This week on the podcast we examine the government’s new industrial strategy and what it really means for higher education – from regional clusters and research funding to skills bootcamps and spin-out support.
Will the plans finally integrate universities into the UK’s economic future, or is this another case of policy promises outpacing delivery?
Plus we discuss the franchising scandal and the damning case for urgent reform, and ask whether new research on social mobility challenges the sector’s claims about access, aspiration, and advancement.
With Katie Normington, Vice Chancellor at De Montfort University, Johnny Rich, Chief Executive at the Engineering Professors’ Council and Push, James Coe, Associate Editor at Wonkhe and presented by Mark Leach, Editor-in-Chief at Wonkhe.
On stage, baton in hand, Rebecca Bryant Novak found her calling in the precarious. She says conducting an orchestra sometimes “feels like trying to do brain surgery on a conveyor belt. You don’t get to stop. You don’t get to pause and say, ‘Hold on, let me think.’” But that high-stakes intensity, the kind that crackles through a Brahms crescendo or explodes in a Mahler finale, is what drew her in. “I love that,” she says. “To conduct an orchestra once in your lifetime, much less dozens or hundreds of times, is just an enormous privilege.”
But behind the podium at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, one of the world’s premier conservatories, the peril Bryant Novak faced was not merely musical. In October 2023, she reported her doctoral program advisor and the director of orchestras, Neil Varon, for harassment. What followed, by her account and email correspondence describing the university’s own investigative findings, was a spiral of institutional dysfunction in which Eastman abandoned its own policies to retaliate against Bryant Novak for speaking out.
What began as a childhood dream — “I saved my babysitting money to buy tickets for me and my mom to go to St. Louis Symphony concerts,” she recalls — has now soured into a fight not merely for her academic degree but for her dignity, for institutional transparency, and for a measure of justice in an industry she loves.
A pianist by training, she fell for music director David Robertson’s conducting as a teenager in St. Louis, where she was captivated by his orchestra’s sound and force. “I loved the idea of being part of it,” she says. “As I look back at that person, she had no idea what she was getting into. But the draw was strong.”
Chasing the grueling dream of the podium was a particularly steep climb for a woman. “There have only been three women admitted to my program in over 20 years,” she says, referring to Varon’s conducting studio, which she estimates has accepted approximately 40 students during that time. “The resources are immense. So is the gender disparity. I mean, it’s extreme.”
Bryant Novak, a first-generation college graduate, said that upon arrival she felt “very much a fish out of water in the fancy music school scene.” Still, she was undeterred. “I said to myself, look, I won the audition. The orchestra voted, and I got an overwhelming orchestra vote. Everyone was thrilled about my being here.” She believed — naïvely, she now says — that the music would speak for itself. “Gender has nothing to do with this. My work stands on its own. So I was kind of in that mindset going in.”
Her optimism did not last.
I had jobs in this field before going back for my doctorate. I knew the scene. My actual experience is that staying silent doesn’t help you that much.
Bryant Novak claims that during one rehearsal, as she was conducting in front of about 60 students, Varon told her she was “Gibson impregnated,” a reference to her former teacher at the University of Cincinnati, Mark Gibson, with whom she had cut contact after completing her master’s degree. Bryant Novak’s history with Gibson was fraught with alleged maltreatment: she says she suffered “inappropriate behavior, including comments on [her] physical appearance” and “physical contact under the guise of instruction” that resulted in “lasting professional harm.”
Gibson and Varon were close professional contacts, and though Bryant Novak says Varon repeatedly noted Gibson’s problematic history and widely known reputation for abuse, she claims he “began referencing [her] history with Gibson as early as [her] audition.” According to Bryant Novak, Varon’s increasingly hostile and erratic behavior in class eventually forced her to end a conducting session with the orchestra, which typically lasted almost an hour, after just fifteen minutes.
In what she describes as a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” calculation, Bryant Novak chose to report Varon. “I had jobs in this field before going back for my doctorate. I knew the scene,” she says. “There have been situations where I’ve stayed silent before, as in my master’s program studying with Mark Gibson. My actual experience is that staying silent doesn’t help you that much.”
Initially, she raised the alarm privately, requesting the administration limit her contact with Varon rather than filing a formal complaint. Her request was denied. Instead, Bryant Novak says Title IX coordinator John Hain suggested she transfer. “I remember asking, ‘How is that supposed to work?’ These programs are very competitive. They’re very small. It’s not like I’m getting my bachelor’s in history. How is this the solution? It was just not at all thought through.”
“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call it sabotage,” she said, after her final recital was stacked with outlandishly difficult material. (Smiley Photography)
“I got this whole lecture about how there’s no law against being a jerk. I’m like, ‘I’m aware of that.’” Worse, she adds, “They disclosed the report to [Varon]. They kind of wagged their finger at him and said ‘good luck’ to me. I was stunned.”
Faced with Eastman’s inaction, Bryant Novak used the only tool she had left — her voice. She wrote about the experience in a post on her Substack, The Queen of Wands, sharing conversations with administrators, naming names, and describing Eastman’s lack of support.
That’s when the retaliation began.
A senior administrator threatened her with a defamation lawsuit — the very same John Hain in charge of handling her Title IX complaint. Students who once applauded her presence grew cold. Some faculty offered quiet support but refused to speak publicly. “It got very bizarre,” she says. “Very, very weird.”
According to email correspondence between Rebecca and university officials, the University of Rochester — Eastman’s parent institution — conducted an investigation that concluded Varon had indeed violated their harassment policy and that Eastman had grossly mishandled her complaint. Despite this, rather than offering protection to Rebecca, Eastman remained intent on shielding its own faculty.
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By the following semester, “there was some nastiness” from some of her fellow students in the orchestra. Her conducting opportunities were reduced. The faculty grew tight-lipped. She would walk into a room and people would stop talking. One tenured professor whispered to her that he’d written a letter of support but begged her not to tell anyone.
Meanwhile, Bryant Novak continued writing publicly about her experience on Substack. Her posts were measured, personal, and often devastating. Her first post, titled “My First Year at Eastman,” told the story of the initial incident and the process that ensued from her point of view. Another, titled “Cease and desist,” detailed John Hain’s defamation threat against her.
Then, however implausibly, things got worse.
