made me think of this from Ted Lasso.

Classes start in two weeks, and students will be back on campus soon. Perfect time for a Ted/Tweedy mindset check.

So I am choosing joy. As I said at the start, this is going to be a hard year at my institution, and I know that is true at many others. Joy does not deny that reality; it is how you decide to face it. And joy, for me, is rooted in my why: I believe higher education can still change lives, but we have to rethink it to meet a new context, or the plot will be decided for us.

To borrow from Tweedy, I want to be a participant in making a world worth saving, and for me, that world is higher education.

I know “joy” can sound glib as an approach to rethinking higher education. I am a social worker, folks. Do not forget that. But what makes it right - for this moment - is that it is uncomplicated, measurable, and the impacts reveal themselves immediately.

We do not change lives by denying our own joy, or by hiding behind conventions in our disciplines that no longer feel relevant. Again: We do not change lives by denying our own joy, or by hiding behind conventions in our disciplines that no longer feel relevant.

Joy might mean rediscovering your passion for your field by imagining different approaches to doing the thing, YOUR thing. I lost myself in those moments as a faculty member, and I rediscovered them this summer, teaching in a prison with nothing but a chalkboard.

Joy might mean something more existential, too. A few weeks ago, I sat with a colleague who has experienced real trauma at their institution, as they worked through a recent situation with me. These situations are always more compounded, and rooted more deeply, than we assume, even using a trauma-informed lens.

When we closed the meeting, I told them, “I want you to find joy in your work again.” It is now on their performance review now, too.

The Ted/Tweedy combination shook loose some massive cobwebs in my own head, and pushed me to practice what I preach. So I am. AY26-27 will be about not giving up my joy, my why, or my commitment to making higher education worth saving.

So here are a few examples of how joy can show up for me this year, perhaps some can inspire you to create authentic joy, too!

• Walk a student to that office with a referral; do not just give directions

• Ask questions first, and listen with intention

• Hold class/meeting out on the quad on a sunny day

• Start class with music as students come in (a Wilco pick for the playlist: “Love Is Everywhere (Beware)” from Ode to Joy)

• Buy your colleague a coffee or make a surprise Ginger Ale’s run

• Learn one new student’s name today, and use it

• Write a colleague a note when they are having a hard semester

• Eat lunch somewhere other than your desk

• Ask a student what they are proud of, not only what they need

• Celebrate a small win out loud, in a meeting or an email

• Leave your office door open one more hour than usual

• Ask your students to review and grade your syllabus

• Tell a mentor what they meant to you, before you assume they already know

• Take the long way across campus, and notice who needs a hello

• Give credit in front of the room, not only in a one-on-one

• Play music you love, and let a colleague catch you enjoying it

In closing, I will leave you with barbecue sauce, for Ted; rock and roll for me. What’s it for you? Comment below!

I’ve been sitting with that this summer, because I keep running into a phenomenon that looks like logistics but isn’t.

We’ve leaned hard into making sure incoming students complete their math placement before they arrive. In a test-optional environment, that placement score is doing real work — it’s often the only piece of information we have to place a student accurately, and depending on major, an accurate placement can mean up to $9,000 in savings on remedial or unnecessary coursework. This should be an easy sell.

Except this summer, students are refusing to take it.

Not struggling with it. Not anxious about it, though I know that anxiety well — I teach the statistics course required of our sociology, criminology, and social work majors, and I’ve watched that fear up close for years. This is different. Students are choosing to walk away from thousands of dollars in savings rather than sit for a placement exam. And I don’t think that’s a math problem, or even a testing problem. I think it’s a wonder problem.

As Dr. Brad Johnson puts it: “There is a war on childhood. But it didn’t start with technology. It started when we replaced wonder with worksheets, curiosity with compliance, playtime with test time.”

That’s blunt. It’s also correct, and I don’t think its reach stops at twelfth grade. Wonder has been relegated to special programming — an enrichment day, a summer camp, a club — rather than treated as curricular intention. And we inherit the result:

• “What is the least I need to do to pass this class?”

• “Can’t you just lecture?”

• “I will read it if I need to.”

• “I didn’t think it was necessary.”

The work is the purpose. That’s not new. What’s new is watching students opt out of the work — and not the tedious work of skill packs and rote memorization, but the work of translating why any of this matters — because no one has handed them a reason to do it.

As Dr. Brad Johnson puts it: “There is a war on childhood. But it didn’t start with technology. It started when we replaced wonder with worksheets, curiosity with compliance, playtime with test time.”

This isn’t only a K-12 problem finding its way to us. I can’t imagine parsing real knowledge construction out from under the fire hose of mandates our K-12 colleagues navigate every day, and I don’t say any of this as an indictment of their work. Higher education is slow to adapt its own classroom practices and policies, and we don’t get to point downstream without that inward look as well.

So here’s what I tell students when they hand me one of these excuses:

• Have you ever wondered about what people in this field do?

• Why are you here? I want to connect this to your why.

• This is your starting point, not the finish line.

• There is a reason you are here. This is not that reason. But it will help you get to that reason.

• Persistence is more important than perfection.

• What makes this assignment necessary depends on you, not me. What would make it necessary for you?

I watch colleagues do this same kind of academic triage constantly — not just reteaching fundamentals, but trying to connect learning for its own sake back into a room that’s been trained out of expecting it.

For me, the fastest way was always looking for the why before the wonder. But that’s backward. A why with nothing underneath it is just a major picked off a list. Wonder has to come first.

I was advising a student for their first semester last week, and I started where I always used to start: “give me your vision, what are you doing five years after graduation?”

“I don’t know. A social worker, probably.”

That’s a major, not a career, I told them. So I tried the question I should have led with instead: “what have you noticed yourself getting curious about — not what you think you’re supposed to want, just what’s actually caught your attention?”

“I don’t know. I liked our social worker at school. But I don’t want to work with kids.”

That was the crack I needed — not a five-year plan, just a flicker of real curiosity about one person doing one kind of work. We talked for a long while about the field from there — including my own path through it, which they made clear they wanted no part of working on public policy. An hour later we’d built a schedule around a much narrower and more energizing vision: geriatric social work in a healthcare setting. I sent them to a few people on campus who could speak to that directly, and back to orientation they went.

Here’s my point. Worksheets, standardized metrics, and common practice can obscure the actual purpose of education, which is the student in front of us. More of our students are arriving without a why — or without ever having been given the agency to build one. But you don’t get to a why by asking for one directly. You get there by asking what someone has already found themselves wondering about, and following it.

This is where NACE — the National Association of Colleges and Employers — has become useful to us, not as a compliance framework but as a way to help students construct a why in concrete terms: a career, or at least an occupation worth investigating. My team is working with our Career Services director to build NACE’s career competencies into first-year and interdisciplinary coursework. Our new freshman seminar will include an interest and competency assessment that feeds directly into later work with the career center. We’re also embedding these same competencies into coursework for students on academic warning or probation, deliberately bridging academic skill-building with occupational purpose — because a student who is struggling with study skills in the abstract and a student who is struggling with study skills in service of becoming a geriatric social worker are not doing the same work, even if the worksheet in front of them looks identical.

We’re not only asking this of students. From my time leading faculty development, I know the same reframe has to happen in front of the classroom before it can happen inside it. We are recruiting and investing in training faculty leaders to move past “why do I have to take this class” as a student complaint to be managed, and toward “what can a student take away from this course, and why” as a design question worth answering out loud, in the syllabus and in the room.

But a student who’s been asked to notice their own curiosity — who has even a rough, unfinished why built from it, like “geriatric social work” — experiences that same exam differently. It stops being a hoop and becomes information they actually want, because it’s in service of getting somewhere they’ve chosen to go.

A student who has never been asked what genuinely catches their attention experiences a math placement exam exactly the way it’s designed to feel to someone trained toward compliance rather than curiosity: an arbitrary hoop, low-stakes to skip, easy to rationalize away.

But a student who’s been asked to notice their own curiosity — who has even a rough, unfinished why built from it, like “geriatric social work” — experiences that same exam differently. It stops being a hoop and becomes information they actually want, because it’s in service of getting somewhere they’ve chosen to go. We can require the placement test all we want. We can spell out the dollar figures in bold. But we won’t get students to want the information until we’ve first done the harder work of helping them notice what they’re curious about.

When a student tells me they want to be a social worker, I’m genuinely glad — even though I caution them it’s a broad field, and even though my own path into it, from a physics major to social work, was anything but a straight line. I found out the hard way I wasn’t cut out to be an astronaut. But I’d rather sit with a student while they figure out what they actually want than hand them a worksheet of degree requirements and call it preparation. The wonder has to come first. The why follows from the wonder. Everything else, including the test, follows from there.

I taught the Sociological Imagination to a class of 14 men at Danville Correctional Center on Tuesday.

I always open my intro sociology courses with a hard-hitting animated lecture on this concept. We walk through Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, observe the conspicuous absence of women from any formal recognition in the sociological canon, then arrive at C. Wright Mills.

I love Mills. Reading him as a student turned the world upside down for me. I was at a precarious point in my education — enrolled in an intro to sociology course I had to retake after failing it the previous semester — and we read a sliver of the original text. It never left me. The feeling that everything finally made sense. Mills was very complicated, but his idea with this imagination that an informed, democratic culture is possible, a light on our contemporary need to believe that it is possible to create a civic culture that is fundamentally open, just, and democratic.

Simply, the sociological imagination is the ability to connect deeply personal issues with public problems. But this is just the surface. Mills opens us toward Verstehen — the capacity to place ourselves in others’ lives and spaces to genuinely understand their conditions of existence. It demands we consider the historical contingencies of a society: how individuals relate to one another, how communities exist in relation to others, how nations do the same. It considers public policies and private practices until we arrive at a place where we can begin to address pervasive public problems.

Imagine asking 14 incarcerated learners to understand their current position in life as a set of historically contingent conditions through which they navigated their own personal troubles.

They got it right away.

And we went deeper. We took on anomie — normlessness. The disorientation that sets in when everything expected and familiar disappears and you are left to traverse new conditions of existence entirely on your own. They got this, too.

But what was most remarkable about this entire dialogue is what happened after.

I let class out, but due to prison rules, the men cannot simply move about the facility. So we stayed. A few trickled out, but most remained. Two of them were deep in a conversation about a mentoring program in which they hold leadership roles — a program that works with newly arrived inmates to help them transition into prison life. Their conversation was Mills and Durkheim made visible: the concept of anomie alive in the specific problem they were trying to solve, and the sociological imagination operating as their method.

One argued that the group setting was the right approach — to set and reinforce shared expectations, because this is a community with norms and values. The other sought nuance: work with each man individually to understand his particular place within the broader structure. Both were right. Both were doing, without the vocabulary, exactly what Mills spent a career asking us to do.

I sat back and watched with delight. My only interruptions were to point to terms on the chalkboard from the lecture, so they could see the sociology already present in their dialogue.

This should sound familiar to those of us in higher education. The transition to college. How we support learners in taking ownership of their work while navigating an entirely new place with new rules, new expectations, and no map.

Mills also argued that once we develop the ability to see the connection between personal troubles and public issues, we recognize that what we experience is likely shared across a wide group of people. That this recognition is both a terrible burden and an extraordinary opportunity.

It is terrible because we can see that poverty, disease, and structural disadvantage are as deliberately constructed as they are culturally perpetuated. That when unemployment rises, we see more of our colleagues and neighbors in personal crisis. That when budgets are cut at our universities — as part of a broader political project to narrow what higher education is for and who it is allowed to serve — the consequences are not abstract. They land on real students, real faculty, real communities.

