Tag: Career

  • The left should reclaim free speech mantle (opinion)

    The left should reclaim free speech mantle (opinion)

    If progressive or even not-so-progressive Jewish students invited comedian Sacha Baron Cohen to their university to perform his riotous parody “In My Country There Is Problem,” with its call-and-pogrom chorus “throw the Jew down the well / so my country can be free,” would Cohen be allowed on campus? If the song were indeed sung, and a few humorless, unthinking listeners were distressed by the lyrics, or at least claimed to be, would the Jewish students face discrimination and harassment charges under the university’s disciplinary code?

    Today, probably. Would they be found responsible for discrimination and harassment based on national origin? Again, probably. And what if a student band wished to parody the parody with a song titled something like, “Throw Chris Rufo Down the Well So My University Can Be Free”? Could the song be sung against the backdrop of students’ sensitivities and the reciprocated rage of today’s young conservative white men?

    In her recently published opinion essay for Inside Higher Ed, Joan W. Scott skewered the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and its vice president for campus advocacy, Alex Morey, for condemning the American Association of University Professors. Scott’s criticism of Morey’s criticism goes like this: Morey lambasted AAUP president Todd Wolfson’s expression of “disappointment” over Donald Trump’s re-election, arguing that Wolfson’s explicit partisanship betrays the AAUP’s purported commitment to academic freedom. Scott countered that FIRE is a libertarian wolf donning academic freedom drag. FIRE, explains Scott, is “dedicated to the absolutist principle of individual free speech,” a principle that is “not,” Scott italicizes, synonymous with academic freedom. In turn, Scott elaborates on academic freedom as “individual and collective rights of faculty as they pursue the mission of higher education in a democracy.”

    We agree with Scott that FIRE—with its many right-wing funding sources as Scott lists them—is unlikely to have our backs if and when the federal government comes to shut down diversity, equity and inclusion programs and cultural studies departments on campus (i.e., queer and Black studies). We respect, too, that Scott knows more about the history and purpose of academic freedom than we do.

    And yet, we worry that the line she draws between free speech and academic freedom—the former ideological and libertarian, the latter true and good—cedes too much. Indeed, her distinction hands “free speech” over to the conservative groups championing their anti-educational causes under its banner, and her dismissal of free speech defenses as apologia for racism lets stand, unnuanced, the left-originating but now right-appropriated proposition that combative, controversial speech is necessarily harmful in an egalitarian university environment. It is the quick conversion of (at times highly provocative) political speech into hate speech that allows “from the river to the sea” to be branded as categorically harassing antisemitism—a conversion that would so quickly ban Jews from sending up antisemitism (“throw the Jew down the well”), ban musicians from joking about drowning Rufo or prohibit, for that matter, marginalized groups from reappropriating slurs to divest them of their injurious force.

    In short, we think there is still good reason—several good reasons—for the academic left to defend speech, both as elemental to academic freedom and as a democratic value unto itself.

    We and nearly every colleague we know have stories of students hastily claiming talk—talk of sex, Israel, Palestine and criticism of affirmative action—as intimidating, harassing or discriminating. It seems to us that a robust defense of academic freedom must include healthy skepticism, but not outright cynicism, of the proposition that words injure. Skepticism, not cynicism, because words may hurt people, further subordinate marginalized groups and erode democratic ideals. David Beaver’s and Jason Stanley’s recently published The Politics of Language draws on critical race and feminist theory to show how some speech acts—affective, nondeliberative and/or racist dog whistles—function to polarize and degrade.

    But we also know, especially in the wake of spurious discrimination claims against campus activists and academics protesting Israel’s military campaigns, that conservative stakeholders are weaponizing the idea of words as weapons, alleging atmospheres of harassment to chill political speech—a project, we must concede, that the left paved the way for.

    Indeed, around 2013, as trigger warnings gained traction on college campuses, the right repackaged “free speech” as the inalienable freedom of anyone to speak on any topic without consequence, especially if that consequence is the loss of a platform. Instead of drawing on the left’s history of free speech advocacy, scholars of “identity knowledges” centered attention on the moral wrongness of offensive speech and the intolerability of feeling unsafe. This shift left progressives defending feelings rather than ideas, collapsing political discord with dehumanization—or, as Sarah Schulman argues, conflict with abuse. Now, with free speech reduced to melodrama, even the Christian right claims to protect its constituents against “harm”—whether from critical race theory or drag shows—rendering the issue a conceit of the culture wars.