In December 2024, the University of Rochester launched a second investigation, this time into Eastman’s continued mishandling of Bryant Novak’s complaint and the retaliation she alleged had taken place against her. That might seem like a reason to think things were finally looking up — except two weeks after Bryant Novak disclosed the second investigation in a Substack post, Eastman expelled her for a “lack of academic progress.”
According to Bryant Novak, this came despite Eastman’s prior confirmation that her academic plan and credits were sufficient in order to graduate. Worse, Eastman’s letter to Bryant Novak ended with a list of non-academic allegations: “misuse of University email systems,” “creating a hostile environment,” and “language that has been perceived as threatening violence.” All this was presented without detail or evidence. It was also described as not the actual cause of her dismissal, but worth “remark.” For her part, she sees it as a last-ditch attempt to discredit her. “The double standards were pretty intense,” she says. The school claimed there wasn’t much it could do to restrain Varon but, she says, “When it was time to expel me — boy, their hands were not tied.”
People assume we’ve moved past this stuff. But no, speech is still powerful. People are still afraid of it. And they’ll try to shut you up.
In a June 18 letter to the university, FIRE detailed how Eastman skipped every procedural safeguard required by their own academic progress policy: no warnings, no probation, no appeal. It doesn’t take a bloodhound to sniff out the pretext: just after Bryant Novak disclosed the second investigation on Substack, Eastman’s concerns about her suddenly became so acute that it bypassed the two-semester review process its own policy required before dismissal. FIRE lambasted the university for this egregious betrayal of due process and charged that the expulsion — taking place amidst baseless legal threats and conflicts of interest — was retaliation against Bryant Novak for speech Rochester’s policies protected.
Bryant Novak says it was Eastman itself that endangered her academic progress. After she reported his behavior, she says, “They let Neil [Varon] have control over my degree recital, which is the centerpiece of my degree. I mean, it was retaliatory. He put material on it that was outlandishly difficult — so much so that two guest faculty intervened and said, ‘This is not okay.’ One of them actually said directly to me, ‘That is a giant middle finger from him to you.’ I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call it sabotage. They did ultimately change it, although you’re supposed to have up to a year to work on this. I was left with two months. And then they were trying to get me out the door. It was very, very clear they wanted me out in any way possible. They created a situation that was unsustainable.”
“There are consequences either way. There are consequences to yourself if you stay silent. There are consequences out in the world if you speak out.” (Smiley Photography)
The situation became so upsetting that she began seeing a university therapist. In her final semester, at the therapist’s request, she started going multiple times a week. “I was just kind of personally deteriorating,” Bryant Novak recalls. “I was honestly kind of having a breakdown.” She spent roughly a month working through her difficulties with her professors and her therapist, who was willing to offer the school documentation of her situation. In turn, Bryant Novak offered to submit that documentation to the school, but says that “a week later,” the school “responded with an expulsion letter.”
In the broader Eastman community, Bryant Novak was shunned by what she describes as a “cultish culture.” Online, including on FIRE’s own social mediaposts, her classmates have left comments smearing her reputation. Some think their interpersonal issues with Bryant Novak, or whatever shortcomings they see in her as a student or conductor, justify her expulsion.
But being unpopular does not cost you your rights. It does not strip you of due process protections. It does not neuter your expressive freedom.
Bryant Novak sees her case as part of a larger trend. This isn’t the first time Eastman has allegedly blacklisted a student for standing up against misconduct. And beyond its Rochester campus, other classical music artists have suffered similar fates for stepping forward. Bryant Novak has no illusions about the conservatoryculture she sees as responsible. “The culture’s awful. It just is,” she says. “Everybody knows it. But at the same time, the music is phenomenal.”
She references a case, documented in New York Magazine, in which an alleged rape victim and an ally were pushed out of the New York Philharmonic and bullied by their peers for speaking up while the accused perpetrators remained. “That story jolted me,” she says. “And now I’m living my own version of it. People assume we’ve moved past this stuff. But no, speech is still powerful. People are still afraid of it. And they’ll try to shut you up.”
Reflecting on it all, Rebecca says that though she is grateful for FIRE’s help, she found it hard to believe she needed it for something like this. “You know, I wasn’t in a Gaza protest. It wasn’t that. It was just saying: ‘Hey, harassment is bad. Can you stop?’ The fact that speaking out against harassment is controversial in this space? That says a lot.”
Still, Bryant Novak refuses to be silenced. In April, she submitted a 200-page complaint to the New York State Division of Human Rights under penalty of perjury. Believing sunlight is the best disinfectant, she is documenting everything and wants it all out in the open. “If there’s an online Neil Varon fan club,” she quips, “I think that’s good for us to know. Surface it all.”
As for her future? “I still want to conduct,” she says. “But more than that, I want a world where women can do this without fear.”
Pausing to think about it, she says, “There are consequences either way. There are consequences to yourself if you stay silent. There are consequences out in the world if you speak out. I prefer the consequences out in the world.”
Hi everyone — pardon the summer interruption, but we’ve got news worth breaking the quiet for.
You may recall that earlier this year, we announced something new: a national conference dedicated to helping Canadian universities rethink what they are and what they could be. We called it Re:University. We said it would be the conference that couldn’t have been an email. We meant it.
Re:University will take place January 29–30, 2026, in downtown Ottawa. Two full days, bringing together hundreds of university leaders and impactful industry and government voices from across Canada, with some brave perspectives from abroad. A lot of hard questions. And, most importantly, some real answers.
As I put it recently: Canadian universities won’t prosper unless they act with ambition (no one cuts their way to greatness), embrace experimentation (the old ways won’t get us where we want to go), and commit to dissemination (share what works, and what doesn’t).
Re:University is our attempt to put those principles into practice. We want to give the sector a space to think new thoughts, to learn from both bold successes and instructive failures, and to build toward models that are better aligned with the challenges and possibilities of the 2020s.
So, two things:
First: If you’ve been involved in a reinvention story, institutional or program-level, we want to hear from you. Daring initiatives, experiments in delivery, innovative partnerships, tough decisions with real lessons. Success is not a requirement. We’re equally interested in failure because learning from what didn’t work is how we build better.
Second: Tickets are now on sale (reuniversity.higheredstrategy.com). There are a limited number of Early Bird tickets, and space is limited (really — AI-CADEMY sold out quickly), so don’t wait.
We already know the old playbook is running out of pages. Flat revenues, rising costs, rigid structures. People are tired. Innovation is often more slogan than substance. But some institutions are finding new ways forward, experimenting, adapting, making hard decisions and learning from them.