But when you can see that these public issues are shared, you can also see the possibilities. The policies that build barriers instead of pathways. The funding decisions that choose inertia over investment. And the opportunity to coalesce — not just to support the learners who seek our institutions, but to assert what institutions owe to the whole of the society before someone else redefines that obligation for us.

Mills writes (p. 7-8, 1959 original; language updated):

“That, in brief, is why it is by means of the sociological imagination that men and women now hope to grasp what is going on in the world, and to understand what is happening in themselves as minute points of the intersections of biography and history within society. In large part, contemporary humanity’s self-conscious view of itself as at least an outsider, if not a permanent stranger, rests upon an absorbed realization of social relativity and of the transformative power of history. The sociological imagination is the most fruitful form of this self-consciousness. By its use people whose mentalities have swept only a series of limited orbits often come to feel as if suddenly awakened in a house with which they had only supposed themselves to be familiar.”

Higher education is going to have another tumultuous year ahead. Budgets cut. Enrollments uncertain. A political moment that seems determined to narrow what universities are for and who they are allowed to serve.

Mills would call this a public issue. I call it a crisis of that needs such an imagination.

And here is what I keep returning to: I did not leave Danville having taught those men the sociological imagination. I left having watched them use it — on each other, for each other, inside an institution that was not designed for their flourishing and certainly not for their intellectual growth.

Two men debating how to hold a community together. One arguing for the group, for shared norms and collective accountability. The other arguing for the individual, for meeting each person in his particular condition. Both of them right. Both of them doing, without the vocabulary, exactly what Mills spent a career asking us to do.

If the men at Danville can build structures of genuine care inside a correctional facility — can look at the people arriving into an institution that was not made for them and ask how do we meet them where they are — then the question for those of us in higher education is not whether we have the tools. We have entire offices, initiatives, and strategic plans dedicated to this work.

The question is whether we have the will. And the humility to learn from the places we least expect.

Tania Ward was an academic advisor of the first order. The spark in the word sparkle, with an infectious laugh that filled hallways and lingered long after she had left the room.

I first met Tania in 2014, when she enrolled in my Family and Society course — her first semester back after a short break, my first time teaching the course. That summer I oversaw her internship, and that’s where she first saw her future: working alongside college students, believing in them, clearing the path. Years later, when I was asked to lead the Student Success Center where she worked, I sought her blessing before I said yes. That full-circle moment has never left me.

Tania also survived a few other courses with me — the Sociology of Poverty and, memorably, Statistics. She was a frequent visitor during office hours that semester. That’s when she got the message to trust her stuff. Every conversation we had after I became her dean, she found a way to bring it back — those words, that mantra, that moment. She carried it as a gift she had been given, not as a lesson she had learned. That is the kind of person she was.

What I want people to understand — what I don’t think is widely known — is that Tania was also a scholar. Her Master’s Thesis, “The Campus Ministry and the African American College Students’ Experience: A Case Study,” is a beautiful piece of work. She was not just a minister; she was a deep, careful thinker about the interior lives of college students and the role of faith in their persistence. She listened at a level most of us never reach.

And that is her truest legacy: she listened.

Not as a courtesy. Not as technique. As a vocation.

After Tania’s passing, I spoke with her husband, Ly’Jerrick, and together we created the Tania Ward Student Success Fund.

https://www.eiu.edu/studentsuccess/ward_fund.php

For EIU Giving Day, I have issued a $1,000 match challenge to raise money for the Tania Fund — to raise the floor for students whose basic academic needs go unmet, quietly, semester after semester.

Here’s what I need you to understand about this fund: it did not come from assumptions. It came from listening.

When we asked students what stood between them and staying enrolled — not what we thought stood between them, but what they told us, in their own words — they described moments of small financial disruption with outsized consequences. A required course material. A certification fee. An unexpected academic expense that didn’t fit neatly into any existing aid category. These were not extraordinary crises. They were ordinary gaps that traditional financial aid was never designed to fill.

Tania believed — lived, really — the idea that you have to meet students where they are. Not where you assume they are. Not where a form says they should be. Where they actually are, with the actual barriers in front of them.

This fund is that belief made permanent.

Through one-time awards of up to $350, the Tania Ward Student Success Fund provides targeted, flexible assistance for short-term academic expenses that are essential for student success but fall through the cracks of conventional support. The goal is simple: keep a student moving forward at the exact moment when a modest financial obstacle could otherwise interrupt their progress toward graduation.

We built this fund because Tania listened. We sustain it because her students — and ours — still need someone to.

Every dollar is matched up to $1,000. Every gift raises the floor.

Why is this a flaw? We are the folks who are quick with a song or a question in times of delay or duress. We can confidently both start a campfire without a match and correctly instruct the proper technique for stomping in puddles. We do not get embarrassed, or shy, or discontent in the service of those we serve. We are in the same universe as theater kids, band kids, and other cheerful outcasts from the adolescent mainstream.

We don’t always fit in with conventions, which is an assetI .

In fact, I recently chaperoned my son’s high school band trip to Walt Disney World. My wife commented that I was going to need my own chaperone. That is valid.

It is also an essential part of my teaching and leadership philosophy. By essential, I mean that it is akin to the security strip in currency — invisible without a black light, but proof that everything else is real.

One summer I followed my good friend Todd to Cornwall, Pennsylvania to run the residential camp at YMCA Camp Shand. Todd had started a tradition of awarding beads to campers who demonstrated the core YMCA principles: caring, honesty, respect, and responsibility. I love those four principles. But something felt incomplete. You cannot ask a ten-year-old to practice responsibility in the abstract. You have to give them a context — a Capture the Flag game, a whitewater rafting trip, a talent show — where responsibility becomes legible. So Todd and I created a play bead, a blend of all four Y colors, red, blue, yellow, and green, to represent what made the other four possible. Not a fifth principle, but the operating condition for all of them.

The bead wasn’t a reward for playing. It was recognition that the other principles needed a context to become real. I’ve spent a long time thinking about what that means for the work I do now.

For me, participating in a game, going to a hike, meeting for coffee, making a craft, these are avenues for accompaniment. I use the word “play” to keep it simple, but do not let that distract from the point.

Third spaces

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg wrote about the importance of what he called third spaces — places that are neither the formal institution nor private life, but somewhere generative in between. The local diner. The barbershop. The town square. These are the places where people actually talk to each other — not in roles, not in transactions, but as human beings sharing the same unscripted moment. For students these spaces are the library, the union, athletics events, and theater performances, just to name a few.

Oldenburg describes not leisure for its own sake, but creating the conditions under which honest contact becomes possible. Higher education rarely designs for this. We design for the first space — the classroom, the advising appointment, the office hour as if education, learning, and growth are only possible within the four walls of a classroom or faculty office— and wonder why students feel they are navigating a system rather than belonging to a community.

A few weeks ago I helped facilitate a TRIO lock-in focused on financial literacy. We covered real content — budgeting, FAFSA timelines, campus resources. But we also fed the students, did karaoke, played Mario Kart, arts and crafts, and more. We played. And in the unstructured spaces between the programming, students told us things they would never have said in an advising appointment. They showed us who they were. They let us in.

For me, play was the mechanism. Accompaniment was the point. A third space made it possible.

Being present with students in their element — not administering them, not evaluating them, not receiving them at our desks — creates the conditions for knowing them. Peter Felten and Leo Lambert call this relationship-rich education, and they are right that it needs to be part of the university’s infrastructure - its fabric, not extracurricular - co-curricular. But it requires us to be present in ways our institutions rarely sanction or schedule.

Why am I talking about “accompaniment”?

If unstructured presence is a methodology, a theme park could be the laboratory.

Somewhere between a roller coaster and an evening churro I found myself in real conversations with the high school students I was chaperoning — future college students, some of them one, two, or three years out.

What I learned about these students: they are questioning whether college is worth the time and the money. They are unsure how a degree connects to a life. Some had simply never been told that college was a possibility for them — not because they lacked ability, but because no one in their world had ever made the invitation.

I learned those things because I was with them, in their element. Establishing rapport, the camp director in me knew exactly what to do with an unstructured evening. And the administrator in me recognized that we hear similar feedback from current students that this is precisely what we rarely make room for on our own campuses — and that the cost of that absence is measured in students who never felt seen enough to stay.

What my students actually say

Every semester I conduct focus groups with students — primarily those newly on academic warning — about their strengths, their definitions of success, the barriers that brought them to that moment, and their needs as students. Really, I want to know how they found themselves on academic warning.

I don’t frame it that way to them, because that framing would produce clinical answers to clinical questions. What I want is authentic conversation. I want the stories.

Under the hood, I want to know how the systems in our institution work for and against the people they are designed to serve. I want to hear what students are actually experiencing, not what they think I came to hear.

The findings this semester were not entirely surprising, but they were validating:

• Students experience the effects of siloed services and feel responsible for navigating them alone

• Students crave belonging — real connection with professionals and peers, not transactional contact

• Financial insecurity is a basic need, on par with connection and relationship

• At the base, students just want to be seen and heard

That last one is the easiest to dismiss and the hardest to act on. It doesn’t map onto a budget line or a program outcome. It doesn’t appear in a strategic plan. But it is the one that, if taken seriously, would require us to reconsider not just what we offer students, but how we are present with them — and how often we are simply not.

It may just require us to be somewhere other than behind our desks and in our offices.

The Point

For me, play is a way in. I can be silly, approachable, and even wear costumes to class to help demonstrate concepts or celebrate Halloween. Perhaps you have a different skill set — or a different fundamental flaw. It is a mode, not the mode, through which I step outside the role I am expected to inhabit as an academic dean. For me, it is authentic, a natural version of myself well outside of the higher education playbook, and a means to an ends: unstructured presence with students outside our formal roles - accompaniment and connection.

Call it accompaniment. Call it third space. Call it relationship-rich education. The label matters less than the recognition that when we step outside the institutional register — when we stop evaluating, judging, and complaining about students, and start being genuinely curious — students tell us what they actually need. They show us who they actually are. And we become, briefly, something other than the institution.

The uncomfortable question this raises is not how do we help students more? We know how to ask that question. The uncomfortable question is: what in our institutional design actively prevents this kind of contact? What are we scheduling, structuring, and rewarding in ways that make accompaniment feel like an indulgence rather than a professional practice?

The camp director in me never forgot that the play bead wasn’t supplemental to the other four principles. It was what made the other four real.

It is time to answer the call from students for connection, relationships, and belonging. It might just prove that accompaniment might just be a secret ingredient for students success.

Next post: a deeper look at this semester’s focus group findings — what students told us, and what I think it means for how we organize support.

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. I never have. I think they’re cliché. I think they’re often bogus. And honestly, they tend to set us up for disappointment—if not by February, then certainly by the end of the year.

What I do believe in are intentions. Goals. Objectives. I’m a scientist, after all. I think in hypotheses and systems, not wishful thinking. That’s probably why resolutions have never worked for me. Intentions leave room for growth. They assume learning. They require adjustment.

So instead of a resolution, I’m setting a theme for the year: Ask Tough Questions.

A new year always invites declarations—priorities, strategies, action plans. But before we rush toward answers, perhaps the most important work is to pause and ask better questions.

As attributed to Jimi Hendrix:

“Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.”

This year, I’m holding tightly to that distinction.

Knowledge Speaks. Wisdom Listens.

In higher education, we are very good at knowledge.

We speak fluently in dashboards, benchmarks, predictive models, strategic plans, and five-year visions. We talk—often confidently—about what students need, what’s working, and what isn’t. We generate reports, hold meetings, and declare initiatives.

But wisdom? Wisdom requires something much harder and far more vulnerable—especially in academia.

Wisdom listens. Especially when what we hear unsettles us.