    In his much-ridiculed op-ed for The New York Times published last year, linguist John McWhorter lamented that he and his students were unable to listen to John Cage’s silent “4:33” during class, as the silence would have been interrupted by the sound of student protests. The irony that McWhorter chided the protesters for impeding his students from appreciating Cage’s invitation to listen to “the surrounding noise” of the environs was not lost on McWhorter’s critics.

    What was not commented on, though, was McWhorter’s contention that if a group of students had been shouting “DEI has got to die” with the same fervor with which they were shouting for Palestine’s self-determination, then the protests “would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange, heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence.”

    Whether correct or not, McWhorter’s speculation is not baseless. We want to insist, though, that there are left, not just libertarian, grounds to defend, for example, a student protest against DEI initiatives. They include: respecting and celebrating the university as a space of open dialogue and debate; the possibility that you might learn something from someone with whom you disagree; the opportunity to lampoon, parody or otherwise countermand whatever worse-than-foolish statement the opposition is making; the opportunity, as John Stuart Mill taught us, to strengthen your own ideas and arguments alongside and against the ideas of others; and finally, avoiding the inevitable backlash of “the cancel,” whereby censored conservatives rebrand themselves as truth-telling victims of the “woke.”

    Granted, some of these grounds for defending speech tilt more liberal or libertarian than pure left, whatever that means, but we nonetheless maintain that it is self-defeating for us to carry the banner for “academic freedom” while consigning “free speech” to the province of white grievance. This is especially true for those of us teaching queer and critical sexuality studies, where classrooms and related spaces of activism and dialogue are increasingly circumscribed, the harm principle ever more unprincipled. Consider the case of Aneil Rallin, who in 2022 was accused by Soka University of America of teaching “triggering” sexual materials to his students in a course called Writing the Body, and whose case—while taken up by FIRE—was met with little alarm from the academic left.

    It also applies to those of us who still recognize satire, irony and social commentary in an age of breathtaking literalism. In 2011, the Dire Straits song “Money for Nothing” (1985) was temporarily banned from Canadian radio for its use of the f-slur, even though the term was intended as a commentary on working-class homophobia. The drive to censor and demonize without regard for social context has arguably gotten stronger in the years since.

    From the recent historical record, it seems to us that the enforcement of bureaucratic speech restrictions often damages campus culture and democratic norms more than the speech acts themselves. Indeed, the better question than is X speech act harmful is, to crib from Wendy Brown, when—if ever and at what costs—are speech restrictions the remedy for injury?

    Debating DEI programs, myths of meritocracy and so on is the stuff of academic freedom. A speech act like “DEI must die” is provocative, abrasive and worth publicly disparaging, but it is not the same as hate speech. Song parodies will not save us from the dark years ahead for public education, academic freedom and egalitarian pedagogies of all kinds. But our battle preparations demand standing up for, not surrendering, free speech.

    Joseph J. Fischel is an associate professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Yale University.

    Kyler Chittick is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta.

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  • West Point disbands student groups for women and minorities

    West Point disbands student groups for women and minorities

    The United States Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., has shut down a dozen student affinity clubs to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive orders to eliminate federal funding for diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and ensure that no member of the military “be preferred or disadvantaged on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, color, or creed,” The Washington Post reported.

    The Asian-Pacific Forum Club, the National Society of Black Engineers Club and the Latin Cultural Club are among the campus groups ordered to shut down, according to a memo sent Tuesday from Chad Foster, deputy commandant at West Point, to the Directorate of Cadet Activities.

    The memo orders all the identified clubs to “permanently cease all activities” and “unpublish, deactivate, archive or otherwise remove all public facing content.” It also orders the dozens of other clubs at West Point to “cease all activity” until they have been reviewed to ensure compliance with Trump’s executive orders and guidance from the Army and the Department of Defense. 

