The Lane Community College Board of Education apologized to President Stephanie Bulger at its Tuesday meeting for how members disrespected her on the basis of her race and sex, Lookout Eugene-Springfield reported.
The board’s apology follows the findings of an investigative report released in August that determined board members were frequently dismissive of Bulger—a Black woman—and often deferred questions to male staff members. The report found that former board chair Zach Mulholland was frequently hostile toward Bulger and often cut her off in their interactions. (He was also found to have physically intimidated a student at a board meeting.) Although Mulholland was censured by the board last month, he has resisted calls to step down.
Much of the report focused on Mulholland, but other members were also implicated.
“The board recognizes and is accountable for the harm caused to you, President Bulger,” said Austin Fölnagy, the current board chair, who was also accused of dismissive behavior. “We are deeply sorry for the negative impact our behavior has had on you and the college community at large. President Bulger, please accept the board’s apology for treating you badly.”
He added that the board is “committed to learning from our shortcomings” and will take “remedial actions including training in bias, discrimination and harassment” this fiscal year.
Bulger has been president of the Oregon community college since July 2022.
Research has the capacity to transform universities, communities and their places. The problem is that the funding architecture does not allow for sufficient sharing of power, benefits, or resources between communities, academics and non-academic partners.
How research funding is organised, distributed, and managed, spotlights issues of regional inequality and uneven cultural and economic growth.
These challenges, and how to address them, are at the heart of the Northumbria University led deep dive scoping report, By All, For All: The Power of Partnership, which provided the robust evidence base for best practice in partnership working and bridging knowledge gaps.
The report makes recommendations for devolving research power, directly addressing the UKRI strategic aim to work across an expanded research ecosystem, with communities as researchers rather than just the subjects of research.
Harnessing the transformative power of devolution, the CIP Awards embed researchers directly within communities across all four devolved nations and devolved mayoral regions of the UK for a year. The awards contribute to an emerging evidence base on how culture can enhance belonging, address regional inequality, deliver devolution and break down barriers to opportunity for communities.
Underpinning the work of the CIPs is a fundamental question: what if we stopped doing research to communities and started doing it with them?
The first cohort of CIPs employed co-creative methodologies to address complex social challenges across diverse communities, from Belfast’s Market area to Welsh post-industrial regions and Liverpool’s healthcare settings. Their work aimed to empower marginalised communities through participatory cultural interventions, using arts, heritage, music and creative practices as vehicles for social change and community building.
Each practitioner developed innovative approaches to bridge academic research with grassroots community needs, fostering cross-sector collaborations that challenged traditional boundaries between universities, public services and residents–using the so-called ‘quadruple helix’ model. Through their community-led research, the CIPs demonstrated how creative co-production can tackle issues ranging from mental health and social isolation to heritage conservation and youth engagement, ultimately building more inclusive and resilient communities.
The 2025-6 cohort of CIPs build on that strong foundation. They will generate vital new knowledge about co-creation and the unique role played by their communities and partnerships in growth through new research, development and innovation (RD&I).
Between them, the six CIPs will transform empty retail spaces into creative hubs in Dundee; foster reconciliation in Belfast through a co-created community art exhibition; strengthen community cohesion through craft in Rochdale; address cultural health and creating cultural planning across Kirklees; support cultural regeneration in Digbeth and inspire new forms of collective storytelling in Cardiff.
Democratising research outputs
With UK Government Missions focused on addressing regional inequality and economic growth, there’s growing recognition that top-down policy interventions have limited effectiveness. The CIP Awards directly address this by generating evidence from the ground up, with communities defining both problems and solutions.
This approach aligns with broader shifts in policy thinking. The recent emphasis on place-based innovation across government departments reflects a growing understanding that place really matters—that solutions appropriate for, say, Manchester might fail spectacularly in Dundee, not because of implementation failures but because they were never designed with local lived experience and landscapes in mind.
When it comes to democratising research funding and carrying out co-creation, significant obstacles remain. The promotion criteria in universities still heavily favour traditional academic outputs over community impact. REF panels, despite rhetorical commitments to broader impact, struggle to assess research where communities are co-creators rather than case studies, and funding timelines often clash with the slow work of building genuine partnerships.
The CIP Awards attempt to address some of these structural barriers by providing dedicated funding for relationship-building and requiring evidence of community partnership from the application stage. But systemic change will require broader cultural shifts.
A model for the future
Early indicators from Creative Communities research are promising. Projects have influenced everything from devolved government manifestos, to UNESCO heritage policies and NHS approaches to community health. But scaling this impact requires moving beyond individual projects to a wider systemic change of who gets to do RD&I.
The CIP Awards represent more than a funding opportunity: they’re a prototype for what research looks like when we take community expertise seriously. In an era of declining trust in institutions and growing demands for research relevance, this approach offers a path toward more democratic, more impactful, and ultimately more valuable knowledge creation that is truly by all, and for all.
Two in three community college students in California lack reliable access to food or housing, according to a new study.
The 2025 Real College CA Student Survey, led by the Community College League of California, found that 46 percent of students are food insecure and 58 percent are housing insecure, which is higher than national estimates: The most recent study from the Hope Center at Temple University found that 41 percent of all college students are food insecure and 48 percent indicated housing insecurity.