This conference is about putting those lessons on the table. Moving beyond admiring the problems, and into working on the solutions. You’ll hear from institutions that have executed real turnarounds, from financial officers who stabilized budgets without gutting their mission, from private universities doing what publics often can’t (but maybe should), and from leaders building new academic models, cross-sector partnerships, and service strategies.
You’ll also hear from our industry partners who are offering transformational approaches to experiential learning, supporting WIL, improving institutional operations, driving commercial collaboration, and advancing research and innovation.
This isn’t a conference of passive panels and polite applause. Expect provocative plenaries, high-impact keynotes, and case spotlights. Expect to wrestle with questions like: “What would you stop doing tomorrow if you had the courage?” and “If you could build a university from scratch, where would you even begin?”
There will also be protected space for institutions to talk to each other and to connect over what’s working, what’s not, and where we go next. If we’ve learned anything from the Recovery Project and AI-CADEMY, it’s that some of the best thinking happens not just on stage, but over coffee, in workshops, and in the shared realization that, “Oh s$!t, you’re dealing with that too?”
We’re especially proud to be presenting Re:University with the RBC Thought Leadership Office as our Title Partner. Over the past year, we’ve worked together to convene a series of cross-Canada roundtables on the future of post-secondary education. As an engagement leader and catalyst for national postsecondary dialogue, our partnership reflects a shared commitment to turning insight into action and supporting bold, collaborative thinking about what comes next.
If you’re also interested in partnering with us at the conference, please take a look at our Conference Partnership & Exhibitor Prospectus or reach out to explore creative and bespoke ways to get involved.
We’ll be releasing more details on speakers and sessions throughout the fall. But for now: block your calendar. Book your flight. We’ll see you in Ottawa.
And until then, please, resume your well-earned vacations.
This week, FIRE filed a “friend-of-the-court” brief in Garcia v. Character Technologies urging immediate review of a federal court’s refusal to recognize the First Amendment implications of AI-generated speech.
The plaintiff in the lawsuit is the mother of a teenage boy who committed suicide after interacting with an AI chatbot modeled on the character Daenerys Targaryen from the popular fantasy series Game of Thrones. The suit alleges the interactions with the chatbot, one of hundreds of chatbots hosted on defendant Character Technologies’ platform, caused the teenager’s death.
Character Technologies moved to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing among other things that the First Amendment protects chatbot outputs and bars the lawsuit’s claims. A federal district court in Orlando denied the motion, and in doing so stated it was “not prepared to hold that the Character A.I. LLM’s output is speech.”
FIRE’s brief argues the court failed to appreciate the free speech implications of its decision, which breaks with a well-established tradition of applying the First Amendment to new technologies with the same strength and scope as applies to established communication methods like the printing press or even the humble town square. The significant ramifications of this error for the future of free speech make it important for higher courts to provide immediate input.
Contrary to the court’s uncertainty about whether “words strung together by an LLM” are speech, assembling words to convey messages and information is the essence of speech. And, save for a limited number of carefully defined exceptions, the First Amendment protects speech — regardless of the tool used to create, produce, or transmit it.
As we told the court, it’s important to answer questions about the First Amendment’s application quickly and fully. Not just to minimize the impact on the parties to the case, but to avoid uncertainty about the First Amendment’s reach that would chill expression more broadly.
That clarity is especially important when the case presents novel issues about an emerging technology. Early decisions in cases about new expressive technologies influence the development of jurisprudence, sometimes becoming accepted “defaults” for decades. For example, the development of Section 230 jurisprudence was heavily influenced by the early Zeran v. America Online case, which still provides the generally accepted interpretation of that law nearly two decades later. Fortunately, the Zeran court got it right. But if the decision in Garcia has a similar impact, expressive rights are in serious trouble.
Delaying review of the district court’s decision will chill a great deal of expression while the case otherwise winds toward an appealable decision — particularly given the implications of holding AI outputs are not speech. If that endures, the government would have vast power, without any constitutional limit, to regulate what we may say, how (and how effectively) we may say it, and even what we know and how we may learn it.
Whether AI output is speech is a question with profound implications. If it is not speech, plaintiffs will be able to impose liability for the distribution of ideas in a way that courts have steadfastly rejected for other forms of media.
The district court’s analysis bypassed these issues and gave the First Amendment question far less consideration than it deserved. This warrants the immediate intervention of an appellate court to approach this issue with a level of rigor befitting the paramount constitutional principle at stake.
This essay was originally published in 24sight’s The Vox Populi section on June 24, 2025.
As artificial intelligence plays a growing role in political discourse, lawmakers across the country have rushed to propose new regulations over fears that misinformation will proliferate with the new technology. But new polling suggests these efforts may not fully reflect public sentiment and serve as a red flag for lawmakers when their state legislatures reconvene in the fall.
Sixty percent of voters say AI-generated content poses a greater threat to elections than government regulation of it. Yet when pressed to choose between stopping deceptive content and protecting free speech, voters side with free speech, 47% to 37%. That support cuts across political lines.
These numbers also tell a complicated story: Americans are uneasy about AI, but they’re more concerned about the government using AI regulation as a tool to silence dissent, just like many Americans feel about the government regulating content on social media. Our most recent survey shows a striking 81% worry that rules governing election-related AI content could be misused to suppress criticism of elected officials. And over half fear that making it a crime to publish altered political content could chill legitimate political commentary.
These aren’t abstract fears. Across the country, lawmakers have introduced, and even enacted, bills that would target the mere sharing of AI-generated political content, no matter the context or intent. In Texas and Vermont, for example, proposed legislation cast such a wide net that distributing satire, parody, criticism, or even memes would have been banned or otherwise ensnared in regulation. Ordinary citizens, not just political campaigns, would face penalties for posting altered images of politicians online.
Americans have the right to speak, joke, criticize, and comment freely, regardless of whether they use AI as an expressive tool in doing so. When lawmakers write vague or sweeping rules about what people can say about candidates, they silence the very public discourse that elections foster.
Indeed, 28% of voters say government regulation of AI-generated or AI-altered content would make them less likely to share content. That’s not just a statistic, it’s a warning sign. Lawmakers risk silencing voters when their voices matter most. And the effect is even greater among young people, who are significantly more likely to engage with and create AI-generated content. When nearly a third of voters, especially the next generation of political voices, are deterred from participating in public discourse, we’re not just regulating technology — we’re shrinking the space for political engagement.