    Below is the full list of disbanded clubs, including some with decades-long histories at West Point, according to the Post:

    • The Asian-Pacific Forum Club
    • The Contemporary Cultural Affairs Seminar Club
    • The Corbin Forum
    • The Japanese Forum Club
    • The Korean-American Relations Seminar
    • The Latin Cultural Club
    • The Native American Heritage Forum
    • The National Society of Black Engineers (West Point chapter)
    • The Society for Hispanic Professional Engineers (West Point chapter)
    • The Society of Women Engineers (West Point chapter)
    • Spectrum
    • The Vietnamese-American Cadet Association

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  • Trump signs order banning trans athletes in women’s sports

    Trump signs order banning trans athletes in women’s sports

    President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday banning transgender women from participating in women’s sports.

    “The war on women’s sports is over,” he said. “With my action this afternoon, we are putting every school receiving taxpayer dollars on notice that if you let men take over women’s sports teams or invade your locker rooms, you will be investigated for violations of Title IX and risk your federal funding.”

    The executive order, signed on National Girls and Women in Sports Day, declares that it’s “the policy of the United States to oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly, as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.” Under the order, the assistant to the president for domestic policy will bring together representatives of “major athletic organizations and governing bodies, and female athletes harmed by such policies, to promote policies that are fair and safe, in the best interests of female athletes.”

    The president’s latest action builds on the GOP’s broader campaign to remove all recognition of transgender individuals from state and federal programs. On his first day in office, Trump signed a separate executive action declaring that there are only two sexes and banning federal funding for any program related to “gender ideology.” And House Republicans have passed a bill that would unilaterally ban trans women from competing in women’s sports. In nearly half of the country, trans women are banned from playing women’s sports at the K-12 or higher education level, but the order would take those bans nationwide.

    Additionally, the order calls on the education secretary to prioritize “Title IX enforcement actions against educational institutions (including athletic associations composed of or governed by such institutions) that deny female students an equal opportunity to participate in sports and athletic events by requiring them, in the women’s category, to compete with or against or to appear unclothed before males.” (Federally funded K-12 public schools and colleges are required to comply with Title IX, which bars discrimination based on sex in educational settings.)

    Charlie Baker, president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, told Congress recently that out of the more than 500,000 college athletes, fewer than 10 were transgender. The NCAA released a statement Wednesday that said, “The NCAA Board of Governors is reviewing the executive order and will take necessary steps to align NCAA policy in the coming days, subject to further guidance from the administration.”

    As Trump spoke Wednesday, girls and women—including former University of Kentucky swimmer and anti-trans advocate Riley Gaines—stood behind him, often clapping in support.

    After thanking them, the president turned back to face the rest of the East Room audience. He acknowledged the federal lawmakers, state attorneys general and governors in attendance, describing them as “friends of women’s sports.”

    “My administration will not stand by and watch men beat and batter women,” he said. “It’s going to end and nobody’s gonna be able to do a damn thing about it because when I speak [I] speak with authority.” (Trump was referring to an Olympic gold medal–winning Algerian boxer whom some accused of being transgender; the boxer has publicly said she was born a woman.)

    Fatima Goss Graves, president of the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement that trans students do not pose a threat in sports and deserve the same opportunities as their peers.

    “The far-right’s disturbing obsession with controlling the bodies, hearts, and minds of our country’s youth harms all students,” Graves said.

    Education secretary nominee Linda McMahon attended the ceremony, though her confirmation hearing for the office has yet to be scheduled. In the meantime, the department is being led by a collection of acting officials and appointees, including Deputy General Counsel Candice Jackson, who described the president’s order as “a demonstration of common sense.”

    “The President affirmed that this administration will protect female athletes from the danger of competing against and the indignity of sharing private spaces with someone of the opposite sex,” Jackson said in a news release. “The Department of Education stands proudly with President Trump’s action as we prioritize Title IX enforcement against educational institutions that refuse to give female athletes the Title IX protections they deserve.”

    Other Republican lawmakers praised the order Wednesday, arguing it would ensure women and girls won’t be pushed to the sidelines.

    But Representative Bobby Scott, a Democrat from Virginia and ranking member on the House education committee, was quick to oppose the order, calling it “yet another overreach by this administration” and saying its lack of clarity will further complicate what should be addressed by sports associations.

    “Rather than address the real, urgent issues that students and families are facing every day, this administration continues to target vulnerable students—specifically transgender girls and women—with a shameless attempt to bully them,” he said in a statement. “They are willing to use the most vulnerable Americans as pawns in a political game.”