Community college students in California reported slightly lower rates of basic needs insecurity in this survey than in 2023, but the number of students needing help remains high.
“It is important to highlight when trends are moving in the right direction, but also that there’s still a lot of work to do,” Katie Brohawn, director of research, evaluation and development at the Research and Planning Group for California Community Colleges, said in a Sept. 24 webinar.
Methodology
Over 76,000 community college students responded to the survey, 3,300 of whom completed it in Spanish. The respondents represented 102 of the 116 institutions in the California Community College system.
The background: For many community college students, financial and mental health concerns can be among the top barriers to completion.
“Before students can thrive academically, their basic needs must be met,” said Tammeil Gilkerson, chancellor of the Peralta Community College District in Oakland, during the webinar.
A fall 2023 study from EdSights found that students at public two-year institutions report the highest levels of financial distress, even though those are among the most affordable institutions across sectors.
One recent study from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University found that nearly 41 percent of community college students experienced food insecurity and 60 percent reported housing insecurity.
Compared to their four-year peers, community college students are also more likely to be from low-income families, racially minoritized, first-generation, immigrant and adult learners. Each of these groups faces unique challenges in their persistence and retention in higher education.
The previous Real College CA survey, administered in 2023, helped college leaders and others in the state identify the role basic needs insecurity plays in students’ academic progress and overall success, particularly as the state was recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, Gilkerson said.
“While we are no longer in the height of the pandemic, its ripple effects remain and they collide with record housing costs, persistent inflation in food and basic goods, and continued debates about the role of higher education, equity and access in our society,” Gilkerson said.
The data: The latest survey found that only 38 percent of students had high food security, while 46 percent had low or very low food security. The most common concerns students identified were worrying about food running out before they can afford to purchase more (52 percent) or being unable to afford balanced meals (49 percent).
Nearly three in five students said they experienced some level of housing insecurity, and one in five reported being homeless in the past 12 months. While only 8 percent of respondents self-identified as homeless, more said they were couch-surfing (16 percent) or staying at a hotel or motel without a permanent home to return to (6 percent).
Basic needs insecurity also varied by region and institution across the state, with the highest reported rates of food and housing insecurity at 70 percent and 78 percent, respectively. The report did not identify which colleges had the highest and lowest rates of basic need insecurity.
Basic needs insecurities disproportionately impact African American and Black students as well as American Indian or Alaska Native students, compared to their peers. Older students (ages 26 to 30), LGBTQ+ students, independent students, Pell Grant recipients, single parents, former foster youth and those with a history of incarceration were also more likely to indicate food or housing insecurity.
The data also points to a correlation between students’ grades and their rates of basic needs insecurity. While students at all levels had some degree of food or housing insecurity, those earning grades lower than B’s were much more likely to indicate they lacked essential resources.
“If we really are dedicated to improving the academic success of students in our colleges, it’s the basic means that we need to meet. Because if we don’t do that, it doesn’t matter how wonderful a student you are, you’re not going to be able to succeed at the rate that you would otherwise,” Brohawn said.
Not every student is aware of or utilizing campus resources that could address these challenges; over one-third of respondents said they were unaware of basic needs supports at their college, and only 25 percent had accessed the Basic Needs Center. Among students who used resources, most did so to obtain food.
Identifying solutions: Over the past five years, California has made strides to better support learners with basic needs insecurity, recognizing housing challenges as a significant barrier to student success.
The state launched a rapid rehousing program to support learners at public institutions including the CCC, California State University and University of California systems. A 2022 bill began requiring colleges to stock discounted health supplies, such as toiletries and birth control, addressing students’ basic needs in a new way.
A pilot program also provides cash to financially vulnerable students at California colleges, including those who were formerly incarcerated, former foster youth and parents.
The report’s authors recommended providing targeted interventions for vulnerable populations and enhancing accessibility and awareness of supports, as well as advocating for systemic changes, such as increased funding for basic needs initiatives or policies that provide living wages and affordable housing for students.
Effective teaching and learning are key elements of a student’s academic success, but ensuring professors have access to training, support and resources to employ best practices in the classroom can be a challenge for institutions.
At the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville’s Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, Lynn Meade created the Faculty Learning Community to tackle this issue, uniting professors across disciplines to improve student learning and achievement.
The Faculty Learning Community, which launched this summer, strives to unite staff and faculty across campus to work toward the shared goal of student success, Meade said.
The background: Meade has worked as a communications professor at the University of Arkansas for two decades, but in 2023, she realized there were entire student support teams and departments that she didn’t know about. The university hosted an event on high-impact practices to invite stakeholders to share and learn from one another.
“I sat down at a table with a whole lot of student success people, and I was amazed at all the things that they were doing and how I could be on our campus for so long and [have] no idea the things that were going on behind the scenes, things students could take advantage of that they hadn’t yet,” Meade said.
This experience prompted her to get more involved with support staff and orchestrate opportunities for other professors to learn from one another across campus. “We need to find a way to integrate faculty and student success initiatives,” Meade said. “They need to know what one another are doing, they need to shake hands, make friends, have coffee, talk—the things that really make things happen, because our students, their success depends on us cooperating.”