Not every datapoint in the polling breaks in favor of free speech. Protecting speech commands broad support, yet many voters also favor checks on misinformation. In the same FIRE survey, while 77% of voters think preserving the right to freedom of speech should be the government’s main priority when making laws that govern the use of AI, 74% of voters believe it’s more important to protect people from misinformation than it is to protect free speech.
Even so, the poll suggests many voters want any effort to curb misinformation to have firm safeguards for open debate. Many bills on the table this year definitely missed that mark.
Technologies evolve. The principles of the First Amendment do not. In our system of government, the answer to bad speech isn’t censorship. It’s more speech.
The radio program/podcast Marketplace hosted me as a guest last week to speak to the question. You can listen to it* or read my notes below, or both. I have one reflection at the end of this post building on one interview question.
One caveat or clarification before I get hate mail: the focus of the show was entirely on higher education’s economics. We didn’t discuss the non-financial functions of post-secondary schooling because that’s not what the show (called “Marketplace”) is about, nor did we talk about justifying academic study for reasons of personal development, family formation, the public good, etc. The conversation was devoted strictly to the economic proposition.
The hosts, Kimberly Adams and Reema Khrais, began by asking if higher ed still made financial sense. Yes, I answered, for a good number of people – but not everyone. Much depends on your degree and your institution’s reputation. And I hammered home the problem of some college but no degree. The hosts asked if that value proposition was declining. My response: the perception of that value is dropping. Here I emphasized the reality, and the specter, of student debt, along with anxieties about AI and politics. Then I added my hypothesis that the “college for all” consensus is breaking up.
Next the hosts asked me what changing (declining) attitudes about higher education mean for campuses. I responded by outlining the many problems, centered around the financial pressures many schools are under. I noted Trump’s damages then cited my peak higher education model. Marketplace asked me to explain the appeal of alternatives to college (the skilled trades, certificates, boot camps, etc), which I did, and then we turned to automation, which I broke up into AI vs robotics, before noting gender differences.
Back to college for all: which narrative succeeds it? I didn’t have a good, single answer right away. We touched on a resurgence of vocational technology, then I sang the praises of liberal education. We also talked about the changing value of different degrees – is the BA the new high school diploma? Is a master’s degree still a good idea? I cited the move to reduce degree demands from certain fields, as well as the decline of the humanities, the crisis of computer science, and the growing importance of allied health.
After my part ended, Adams and Khrais pondered the role of higher education as a culture war battlefield. Different populations might respond in varied ways – perhaps adults are more into the culture war issues, and maybe women (already the majority of students) are at greater risk of automation.
So what follows the end of college for all?
If the American consensus that K-12 should prepare every student for college breaks down, if we no longer have a rough agreement that the more post-secondary experience people get, the better, the next phase seems to be… mixed. Perhaps we’re entering an intermediary phase before a new settlement becomes clear.
One component seems to be a resurgence in the skilled trades, requiring either apprenticeship, a short community college course of study, or on the job training. Demand is still solid, at least until robotics become reliable and cost-effective in these fields, which doesn’t seem to be happening in at least the short term. This needs preparation in K-12, and we’re already seeing the most prominent voices calling for a return to secondary school trades training. There’s a retro dimension to this which might appeal to older folks. (I’ve experienced this in conversations with Boomers and my fellow Gen Xers, as people reminisce about shop class and home ec.)
A second piece of the puzzle would be businesses and the public sector expanding their education functions. There is already an ecosystem of corporate campuses, online training, chief learning officers, and more; that could simply grow as employers seek to wean employees away from college.
A third might be a greater focus on skills across the board. Employers demand certain skills to a higher degree of clarity, perhaps including measurements for soft skills. K-12 schools better articulate student skill achievement, possibly through microcredentials and/or expanded (portfolio) certification. Higher education expands its use of prior learning assessment for adult learners and transfer students, while also following or paralleling K-12 in more clearly identifying skills within the curriculum and through outcomes.
A fourth would be greater politicization of higher education. If America pulls back from college for all, college for some arrives and the question of who gets to go to campus becomes a culture war battlefield. Already a solid majority of students are women, so we might expect gender politics to intensify, with Republicans and men’s rights activists increasingly calling on male teenagers to skip college while young women view university as an even more appropriate stage of their lives. Academics might buck 2025’s trends and more clearly proclaim the progressive aims they see postsecondary education fulfilling, joined by progressive politicians and cultural figures. Popular culture might echo this, with movies/TV shows/songs/bestsellers depicting the academy as either a grim ideological factory turning students into fiery liberals or as a safe place for the flowering of justice and identity.
Connecting these elements makes me recall and imagine stories. I can envision two teenagers, male and female, talking through their expectations of college. One sees it as mandatory “pink collar” preparation while the other dreads it for that reason. The former was tracked into academic classes while the latter appreciated maker space time and field trips to work sites. Or we might follow a young man as he enters woodworking and succeeds in that field for years, feeling himself supported in his masculinity and also avoiding student debt, until he decides to return to school after health problems limit his professional abilities. Perhaps one business sets up a campus and an apprenticeship system which it codes politically, such as claiming a focus on merit and not DEI, on manly virtues and traditional culture. In contrast another firm does the same but without any political coding, instead carefully anchoring everything in measured and certified skill development.
Over all of these options looms the specter of AI, and here the picture is more muddy. Do “pink collar” jobs persist as alternatives to the experience of chatbots, or do we automate those functions? Does post-secondary education become mandatory for jobs handling AIs, which I’ve been calling “AI wranglers”? If automation depresses the labor force, do we come to see college as a gamble on scoring a rare, well paying job?
I’ll stop here. My thanks to Marketplace for the kind interview on a vital topic.
*My audio quality isn’t the best because I fumbled the recording. Sigh.
Over 820,000 undergraduates are connected to the U.S. military, including those who are actively serving or enlisted in the National Guard, former service members and spouses, or dependents of military service members.
The University of Texas at San Antonio, located in Military City USA, serves over 5,000 military-affiliated students, including veterans, service members and their families, in a region that has the largest concentration of military bases in the country.