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  • Career coaches fill critical gaps in Ph.D. training

    Career coaches fill critical gaps in Ph.D. training

    To the editor:

    In “The Doctoral Dilemma” (Feb. 3, 2025), Inside Higher Ed reporter Johanna Alonso describes career coaching as a “cottage industry” of “gurus” that emerged to fill critical gaps in graduate training. As a career coach cited in the article, I was disappointed to see such an inaccurate and biased portrayal of my work. 

    Coaching is a professional industry with proven methods, tools, and credentialing provided by the International Coaching Federation (ICF). Coaching is distinct from “consulting,” and it’s an intentional, strategic step for anyone seeking to change careers. This is why Johns Hopkins University employs coaches as part of its Doctoral Life Design Studio. Yet, the article portrays these university-led coaching initiatives as legitimate, structured and holistic, while describing coaching outside of the university as an opportunistic “cottage industry.” Why frame the same service in two very different ways?

    From our wide-ranging, 20-minute interview, Alonso only highlighted my hourly rate—$250/hour for a single one-to-one meeting—without any context. There is no mention of the benefits of career coaching, or whether universities like Johns Hopkins pay their coaches a similar rate. The monetary cost, presented in isolation, suggests exploitation. The reality? As a neurodivergent person, I find one-to-one meetings draining, so I’ve priced them to limit bookings. Instead, I direct Ph.D.s toward my free library of online content, my lower-cost group programs and my discounted coaching packages, all of which have helped Ph.D.s secure industry roles that double or triple their academic salaries. The article doesn’t include these details.

    The most telling sign of the article’s bias is the use of the word “guru.” Why use a loaded term like “guru” instead of “expert” to describe career coaches? As I frequently remind my clients, language shapes perception. Ph.D.s are more likely to be seen as industry-ready professionals if they use terms like “multi-year research project” instead of “dissertation” or “stakeholders” instead of “academic advisers.” The same logic applies here—calling career coaches “gurus” trivializes our work, implying we are self-appointed influencers rather than qualified professionals. I’ll never forget the professor who once tweeted, “If life outside of academia is so great, why do alt-ac gurus spend so much time talking about it? Don’t they have better things to do?”

    My response? “I wouldn’t have to do this if professors provided ANY professional development for non-academic careers.”

    Because contrary to what the article claims, I didn’t start my coaching business because I wished there were more resources available to me. I started it because, after I quit my postdoctoral fellowship for an industry career, I spent untold hours providing uncompensated career support to Ph.D.s. For nearly two years, I responded to thousands of messages, created online resources, reviewed résumés and met one-to-one with hundreds of Ph.D. students, postdocs and even tenured professors—all for free, in my leisure time. Eventually, I burned out from the incessant demand. I realized that, if I was going to continue pouring my time into helping Ph.D.s, I needed to be compensated. That’s when I started my business.

    Academia conditions us to see for-profit businesses as unethical, while “nonprofit” universities push students into a lifetime of high-interest debt. It convinces us that charging for expertise is predatory, while asking Ph.D.s to work for poverty wages is somehow noble. It forces us to internalize the idea that, if you truly care about something, you should sacrifice your well-being and life for it. But our time is valuable. Our skills are valuable. We deserve to be fairly compensated for our labor, inside and outside of academia.

    Career coaching isn’t the problem. The real problem is that academia still refuses to take a critical look in the mirror.

    Ashley Ruba is the founder of After Academia.

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  • Encouraging first-gen students to study abroad

    Encouraging first-gen students to study abroad

    Study abroad is tied to personal and professional growth for college students, but crossing the border can be an enormous hurdle or feel unattainable for some learners.

    A new initiative at Bucknell University seeks to empower and support first-generation and low-income students who are interested in experiential learning and study away through workshops, financial aid and mentorship.

    In this episode of Voices of Student Success, host Ashley Mowreader speaks to Chris Brown, Bucknell’s Andrew Hartman ’71 and Joseph Fama ’71 Executive Director of the Center for Access and Success, to learn more about the center and how it reduces barriers to student participation in high-impact activities.

    Listen to the episode here and learn more about The Key here.

    Read a transcript of the podcast here.