Students are more likely to talk to a faculty member they trust than seek out a support office on campus, Meade said. “I think informing them not only how to teach their class well, but also how to integrate those resources, is really important.”
The result was the Fulbright Faculty Learning Community, a community of practice and faculty development program, which Meade now leads as director.
How it works: The program launched with four offerings for faculty: a course-building workshop, a reboot class to help with updating content, forums for sharing innovative teaching ideas and introductions to student success teams.
One of Meade’s goals is to avoid replicating existing efforts on campus but provide a one-stop shop to unify and amplify the great work taking place. “There’s so many cool resources on our campus, but there’s no one place they all exist,” she said.
The Fulbright Learning Community had its kickoff event this summer, engaging 14 faculty members in a three-hour workshop on course building.
The workshop invited faculty to consider students, rather than content, at the center of their syllabus, using a communications principle of audience and purpose. “I think if our audience is students and our purpose is to teach them, maybe we shouldn’t say, ‘I’m going to cover my material,’ but, ‘I’m going to think of ways that they can learn the material,’” Meade said.
Survey Says
A 2024 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab found that 40 percent of respondents believe their academic success would improve if professors connected in-classroom learning to issues outside the classroom or students’ career goals.
Some professors who are straight out of grad school may have only received teacher education or used material given to them by other faculty, Meade said. Others who have taught abroad but never in the U.S. may need some help adapting their materials for American students.
The learning community also invited career center professionals to showcase ways to embed career competencies in the syllabus and attach resources to their learning management system to help address career development for students. A future session will invite professors to share how they’re using and teaching generative AI tools.
“Faculty success equals student success,” Meade said. “The teachers are their first line [of support]; a lot of that success is what’s happening with the teacher. When we all work together on the same side, how we communicate with each other is going to make a big impact on the student retention.”
If your student success program has a unique feature or twist, we’d like to know about it. Click here to submit.
The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point is teaming up with a community college to share space, offer joint programming and develop transfer pathways between the institutions.
Under the partnership, UW-Stevens Point’s Wausau branch will relocate to nearby Northcentral Technical College’s campus in the city beginning in fall 2026.
Through the partnership, the university plans to increase degree programs in Wausau in high-demand fields like healthcare and business. For example, the two institutions are discussing collaborating on a surgical technician program, they said.
Dive Insight:
The partnership between UW-Stevens Point and NTC comes after years of steep enrollment decline at the university’s Wausau location and questions about the branch’s viability.
Between fall 2011 and fall 2023, full-time equivalent enrollment at UW-Stevens Point’s Wausau campus fell by a vertiginous 78.5% to just 232 students, according to institutional evaluations of the Universities of Wisconsin system by Deloitte last year.
The university’s Marshfield campus suffered a similar decline. Deloitte’s assessment of both campuses was that the sharp enrollment drop-offs “threaten the future viability” of those locations.
It also added pressure to the university as a whole. Without making operational changes, Deloitte forecast UW-Stevens Point would face mounting deficits in the years ahead.
NTC has also seen declines in recent years. Between 2018 and 2023, fall headcount declined 8.7% to 5,838 students at the technical college, per federal data.
The institutions hope that joining forces can help play to their strengths while offering students new reasons to attend each college. The UW-Stevens Point branch will offer bachelor’s and master’s degrees while NTC offers associate degrees and certificates.
“Students will have a seamless connection between UWSP and NTC,” Miranda Gentry-Siegel, executive of UW-Stevens Point’s Wausau campus. “Advisers from both schools will work together to find options that fit students’ interest and finances.”
The institutions also pointed to the potential for joint programs, collaboration between faculties on program design, combined student support services, and cost savings by reducing duplicated programs and services.
Faculty from UW-Stevens Point will stay employees of the university upon moving to teach at NTC’s campus, according to a FAQ page. It also signaled the possibility that some staff positions could be cut, noting that those who lose their positions will be “given the opportunity” to pursue jobs elsewhere in UW-Stevens Point or in the county government.
The university is working with Marathon County to determine future use of its current campus, which is about two miles from NTC.
After the move to NTC’s facilities, UW-Stevens Point will end its varsity sports programs in men’s basketball and women’s volleyballthrough the Wisconsin Competitive Sports League, the university said.
Several branch campuses within the Universities of Wisconsin system have shuttered in recent years.UW-Milwaukee closed its campus in Washington County in 2024 and its Waukesha campus this summer. However, the university is opening a center at Waukesha County Technical College to offer bachelor’s and graduate programs.
Additionally, UW-Platteville closed its Richland campus in 2023, and UW-Oshkosh shuttered its Fond du Lac branch in 2024.
A new report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement found that even though parenting students are especially dedicated to their studies, they face significant obstacles in college.
The report, based on a 2024 survey of students from 164 community colleges, found that parenting students were more engaged than nonparenting students across multiple benchmarks, including coming to class prepared and never skipping classes, despite their additional responsibilities. These students were also more likely than nonparents to have earned an associate degree or certificate or to mention changing careers as a goal.
But even with such strong drive, 71 percent of student parents reported caring for dependents could cause them to withdraw from college; 73 percent said financial circumstances might make them stop out. Student parents were also more likely than nonparents to face food and housing insecurity, but only small fractions of students reported receiving food or housing support from their college in the last month. In a similar vein, a third of students with children say that their colleges don’t adequately support them as parents. Meanwhile, these students say underutilized supports that could help them, including campus childcare services, financial advising and career counseling, the report found.