In the most recent episode of Voices of Student Success, host Ashley Mowreader speaks with Michael Logan, UTSA’s senior director for veteran and military affairs and a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, about supporting military-affiliated students through their transition into higher ed and the role of community in student veteran retention.
An edited version of the podcast appears below.
Q: Can you set the playing field for people who might not be familiar with San Antonio and the region and how that impacts your military-affiliated students?
Michael Logan, senior director for veteran and military affairs.
University of Texas San Antonio
A: It’s interesting, because the branding of the city, or the trademark, is Military City USA, and that’s not hyperbole when you consider not just the active-duty components that are here, but how many veterans retire to this area.
It’s not just the folks that are here because [the Department of Defense] is making them be here, but it’s a destination. In the county alone, there are about 100,000 veterans. If you expand into the Alamo area, Council of Governments region, it gets up to about 250,000 veterans. So you have to think, it’s not just the veterans, it’s the veterans’ spouses, all the dependents, all the family members. And so the number is probably three times that that we’re actually serving.
Q: That’s crazy, just the sheer number of people. I wonder if you can tie into this population of military-affiliated students at the university. Obviously you have veterans and then those, like you mentioned, family members, dependents. But then there’s also students who are currently engaged in the military.
A: You’ll notice if you look at our website, we lean away from using “veteran” in our terminology even in our center for military-affiliated students, and that’s intentional. Because we have so many different military-connected students that are not specifically in that veteran category. We do have a lot of National Guard and military reserve members; we do have a lot of activity duty. In fact, the family members probably outnumber the veterans and active duty two to one.
So for us, it was very important that the entire military-connected population understood that we were here to support everybody and not just that narrow swath of just those who had previously worn the uniform.
Q:When we are thinking about those students who are associated more directly with military service, so student veterans, ROTC or currently enlisted, can you talk a little bit about some of those challenges or opportunities when military-affiliated learners engage with higher education and how they look different from maybe your traditional learner on campus?
A: That’s a very good question, and I learn something every day, too. Even as someone who did time on active duty, I wasn’t doing those things simultaneously.
But what’s very interesting to me is having to articulate to folks who are not vets or not military-connected that military is a culture. So when we’re talking about validating everybody’s experiences in the classroom and making sure that we’re digging into the full richness and depth of experiences to really give everyone the best possible collegiate experience, we can’t discount military service as a separate and distinct culture.
I think what has happened previously is that there was concern where maybe a student was reframing things they were learning in their military context, and the instructor might have been thinking, “Well, you’re not getting it. I’m trying to get you to think this certain way, but you keep defaulting it back to your military context.” And then that leads to a conversation that I’ll eventually have with the instructor that talks about, “Well, the reason why this is happening is because categorically and demonstrably military service is a culture.”
I actually did research on that back in 2019, and again in 2024, we did a quantitative study. I did it with some student veterans who were graduate students here at the university, where we were able to empirically demonstrate that veteran itself is a culture.
You are all your intersectional identities, but once you’ve served and once you’ve had that military service experience, you experience all of those pieces of yourself through the lens of that military service. And so of course, when you’re teaching somebody something, when they contextualize it, it’s going to be through the lens that they see everything else, including their own identity.
Q: I’m the daughter of two veterans, and it’s funny, I remember being in high school, and the word “squad” was really trendy with young people at that time, and my mom was like, “Squad? That’s a military term. Like, what do you mean, your squad? Like, your squadron? What’s happening?” Even in the daily words that we use, there’s this affiliation that’s always going to come back to people.
So when we talk about supporting students that are military affiliated on campus, can you walk us through some of the programs and offerings that you all have?
A: There’s many, and some of them are more focused on traditional academic outcomes; we’ve got resources specific for individual tutoring.
We recognize that we have a very large relative population of veterans using what’s called veteran readiness and employment, which means they’re disabled veterans. We have over 430 of those on our campus, so we have more just from that group than most campuses have veterans. So we’re very intentional about providing services that are, first of all, diverse enough to cover all the different conditions, visible and invisible, that might be barriers to success academically.
The activities that I’m most proud of are the ones that are more impactful and [contribute] directly toward sense of belonging and community building. Because I think if you don’t have a strong sense of belonging, and you don’t have a visible and established community, then you’re not going to get true engagement. You’re just going to get a veteran or a family member that shows up, goes to the class, absorbs the information, goes home, but they’re not really engaging with their peers on campus, or campus culture. They’re not getting the other 50 percent of why you go to college, which is to develop social capital and be exposed to ideas that are new and different than your own.
Some of the programs that we’ve put together on that front are something we call Coffee With Vets, which is a very informal mixer that we do every second Wednesday of the month. When I say Coffee With Vets, you’ll notice I didn’t say with student vets, right? Because it’s for the entire veteran community. We have over 200 employees that wore the uniform as well, and it’s not uncommon to see students, employees, people from the community, stakeholders, that use that event as an opportunity to just be seen and get to know people.
I think what we’re guilty of, myself included, is that a veteran might look at a resource and think, “I don’t need that today, so it’s not relevant to me,” and then when they do need it, then there’s this issue with trust: “I’m only going to engage with something I trust.” And so Coffee With Vets is an opportunity for someone like me to maybe engage with VA [U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs] staff. And even though I may not need what they’re doing right now, I may need it in six months or a year, and I’m going to remember that person that I commiserated with over a bacon-covered doughnut and some Black Rifle coffee. I’m much more willing to engage in whatever that support is.
That’s just one example. And the reason why we do that, the reason why we emphasize community building and building that trust is because when you look at some of the barriers to completion and matriculation, a lot of them are vets putting something off or not engaging with something. So if we can minimize hesitation and maximize trust, then we can get those vets to fully utilize the wraparound services that we provide and ultimately be successful, not just in school, but beyond school, because they’re only here for a little while. And what we’re trying to do is set them up for success in the future.
Q: I’m so glad that you mentioned that role of helping students see that resources might be useful later on. Because one of the common barriers that we hear from student veterans is that the military is so structured and that there’s so much told to them about what your next step is and where you’re going to go and what your job is, that when you come to higher ed, you really have to find a sense of self-advocacy and start finding things on your own that might just be unfamiliar or different.
I love that you all provide a space for students to explore but also be connected with people who think like they do and understand that it might be a totally different culture change to have somebody like you have to ask for help sometimes.
A: The two things you bring up are advocacy and what I like to call cultural considerations. I don’t like to say cultural competency, because that implies incompetency. It’s not incompetency, it’s just cultivated.