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  • As DEI is scapegoated, silence is complicity (opinion)

    As DEI is scapegoated, silence is complicity (opinion)

    President Trump has used diversity, equity and inclusion to explain failures in education, the economy and national security, so you might think we’d be inured to his strategies by now. When he blamed the tragic plane crash in Washington, D.C., on DEI, he reached a new nadir of callousness. The victims of the crash had not even been recovered and he was blaming DEI policies for “lower” standards. When pressed by reporters, he couldn’t even articulate the object of his complaint or any specifics related to last week’s crash. His instinct, though, reveals a deeper, more troubling current.

    By tacking immediately to DEI in the wake of a tragedy, he seeks to create an association in the minds of Americans: People of color are underqualified and incompetent. As a woman of color who earned a Ph.D. and is also the president of a university, I know these narratives are baseless. I know how many talented, innovative people of color there are in our country. I know that their leadership, research and intelligence have produced countless benefits to our society. I also know that we have spent the last century undoing the psychological and practical damage of systemic racism in our nation. We have spent precious capital in our country recreating equality of opportunity, and programs of diversity, equity and inclusion have been essential to this transformation.

    When a president of the United States has the audacity to pose DEI as a corruption tool he is combating, I cannot be silent. It is an affront to those who sacrificed in the multiple civil rights struggles of the 20th century and helped position our nation as a place with more equality of opportunity than ever in our history. Education has been a central part of that architecture.

    As a student of language and culture, I also know that when a president and his narrow-minded minions repeat a paradigm ad nauseam, people start to believe it. The forerunner of exclusion and violence across history has been gradual dehumanization. Let us not be complicit with our silence.

    DeRionne P. Pollard is president of Nevada State University. The views expressed here are her own and do not represent the views of Nevada State University or the Nevada System of Higher Education.

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  • Hegseth orders military academies to end affirmative action

    Hegseth orders military academies to end affirmative action

    Newly confirmed U.S. secretary of defense Pete Hegseth issued a memo Jan. 29 ordering the Department of Defense to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and offices—including race-conscious admissions at military academies.

    The memo establishes a task force “charged with overseeing the department’s efforts to abolish DEI offices” and specifically prohibits “sex-based, race-based or ethnicity-based goals for academic admission” within the department, which oversees military academies. Hegseth wrote that he’s enforcing an executive order issued by President Trump instructing military academy leaders to eliminate DEI initiatives. 

    When the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in 2023’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill, the justices explicitly made an exception for the military academies. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that the institutions, which train the military officer corps, may have “potentially distinct interests” when it comes to admissions and that diversity in the armed forces may be a national security prerogative.

    Three of those academies—the Military Academy at West Point, the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy—have since been sued by anti–affirmative action groups seeking to eliminate the exemption. Last February the Supreme Court declined to hear the case against West Point, and in December a federal judge ruled that the Naval Academy can continue to consider race in admissions; the case against the Air Force Academy is ongoing. 

    It is unclear if Hegseth’s order to eliminate race-based “quotas” in admissions would prohibit military academies from considering race at all when reviewing applications. 

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  • Trump reiterates plan to abolish the Education Department

    Trump reiterates plan to abolish the Education Department

    Amid reports that the White House is finalizing an executive order to get rid of the Education Department, President Donald Trump said Tuesday that when he nominated Linda McMahon as secretary, he instructed her to “put herself out of a job.” 

    “Linda, I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job,” the president said to a group of reporters in the Oval Office.

    The comment was the first time Trump has publicly talked about his campaign promise to dissolve the department since taking office last month. Several media outlets reported Monday that the administration is preparing an executive order that would direct department officials to shut down some functions and develop a plan for the agency’s demise. The timing of such an order is still unclear.

    When asked Tuesday whether abolishing the department was something he could legally do, the president said, “I’d like to be able to do that.” He later added that “there are some people that think I could.” Many experts say that only Congress can kill off the federal agency.

    Trump said that the largest obstacle in the way of passing a bill to dissolve the department is teachers’ unions.

    “The teachers’ unions are the only ones that are opposed to it,” he said. “No one else would want to hold [us] back.”