The report also offers examples of higher ed institutions that have put in place effective supports for student parents. For example, Lee College in Texas offers weekly financial assistance for childcare and family-friendly study areas. Monroe Community College in New York created a designated student success coach role to serve single mothers.
“Parenting students are among the most engaged learners on our campuses, but they face barriers that too often derail their progress,” Linda García, CCCSE’s executive director, said in a news release. “But when colleges take intentional steps to support them, the impact is not only on students, but on their children and communities.”
The second line band’s brass instruments gleamed in the morning sun as they led nearly a thousand first-year students out of the Vadalabene Center arena. The festive New Orleans style procession wound its way across Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s campus, past the towering Cougar statue where students would soon gather for their traditional class photo. Parents lined the walkway, some having extended their stay just to witness this moment—their children’s ceremonial entry into college life.
Among the crowd, one mother approached Dr. James T. Minor with tears in her eyes.
“That’s my son,” she said, pointing to a young man adjusting his position for the photo. “This is so great. I can’t believe what you’re doing. I’m so proud of him.”
Dr. James Minor talking to a SIUE student. For Minor, SIUE’s first African American chancellor, this moment embodied everything he hopes to achieve at the institution he has led since March 2022. A Detroit native with a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a distinguished career spanning federal government, the California State University system, and scholarship in educational policy, Minor brings both academic rigor and practical experience to his transformational vision.
“This is as close as I get to what’s truly special about university communities,” he reflects on the school’s most recent convocation. “You’ve got thousands of young people who have made a decision about their life—that they’re going to pursue a college degree—and the university has a responsibility to facilitate that.”
But behind this celebratory scene lies a story of dramatic transformation, one that has seen SIUE emerge from serious fiscal challenges to become a model for how regional public universities can thrive in challenging times.
A $18 Million Wake-Up Call When Minor arrived on campus in March 2022, he brought credentials that positioned him uniquely for the challenges ahead. As the 10th chancellor in SIUE’s history, his appointment followed distinguished service as deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Education, where he administered more than $7 billion in federal higher education programming. His most recent role as assistant vice chancellor and senior strategist at California State University—where he helped achieve the system’s highest graduation rates in history and secured hundreds of millions of dollars for graduation initiatives—prepared him for the complex work of institutional transformation.
But even this impressive background couldn’t ready him for what he discovered within his first 45 days: an $18 million structural deficit that had been masked by years of poor budget practices.
“I was giving a university budget presentation that was not particularly pleasant,” Minor recalls of those early days in his tenure. “That was not on my list of things to do in the first 100 days—to organize and understand this structural deficit, communicate it to the university community, and then lay out a plan for managing it.”
Dr. James T. Minor at commencement.The distinction between a structural deficit and a spending deficit became crucial to Minor’s communication strategy. Unlike a simple overspend that could be corrected immediately, SIUE faced a fundamental mismatch between fixed expenses and revenue. The number of people, buildings, and courses— the structural components of the budget—exceeded revenue by roughly $18 million.
“We had available cash sources and other things that we could manipulate to cover it,” Minor explains. “We operated that way for a number of years before I arrived, but we all know that’s not sustainable.”
The solution required what Minor calls “environmental responsiveness”— the ability of institutions to expand and contract according to changing conditions. This meant making hard choices about class sizes, graduate assistantships, and operational efficiencies that some within the university community initially resisted.
Fast forward to September 2025, and Minor will soon announce to the campus community that SIUE has effectively resolved its structural deficit, maintains one of the best cash positions among Illinois universities, and accomplished this transformation without spending a single dollar from its cash reserves.
Building a Culture of Student-Centered Data Perhaps even more significant than the financial turnaround has been Minor’s campaign to make SIUE fluent in its own student success metrics. When he arrived, he was stunned by what he discovered during informal surveys of faculty and staff.
“I would walk into a room and ask, ‘Who here can tell me our four-year and six-year graduation rates?’” Minor recalls. “These are people who presumably should have an idea— people who work here, not people shopping at Target or in the grocery store. I would ask about our first-to-second-year retention rate, and it wasn’t meant to embarrass people. It was to underscore the lack of awareness we had as a university community about the most important thing we do.”
Today, when Minor walks into any room on campus, hands shoot up when he asks those same questions. “People expect the question,” he says with satisfaction. “I have promised them, I don’t care if we’re talking about the paint in the stairwell, I will start every conversation here at the university about our student outcome data.”
Dr. James Minor meeting students on campus.This data-driven approach has yielded measurable results for the institution that boasts more than 12,000 students. First-to-second-year retention rates have increased, graduation rates have ticked up, and the university is expecting growth—a major accomplishment in today’s challenging enrollment environment.
Dr. Robin Hughes, dean of the School of Education, Health and Human Behavior, sees Minor’s unique combination of scholarship and leadership as precisely what SIUE needed.
“Chancellor Minor is by far what most institutions look for and want in an organizational leader,” Hughes observes. “He is a distinguished scholar whose work focuses on the study of higher education organizations. He is also an experienced organizational leader who brings both academic insight and institutional expertise to his work. A strong advocate for students, he makes organizational decisions that positively impact their success both during their studies and beyond.”