Advocacy is a big thing. There’s a significant amount of my time spent doing that, sometimes at the request of veterans, sometimes not. Sometimes it’s because I need to help the veteran figure out how to learn to live in the world that they’re in now. But it’s not uncommon for me to have a veteran reach out and say, “I want to have this conversation with an instructor, but I don’t know how to do it without coming across as just super aggressive or knife handing or using the F-word as a comma,” which sometimes they’re still in the habit of doing. But they’re self-aware, right? So they’re coming in, they’re asking, “I don’t want the message to get lost in how I’m delivering it. So please help me.” And we’ll do that.
But the other side of that is also the self-advocacy piece, which I’m glad you mentioned, too, because there’s just, like you said, when you’re on active duty, there’s somebody who’s responsible for you. As you mentioned, you’ve got a squad leader, you’ve got a battle buddy, you’ve got somebody, even when you check into a base, somebody walks you around and shows you everything. And that’s just not the case in higher ed.
You may not know what Student Disability Services is. You may not know that if you have a 50 percent or higher [disability] rating, you get free [ADA] surface parking. So here you are paying for it. Or testing accommodations—just all these different things that vets are leaving on the table, and it’s hurting them in some form or fashion, because they’re not able to maximize their potential.
It’s a weird tightrope where we’re trying to figure out, “How do we give them all this information, but in a way where it’s not like sipping water from a fire hose or this is going to be information dumped five minutes later?” We have to be very, very intentional about parceling out that information.
We kind of do it in layers. First, here’s who we are, then if you have an interest in these things categorically, and then it eventually it gets into the into the weeds of things. But that’s actually been very successful for us.
As a matter of fact, we asked some of our vets, “Hey, what do you wish you would have known the first day, now that you’re here towards the end, what do you wish you would have known?” And they actually put together a booklet that has everything that they all said: “Here’s what would have been super helpful on day one to know.” So now that’s turned into something that our student vets maintain.
My transition off of active duty was—I’m going to date myself here—over 20 years ago, probably over 25 years ago. My experiences and my needs are very, very different than a service member becoming a veteran in the year 2025. So it’s very important that we maintain that close connection with these subsequent cohorts of veterans that are showing up on our campus and giving them the agency to drive—“Here’s the information we need, so hey, please provide it.”
That requires a lot of psychological safety on behalf of my staff, because you get that thought about, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But at the same time, something that was relevant two years ago may not be relevant to the folks that are getting out in a very different environment.
Q: You touched on this a little bit earlier, but I think just having that staff that has military experience or military affiliation as well can be really helpful. And like you said, translating to higher education, but also understanding, like, even if it’s not right now, what service members might need, but having a little bit of empathy for that circumstance and what they might be transitioning through.
A: I agree with that 100 percent. All of the staff members that I have today in summer of ’25 I had in fall of 2018, every single one of them. I haven’t lost anybody through COVID—if you’re in Texas, Snowvid—or the great resignation.
I think that is a very clear indicator of the orientation of my staff. We’re all military connected, either veterans or family members themselves, and they’re here because the work that we do here is what fills our cup.
As a matter of fact, we have a purpose statement that is taped up everywhere, and it’s derived from an old story about President Kennedy visiting NASA. He sees a janitor, and he asks the janitor, “Hey, what do you do here?” And the janitor says, “I’m helping put someone on the moon.”
We’ve adapted that, and if you were to walk into UTSA Center for Military Affiliated Students and you see somebody shredding paper or filing or helping a student all across the range of things we could be doing, and you ask them, “Hey, what are you doing here?” The answer is going to be “I’m trying to provide a level of support for students that I wish I would have had for myself.”
Q: I wanted to talk a little bit about careers, because military students often come in with lots of life and career experience, but often enter higher education as a pivot or as an exploration of doing something else. I wonder if you can talk about navigating that space and understanding where higher education is a bridge for military-affiliated students.
A: That’s a tricky one in that you’re right, some of them come in and that pivot sometimes is intentional. If you look at our chief information officer [Kendra Ketchum], who was a Navy corpsman, and then postmilitary pivoted into, she’s our CIO.
But I think what’s very important when trying to help a service member navigate what they’re going to do with their higher education experience is you have to ask almost the five whys. If you’re familiar with Lean, you know what the five whys are. If you have a toddler, you know what five whys are.
But if you ask a vet, “Hey, why are you here?” The first answer you’re probably going to get is, “Because you’re supposed to use the GI Bill.” That’s what you’re told. You leave active duty, you go to college, you use the GI Bill.
“So what do you want to get out of it?”
“I wanted to get a degree and get a good job.”
But really, what it comes back to is trying to get them to be reflective on who it is you want to be, rather than what it is you want to do. What we uncover is that most veterans are looking for two things: to continue serving and community.
So once we figure out what that piece is for them, it’s a lot easier to guide them through the process and not just tell them all, “Here’s the major you should take, or which classes or which instructor,” but actually provide opportunities for academic inquiry.
I mentioned earlier that we did research for sense of belonging and identity. It started years ago when a veteran came to me, and she was frustrated because she had this great idea for doing a study to create a rubric based on positive psychology to figure out what motivates a veteran, what makes them tick, what fills their cup. Because she wanted to focus on that, not on the deficit discourse: What’s wrong with you and how do we address your problem today?
She had gone to different places and couldn’t get any traction because nobody was studying that; that wasn’t a topic that anyone was researching. And I said, “Well, I’m not a psychologist, but I’ll do everything I can to help you.”
Fast-forward to the end of that story: She did the study, and then she got accepted to two national conferences to talk about it, and she graduated with her master’s in social work and has returned to our university as an internship coordinator to start our first-ever veteran case management program. We’re going to pilot it under her watch. She invented the rubric.
That’s one example and I can give you many more. But again, it’s very nontraditional. We’re not just talking about advising students, we’re talking about providing opportunities for students to develop and cultivate their inquiry so they don’t lose that through the college process and then end up being something other than what they intended when they graduate.
Q: Regarding sense of belonging, I think it’s natural for student veterans to fall in step with each other. But then there’s also the wider campus community and finding that sense of belonging just on campus as well. I wonder if you can talk about those two avenues, one connecting like-minded, military-affiliated students, and the other encouraging them to get out, explore and see what else the campus has to offer?