    A recent Wall Street Journal poll found that 61 percent of registered voters oppose getting rid of the department. Numerous education lobbying groups, higher education experts and Democratic lawmakers have criticized the concept, saying that it would cause chaotic disruptions and make college hard to access for low-income students and those with disabilities.

    “Investment in our children is an investment in our future. Dismantling the Department of Education would do the opposite by making it harder for children to achieve and for parents, caregivers, and communities to thrive,” Senator Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said in a news release. “President Trump wants to lock the promise of public education—of equal opportunity and hope for all—behind an ivory tower accessible only to his billionaire donors … It is callous and cynical.” 

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  • Seven strategies to build global learning community at scale

    Seven strategies to build global learning community at scale

    In higher education, your relationship with learners shouldn’t end when their program does. If fostered correctly, they’re applying the knowledge they gained, sharing their experiences with their personal and professional networks, and staying engaged with your institution.

    Strengthening your relationships post-program will not only enhance the learning experience and create a sense of belonging, but inspire lifelong learning and repeat engagement, build awareness in a competitive education landscape, and transform your learners into your brand’s biggest advocates.

    Building a vibrant community is vital for maintaining these post-program relationships. In a survey by the community marketing platform TINT, 73 percent of consumers reported having a positive opinion of brand communities, while 84 percent said the community surrounding a brand impacts their feelings about it.

    Many online learning providers must battle the misperception that community-building and networking only happen in person. At Harvard Business School Online, we launched our Community in 2018 to provide online learners the chance to connect off-line by forming chapters worldwide. Over the last six years, we’ve expanded to nearly 40 chapters and more than 650,000 members from 190 countries. And importantly, we’ve evolved beyond in-person meetups to also host virtual events and discussions through our Community platform.

    If you’re interested in building a global community at scale, here are seven tips to consider.

    Tips for Building an Engaged Global Community

    1. Find Your Superusers Early

    Start by identifying your most active, engaged learners. Perhaps they’re always the first to comment on their peers’ responses and provide feedback. Or maybe they’re sharing their certificate and learning experiences on LinkedIn, taking multiple programs, or promoting your school and proactively addressing questions in Reddit threads. Determine your engagement metrics and use them to spot your superusers early.

    Programs should offer multiple connection points throughout the experience. HBS Online offers networking opportunities before, during and after courses. Anyone can join a public chapter to learn more about the brand and build knowledge. Once enrolled and upon course completion, they’re added to different private discussion boards and gain access to exclusive networking opportunities.

    The earlier you integrate community into their experience, the faster they’ll become familiar with it and the more engaged they’ll be over the long term—helping you more easily surface your superusers.

    1. Transform Your Superusers Into Brand Ambassadors

    Communities are stronger when everyone is involved. Once you’ve identified your superusers, empower them to be brand ambassadors. Provide ownership of the community experience to keep them invested and committed to fueling its success. In turn, you can scale faster by delegating some of the event and community management.

    Our chapters are run by chapter organizers—volunteers who’ve taken at least one HBS Online course and been vetted by our team. These volunteers are responsible for hosting an event a quarter and posting on their chapter’s discussion board.

    This structure enables us to grow our Community globally and offer in-person and virtual events and networking opportunities throughout the year. Our learners forge real-world connections while our chapter organizers gain experience they can add to their LinkedIn profiles and résumés.

    1. Provide Them With Helpful Tools, Training and Tactics

    To help your learners become brand ambassadors, equip them with the right tools, tips and training. Onboard them to your community software, develop documentation and responses to frequently asked questions, and regularly host training sessions to explain new and existing platform features.

    Data is another powerful tool. Track which conversations garner the most engagement or the events with the highest registrations, and share those insights with your community leaders. It will provide a jumping-off point and help them build stronger networking opportunities and relationships.

    1. Establish and Share Clear Guidelines

    During onboarding, share clear brand guidelines and expectations with your community leaders, including:

    • Your community’s goals and objectives
    • What their role entails and how to refer to it
    • How they should attribute your brand, and if/when they can leverage your logo
    • Your social channels and any campaign hashtags
    • Examples of effective content, whether a social post, forum discussion or event
    • Specific brand style guidelines

    By providing this material, you can empower them to be stronger advocates and alleviate branding concerns as you grow and scale your community.