Dr. Jessica Harris, acting chief of staff and vice chancellor for Anti-racism, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, chaired the search committee that brought Minor to SIUE.
“I remember reading his cover letter and saying to my mom, ‘I think this is our next chancellor,’” Harris recalls. “Every accomplishment he talked about in his career was about how it positively impacted or transformed the experience for students. That was a consistent thread throughout his cover letter.”
Nearly four years into his tenure, Harris sees that student-centered focus as the driving force behind institutional change.
“One of the major shifts I’ve seen is a very clearly articulated and collective focus on student success,” she explains. “Not that it wasn’t a commitment before, but there’s a level of intentionality I didn’t see across all areas before he started. Every presentation starts with mission—this is why we’re here, these are our enrollment numbers, retention and graduation numbers. He keeps it front of mind for us.”
Dr. Earleen Patterson, associate vice chancellor for Student Opportunities, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, has witnessed this transformation firsthand.
“There’s a reason I’m still here,” she says of her longevity at the university that began in 1990. “Over the course of time, I’ve seen a lot of evolution of this journey of progress toward being inclusive, toward offering opportunities to every sector of our population.”
The results are visible in SIUE’s incoming class, which Patterson describes as having “the highest African American enrollment in the history of the university.” This fall’s freshman class includes nearly 600 Black students in the Boundless Scholars Experience alone—a comprehensive academic program designed to promote belonging, academic achievement and degree completion. At a time when voices opposing diversity, equity and inclusion efforts grow louder across the higher education landscape, SIUE has chosen to double down on its mission, letting results speak louder than rhetoric.
The focus on student success extends far beyond enrollment numbers. Patterson describes a comprehensive approach to retention that begins before students even attend their first class. The Boundless Scholars Experience moved students in early, gathering them with their families in the campus ballroom for what Patterson calls “real talk” about college expectations.
“What they saw was a room that reflected who they are,” Patterson explains. “But we let them know, come Monday, as you walk out into the university community, you may be the only one in your biology course, in your chemistry course, in your economics course. But you have a community, you have a village.”
This village includes strategic course placement with faculty who are particularly effective with first-year students, early warning systems that track attendance and performance, and support staff who can call students by name when they miss class.
“It marvels them when they come into my office, and I already know you missed chemistry on Tuesday,” Patterson says with a chuckle. “They’re like, ‘How do you know?’ I care enough to know about that—about all of these students.”
For Dominic Dorsey, president of the Black Faculty and Staff Association and director of the Access (Disability Services) Department, representation at the leadership level makes a tangible difference for students.
“We’ve been blessed not just to have Dr. Minor as our first Black chancellor, but to have a chancellor that’s an actual thought leader and transformational in the truest sense of the word,” he says.
Dorsey’s own department has seen dramatic growth, with registered students with disabilities increasing from about 650 when he arrived in 2018 to nearly 1,400 today. This growth reflects SIUE’s broader commitment to inclusive excellence that extends beyond traditional diversity metrics.
Town-Gown Collaboration The transformation at SIUE also stretches beyond campus borders through an unprecedented partnership with the city of Edwardsville. Mayor Art Risavy, a small business owner who has served as mayor for five years after a decade as an alderman, describes an intentional effort to strengthen university- city relations.
“Early on, when I became mayor, one of the first things we decided collectively was we wanted to work on our relations with the university,” Risavy explains. “We reached out to the chancellor, and it didn’t take long—Chancellor Minor wants to do stuff pretty quickly—before we had a meeting set up.”
These conversations led to concrete initiatives: improved website integration between city and university, the Hashbrown Huddle breakfast meetings that bring students directly into downtown Edwardsville, and shared committee appointments that give the university voice in city governance.
“We want to see students in our businesses, involved in our organizations,” Risavy says. “We want them to feel comfortable downtown, going through our shops and participating in our events. This is their home for four years or five or six years.”
The collaboration extends to shared programming, with Minor and Risavy regularly attending each other’s events, from the city’s state of the city address to SIUE’s ice cream social that draws over a thousand participants.
Navigating Challenges with Bold Leadership The success story at SIUE is unfolding against a backdrop of national political tensions around higher education, particularly concerning diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. For leaders like Dorsey and Patterson, this context requires strategic adaptation without abandoning core values.
“The way that we approach the work has not changed,” Dorsey explains. “We just don’t publicize the way the work is done. Our ancestors created an underground railroad for a reason—it’s a reason why it wasn’t an above ground railroad.”
This approach allows SIUE to continue providing scholarships, celebration opportunities, and support systems for underrepresented students while focusing public attention on broader institutional success metrics that benefit all students.
Patterson emphasizes the importance of drowning out external noise.
“If we were to play into that distraction, we wouldn’t be able to focus on the charge that is in front of us. And these students are in front of us,” she said.
Doug James, immediate past president of the Staff Senate, describes an administration focused on “majoring on the major things” while maintaining awareness of smaller concerns.
“I think there was an appetite for honest conversation,” he says. “Let’s get in a room and talk about what are our challenges, where are we winning, what are the things we get to celebrate, and what needs our attention.”