A: That’s an excellent point, and it is a strange kind of rut that we fall into where we want to gravitate towards what we know. We show up on a campus and everything’s weird, and people are different, and so we’re looking for other people that are like us, and that’s kind of missing the point.
What I do to try and encourage engagement outside of just vets hanging out with vets is I will encourage vets to cultivate the thing that they want to keep doing, which is continue serving, but expand that vision beyond vets.
For example, our local Student Veteran Association chapter, they were doing a lot of programming that was vet-focused, vet-centric. And I said, “You know who doesn’t have a lot of support on this campus is military family members, like the kids in the center for military families. So maybe we connect with them and we look for a broader opportunity to support where there’s a gap.”
We had vets that would ask me, “How come I’m having trouble getting nonvets to see the value in us, or not look at us sideways or appreciate our presence in the classroom?” And I said, “Well, why don’t we look at service projects that benefit them, and not necessarily just y’all?”
So a group of vets got together, and they came up with this great idea to provide golf cart shuttle service for folks with mobility issues. It was the vet group that was like, “All right, we’re going to write the grant, we’re going to get the golf cart, we’re going to drive it, but it’s going to be available to anyone who’s got any kind of mobility issue.” They didn’t even say disability, just mobility. It could be a sprained ankle.
And it’s a service that they were going to leverage their capital. Because vets can go and they can ask for these things and get these donations, but [they] make it available to the entire campus population and that lines up exactly with their values. They enlisted to serve, and they served folks. This was kind of a microcosm of that.
It’s great to see how, when they’re thinking it through and they’re ideating, all of a sudden, that light bulb goes off, and it makes sense that we don’t have to circle the wagons because we’re in a strange environment. What we need to do is do what we’ve always been doing and leverage everything that we bring to the table to lift everyone else around us.
Q: You’re a veteran and a veteran in this space in higher education. For those who might be unfamiliar with working with military-affiliated students or looking to do more on their campus to support these students, what’s a point or two you would give for someone who wants to do better?
A: First and foremost, I think that there might be a misconception out there that vets maybe see themselves as apart from or maybe even above [others]. You hear about Billy Madison syndrome: “I’m older and I know more things.”
While that might be true for some vets, vets are typically not looking for differential treatment—especially in the classroom or among their peers or from instructors or even from staff; they’re just looking for their experiences to be as validated as anybody else’s. So it’s very important that we’re aware that there are some things we can do and say that will be received as microaggressions. The issue is, when a vet experiences a microaggression, they don’t get aggressive. I think some people think, “Oh, man, they’re about to snap and lose their minds,” and that’s not what they’re going to do. What the vet’s gonna do is absolutely shut down, and they will disengage, and you will have lost any opportunity going forward to regain their trust and to have them feel a part of the community.
So first and foremost, just if one could shift their mindset and understand veteran [experiences] is a culture, and think of it as any other culture you support on campus. No. 1, that’s going to help you as the nonvet to really inform your perspective.
Then second of all is listen and don’t be prescriptive. And that applies not just for nonvets, but for people like me as well. Like I mentioned, my [military] experience was a long time ago versus what people are experiencing now. And as much as I’m tempted all the time to say, “I know what you’re going to need, I know what’s going to happen to you in six months and in two years, and the stages of going from active duty to civilian and the wall you’re going to hit. I know all these things are coming, so I’m going to set all these things up, and I’m gonna expect you to do them.” Every vet is sitting there saying, “Oh, that’s not me. You don’t know me.” And I know, because I was that guy that did the same thing.
It’s important to kind of push down my own impulses and stay very, very actively engaged and just constantly ask, “What is it you need? What is it I can do to support you?” By doing that, you’re building that trust, so that when those other [challenges] inevitably do happen, you don’t have to go find them and save them from it. They’re going to come to you and ask you, “Hey, can you help me through it?”
That’s the difference between, I think, being effective and going through the motions, is when they’re asking for it and they want to engage with it. But those are the two biggest things. Vets aren’t all that different. They’re just actually, weirdly, looking to be part of the crowd.
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The recent decision by the American Council on Education and the Carnegie Foundation to simplify the classification of research universities may have been well meaning, but it represents a serious misstep with consequential results.
By reducing a comprehensive system of research metrics down to just two—in order to gain coveted R-1 status, an institution must now spend $50 million annually on research and award 70 research doctorates per year—ACE has fundamentally changed what it means to be a top-tier research institution. The shift away from more holistically evaluating research activity risks distorting public understanding and perception of university excellence while incentivizing behavior that undermines long-term research creativity and innovation.
To most effectively appreciate the importance of this change, it is helpful to trace the history of the Carnegie classification system. Initially conceived in 1973 by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, the system was intended as a tool to support research and policymaking by categorizing U.S. colleges and universities according to their missions and output.
Over the decades, the classification system has become a trusted compendium for the public, media and higher education community. Designations such as “R-1” (which historically stood for “Doctoral University—Very High Research Activity”) and “R-2” (“Doctoral University—High Research Activity”) gained prominence, indicating robust levels of scholarly productivity, research funding, doctoral education and infrastructure.
The methodology used for the 2021 classifications (the most recent until this year) involved a suite of indicators that aimed to quantify research excellence, with partial normalization for institutional size. These included total research expenditures in science and engineering, research expenditures in non–science and engineering fields, science and engineering research personnel size (postdoctoral appointees and other nonfaculty Ph.D. researchers), and the number of doctoral degrees awarded annually in humanities, social sciences, STEM fields and other fields like business and education.
A principal components analysis then allowed for the creation of indices representing both total and per-capita research activity, enabling close and equitable comparisons across different institutions. This methodology was, in many ways, one of the most comprehensive and encompassing frameworks to date, providing a statistical assessment of American research universities founded on publicly available data.
For the 2025 classifications, however, the landscape changed. With ACE’s leadership, the Carnegie Foundation developed a new framework that substantially simplifies the standards for achieving flagship research status. The revised criteria focus on just the two metrics mentioned above: Institutions must spend at least $50 million annually on research activities and award at least 70 research doctorates per year. Institutions qualifying on both criteria are R-1; those that fail to qualify but spend at least $5 million on research activities and award at least 20 research doctorates are R-2. These terms now stand for very high and high “spending and doctoral production,” respectively, and not the previously used very high and high “research activity.”