Listening requires us to slow down our certainty. To resist defensiveness. To sit with critique without immediately explaining it away. And to take seriously the possibility that our systems, our traditions, and even our identities as professionals may need to be adapted.

Feedback, Critique, and Intersectionality

I believe in feedback. I work intentionally to provide it as a standard operating practice. I also ask for it—and listen.

This year, I received a great deal of feedback about Raise the Floor. Much of it was affirming. Many of you shared that the writing resonates, that it names realities you see and feel every day. I’m deeply grateful for that.

Some of the feedback, though, was critical. I am even more grateful for this.

I was told that I sound like I’m complaining. That I sound whiny. That it’s off-putting.

Fair.

I was also told that I’ve strayed from the agenda—that I’ve become overly critical, that perhaps I should dial it back.

Also fair—at least in the sense that I am being critical. But that part is intentional.

I am critical of a professorial culture that places students anywhere other than first. Second is not enough. Third is unacceptable. I am critical of administrations that lack transparency—because transparency is not optional; it is foundational. I am critical of leaders who weaponize emotion. I am critical of how “academic freedom” and shared governance are sometimes used to resist change, as if innovation hasn’t always been the engine of higher education’s greatest contributions.

But let me return to the agenda.

To understand how and why I write the way I do, it helps to understand the lens I bring to this work—my intersectionality.

I’ve spent 17 years in the university classroom teaching statistics and research methods, poverty studies, sociology of the family, and senior capstone courses. I served nearly four years as the director of a faculty development and innovation program. I’ve published on pedagogy, policy, p-values, and poverty, and presented at multiple international conferences. I’m also a social worker (MSW, 2003) and a sociologist (BA, 2001; PhD, 2010).

I’ve spent much of my life as an ally and advocate for marginalized populations. My research directly contributed to the establishment of a food pantry on my campus, and my dissertation was grounded in Marxist political economy.

I also spent five years professionally as a program evaluation and policy analysis consultant for federally funded IDEA and TANF programs across all 83 Michigan counties. I supported state- and county-level efforts to improve services for infants and toddlers with disabilities and for families involved in child abuse and neglect prevention systems. The coolest thing I did during those five years was present findings to a state senate budget subcommittee. The second coolest was presenting to the state board of education.

I’m someone whose voice doesn’t always fit comfortably within traditional higher education spaces—despite being, as I tell my introductory sociology students, an over-educated, cisgender, able-bodied, upper-middle-class white dude.

But, I have done some things.

All of this aside, I am critical of higher education because I deeply love its capacity to change lives—every single day.

I also understand that, despite the above, I am now often seen only as an administrator. That feedback was among the hardest to receive this year—and also one of the most impactful. It pushed my growth.

So yes—add administrator to this intersectionality.

This is the lens, the framework, and the experience I bring to my work. And if you can see past what might feel like grandstanding or New Year’s self-validation, I would ask you to focus on one word above all others: love.

Love does not require silence. And commitment does not mean complacency.

Ask Tough Questions

I started Raising the Floor as an opportunity to write and explore ideas and experiences, and to develop my own voice in this landscape. It has never been about incremental improvement at the margins—though I know higher education often moves like a glacier. It has always been about interrogating the material conditions that make success fragile for some students and seamless for others.

The floor—the metaphor—is the base. Raising the bar without strengthening the base serves students who arrive two or three generations deep into college-going, from well-resourced secondary institutions, with different opportunities leading to a higher starting point. Meanwhile, at-promise students, nontraditional learners, and neurodivergent students are too often left navigating siloed structures and fragmented systems.

So this year, I am intentionally centering tough questions—both here and in my daily work—to raise the floor for all students.

For me, that means asking tough questions of myself and others—questions that don’t fit neatly into existing structures or confirm our assumptions.

Questions like:

• Who is consistently thriving here—and who is merely surviving?

• What are students navigating that our policies quietly ignore?

• Where have we confused access with equity?

• Which practices persist because they are familiar, not because they are just? Or ethical?

These are not comfortable questions. They challenge material conditions many of us benefit from. They force us to examine not just programs, but power, culture, and accountability.

And the answers must be honest, critical, vulnerable, and innovative.

“This is how it’s always been done” is not an answer.

“This is how I learned it” is not an answer.

“This would set a dangerous precedent” is not an answer.

“Because I would have to update my syllabus” is not an answer.

Listening as an Act of Courage

Listening is often framed as passive. It is anything but.

To truly listen—to students, to staff, to faculty, and to communities at the margins—is to risk being changed by what we hear. It requires resisting the urge to defend, explain, or fix too quickly. It asks us to sit with complexity, contradiction, and critique.

It also requires honesty.

I talk with my statistics students about a similar way of thinking, the statistical imagination. That is, the openness to allow statistics (as a discipline) to inform our perspectives and challenge our assumptions (see social worker reference above).

Higher education has long been a seedbed of innovation—the beacon of liberal education and a gateway to civic participation. So why are we so siloed, insular, and fearful of progress within our own institutions when proven practices and troves of hypothesis tests have confirmed business as usual is not sustainable? Why do we resist opportunities to grow and evolve as both individuals and organizations? Why are we shocked when social and technological change outpaces our willingness to adapt?

For instance, we should not have been surprised by the release of ChatGPT. We should not have panicked. We should have listened to the voices that anticipated it. We should have been prepared. That moment exposed something we often avoid naming: higher education is frequently reactive when it should be visionary.

And if that freaked you out, just wait until you learn about the capabilities of smart glasses.

My Intention: Ask Tough Questions

Asking tough questions is not an endpoint. It is a commitment.

• A commitment to learning without defensiveness.

• To evolving without nostalgia.

• To challenging inequitable norms and siloed approaches.

• To innovating beyond performative change.

I am compelled to align my values, my rhetoric, and my realities on the ground. I call this authenticity—not the curated kind, but the kind that admits missteps, names tension, and chooses courage over comfort.

So this year, I’m asking myself questions like:

• What can I do differently, better, or more innovatively to engage my team?

• How can I help students engage ideas from perspectives beyond their own?

• How do I apply a critical lens to AI in my role while raising the floor for staff and students to do the same?

• How can I more effectively engage stakeholders in hard—but necessary—conversations?

• How can I better educate institutional leadership about innovative pathways and persistent barriers to student success?

As we step into this new year, my intention is simple—but demanding:

• Ask tougher questions.

• Listen more deeply.

• Learn without defensiveness.

• Evolve with purpose.

• And push—always—with integrity.

Raising the floor is not about having all the answers. It’s about being brave enough to ask the questions that make transformation possible—and wise enough to truly hear what comes back. Watch this space.

That’s my agenda.

I take that seriously. Our Thanksgiving table is open—friends, students who remain in town, colleagues seeking respite from their own family celebrations. Anyone who has joined us knows this openness is the greatest gift I can offer.

Gratitude isn’t seasonal. It became central to my life during a difficult season years ago, and I’ve carried it with me into every space I lead. Recently, I began reading Leading with Gratitude: Eight Leadership Practices for Extraordinary Business Results by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton. The book literally fell into my lap—my partner spotted it at a resale shop.

The gratitude we extend in our personal lives—especially when rooted in care, openness, and hospitality—can and should shape how we lead our teams. The book helped me name what I’ve long felt: gratitude is a leadership practice, not a holiday sentiment.

From the first chapters, I felt seen. Practices I’ve tried to model with my team suddenly had names, frameworks, even empirical backing. The authors describe the “gratitude gap”: the distance between the appreciation leaders believe they convey and what staff actually experience. Leaders often assume they’re expressing gratitude regularly, but employees report far less. That gap erodes trust, weakens engagement, and stifles innovation.

Ecological Validation in Action

As I read about the gratitude gap, I found myself returning to a framework that shapes so much of my work in student success: ecological validation. This approach reminds us that people—students and staff alike—thrive when they are affirmed, seen, and supported across the multiple contexts of their lives. It asks leaders to move beyond transactional interactions and toward intentional, relational ones.

Through ecological validation, gratitude becomes more than a polite gesture. It becomes a practice that acknowledges identity, honors lived experience, and cultivates environments where people feel psychologically safe to learn, collaborate, and take risks. For at-promise students, this kind of validation is essential. The same is true for the professionals who support them. Staff cannot create validating environments for students if they themselves are operating in spaces where their labor is unseen or their contributions go unacknowledged.

This is where Gostick and Elton’s work resonates so deeply. Their research gives language and evidence to a truth that ecological validation has long affirmed: gratitude is not incidental—it is developmental. It builds trust, strengthens connections, and creates the conditions under which people can grow and excel. When leaders express gratitude authentically and consistently, they are not just being kind; they are shaping an ecosystem in which both staff and students can flourish. Organizations with high-recognition cultures demonstrate stronger engagement, lower burnout, greater psychological safety, and better retention.

Gostick and Elton insist gratitude isn’t a soft skill. It’s a performance driver. What resonates most is the book’s blend of myth-busting (e.g., the idea that “people expect too much praise”) with practical, observable habits that embody gratitude in action—like truly walking in someone else’s shoes.

What This Book Reveals About Student Success Leadership

Through the lens of ecological validation—a holistic, relational, identity-conscious framework—Leading with Gratitude offers several powerful parallels for higher education.

1. Gratitude as Relational Culture-Building

Gratitude strengthens relational trust, a cornerstone of at-promise student success. In student support environments, trust accelerates collaborative case management, trauma-informed communication, equitable decision-making, and more responsive care for students navigating complex academic and personal circumstances.

2. Gratitude Counters Deficit Framing

The book’s emphasis on noticing small wins aligns with validation-centered practice. For students historically marginalized by educational systems, consistent acknowledgment of strengths supports self-efficacy, deepens belonging, reduces stereotype threat, and nurtures persistence. Gratitude compels us to see students through an asset-based lens—an essential shift for any institution serious about equity.

3. Gratitude as a Lever for Organizational Alignment

Gostick and Elton stress that gratitude must be cultural, not individual. In student success leadership, this means gratitude can unify siloed units around shared values. It creates conditions where staff feel respected and empowered, and it models the affirming environment we want students to experience across campus.

4. Gratitude as Burnout Prevention

Student-facing roles require emotional labor and a steady presence in moments of crisis. Gratitude acts as a buffer. A culture of appreciation fosters resilience, psychological safety, creativity, and innovative problem-solving—conditions that sustain staff who support students day in and day out.

A New Tradition: Gratitude as Leadership

In higher education, we cling tightly to certain traditions—often more tightly than they serve us. It’s time for a new one: authentic, intentional gratitude for the colleagues whose everyday work keeps our institutions functioning and our students thriving.

The day before Thanksgiving, I worked nearly a full day. Staff were sparse, but I made a point to connect with each person who was in the office. My assistant took a well-deserved half day, and a few colleagues even brought their kiddos to work for part of the afternoon. It was a small snapshot of the quiet, consistent labor that keeps our work moving.

Student-centered leadership requires team-centered care. In fact, student-centered leadership raises the floor for the staff who serve students—our advisors, office managers, program coordinators, counselors, and so many others who do the real relational work that powers student success.

Moreover, we must be explicit: our institutions rely on staff who carry students through their hardest moments, on colleagues from minoritized identities who perform disproportionate relational and identity labor, and on team members who routinely absorb institutional inefficiencies so students don’t suffer the consequences. This labor is indispensable—and too often unrecognized. Naming it, valuing it, and building structures of genuine gratitude around it is not optional. It is a leadership responsibility and a requirement for any institution that claims to support equity and student success.

If we want students to experience validation, belonging, and care, our teams must experience those same conditions first. Gratitude isn’t just kindness—it is a strategy for equity.

This past week, to celebrate First-Gen Student Week, my team opened the First-Gen Hub — a space of validation and belonging for first-gen students.