Yet Harris points to concrete evidence of this collective effort.
“You don’t see 10 percentage point increases in Black student retention without people doing work inside and outside of the classroom. We’ve hit historic fundraising goals since Chancellor Minor’s been here. He’s helping to shift our culture. He often talks about us being first and best in class.”
Looking ahead, Harris envisions SIUE becoming “a model regional public institution with a national reputation” within the next three to five years. The university is already approaching 80% retention for domestic students and has set an ambitious goal of 90% first-to-second-year retention—a benchmark that would distinguish SIUE among institutions of its type.
“In the midst of all the challenges facing higher education, all the anti-DEI efforts, all the darts being thrown at us,” Harris reflects, “we are keeping on. We’re not deterred. In fact, we are making really great progress.”
The Price of Progress Minor’s transformation of SIUE hasn’t come without resistance. As the first African American chancellor in the institution’s history, he acknowledges the complexity of his position with remarkable candor.
“Some people think about it individually. I haven’t,” he tells me. “I’ve thought about what it means for other people and what it means for this university community with respect to our ability to move forward.”
Quite frankly, the university community has had to adjust to new leadership and some members have experienced dissonance with the very idea that a Black man is in charge.
“Sometimes it’s passive resistance, sometimes it’s active resistance, sometimes it’s a level of questioning and verifying before we can participate or agree to move in the right direction, and quite honestly, sometimes it’s blatant sabotage,” the chancellor admits.
Yet Minor approaches these challenges with the same organizational theory perspective he brings to budget management and student success metrics. For him, institutional transformation requires acknowledging and managing all forms of resistance while maintaining a clear focus on the core mission.
Still, the significance of this representation isn’t lost on the broader SIUE community, particularly among Black alumni who lived through earlier eras of the institution. Minor recalls one particularly poignant encounter with an alumna from the mid-1960s: “She came up to me, grabbed my hand and started patting my hand as any good grandmother would do, and said, ‘Baby, I’m so proud of you. It’s so wonderful to see you in this role.’ And as she was patting my hand, she leaned in and said, ‘Now, don’t you mess this up.’”
The exchange captures the weight of expectation that comes with being a first—representing not just personal achievement, but the hopes and dreams of those who paved the way.
“For individuals from that era, that generation, I represent their hopes and dreams for equity and equality and opportunity,” Minor reflects.
A Model for Regional Public Universities
The SIUE story offers lessons for similar institutions nationwide. Minor’s approach demonstrates that even universities without massive endowments can achieve significant transformation through strategic focus, data-driven decision- making, and commitment to operational efficiency.
“Regional public institutions don’t have the margin to be inefficient,” Minor argues. “We’ve got 1960s infrastructures and boilers and aging infrastructure that we have to manage. You can’t manage that and be grossly inefficient at the same time.”
As SIUE prepares for its next chapter, the metrics tell a story of remarkable progress. The university maintains a strong financial position, has achieved record fundraising including the largest single gift in institutional history, and expects continued enrollment growth in a challenging market.
But for Minor, the real measure of success remains that moment during convocation when a parent’s pride reflects the transformative power of higher education.
“The idea that I get to help facilitate the environment in which young people have an opportunity to transform their life—it’s a dream job,” he says. “It’s not the title, it’s not the status, it’s not the position. It is having the opportunity to facilitate the environment in which young people have an opportunity to transform their life.
“I love university communities. I love the power of institutions,” he adds. “I love the idea that they could be beacons of social and economic opportunity. I love the idea that the teaching and learning environment can transform the mind, prepare people professionally in a way that changes the trajectory of their life and their children’s lives. That, to me, is powerful in its own right.”
That transformation happens every day, every semester, every academic year at SIUE. And as the second line band plays on, leading another class of students toward their futures, the sound carries a promise—that this institution, this community, this partnership between town and gown will continue rising above the noise to focus on what matters most: changing lives through education.
New research has found that rural LGBTQ+ teens experience significant challenges in their communities and turn to the internet for support.
The research from Hopelab and the Born This Way Foundation looked at what more than 1,200 LGBTQ+ teens faced and compared the experiences of those in rural communities with those of teens in suburban and urban communities. The research found that rural teens are more likely to give and receive support through their online communities and friends than via their in-person relationships.
“The rural young people we’re seeing were reporting having a lot less support in their homes, in their communities, and their schools,” Mike Parent, a principal researcher at Hopelab, said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “They weren’t doing too well in terms of feeling supported in the places they were living, though they were feeling supported online.”
However, the research found that rural LGBTQ+ teens had the same sense of pride in who they were as suburban and urban teens.
“The parallel, interesting finding was that we didn’t see differences in their internal sense of pride, which you might kind of expect if they feel all less supported,” he said. “What was surprising, in a very good way, was that indication of resilience or being able to feel a strong sense of their internal selves despite this kind of harsh environment they might be in.”
Researchers recruited young people between the ages of 15 and 24 who identified as LGBTQ+ through targeted ads on social media. After surveying the respondents during August and September of last year, the researchers also followed up some of the surveys with interviews, Parent said.