    1. Highlight Achievements and Incentivize Advocacy

    For your community to be successful, it needs to be mutually beneficial. Your learners are likely juggling their education alongside various personal and professional commitments. Acknowledge their time spent volunteering.

    At HBS Online, we share our praise in various ways, including dedicated learner profiles, Community engagement and recognition badges, social media callouts, a monthly Community-focused newsletter where we promote upcoming events and achievements, and free tickets to and dedicated recognition at our annual hybrid learner conference, Connext.

    Consider how you can leverage gamification to encourage engagement or incentivize your community leaders to promote your brand. Perhaps you gift them exclusive swag if they hit certain engagement metrics or welcome them to beta-test new products. Determine what works best for your institution, but ensure you’re meaningfully saying, “Thank you.”

    1. Give Your Community Meaning

    Purpose fuels passion. Find ways to make your community something your learners are proud to participate in. Survey them to discover how they view your community and the value they derive from it and leverage those insights to create programming aligned with your institution’s mission.

    Six years ago, HBS Online introduced the Community Challenge to empower our learners to enact global change. Through the challenge, we collaborate annually with a nonprofit and ask for a pressing issue facing their business. We then share that problem with our learners, who gather worldwide to develop and pitch solutions. Over the years, they’ve tackled topics like food insecurity, climate change and education access while applying the business knowledge gained through our courses and fostering teamwork globally.

    1. Create an Internal Support System

    For any of these community efforts to take off, you need buy-in from senior leadership. Without it, you’re unlikely to get the necessary tools and resources to grow an engaged community. Communicate the value to your institution’s key stakeholders and provide them with the talking points to advocate for the initiative organizationwide since you’ll need support from multiple teams—like tech, program delivery and marketing—to make this work possible.

    If feasible, having a dedicated community manager can also help supercharge your efforts. That employee can provide a safe space for your community leaders, give them a direct point of contact, listen to and enact feedback, and ensure brand guidelines and expectations are met.

    Build Lifelong Relationships

    Your learners are your higher education brand’s most valuable asset. They can provide insights to help you develop new programs, advocate on your brand’s behalf, build awareness and drive repeat engagement.

    To foster lifelong learning, you must prioritize building lifelong relationships. Is your institution missing out on a competitive advantage?

    Lauren Landry is the director of marketing and communications at Harvard Business School Online, overseeing its organic marketing strategy, brand messaging, Community and events. Prior to joining HBS Online, she served as an associate director of content marketing at Northeastern University and as a reporter and editor covering higher education and start-ups for the likes of BostInno and Boston Magazine.

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  • College leaders in the foxhole (opinion)

    College leaders in the foxhole (opinion)

    The second Trump administration has begun with a cacophony of executive orders, memos from the Office of Management and Budget, and the disconcerting disappearance—and some reappearance—of research grants and programs. This has led to fear of the loss of important federal data, threats to the livelihoods of researchers and students, and the end of critical programs that have enabled greater participation in science. Many of these actions are being litigated in the courts, and while some judges have helped stop the worst actions, the whiplash leads to more drama and uncertainty. The research community on college campuses has been left in a state of anxiety and confusion.

    The public response from college presidents has been mostly muted so far. While this is causing even more distress in some quarters, there are reasons for it. The administration has suggested that on top of the current actions, there are prospects for increasing the tax on large university endowments, cutting indirect cost recovery on federal grants, investigating students and institutions for antisemitism, and more. It’s no surprise that university presidents, general counsels, communications professionals and federal relations officials want to play it safe. Many of these leaders probably also feel constrained by their commitments to institutional neutrality and don’t want to be seen as taking a political position against the administration’s actions.

    And so higher education is in yet another crisis. This one affects the whole country, just like the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic. Former Tulane University president Scott Cowen faced a unique local crisis after Hurricane Katrina and also navigated the pandemic as interim president at Case Western Reserve University. He has been justifiably praised as an outstanding crisis manager, bringing Tulane through an event that easily could have permanently devastated the institution. He said on this site that—both after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and during COVID-19 in Cleveland—frequent, emotionally transparent communication was crucial to lower anxiety and provide updated information.

    “Crises are bound to happen,” he said, “impacting a few people or everyone. How we lead through them depends in large part on the nature of the crisis. And when one strikes, a leader should first understand how that particular crisis makes them feel” (emphasis mine).