At one point in time, everyone was a first-gen student. These were the men and women who became the thought leaders of their generation, building the very institutions that have shaped human progress. But it has been less than a century since higher education became a possibility for entire populations once excluded by law or by culture from its promise.

I think about this sometimes when I am working one-on-one with a student that I know is first-gen, and it still blows my mind to realize: this student is the first. The first in their family to navigate FAFSA. The first to decode the syllabus. The first to learn the language of office hours. I encourage you to do the same next time you meet a first-gen student—pause and realize they are a trailblazer.

I am critical of a faculty culture that privileges the discipline over the student, especially at the undergraduate level. We should be bridges, not barriers. I am critical of campus politics that ossify rather than do what is right for the student. We should be bridges, not barriers.

For example, this past week, while celebrating—yes, celebrating—first-gen students, I found myself having to defend their celebration. A colleague questioned the need for a hub worth celebrating, questioned the need to even center these students at all. And on that very same day, we made the difficult decision to withdraw a first-gen student who was not yet ready for the rigor of university life—someone who needed time to build a better foundation at a community college that would one day make their success at EIU sustainable.

That juxtaposition stays with me. Because both students—the one questioned and the one withdrawn—deserve to be seen. To be met where they are. To be believed in.

We are bridges, not barriers.

So, in the spirit of both criticism and celebration of my people—my first-gen students—here is why you still matter:

1. You are still making history and changing the course of your life. Just because others have crossed the bridge before you doesn’t make your passage any less powerful. Every first-gen journey carries the weight and beauty of intergenerational courage. You are rewriting what is possible for your family and your community.

2. You remind us that higher education must prove its worth. You see the value of college not just as an idea, but as something that must be lived—through belonging, fairness, and genuine opportunity. You push us to make education real, not theoretical.

3. You show that higher education is still an unfinished project. Your presence in classrooms, labs, and leadership roles reminds us that access must become opportunity, and opportunity must become belonging. You are the evidence that our work as educators is not yet done.

4. You embody innovation born of necessity. You navigate systems, decode cultures, and build networks from the ground up. You make a way where there was none. Those are not deficits—they are leadership skills, resilience, and brilliance in motion.

5. You expand the cultural and intellectual fabric of the university. Your stories, languages, and ways of knowing broaden what counts as knowledge. You make our classrooms more honest, our conversations more relevant, and our education more human.

6. You keep the university connected to its purpose. If higher education truly exists for social mobility and civic contribution, you are that mission embodied. Your pursuit of education affirms that this work still matters.

7. You are multipliers. Your success doesn’t stop with you—it ripples through families, neighborhoods, and generations. When you earn a degree, you open a door that stays open for others.

8. You keep us accountable. Your questions, your presence, your persistence—they reveal the hidden curriculum of privilege that still shapes who thrives and who merely survives. You help us see where we fall short and where we must do better.

9. You invite us into relationship. Your stories remind us that student success is not transactional—it’s transformational. You teach us that validation, not assimilation, is the heart of belonging.

10. You make us better educators and better humans. Walking alongside you reminds us that education, at its best, is an act of courage, community, and connection. You call us back to the soul of this work.

When we celebrate first-gen students, we are not just celebrating individuals. We are reaffirming the promise of higher education itself—the belief that knowledge can change a life, a family, a community, a nation.

In a world of barriers, be a bridge.

We are running out of runway.

The world around us is changing faster than our institutions are willing to move. Students are questioning the value of college, faculty are stretched thin, and the public narrative about higher education is eroding. Yet inside our campuses, we often act as if staying the course is still the safest option. It’s not.

Don’t worry about our R-1 peers. We are not them, and they are not us. We cannot compete with them on many fronts, but they don’t have many of our assets at regional PUIs. But we need to embrace change…and the time for change is now.

We’ve weathered budget restrictions, enrollment declines, and pandemics. We’ve come through a system built on privilege and assurances that promised stability as long as we stayed the course. Along the way, we’ve produced invaluable insights—social, physical, and metaphysical—that have reshaped human understanding across generations.

But it no longer works for our image. This does not resonate for the students who arrive at our institutions - they are looking for their “why”. They are more anxious and concerned about their career now than ever before, so what they are looking for is a pathway for career goals and success.

Higher education (authentically) must be about the student’s goals and definitions of success. If it’s not, we are destined to fail. The beauty of the academy is something that can be discovered, the purpose of the university should be student success.

Eastman Kodak’s story offers a lesson worth heeding. Kodak once led its industry but collapsed because it denied the realities of technological and societal change. The company protected its identity at the expense of its future. Higher education risks the same fate when we deny how profoundly today’s students—and the world around them—have changed.

I have spent 17 years teaching in college classrooms, 15 of them at Eastern Illinois University. As a tenured full professor of sociology, I specialize in quantitative methods, social theory, poverty, food insecurity, and welfare policy. Like many faculty colleagues, I received little to no formal training in teaching. So, as many of us do, I taught as I had been taught—finding a rhythm early on and rarely straying from it. That rhythm becomes our pedagogy.

Their advice still hits today: “I quickly learned that belonging and connection had to be established before true learning could happen. I needed to change my pedagogy to situate the student in the discipline, not try to force it upon them.”

For much of my career, I taught statistics—a required, gateway course for sociology and criminology majors. It was a class students approached with apprehension. Each semester began with that familiar mix of anxiety and obligation that signals disconnection rather than engagement.

When I was a junior faculty member in my third year of teaching, I asked a mentor to help me be a better instructor. Their advice still hits today: “I quickly learned that belonging and connection had to be established before true learning could happen. I needed to change my pedagogy to situate the student in the discipline, not try to force it upon them.”

As Director of Faculty Development and Innovation at EIU, I heard the same story repeatedly from colleagues: we tend to teach as we learned but discovered at some point that it was not effective. And while we discuss pedagogy often in workshops and learning communities, it’s usually among those already invested in teaching improvement.

I share this background because it grounds what I am about to say:

Students do not feel like they belong in our classrooms because they do not see the purpose—the “why”—behind our courses.

This past summer, colleagues and I called and texted returning students who were eligible to register but hadn’t yet done so. The stories were familiar: financial strain and a lack of connection to campus. One student, who had planned to major in business, decided instead to start a dog grooming company after their first year. They simply couldn’t see how their degree aligned with their goals. That conversation has stayed with me. This is higher ed’s “wicked problem”.

Higher education must urgently pivot from preserving its traditional identity to centering students’ purpose, belonging, and future relevance—by reimagining curriculum, pedagogy, and institutional culture to meet the realities of today’s learners.

Higher education can do better - especially at our regional primarily undergraduate institutions. Based on my experiences as a faculty member and administrator, I offer a few recommendations for how:

1. Connect the curriculum to careers.

We need to center purpose in every classroom. Career Services and faculty should collaborate to embed service, experiential learning, and career exploration into all courses. Curate internships and applied projects that help students see the real-world value of their studies—especially in interdisciplinary contexts.

2. Build a first-year curriculum that serves all students.

First-year and summer bridge programs rightfully focus on at-promise students, but high-achieving students need community and foundational belonging too. Inclusive first-year experiences set shared expectations for what it means to be a college student. When these programs are integrated—rather than siloed—they foster peer networks across academic and social divides, reducing imposter syndrome and stereotype threat for everyone.

3. Center instruction and innovation.

Instruction matters. Faculty are brilliant scholars, but centering students often requires unlearning how we were taught. Academic freedom is also the freedom to innovate—so give yourself permission to experiment with pedagogy. The rewards, for both students and faculty, are worth it. David Franklin’s Invisible Learning is a testament to student-centered teaching (and useful for my own pedagogy).

4. Empower and reward faculty innovation.

Institutions must invest in educators who design learning for today’s students, not yesterday’s. Innovation should be part of evaluation, contracts, and promotion—not an extracurricular activity. We are teaching institutions now. Let’s own that with pride and purpose and accountability for our students.

5. Acknowledge (and invest in) the impact of all educators.

Faculty are vital, but they are not alone. Advisors, peer educators, supplemental instructors, coaches, RAs, and financial aid staff—all of them educate. All of them shape belonging. We must break down the ideological silos that marginalize non-faculty educators and instead honor the collective ecosystem that supports student learning, and invest in these services.

6. Stop blaming students for being “unready.”

College readiness is not a student deficit—it’s a systemic design challenge. Universities must integrate remedial and supplementary learning with degree pathways so that every student can connect skills to purpose. Seeing students through a growth mindset is essential; otherwise, we limit their potential before they have the chance to realize it.

I believe deeply in the power of higher education. It changed my life—as it has for so many of you, and for countless students past and present. But belief is not enough. If we don’t pivot now, we risk becoming obsolete by our own resistance to change.

Like Kodak, we can cling to what we were—or we can evolve toward what our students need us to be.

The next chapter of higher education will not be written by those who defend the past, but by those who reimagine the future with courage and care.

Our students are already rewriting the narrative—we just have to decide whether we’ll join them.

The very thing that made me want to go into education in the first place - the power of the classroom - is no longer my charge. As I start my first academic year as dean, officially leaving the classroom for administration, I felt compelled to write about this transition.

The Call of Duende

Several summers ago, while traveling in southern Spain near Seville, I witnessed multiple live flamenco performances. The movements, the colors, the music, and the passion were intoxicating, but what lingered was the connection the performers forged with their audience through their art.

Flamenco dancers use the word duende to describe a heightened state of emotion, expression, and authenticity deeply connected to their art. It is a mysterious, powerful, and often elusive emotional force that transcends mere technique and signifies a soul-stirring, in-the-moment spark that makes a performance unique, unrepeatable, and deeply moving.

The following day after one of these performances, a revelation came as I was sitting a Spanish café. I was reading Thich Nhat Hanh's work on happiness mindfulness, reflecting on both my craft and the dancers', when I realized that the motivation, authenticity, and spirit driving flamenco mirrors the very essence of a vocation. As I absorbed Hanh's words - "Our quality of being determines our quality of doing" - it all clicked.

This captures how I experience not just teaching, but higher education at its deepest level. This is why I have the word duende tattooed on my left arm. Whether explaining ANOVA results, editing a literature review, writing recommendation letters, or simply being present in campus commons, our quality of being shapes our quality of doing.

Reflecting on this most recent transition, I now know I was being called toward educational leadership - not away from teaching, but toward amplifying its reach.

The Students We Actually Serve

While sifting through an old notebook recently, searching for an article reference for a research project, I re-read a quote I had written in bold in the margin amidst details from a strategic planning meeting last fall. I remember now I wrote the quote because of how much it affected me. The quote, by a faculty colleague, reads, "We need to recruit students we can teach. Our students can't learn."

Herein lies the challenge facing higher education in 2025. Too often, we design programs, courses, and institutions for the students we wish we served rather than the ones sitting in our classrooms. The bodies in those seats are searching for relevance, belonging, and meaning in spaces where they may not feel valued, respected, or that they belong.

Last week, addressing an auditorium of new freshmen, I shared that my top advice was to cultivate relationships with faculty and staff. Research shows that meaningful, accountable relationships with educators improve student outcomes, particularly for first-generation, minoritized, and low-income students. But this relationship-centered approach demands something of us as educators: we must embrace a higher education that prioritizes authentic connection over transactional efficiency.

I recognize that not every student seeks deep mentoring relationships, but the invitation itself matters. Validation and belonging form the foundation of educator-student connections, though they manifest differently for each individual. Like artistic expression, people engage with educational opportunities in their own ways, and not every interaction will be transformative. But shouldn't transformation remain our aspiration?