According to the study, rural teens were more likely than their urban and suburban counterparts to find support online. Of the rural respondents, 56% of rural young people reported receiving support from others online several times a month compared to 51% of urban and suburban respondents, and 76% reported giving support online, compared to 70% of urban and suburban respondents.
Conversely, only 28% of rural respondents reported feeling supported by their schools, compared to 49% of urban and suburban respondents, the study found, and 13% of rural respondents felt supported by their communities, compared to 35% of urban and suburban respondents.
Rural LGBTQ+ young people are significantly more likely to suffer mental health issues because of the lack of support where they live, researchers said. Rural LGBTQ+ young people were more likely to meet the threshold for depression (57% compared to 45%), and more likely to report less flourishing than their suburban/urban counterparts (43% to 52%).
The study found that those LGBTQ+ young people who received support from those they lived with, regardless of where they live, are more likely to report flourishing (50% compared to 35%) and less likely to meet the threshold for depression (52% compared to 63%).
One respondent said the impact of lack of support impacted every aspect of their lives.
“Not being able to be who you truly are around the people that you love most or the communities that you’re in is going to make somebody depressed or give them mental issues,” they said in survey interviews, according to Hopelab. “Because if you can’t be who you are around the people that you love most and people who surround you, you’re not gonna be able to feel the best about your well-being.”
Respondents said connecting with those online communities saved their lives.
“Throughout my entire life, I have been bullied relentlessly. However, when I’m online, I find that it is easier to make friends… I met my best friend through role play [games],” one teen told researchers. “Without it, I wouldn’t be here today. So, in the long run, it’s the friendships I’ve made online that have kept me alive all these years.”
Having support in rural areas, especially, can provide rural LGBTQ+ teens with a feeling of belonging, researchers said.
“Our findings highlight the urgent need for safe, affirming in-person spaces and the importance of including young people in shaping the solutions,” Claudia-Santi F. Fernandes, vice president of research and evaluation at Born This Way Foundation, said in a statement. “If we want to improve outcomes, especially for LGBTQ+ young people in rural communities, their voices–and scientific evidence–must guide the work.”
Parent said the survey respondents stressed the importance of having safe spaces for LGBTQ+ young people to gather in their own communities.
“I think most of the participants recognize that you can’t do a lot to change your family if they’re not supportive,” he said. “What they were saying was that finding ways for schools to be supportive and for communities to be supportive in terms of physical spaces (that allowed them) to express themselves safely (and) having places where they can gather and feel safe, uh, were really important to them.”
Hopelab seeks to address mental health in young people through evidence-based innovation, according to its organizers. The Born This Way Foundation was co-founded by Lady Gaga and her mother, West Virginia native Cynthia Bisset Germanotta.
The organization is focused on ending bullying and building up communities, while using research, programming, grants, and partnerships to engage young people and connect them to mental health resources, according to the foundation’s website.
When I was handed the class list at the start of term, I sensed it was an opportunity to try something. The list told me that for most of the students taking the Leadership class, this was their only course for the semester. This is in line with the shift to part-time learning we have seen accelerate in the last five years. For this group of students, their only experience of college this semester would be the time we spent together as a class.
Each year at our graduation ceremony, we interview a couple of the graduating students and ask them about their time at college. When asked for a highlight, inevitably, almost without exception, year after year, the answer is the same: the community. It is the friendships they forge with their peers, friendships that often go on for years afterwards. They thrive on studying together. They love sharing life together. And they relish the interaction with the faculty. We all share a common meal area, so at any given lunch time you can find students of each year level sitting at the same table as faculty and staff discussing anything from the content of the morning’s lecture to the health of their family or the agonies of which team they support or some obscure drama they are streaming. Community is a very important value for our college.
Thirty or forty years ago, the experience of learning was summed up in the adage, “one third lecture, one third library, one third lunchroom.” But what happens when a part time student is not around for lunch times? And they don’t hang out in the library but access the journals and e-books remotely? That only leaves the lecture. The classroom becomes the focal point, not just of learning, but of the student’s experience of community and college as a whole. How then do I foster community among a class that will not be around any part of the college week other than this solitary class on a Tuesday afternoon?
Cake.
On Sunday afternoons I would bake a cake and bring it in for class on Tuesday. After the first hour of class, we would stop, make a cup of tea or coffee, and eat cake together. Now let me be very clear, I am no celebrity baker! I was using simple recipes. Across the semester I rotated through four types of cake: cinnamon tea cake, vanilla butter, chocolate, and orange cake. I have a limited repertoire!
The feedback from the students was very positive. A buzz quickly developed around ‘what type of the cake is it this week?’ (cinnamon tea cake proved to be the favourite). It became a ‘social lubricant’ allowing students who had not met before to comfortably chat and move beyond stilted conversations about the next assignment. And their expressions of thankfulness gave me the sense that they felt cared for. The Tuesday afternoon Leadership class developed their own sense of community that reflected the broader fabric of the college.
The success of the ‘cake experiment’ reinforces two important points for me as an educator. First, educational is fundamentally relational. Previous studies have highlighted that student learning is fostered through supportive relationships, both with faculty and student peers (Cranton 2016). As faculty bring authenticity to the classroom, it facilitates trust, openness, and engagement with others and the material (Cranton 2016). Personal authenticity is not just another part of an educator’s skill set, switched on and off when entering and leaving the classroom – authenticity needs to be authentic! I feel privileged in my context that I have the opportunity to get to know students and can genuinely say I enjoy relating to them. They are seeking to be authentic with me, as I with them. This reinforces the finding that “students appreciate feeling cared about and they want to connect with faculty members on a personal level” (Grantham et al 2015).