    We don’t need to wonder about how people feel this time. The current crisis is definitely making people on campuses anxious and afraid. A few presidents have heeded Cowen’s advice and made public statements, including Christina Paxson at Brown University, Maurie McInnis at Yale University and Kevin Guskiewicz at Michigan State University. These statements have all acknowledged the pain and anxiety on the campuses. All three of these presidents are quite experienced: Paxson has been in office at Brown for 12 years, and McInnis and Guskiewicz are both in their second executive positions.

    Paxson perhaps went the farthest in taking a stand. “We always follow the law,” she said. “But we are also prepared to exercise our legal right to advocate against laws, regulations or other actions that compromise Brown’s mission.” That would be a difficult statement to make at a public university in a red state—and is still quite a courageous one at a private one in Rhode Island.

    Other presidents have made similar statements, and as the situation grinds on, more will continue to do so, particularly as it becomes apparent that this is not something to be waited out but rather to be managed and adapted to. Nearly every college president cares first and foremost about their campus; when they don’t show it, it’s usually because they think doing so would cause more damage in the long run. My heart goes out to all of the officials who for two weeks—and for many weeks to come—have had long early-morning and late-night meetings trying to figure out what they can and cannot do or say. Being in the foxhole late at night with your team and college town takeout can be energizing at first, but as it continues, it gets very difficult, especially as the days start to blur and it’s hard to remember whether you’ve already decided something or not.

    I went through two crises myself as chancellor of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I followed Cowen’s advice on the first one, the 2008 financial crisis; I had seen him present on what he did at Tulane at my first presidents’ meeting. I sent out frequent emails to the campus with the help of a very sharp communications colleague who helped me craft my voice for such times. I went to employee meetings and answered all the questions I could. I hugged people when appropriate and let them share their emotions. As an autistic person, I don’t always know when emotions are in the air, but this was a dire enough situation that I didn’t need to do a lot of interpreting. We got through it, and I felt even more connected to the campus when we did.

    In the second crisis, which was a local scandal involving UNC athletics, I started off on the right foot by famously apologizing to “everyone who loves this university” at the first press conference. It seemed a logical continuation of what had gotten me through my first crisis, and it was consistent with what I had learned from Cowen. But the reaction was very different. While much of the campus appreciated it, the sports fans ridiculed me for being apologetic and not having a “stiffer spine” when it came to fighting for athletics. To my literal brain, this meant they wanted me to say it was acceptable that we cheated. I should have ignored that, because it caused me to lose my voice for a year or more, during which I just looked tongue-tied and indecisive while the scandal grew. As with the current situation, I was worried that saying anything would lead to more investigations and penalties for the Tar Heels. Finally, a wise adviser told me that I needed to decide who my people were. The people on the campus—the students, staff and faculty—those were my people. The sports fans were not; I can’t make a layup to save my life. “Stick to your people,” he said. I eventually got my voice back and happily went off to a Division III university.

    As the current crop of presidents goes through this same process, they’ll begin sticking with their people, too. Like me, many of them will end up wishing they did it sooner, but that’s to be expected given the stress and tension. In the long run, we need leaders who can lead the academic community to the other side of this. And that doesn’t always mean overt “resistance” as we often hear calls for, although as Paxson said in her letter, it certainly does mean standing up for the academic freedom of the individuals on the campus. It also means understanding the situation, caring for the people under their charge who are affected, helping them grieve for what is being lost and leading a conversation about how higher education is going to adapt to the new realities without sacrificing our values. I believe those leaders will emerge.

    As McInnis said at Yale, “Our mission is to create, share and preserve knowledge; to educate and inspire students; and to apply our discoveries to address the world’s greatest challenges. We are committed to navigating these times with a steadfast focus on advancing that mission and on supporting members of our community.” Most of the college leaders who read this and don’t think they can say something like it are wishing they could. In the coming weeks, more will.

    In the meantime, the academic community needs to stick together and try not to get overwhelmed by responding to everything that comes along while also acknowledging the fear, loss and pain many are experiencing. Teaching, patient care, research, justice and opportunity have defined American higher education for a century. And, somehow, they will continue.

    Holden Thorp is the editor in chief of the Science family of journals. He previously served as the chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the provost of Washington University in St. Louis.

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