This works in both directions. As educators, we must meet students where they are if we expect them to find engagement and opportunities for growth in our classrooms. This means cultivating relationships that honor their experiences while fostering knowledge, curating diverse perspectives, and promoting critical dialogue. This approach does more than create opportunities for students - it fundamentally reframes the motivation driving our work.

On Vocation

If one's quality of being determines our quality of doing, then authentically teaching and guiding learners is a reflection of one's vocation. Vocation, broadly, is the work we feel compelled to do, or a calling toward a particular path in life.

The sociologist Max Weber, writing about academic vocation over a century ago, argued that intellectual pursuits require both rigorous methodology and creative inspiration. More importantly, he recognized that if we believe in higher education's transformative power, we must help students develop and refine their own sense of academic vocation. Weber understood that our primary contribution is to promote clarity and self-understanding rather than imposing predetermined paths.

To put it bluntly: educators are too beholden to an academic discipline rather than the people seeking meaning and self-efficacy in our classrooms.

Educators must serve as conduits of validation and empowerment, connecting their calling to their audience. We are not mere performers but levers of possibility, ambassadors to our disciplines, and agents of transformation. The connection between dancer and audience, between educator and learner, forms the very heart of the art.

As dean, I have to discover how to scale my being to determine my doing. How do I preserve duende when a "classroom" becomes an entire university? How do you foster authentic connection through policy decisions, budget meetings, and strategic planning?

This is what I have discovered to be true in higher education leadership: vocation matters. Building on Weber's insight, I have discovered that effective higher education leadership requires being creative yet methodological, flexible yet efficacious, open yet disciplined while creating conditions that center student success. My role now is to be a lever of possibility not for thirty students, but for an entire academic community.

Resolution

This week I walked campus at the time I would normally teach (10a M, W, F). Students filled the pathways on their first week of classes. I encountered familiar faces, enjoyed meaningful conversations, and returned to my office fulfilled. The realization settled: my authenticity, passion, and mission remain unchanged - only the venue has shifted.

But my questions have become more concrete: How do I bring duende to budget conversations by ensuring every financial decision reflects our commitment to student success? How do I find that soul-stirring spark in accreditation reports by treating them as opportunities to articulate our authentic mission? How do I structure meetings so they become spaces for genuine collaboration rather than procedural obligations?

Perhaps the answer lies not in trying to recreate the classroom experience, but in recognizing that vocation itself can transcend venue.

The role of university leadership, at its best, amplifies the possibility for countless learners to find their own calling, to ensure opportunities to cultivate passions, and prioritize pathways that reflect our students' vocations. When I advocate for resources that support student-faculty relationships, I'm scaling the connections I once created with individual students. When I champion policies that prioritize belonging over exclusion, I'm extending the validation that transforms lives. When I center student success in committee conversations on programming, I am being my authentic self when I am evoking my vocation.

My vocation, shrouded in duende, demands sincerity over perfection, intention over transaction, connection over irrelevance. These principles remain constant whether my audience is thirty statistics students or an entire university community.

It is precisely at these very moments that we circle our silos, call into effect standard operating procedures, and insulate ourselves against threats—both for resources and for validation. But this defensive posture may be exactly what's holding us back.

Einstein's Wisdom for Modern Challenges

In high school, I fell deeply enthralled with the life of Albert Einstein—not just the science, but the social activism, the contradictions of his time, the true essence of the man. Though I switched from a physics major and finally landed several years later on a sociology degree, I've always had that deep admiration for a man who made his purpose pragmatic both socially and scientifically. I still read Einstein from time to time, and find him helpful when navigating problems.

Einstein is also very quotable, and here are some of my favorites that speak directly to our current moment:

"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them," emphasizing the need for a new or higher level of thinking to overcome challenges.

"If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions," highlighting the importance of problem definition and preparation.

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new," linking mistakes to innovation and learning in the face of problems.

The Silo Effect in Action

I've been watching silos ossify as I navigate my first year as a dean in this vortex of internal and external barriers. The external barriers are difficult enough, but they become more challenging when internal barriers serve a path very different from Einstein's insight—they promote standard operating procedures instead of innovative thinking.

For example, myself along with two other colleagues fleshed out an idea to create a resource and referral hub for students that is centrally located in my area. I wrote the final proposal, sent it through my chain of command, and was approved. In addition, I was allocated resources to furnish the space.

Throughout the proposal process and the conversations around campus about this hub, we have continually expressed and described it as a collaborative space that will necessarily thrive through interdivisional, interdepartmental collaborative structure. The hub focuses on being a one-stop place where students can get financial aid information and be directed to the right office, receive a referral to counseling services with someone to walk them over there, or get information about what's available at the student rec center. Instead of navigating campus in ignorance as many of us do when we first get to college, students have one place to go where they know they're going to be welcomed, get the information they need, and receive the name and location of who they need to follow up with.

The vision statement for the hub is clear: this initiative aims to transform institutional operations to better support how diverse student populations navigate campus, moving beyond traditional support models designed for 'traditional' students. Its central location provides access to academic advising, support, tutoring, testing, and accommodation services, plus provides a collaboration space and extended hours while serving as a recruitment tool demonstrating the institution's commitment to student success broadly, and especially students taking their first steps in higher education.

Rather than perpetuating equity gaps by focusing solely on student acclimation and transactional support, the Hub transforms institutional operations to leverage diverse student strengths and experiences in a relentlessly welcoming, growth-oriented milieu.

This project necessitates innovation, collaboration, and active partnerships to get at a root cause of retention issues: belonging uncertainty.

When Silos Strike Back

And then it was announced that the university will be operating at a deficit budget to start this fiscal year. And the silos intensified.

Now key partners are questioning the intentions of the hub project: Is this overreach? Is this really what academic affairs should be doing? "This sounds a lot like something we would do!" But collaboration is not a zero-sum game.

Cue Einstein: we work in a higher education system that functionally exploits its silos. They serve as necessary scapegoats when outcomes dictate, either as being good or bad. Systemically, reporting structures and budgets are the bloodlines of silos, but there is also a culture that thrives off of that scaffolding. And it is intergenerational—we have been socialized, as those who came before us, into such a system.

Hence silos get reproduced in interpersonal and interdepartmental processes and show up as increased charge-back costs for campus services, faculty defending the interests of the department rather than the students of the discipline, and research relationships severed due to increased red tape.

The human cost of this silo mentality hit me about a month ago when I got a call from a parent whose student was told their summer class was canceled due to low enrollment. The parent was concerned because this would delay their child's graduation, but were told by the department that there was nothing more they could do. So mom started looking for someone to talk to and found her way to me. I found a course at a community college near their home that would transfer in as credit for the class. In all, it took about 30 minutes of my time to solve what had been a parent's very frustrating day. Thirty minutes. But the department had already closed the door, retreated to their silo, and moved on.

More Ramps, Fewer Walls

I gave a brief speech this past week on the Hub, questioning the confrontational nature of silos and the assumptions thereof. In the speech I said:

"As I've been talking about this, I've been saying the Hub is like a welcome center to campus—just like that welcome center on the Interstate. But at its core, it is a resource, referral, and programming space to support first generation, first year, new transfer students, returning non-traditional students, and international students. In essence, an inclusive space. The target is first generation students, but research supports the idea that many student populations struggle in their academic and social transitions to and through college.

“In these terms, I really like this metaphor: it is like a wheelchair ramp—it serves a defined population, but everyone benefits and can use it.

“It's an idea that—if people agree with me and the other folks who have had input on crafting this idea and it's an idea that has merit—it doesn't have to be an academic affairs initiative, it doesn't have to be a student affairs initiative. It is a University initiative."

Silos create competition, not innovation. Silos stifle creativity and promote insulation. Silos reflect the thinking that has often created problems, but new thinking is needed to get higher education through a moment that is certainly existential.

Einstein's wisdom reminds us that the challenges facing higher education today—demographic shifts, funding pressures, changing student needs—cannot be solved with the same departmental thinking that created our current struggles. We need to spend more time understanding the problems our students face and less time defending our organizational territories.

The wheelchair ramp metaphor isn't just about accessibility—it's about recognizing that when we work for inclusion, everyone benefits. Similarly, when we break down silos and collaborate across divisions, we don't lose our identity or expertise, we amplify it.

Higher education's moment of reckoning demands Einstein-level thinking: innovative, collaborative, and focused on the larger purpose that brought us all here in the first place—serving our students and advancing human knowledge. The question isn't whether we can afford to break down our silos. The question is whether we can afford not to.

One of my favorite writers and thinkers about organizational psychology and culture is Adam Grant. The Wharton professor and fellow Michigan alum has a lot to say about how to build and sustain a workplace by centering the people who serve. I recommend his Granted Substack as a valuable resource as I continually navigate my approach to leadership and the people I'm charged with leading.

Adam has a mantra of sorts about the mistake of thinking of your staff as a family. Rather, he argues that workplace culture is best thought of as a community. I've been thinking a tremendous amount about this distinction because I lead a division that provides remedial, co-curricular, and alternative educational pathways for the breadth of students at my institution. This is to say, we thrive on rapport with and service to our students—we are human services workers.

This work attracts a certain caliber of professional who wants to dedicate their life to academic advising, disability services, and remedial education within a student population that is nearly one-half first-generation, culturally and economically diverse, and academically promising despite gaps in preparation. We hear the "family" metaphor often; we are these types of people.

Defining Community in Practice

Each Friday, I send an email to the entire staff in my division. The typical content includes announcements and program updates, birthday applause, and a shout-out to an individual staff member who went above and beyond that week. Sometimes I use some space to discuss an issue or decision, being transparent with the staff as a whole. Recently, I wrote about community:

I want to share some thoughts about community—a term we hear frequently on a university campus. When I use this word, particularly in reference to our Student Success community, I'm thinking about the interconnectedness of various aspects that contribute to our collective well-being and empowerment. As both a sociologist and social worker, I see community as built on interdependence, mutual support, shared goals, and transparent progress. Most importantly, true community respects how each individual chooses to participate.

I then shared an example of community interdependence: when my team saw a gap in another division's programming and collectively worked to fill that space. It was a positive example of community that needed recognition.

I closed with:

This exemplifies what makes our group special: you show up for each other not just because it's the right thing to do, but because of the standard you have set as a team. Strong communities also provide constructive feedback because they maintain high standards. And while I see areas where intentionality needs nurturing and support, I also regularly observe your mutual respect.

When Community Means Setting Boundaries

The "intentionality that needs nurturing" came from a few other examples where—to the people involved—they knew exactly what I was doing: reinforcing community. In each circumstance, I communicated a set of principles I use in navigating difficult situations: checking on their well-being, getting multiple perspectives, protecting confidentiality, and supporting growth by looking for root causes.

One instance resulted from a mistake by another program area outside our division, over which I have no authority. Staff in my division sometimes receive requests to help serve families and students who might need translating, sign language, or accessibility services during campus visits. In the past, these requests were typically honored by my predecessor in the spirit of serving families and students (typically prospective students).

When a recent request was made asking a staff member to leave their position to work with a family, I said absolutely not. Despite my empathy for that family and their needs, I had two things to accomplish: protect my staff member and be transparent - key components of community-building.

First, community does not take advantage of people—it reinforces shared opportunities, goals, and well-being. That request failed to respect both the person and the broader context in which that request was being made. Plus, it was not the first, and certainly will not be the last a request like this will be made, so I needed to reset the expectations for the broader campus community.

Second, I needed to inform the staff member about their rights as part of a negotiated unit on campus and that I wasn't willing to put them or myself at risk for a grievance due to someone else's oversight. This wasn't obvious to the staff member, but it provided me the parameters to make the only right decision. It also allowed me to frame my first point about not being taken advantage of; I needed them to feel empowered while also educated about their rights.