This change may appear technical, but it removes numerous subtle measures of academic involvement and output and represents a profound shift in values. Under the previous activity-based framework, institutions were rewarded for building a diverse research ecosystem across a range of disciplines. Now, the metric has been reduced to total money spent and degrees awarded—inputs and outputs that do not necessarily equate to research excellence.
Moreover, this move opens the door for institutions to “teach to the test.” Rather than pursuing organic growth in their research missions, universities may instead make tactical investments to reach the magic numbers needed for R-1 status. This situation is a textbook case of Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
By selecting just two metrics to assess national standing, the classification system invites institutions to game the criteria, boosting research spending and degree output not necessarily through improved research performance but administrative and accounting shifts. This oversimplification of a complex and holistic evaluation tool can have unintended consequences, such as distorting institutional priorities and stifling the motivation to invest in long-term, mission-driven scholarship.
Unfortunately, proof of this phenomenon is already visible. A cursory search of the internet will reveal multiple universities that have recently announced their elevation to R-1 status: More than 40 new institutions gained R-1 status under the revised criteria. While many have made commendable progress, it’s worth noting that their elevation to “elite” research status occurred not as a result of a significant shift in scholarly output, but because they met the two quantitative benchmarks.
The concern is not that these institutions shouldn’t be proud of their growth—it’s that the public will now assume parity between these universities and others whose research footprints are significantly deeper, broader and more globally impactful. ACE has effectively redefined what it means to be an “R-1” institution without clearly communicating that this designation no longer reflects the same type of achievement it once did.
To prevent confusion and preserve the integrity of the classification system, ACE and the Carnegie Foundation should consider rebranding the new categories to reflect their true nature. Rather than continuing to use the historically meaningful “R-1” and “R-2” terms, a more accurate labeling system might be RS-1 and RS-2, signifying “research spending.” This small change would clarify for stakeholders that these categories are now based largely on spending thresholds, not a holistic measure of research activity.
Whereas simplification may make the classifications more politically appealing and easier to administer, it does so at the cost of such vital ingredients as analytical comprehensiveness, contextual responsiveness and evaluative accuracy. To appropriately recognize and support genuine centers of research excellence, it is imperative to adopt a multidimensional evaluative framework—one that ideally encompasses not only research expenditures and doctoral degree program productivity, but also incorporates measures of scholarly impact, the quality of research publications, the development of research infrastructure and the extent of faculty engagement in research activities.
Also, to balance the structural advantages of larger institutions, appropriate normalization factors—such as costs per faculty member, publications per capita and doctoral degrees per research-active department—must be factored in. The 2021 classification model better reflected such a comprehensive and equitable approach, in contrast to the more reductive orientation observed in the 2025 iteration.
In order to preserve the integrity of American research universities as engines of discovery and innovation, their evaluation should be grounded in objective scholarly metrics that meaningfully reflect institutional excellence in research. Given the multifaceted nature of research excellence, our classification systems should be equally nuanced and comprehensive.
G. Dale Wesson is the dean and director of land-grant programs at Florida A&M University’s College of Agriculture and Food Science. He holds a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Michigan State University, an M.S. in chemical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and a B.S. in chemical engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology.
The much awaited Contributions to Knowledge and Understanding (CKU) guidance for REF 2029 is out, and finally higher education institutions know how the next REF will work for the outputs component of the assessment. Or do they?
Two of us have written previously about the so-called portability issue, where if a researcher moves to a new institution, it is the new institution to which the research outputs are credited and potentially future REF-derived funding flows.
We and others have argued that this portability supports the mobility of staff at the beginning of their careers and the mobility of staff that are facing redundancy. We believe that this is an important principle, which should be protected in the design of the current REF. If we believe that the higher education system should nurture talent, then the incentive structure underpinning the REF should align with this principle.
We maintain that the research, its excellence, and the integrity with which it is performed depends upon the people that undertake it. Therefore, we continue to support some degree of portability as per REF 2021, acknowledging that the situation is complex and that this support of individual careers can come at the expense of the decoupling and the emerging focus on institutions. The exceptions delineated around “longform and/or long process outputs” in the CKU guidance are welcome – the devil will lie in the detail.
Who the return represents
Leaving aside portability, the decoupling of outputs from individuals has also resulted in a risk to the diversity of the return, especially in subject areas where the total number of eligible outputs is very high.
In previous REF exercises the rules were such that the number of outputs any one researcher could return to the department/unit’s submission was restricted (four in REF 2014 and five in REF 2021). This restriction ensured that each unit’s return comprised a diversity of authors, a diversity of subdisciplines and diversity of emerging ideas.
We recognise that one could argue the REF is an excellence framework, not a diversity framework. However – like many – we believe that REF also has a role to play in supporting the inclusive research community we all wish to champion. REF is also about a diversity – of approaches, of methodologies, of research areas – research needs diversity to ensure the effective teams are in place to deliver on the research questions. What would the impact be on research strategies if individual units increasingly are dominated by a small number of authors?
How the system plays out
Of course, the lack of restriction on output numbers does not preclude units from creating a diverse return. However, especially in this time of sector-wide financial pressures, those in charge of a submission may feel they have no option other than to select outputs to maximise the unit score and hence future funding.
This unbounded selection process will likely lead to intra-unit discord. Even in an ideal case will result in the focus being on outputs covering a subset of hot topics, or worse, subset of perceived high-quality journals. The unintended consequence of this focus could place undue importance on the large research groups led by previously labelled “research stars”. For large HEIs with large units including several of these “stars”, the unit return might still appear superficially diverse, but the underlying return might be remarkably narrow.
While respecting fully the contribution made by these traditional leaders, we think the health of our research future critically depends upon the championing of the next and diverse generation of researchers and their ideas too. We maintain the limits imposed in previous exercises did this, even if that was not their primary intent.
Some might, for a myriad of reasons, think that our concerns are misplaced. The publication of the guidance suggest that we have not managed to land these important points around diversity and fairness.
However, we are sure that many of those who have these views wish to see a diverse REF return too. If we have not persuaded Research England and the other funding councils to reimpose output limits, we urge them at least to ensure that the data is collected as part of the process such that the impact upon the diversity of this unrestricted return can be monitored and hence that future REF exercises can be appropriately informed. This will then allow DSIT and institutions to consider whether the REF process needs to be adjusted in future.
Our people, their excellence and their diversity, we would argue, matter.