Though the staff member lobbied hard to help, and I communicated my empathy with both the family and the staff member, I was resolute. It took a few days, but they thanked me for my decision, acknowledging it was right. They also thanked me for having their back. I showed them how to say "no" while learning their rights and understanding they are supported by their dean.

Relationships and Results

In Adam Grant's work, he points out that community is about relationships and results; family is all about relationships. This is the key point to the context above: community is built between people, not taken for granted, and nurtured intentionally. The relationship serves the desired result. I recommend this episode of Adam’s podcast, WorkLife on toxic work cultures for some deeper insight into his thoughts.

In these cases, if I had treated my team as a family in this situation, I would have prioritized the emotional appeal and personal relationships over professional boundaries and individual well-being. A "family" approach might have led me to say yes to the request because "family helps family" and "we don't let each other down," potentially putting my staff member in an exploitative situation while exposing both of us to violations.

The family mentality could have made me feel guilty for saying no, viewing it as abandoning someone in need rather than protecting them from being taken advantage of. Most problematically, treating staff as family often means expecting unconditional loyalty and sacrifice—asking people to go above and beyond their job responsibilities because of emotional bonds rather than shared professional goals.

This approach would have undermined my staff member's agency and rights, failed to model healthy boundary-setting, and ultimately weakened our team by creating unsustainable expectations where personal sacrifice is valued over mutual respect and professional standards.

Here, the rapport and relationship was nurtured to communicate a different desired result—their empowerment and protection within our community.

Building true community requires leaders who understand that sometimes the most caring thing you can do is expose the difference between enabling and empowering, between being nice and being kind. In this case, saying "no" wasn't just about protecting one staff member—it was about raising the floor on the standards that strengthen our community.

The Federal budget proposal currently before Congress includes something immoral: the wholesale elimination of TRIO programs—a critical educational lifeline that has transformed countless lives since the Johnson Administration's Great Society initiatives of 1964. This is not merely a budget cut; it represents the systematic dismantling of educational pathways designed specifically for those who need them most.

What TRIO Actually Does

TRIO Student Support Services addresses precisely what higher education claims it wants to accomplish: college access, persistence, retention, and graduation leading to workforce readiness. These are not luxury services—they are the foundational supports that make educational promises real for first-generation, low-income, and disabled students across America.

The Federal TRIO Programs comprise eight distinct initiatives that guide disadvantaged students through the entire academic pipeline—from middle school to postbaccalaureate education. These programs don't simply offer encouragement; they provide concrete, evidence-based interventions: academic tutoring, course selection guidance, financial literacy education, assistance with financial aid applications, and critical support for students transitioning from two-year to four-year institutions.

TRIO is not a monolithic entity but rather a constellation of targeted interventions strategically positioned throughout the educational journey. These eight programs collectively ensure that talent isn't wasted due to circumstance—that economic disadvantage doesn't translate to educational disenfranchisement. Beyond direct student services, TRIO includes vital training programs that ensure directors and staff remain at the cutting edge of educational support methodologies.

The funding structure itself reflects TRIO's deep integration with America's educational ecosystem. Grant recipients include institutions of higher education, public and private agencies, community-based organizations with proven experience serving disadvantaged youth, and secondary schools. These diverse stakeholders collaborate to plan, develop, and implement services tailored to their specific student populations—creating a web of support that adapts to local needs while maintaining national standards of excellence.

The Student Support Services (SSS) program—the cornerstone of TRIO's college-level initiatives—offers comprehensive support that addresses both academic and non-academic barriers to success. Every SSS project nationwide provides essential services including:

• Intensive academic tutoring in critical subjects from reading and writing to mathematics and science

• Strategic guidance for navigating course selection and academic pathways

• Comprehensive financial aid counseling, including assistance locating scholarships and completing applications

• Financial literacy education that empowers students to make sound economic decisions throughout their lives

• Preparation for graduate and professional programs to ensure upward educational mobility

• Specialized assistance for students at two-year institutions seeking to transfer to four-year programs

These services aren't optional or supplementary—they are the fundamental infrastructure that makes educational equity possible. They transform abstract promises of opportunity into concrete pathways for achievement.

The False Rationale for Elimination

The justification for eliminating TRIO programs reveals either profound ignorance or deliberate mischaracterization (p. 5):

"TRIO and GEAR UP are a relic of the past when financial incentives were needed to motivate Institutions of Higher Education (IHEs) to engage with low-income students and increase access... Today, the pendulum has swung and access to college is not the obstacle it was for students of limited means."

This assertion is demonstrably false. Recent U.S. Census Bureau data analyzed by the Council for Opportunity in Education shows that students from the highest income quartile earn college degrees at a rate more than four times higher than students from the lowest income quartile (62% vs. 15%). The "pendulum" has not swung—the educational playing field remains dramatically uneven.

Beyond Academic Merit: Why Even "High Achievers" Need TRIO

Consider the potential Presidential Scholar at my institution—a high school student with a 3.75 GPA or a 3.5 GPA with impressive standardized test scores. These students are undeniably brilliant and academically talented, yet several of our scholars are first-generation, low-income college students.

A perfect transcript doesn't teach you how to navigate complex financial aid systems. A high SAT score doesn't explain how to access mental health services when you're struggling. Academic talent doesn't automatically confer the cultural and social capital that more privileged students inherit without thought or recourse.

This is where TRIO truly matters. It provides the mentoring and support systems that help talented but disadvantaged students understand the unwritten rules and hidden curriculum of higher education. TRIO raises the floor on educational equity by ensuring that merit can actually translate into achievement.

The Broader Implications

As a sociologist who has studied social welfare policies from the 1935 Social Security Act through the 2008 Great Recession, and present shifts in food insecurity programs, I recognize a familiar pattern in the proposed elimination of TRIO. When we dismantle policies that structure support for marginalized populations, these programs rarely return. The infrastructure of opportunity, once razed, is not easily rebuilt.

TRIO has become a target precisely because it works—because it empowers upward mobility and reorients life trajectories. This is not about budget efficiency; it is about maintaining established social hierarchies.

The data on TRIO’s effectiveness are clear:

• Upward Bound students are more than twice as likely to earn a bachelor’s degree by age 24 than students in the lowest income quartile.

• Student Support Services participants are 47% more likely to complete a two-year degree or transfer, and 18% more likely to complete a bachelor’s degree than similar nonparticipants.

• Talent Search students are 33% more likely to enroll in college than other students from the bottom income quartile.

• Veterans Upward Bound participants are 42% more likely than their peers to earn a bachelor’s degree within six years.

• EOC programs report that 60.6% of “college-ready” participants enrolled in higher education, and 71% applied.

• McNair Scholars are 78% more likely to enroll in graduate school compared to similarly situated low-income college graduates.

Even at my own institution, TRIO students are retained and persist at a higher percentage than the general population of students.

Higher education exists within an interdependent, historically-contingent relationship with other social institutions. By targeting TRIO, the current administration is not simply cutting a line item in a budget—it is actively reshaping the conditions of existence for generations of students and their families.

The Stakes Could Not Be Higher

If we still believe that higher education is an essential credential for maximizing human potential and building a just society, then we must recognize what the attack on TRIO represents: a declaration that educational access is no longer a policy priority in America.

This is not a partisan issue—or at least it should not be. TRIO's establishment and expansion enjoyed broad bipartisan support for decades because both parties recognized that talent is distributed equally throughout our society, but opportunity is not.

To abandon TRIO now is to abandon the fundamental American promise that hard work, determination, and ability—not family wealth or social position—should determine one's educational and economic future. This is a promise worth fighting for, and TRIO is a program worth saving.

Use Your Voice

The Council on Opportunities in Education have several advocacy resources. If you are interested in lending your voice to preserve TRIO and the educational safety net for our current and future students, you will find many avenues down which you can lend a voice to the fight. May I suggest first contacting your representatives in Washington DC.

These opinions are my own personal views and this post does not reflect the views of my employer and institution.

When an audience member asked, "What single question from your professors could make the most difference?" one student leaned forward with certainty and said, "No one has ever asked me what my definition of success is."

The simplicity and power of this statement silenced the room. It revealed a fundamental disconnect: while institutions measure success through standardized metrics like GPAs and graduation rates, students—particularly those from marginalized backgrounds—may be operating with entirely different definitions of achievement. What followed was a compelling articulation of how higher education's expectations often fail to align with the lived realities of the students we serve.

This moment forms the foundation of my argument: before we can effectively support students, we must first understand how they define success for themselves.

For some students, just making it to college is success. For some students who have lived lives with dreams deferred or delayed, acceptance into our institutions in an honor. And when they get to campus, when they enter our classrooms and sit through our PowerPoint presentations, take our tests, and respond to essay prompts, they are operating in a different mindset than we may think (hope).

Our metrics of success are grade point average (for students) and retention and graduation rates (for institutions). These are standard markers of success. And I agree - I am still proud that I graduated undergrad with distinction, especially after a college transfer, declaring 7 different majors, being on academic warning, failing introductory sociology (my eventual degree) and a real serious internal dialog on the gravity of what I was doing. I would be the first in my family to graduate college if I could make it. That became my definition of success - make it.

I eventually had to change my relationship with higher education.

The research on student belonging in higher education is rather clear - belonging is as good a metric of student success as GPA or retention. The thing is, belonging is built on relationships.

It is time to focus on the relationship between students with their student success. So here is my idea: ask students for their definition of success. More specific if warranted, "What does success look like to you at our university?"

The concept is belongingness uncertainty. And I submit, the key factor in student success is targeting this uncertainty. The first step is to learn of the students' definitions of success at our institutions.

The rationale behind this is simple, and rooted in mindset theory, validating questions build rapport and connection. More important, they feed a mindset of growth because the definition of their success is validated. Validation leads to persistence, and persistence leads to success.

I have, for years, entertained the anxieties of my statistics students. For two full weeks I poke fun at the fact that on their first day survey, 90% indicated they strongly agree or agree that they only enrolled in my class is because it is required for the major. I have been doing this for 15 years. The data NEVER change. But it opens up the conversation of success. Their success in my class is NOT an A. It is survival. Once I figured this out, it transformed how I teach my class because now it is focused on the students' definitions of success: finding relevance to their future as criminologists, social workers, and human services professionals.

Working with individual students is like designing a new course. You have to understand the desired outcomes before you can move forward. It all starts with the definition of success. And that is the opening to building a relationship between that student and their academic success.

Along the way, we as educators hope that their definitions come into alignment with those of the institution.

But I also hope the expectations of the institution come more into alignment with students. Like Bronfenbrenner's ecological system theory, relationships are multifaceted and synergistic. This would be intentional and cultural, curating an interconnected web of educational environments focused on the relationships we have with their success over the course of their career at our universities.

Creating a campus-wide culture of student success predicated on alignment between institutional-centric and student-centric definitions of success is big work. But to get started, we need to be focusing on what our students have to say about their success. I am working on a more robust list of students' success-focused questions, but here is a list I am developing for working with students and unpacking their definitions of success at my institution.

How do YOU define success? "In your own words and based on your personal values, how do you define what it means to be successful? What elements or experiences are essential to your definition?"

Personal Success Metrics: "Think about a time when you felt truly successful. What specific elements made that experience feel like success to you? Are these still elements of your personal success metric?"

Beyond Traditional Metrics: "Universities often measure success through retention rates, GPAs, and graduation rates. What non-traditional or overlooked indicators do you believe should be valued when evaluating student success?"

Success Tensions: "As students, you likely balance multiple priorities. When have your personal definitions of success conflicted with institutional or societal expectations? How did you navigate that tension?"

Academic vs. Social Success: "How do you view the relationship between academic success and social success during your college experience? In what ways do these two areas complement or conflict with each other, and how do you balance them as a student?"

Evolving Definitions: "How has your understanding of 'success' changed since you first arrived on campus? What experiences or insights prompted these shifts, and how might they inform how you support other students?"

Student Success as Institutional Success: What could the university do to incorporate more student definitions of their success with institutional definitions? How can we support ways students can better connect their personal definitions with institutional definitions?

Thanks for reading. I would love to hear other ideas about student belonging and how this connects to success. What about this list of questions? What should I add? Anything missing? Let me know what you think!

Trauma in this context encompasses a wide spectrum—from growing up in foster care or being the victim of physical or emotional abuse, to not having your IEP honored by teachers in your classroom. The safe, supportive, and inclusive learning environment acknowledges trauma in its various aspects but also transcends that by validating the experiences of the learners.

I read a quote this morning by Simon Sinek about how when you are a worker, your responsibility is to the job, but when you become a leader, your responsibility becomes the people doing the work. This struck me profoundly because the longer I've been in leadership, the more I've felt the need to center a trauma-informed leadership model.

Following, trauma-informed leadership creates a safe, supportive, and inclusive working environment that not only promotes resilience but also prevents re-traumatization. I encountered Sinek's quote the day after having an unexpected but powerful conversation with a colleague who was navigating a traumatic experience with a supervisor. What had started as a discussion about program redesign—thinking about how to raise the floor for this program to better serve its students—ended with a revelation. The impediments to past progress weren't because of bad design, misguided mission, or unclear values; they stemmed from the misunderstanding that when you are a leader, your responsibility is to the people.

I've been thinking about this a lot as I have been navigating my new role, because I was immediately confronted with the need to lead in a way that honored the effects of past experiences. I've also observed similar needs across campus, across higher education, and across different contexts—certainly the current political situation doesn't help.

I wanted to develop an approach to connecting with individuals on their terms, so I've been considering ways to approach leadership through a lens that acknowledges that some of our best and brightest staff have had experiences with leadership that have negatively impacted the quality of their work life. Trauma is broadly defined here because people experience trauma differently—what might not be a big deal to me might be deeply impactful for another person.

So, here are five questions I believe trauma-informed leaders should ask:

First: "Tell me about your job from your perspective. What is it that you do?"

Here, you listen and learn, because how somebody defines their job says a lot about their approach to it. You can observe whether the job makes them sparkle—there are words, and there are affects, and they go together. That emotional intelligence is important; you get a sense of how they feel about their job very quickly.

Second: "Where do you want to be? What's your career goal? Where do you want to end up? Who do you want to lead?"

This is simple—you need to know where they're at and where they want to go because your job now is supporting the people doing the work. Building them up will improve your outcomes as well as the satisfaction of the people doing the job.

Third: "What's one change we could make that would have a positive impact on your job right now?"

This has to be feasible—something that goes against university policies isn't going to happen. But sometimes little things can make big differences, and it's those little things that matter.

Fourth: "How can I best communicate with you?"

This acknowledges that people hear messages differently and feel comfortable communicating in different ways. Past face-to-face conversations with managers or leadership might not have been positive experiences, so perhaps emails, text messages, or Teams messages would be preferred. Conversely, some people may not have had the opportunity to have meaningful face-to-face dialogue with their supervisor and crave that connection. Meeting people where they're at is a strategy for raising the floor.

Fifth (and this is an important one): "What are your expectations of me?"

In my experience, you would be surprised how much this question both disarms (in a positive way), empowers, and centers people. It's a question we rarely ask in the classroom, too: "Students, what are your expectations of me as your instructor?" Now, the question is: "Program manager, area director, vice president—what are your expectations of me as your leader?"

I'd love to hear other comments on this conceptualization. I'd love to hear experiences and perspectives. What other questions should we ask? If we're going to raise the floor, we have to acknowledge the people doing the work in the trenches every day, and the experiences they've had serve as both learning opportunities for us and growth opportunities for them.

I recently had the honor of delivering a plenary address at an Advising Symposium centered on the theme of "What's Next?" With transformative changes surrounding us in higher education and an increasingly unpredictable political landscape, we find ourselves collectively wondering how to navigate what lies ahead. More specifically, how do we manage change in such an environment, and how can people within that process become engaged in change management?

The Triangle: A Framework for Change

I shared a method for approaching change management that frames my thinking about leadership – the triangle. The triangle has many inherent qualities that make it an apt metaphor. It's the strongest geometric figure, one that minimizes design complexity while maximizing strength and tenacity. Triangles can be assembled into trusses to create even stronger structures. The triangle is also a powerful indicator for change because in mathematics and science, when change must be incorporated into formulas, it's notated by the Greek letter delta (Δ), which is shaped like a triangle.

My framework consists of three interconnected elements:

1. People – forming the base of the triangle

2. Process – defining how change will happen

3. Preparation – how people and processes are readied for change

These three elements cannot exist in isolation. You must prepare people for the process. You must allow people to help shape and prepare the process. And built into everything, the process itself prepares people. This creates a holistic, collaborative framework that is highly relational and necessitates genuine buy-in and a growth mindset.

People: The Foundation of Change

The reality about change is that it often happens to us, not with us. The crucial aspect of managing change effectively is managing our response to it. As leaders, this includes taking care of your people throughout the entire change process.

Taking care of your people looks like:

• Providing meaningful professional development opportunities

• Engaging in conversations where you listen significantly more than you talk

• Presenting a clear picture of your mission and vision

• Practicing radical transparency

In curriculum redesign initiatives, transparent leadership practices make a substantial difference in faculty buy-in. When academic leaders create regular open forums where faculty can ask questions, voice concerns, and contribute ideas, the process becomes more inclusive. These sessions prove most effective when they move beyond mere performance—when faculty suggestions are genuinely considered and incorporated into the final design. Institutions that establish such transparent communication channels typically experience less resistance to change than those where decisions are simply handed down from above. The difference lies in creating authentic opportunities for stakeholder input rather than presenting change as a fait accompli.

This approach builds trust with your team and trust in the system, providing scaffolding for your people to succeed. When this foundation is solid, adaptive changes—small, iterative, and evolving adjustments—can happen fluidly. These adaptive changes allow responses to emerge organically because of the established trust.

However, transformational changes—large-scale shifts that significantly depart from the status quo—are where true leadership happens. Successfully navigating transformational change creates the conditions that enable those smaller adaptive changes down the road. How you manage change as a leader directly influences how you manage change as an individual, which is why our response to change is so consequential. Being mindful of your response makes all the difference in how effectively you navigate change.

The Individual Response to Change

Individuals throughout the organization, college, department, or program undergoing change also need to look inward to determine their role in the change process. For individuals facing change, there are five essential questions to consider:

1. What changes can I control? What's my responsibility in handling this change?

2. Where can I best serve? What are my skill sets and potential contributions, and how can I insert myself into the process?

3. What will I contribute? Beyond identifying where I can serve, what specific actions will I take to support this process?

4. Who am I bringing with me? Change shouldn't happen in isolation. Who are your allies, your team, the people you're bringing along? These are the same people you'll rely on throughout the process and after the change is complete. When you've gone through it together, the result is stronger.

5. How will I respond? This final question is perhaps the most critical reflection point.

For instance, in times of rapid change, cross-functional teams that combine the technological fluency of newer professionals with the institutional knowledge of veteran staff members can be particularly effective. Such collaborations frequently address immediate challenges while simultaneously fostering mentoring relationships and knowledge transfer that benefit the institution long-term. By intentionally considering these five questions, potentially disruptive changes can be reconsidered as opportunities for both personal growth and enhanced student support.

Higher Education as a Human Service

I believe higher education is fundamentally a human service. Yes, it operates within a business model. Yes, there are goals, objectives, and KPIs to meet. But at its foundation, higher education is humans working with humans. This means people working with people who:

• Tend to grow when they're supported

• Are more engaged when they feel valued

• Become creative and resilient through change when they are authentically invited and welcomed into the change management process

People respond to and experience change differently based on their social histories, contexts, and perspectives. This isn't easy to navigate, but when acknowledged properly, these differences can reinforce the necessity for diversity, equity, inclusion, and an exemplar of access in higher education. A functional team requires people who experience change differently to fully validate, realize, and appreciate the impact that change has on people.

A key question emerges: How can we create psychological safety to support people through vulnerability? When we consider this question—when we think about taking care of people through the process and offering that safety—it becomes a validation through vulnerability.

I witnessed this with the faculty and department chairs who participated in the DWF Initiative at my institution. Innovation needs space and creativity, but also a safety net to allow for growth through mistakes or failures. By our measures, that initiative is a success because of the support given to faculty willing to step out of their comfort zone and reconsider their pedagogical approach.

Process: Serving the People

It's critical that the process of change serves the people because when we welcome them in, we're also depending on them during and after the change process. To support this, we can:

• Reduce cognitive load through transparency

• Ensure roles are clearly defined so people don't have to worry about what falls within or outside their purview

• Focus on developing people's growth mindset for change

• Take opportunities and lessons from the process, not seeing mistakes or failures as confirmation that it's not working, but as invitations to learn and grow

The process must be flexible, iterative, transparent, and most importantly, accountable. This means communicating the "why" at every step: Why are we doing this? Why is this important? Why was this decision made? Why was this decision not made?

When I was a camp counselor, then program director, and eventually camp director many years ago, we had a policy called "Dare to Suck" to encourage campers to break out of their comfort zones and try new things. This policy invited campers to make mistakes and learn from them. It's no different now—if we can design processes to manage change that allow for mistakes, feedback, and learning in a safe environment, change will be realized in a much more positive way.

The key question here is: How can our processes become learning laboratories rather than compliance exercises?

This process-oriented approach translates effectively to one-on-one interactions across various roles in higher education:

Academic Advisers can apply this model when helping students navigate curriculum changes. Rather than simply directing students to follow new requirements, advisers who take time to explain the rationale behind changes, explore how these align with the student's goals, and invite students to participate in planning their adjusted academic journey typically see higher student satisfaction and retention. The adviser who asks, "How can we make this change work best for your specific goals?" creates a collaborative process that serves both institutional needs and student success.

Faculty Members can implement this approach during office hours when students struggle with course material. Faculty who engage students in a dialogue about their learning preferences, create a safe space to acknowledge challenges, and co-develop customized strategies often witness remarkable turnarounds. When a professor asks, "What parts make sense to you so far?" before diving into explanations, they're establishing a learning laboratory rather than a remediation session.

Resident Assistants find this model particularly valuable when mediating roommate conflicts. When an RA approaches tension by first listening to each resident's perspective, then guiding a transparent discussion of possible solutions, and finally preparing residents with communication tools for future conflicts, they're applying all three elements of the triangle. The RA who frames the conversation as "Let's figure out how to make your living situation better together" rather than imposing rules creates psychological safety that leads to more sustainable resolutions.

In each case, the professional serves as a guide rather than a director, the process becomes collaborative rather than prescriptive, and the preparation focuses on building capacity rather than enforcing compliance. This approach consistently yields better outcomes because it respects the agency of all participants while still moving toward necessary changes.

Preparation: Setting the Stage for Success

Change management must include clear preparation for the change, both in mindset (how people view the change) and in action (how the change will be implemented). This action must be supported through professional development, which is key for people to grow as practitioners and to know they're working in an environment that supports their growth.

Different stakeholders require different preparation. The board of trustees will need something different than financial aid advisors implementing a change, or graduate assistants working in the trenches day-to-day with at-promise students. Preparation includes:

• Emotional readiness

• Cultivation of relationships between people, departments, and colleges

• Innovation that looks forward, not backward

This means thinking outside of what has been, outside of conventional workshops, outside of the box and existing rules—because what is or has been might not necessarily be what should be or could be in the future.

Preparation cannot be one-size-fits-all, and it doesn't mean everyone must participate in each part of the process. Rather, preparation creates space for agency and choice within change initiatives. As mentioned earlier, individuals must approach change with a mindset of growth and opportunity, asking themselves what they can contribute, where they'll work best, and how they'll respond to the change. But we must create space for this reflection.

The key question: Are we preparing people to be passive recipients of change or active co-creators? I want those active co-creators.

Relationships: The Ultimate Measure of Success

This model isn't just about leadership or preparing teams to envision something different and move toward an improved condition. It's also a model for how we work one-on-one with people. I use this approach in my classroom from day one. I apply it when talking with students individually, advising them on graduate school options or thesis development.

Changes are happening all around us, and we must remember the people, the process, and the preparation for handling it all. Whether implementing a new student success initiative, redesigning a curriculum, or helping a single student navigate a challenging academic transition, this triangle model provides a framework for inclusive, effective change.

At the end of the day, successful change management is about relationships. If you do it right—if you take care of the people and create a transparent process, if you prepare people for that process—this is what success looks like. The triangle isn't just a model for managing change; it's a reminder that even amid the most significant transformations, the human connections we nurture remain our most valuable resource and our greatest strength.

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My journey in higher education began with struggle. As a first-generation university student, I was listless for the first few years as I bounced between majors, starting in physics before realizing it wasn't the right fit. I was socially engaged but academically adrift, until a pivotal moment changed everything: retaking an introductory sociology course with a different professor. I failed this course the first time around and needed to get that grade off of my transcript. My previous instructor was dry and disengaged with their work and disengaged with the class. But when I retook the course with a different instructor, one my academic coach suggested (I was on academic probation at the time), the rest, they say, is history.

Rather than read a textbook and listen to an uninspired lecture, this instructor designed the course around a simple premise: in order to learn sociology, you have to do sociology. In doing so, I read Orwell's Animal Farm and applied fundamental concepts to the text. I also completed a participant observation project that became my first of many applied projects in my academic career.

That class also transformed my academic life. Within a year, I became a straight-A student and discovered my passion for sociology. More importantly, I witnessed firsthand the profound impact that effective instruction could have on a student's trajectory. This revelation eventually led me to become a social worker who focused on policy and assessment of programs, then to a PhD in sociology.

Despite some raised eyebrows from my dissertation advisor and peers, when weighing my options I chose to join the faculty at an institution with a mission focused on teaching - I was shaped as an academic through the power of instruction.

Previously, as director of our Faculty Development and Innovation Center (FDIC), I had the opportunity to put these beliefs into action. Just over a year ago, our president and provost approached me with a challenge: address the high DWF rates (D grades, withdrawals, and fails) in our general education courses – the very gateway courses that can make or break a student's college journey, just as sociology did for me.

We recently completed our first implementation of this DWF initiative, working with eight departments across diverse disciplines – from human services to chemistry, speech to public health. The redesign process was intentional and comprehensive, including training and support from an instructional designer, using the backward design methodology, financial support for curriculum updates, and incentives for departments that reduced their DWF levels by 7.50 percentage points or more.

The results? They're promising. Across 65 sections serving 1,623 students, we saw the overall DWF percentage drop from a three-year average of 26.40% to 22.86%. Even more encouraging, 60% of sections reduced their DWF rates, and of those, three-quarters achieved reductions exceeding 7.50 percentage points. Sections that implemented the redesigns consistently outperformed those that didn't.

Sure, we heard skepticism. Concerns about grade inflation and academic freedom surfaced. But what made the difference was the courage of faculty members to step outside their comfort zones and rethink how they taught these foundational courses. They found innovative ways to raise the floor, meeting students where they are, like restructuring a music history course to work backward from the present to the past, or integrating practical certifications into a public health curriculum.

What I've learned through this initiative reinforces what hooked me into higher education decades ago: instruction matters. It is most impactful when it is student-focused and has the permission to be innovative; bonus points if you can connect it with practical applications and transferable skills. Even now as Acting Dean of Student Success, I am still coordinating this initiative and infusing these ideas to better design and deliver an academic support infrastructure that is also student-focused and innovative.

Effective instruction requires a holistic approach that combines quality course design with permission to innovate, backed with robust support for faculty and comprehensive support systems like peer tutoring and coaching for students. This ecological validation approach is how we truly raise the floor and lift students to meet our expectations.

Instruction, intentional design, supporting innovation, and empowerment through validation. These are the building blocks of transformative instruction. That's how we raise the floor. That's how we change lives; I don't just believe in it, I am proof of it.

What sets this work apart is its concrete roadmap for building truly equitable and accessible campus cultures through what the authors call "ecological validation." I particularly appreciate their shift in language from "at-risk" to "at-promise" students – a subtle but powerful reframing that acknowledges what I've long believed: talent is distributed equally, but opportunity isn't. A college education is nothing if not the promise of opportunity.

The concept of ecological validation resonates deeply because it goes beyond superficial inclusion. It's about creating environments that actively affirm and support students' experiences and identities at every touchpoint – before, during, and after their time with us. This approach doesn't force us to choose between academic excellence and accessibility. Instead, it shows how these goals naturally reinforce each other when we build systems that validate every student's human experience. In fact, in also reinforces the same validation towards the staff and faculty. It is ecological.

As someone who has spent their career challenging students to question their assumptions and rethink their conclusions, I find myself doing the same through this book. It's a powerful reminder that true educational leadership requires constant evolution – being adaptive, receptive, and open to new perspectives that can reshape our thinking.

What excites me most is that this isn't just theoretical – my colleagues and I are launching a campus reading group to explore how we can implement these ideas right here. It's one thing to talk about institutional change; it's another to roll up our sleeves and make it happen.

For institutions that pride themselves on being both superior and accessible, ecological validation isn't just a “nice-to-have” – it's essential. When we create environments that truly validate every student's experience and potential, we don't just maintain high standards – we enable more students to reach them.

In the upcoming posts, I am going to discuss some of the "This I Believe" type of topics. When I work with students who are struggling to find their path, I talk about the "This I Believe" approach to defining your core values. How do you know what you want to do if you cannot articulate what you stand for? I also have copies of these books to give to students who might be interested. But if one thing I believe in it is transparency, I thought I’d do the same to really get this newsletter off to a good start. (I also believe that you lead with examples.)

Here are my thoughts on academic integrity: academic integrity is a two-way street.

Integrity, rigor, and freedom are vital components to the open inquiry and discovery that are the promise of higher education. Students want to learn, and that the learning process is challenging. Faculty want students to learn, and that the learning process is challenging. Yet, there is a mismatch between expectations and realities.

Consider a test-optional admissions policy. This is an often cited reason that DWF rates and other academic success issues exist. We welcome students with tremendous potential who may not have had traditional college prep backgrounds. The promise is there - but so is the gap, and thus raising the floor becomes critical to ensuring equitable opportunities for all learners.

Let me share a recent case that illustrates this perfectly. A student faced academic dismissal after failing their first semester. There were extenuating circumstances - a death in the family, some personal challenges. The student appealed, and we spoke with a few faculty members and their advisor, and ultimately offered a second chance with clear conditions: specific tasks and appointments to complete within the first two weeks of returning. Seems reasonable, right?

Well, this student vanished. We knew they had arrived to start the semester and had been seen on campus, but they did not check-in with our office. Despite our best efforts - calls, texts, emails, even checking with their RA - silence. By census day, we had to drop them from their courses or they would be on the hook for tuition. When they finally surfaced the following week, their advisor and I laid out the agreement they had made and asked what had happened that kept them from completing these appointments. Something remarkable transpired. Instead of excuses, they said, "It was my responsibility. I get it now." The path forward? Complete 12 credits at a community college, show us your best self, then come back stronger. You have to go to class. You have to meet deadlines. You have to do the work.

And so do we.

That's what raising the floor looks like sometimes. We have to demonstrate it. We have to empower these students to see our expectations in contrast to their expectations and how to raise them.

But consider this: I co-facilitated a focus group last spring with a diverse group of students (not necessarily all 4.00 stars, but the ones who are engaged). We were interested in their definitions and experiences with academic integrity, and during the conversation something profound emerged. These students articulated perfectly what we sometimes dance around: academic integrity is a two-way street.

They're savvy enough to spot a professor who hasn't updated their lectures since the Obama administration, but in return are expected to produce graduate-level analysis. They care about the content but resort to taking photos of dense PowerPoint slides rather than hastily writing all of the information down. They can identify excellence in teaching just as surely as we can spot excellence in learning. Sometimes they'll take the path of least resistance (they are human), but it is not an absolute rule; students have a more nuanced algorithm than we might have expected.

Academic integrity is a two-way street. It is an ecosystem where excellence begets excellence, and where rigor isn't just demanded, but demonstrated.

What do you think? What does academic integrity look like to you? I would love to read your thoughts!

Time and again, I've found myself becoming that safe space for students and advisees to share their stories—both good and not so good—about their experiences across campus. I've long maintained that the most significant relationship in academia isn't what happens inside the classroom—it's the connection that forms outside of it. That's where faculty and students truly see each other as human beings. When this finally clicked in my head after a few semesters teaching at my current institution, it transformed my approach to teaching, scholarship, and service.

Now, a few weeks into my new position as Acting Dean of Student Success, this truth feels more acute than ever: Our students crave connection and engage deeply within this rapport. I often tell students that their number one key to college success is cultivating relationships. The time and effort this takes is significant, but what's truly devastating is when these attempts at connection aren't reciprocated. It is not hard: just having the respect to respond to an email, this basic act, may make the difference to many students.

Creating a genuinely student-focused culture requires a fundamental shift—one that begins with cultivating more robust connections with our students. Success should be measured by the quality of the relationship.

The pandemic has widened pre-existing gaps in educational, economic, and geographic inequality, creating an even greater divide between "prepared" and "underprepared" students. But here's the reality: we serve all students who come through our doors. We cannot self-select who registers for our classes, but we do choose how we work with them. The more we understand about their lived reality outside of the classroom, the better we can support them.

I'm not suggesting we lower our expectations—rather, we should maintain high, rigorous standards while reconsidering our starting point. We excel at setting high expectations but struggle to help those starting from different points have the same opportunity to reach those expectations—even if this means giving some students more opportunities to be successful. This is where our real work lies. This is what it means to raise the floor. We need to listen to our students, respect their stories, and meet them where they are.

Recently, I attended the Illinois Higher Education Equity Conference at SIU Carbondale—two days that can only be described as paradigm-shifting. While the room was filled with bureaucrats, administrators, and high-profile faculty members, the true power came from a panel of students of color who spoke with remarkable courage. During the Q&A, someone asked about defining success through an equity and inclusion lens. One student's response stopped me in my tracks: "Success has never been defined by us—it's always been given to us. Nobody ever asked me what my definition of success is."

That moment crystallized everything for me. The audacity of that student to stand up and speak that truth to a room full of legislators and university administrators—that's the kind of transformation we need in higher education. If we want to address retention issues and truly support student success, we need to start by listening to our students and understanding success through their eyes.

I am taking some concrete steps forward. This semester, I'm conducting focus groups with students in remedial courses to understand their academic struggles from the Fall. This insight will not only inform our programming but provide valuable data to campus about these students' lived experiences. Additionally, we're redesigning our University Foundations course for first-time, full-time freshmen, which will include a comprehensive survey to create a profile of our incoming class to share with the campus community.

These are easy steps, too. So let's rethink how we see our students. They are not numbers, statistics, or quotas. They are human beings. And when enrollment decisions matter, especially retention concerns and a looming demographic cliff, the best choices will always be made based on the quality of relationships we build.

All we need is the courage to do it.