Of course, cake is only one example of how this can be developed. One of my colleagues teaches a foundation level courses to first years. Each semester, he invites his first-year class to his house for afternoon tea. It’s not compulsory yet most of the students relish taking up the invitation.
Second, the cake experiment fits with discussions about hidden curriculum. This has been a learning point for me as I have reflected on the semester. In our Leadership class we have discussed issues of power and ethics, developing culture, teams, vision and strategy, and patterns and styles of leadership; and the students have brought case studies from their contexts that have prompted excellent discussions. Yet I wonder if the most important thing I taught was through baking cakes. If the hidden curriculum are the behaviors, relationships, and values modelled and emphasized (Shaw, 2022), then perhaps baking cakes aligned with our discussions of how we use power as leaders, how we develop culture as leaders, how we embed vision as leaders and so on. The formal curriculum was reinforced by the hidden curriculum. And the hidden curriculum always overrides the formal curriculum!
It has been a(nother) semester of learning for me: yes, at heart of education is the relationships I enjoy with the students, and who I am is so much of what I bring to the classroom. Speaking of learning, I will need to learn some new cake recipes to expand my range for next semester.
David Wright is Dean of Students and Practical Ministry Lecturer at Bible College SA, Adelaide, Australia. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses for the last thirteen years. His current research interests include gradeless learning and personal formation, and he is writing a book on the training and equipping of people to complement his earlier work on Integration in theological education.
References
Cranton, P. 2016. Understanding and Promoting Transformative Learning: A Guide to Theory and Practice. Sterling: Stylus.
Grantham, A., Robinson, E. E., Chapman, D., 2015. “That Truly Meant a Lot to Me.”: A Qualitative Examination of Meaningful Faculty-Student Interactions. College Teaching 63: 125-132.
Shaw, P. 2022. Transforming Theological Education: A Practical Handbook for Integrative Learning. 2nd edition. Carlisle: Langham Global.
When I was handed the class list at the start of term, I sensed it was an opportunity to try something. The list told me that for most of the students taking the Leadership class, this was their only course for the semester. This is in line with the shift to part-time learning we have seen accelerate in the last five years. For this group of students, their only experience of college this semester would be the time we spent together as a class.
Each year at our graduation ceremony, we interview a couple of the graduating students and ask them about their time at college. When asked for a highlight, inevitably, almost without exception, year after year, the answer is the same: the community. It is the friendships they forge with their peers, friendships that often go on for years afterwards. They thrive on studying together. They love sharing life together. And they relish the interaction with the faculty. We all share a common meal area, so at any given lunch time you can find students of each year level sitting at the same table as faculty and staff discussing anything from the content of the morning’s lecture to the health of their family or the agonies of which team they support or some obscure drama they are streaming. Community is a very important value for our college.
Thirty or forty years ago, the experience of learning was summed up in the adage, “one third lecture, one third library, one third lunchroom.” But what happens when a part time student is not around for lunch times? And they don’t hang out in the library but access the journals and e-books remotely? That only leaves the lecture. The classroom becomes the focal point, not just of learning, but of the student’s experience of community and college as a whole. How then do I foster community among a class that will not be around any part of the college week other than this solitary class on a Tuesday afternoon?
Cake.
On Sunday afternoons I would bake a cake and bring it in for class on Tuesday. After the first hour of class, we would stop, make a cup of tea or coffee, and eat cake together. Now let me be very clear, I am no celebrity baker! I was using simple recipes. Across the semester I rotated through four types of cake: cinnamon tea cake, vanilla butter, chocolate, and orange cake. I have a limited repertoire!
The feedback from the students was very positive. A buzz quickly developed around ‘what type of the cake is it this week?’ (cinnamon tea cake proved to be the favourite). It became a ‘social lubricant’ allowing students who had not met before to comfortably chat and move beyond stilted conversations about the next assignment. And their expressions of thankfulness gave me the sense that they felt cared for. The Tuesday afternoon Leadership class developed their own sense of community that reflected the broader fabric of the college.
The success of the ‘cake experiment’ reinforces two important points for me as an educator. First, educational is fundamentally relational. Previous studies have highlighted that student learning is fostered through supportive relationships, both with faculty and student peers (Cranton 2016). As faculty bring authenticity to the classroom, it facilitates trust, openness, and engagement with others and the material (Cranton 2016). Personal authenticity is not just another part of an educator’s skill set, switched on and off when entering and leaving the classroom – authenticity needs to be authentic! I feel privileged in my context that I have the opportunity to get to know students and can genuinely say I enjoy relating to them. They are seeking to be authentic with me, as I with them. This reinforces the finding that “students appreciate feeling cared about and they want to connect with faculty members on a personal level” (Grantham et al 2015).
Of course, cake is only one example of how this can be developed. One of my colleagues teaches a foundation level courses to first years. Each semester, he invites his first-year class to his house for afternoon tea. It’s not compulsory yet most of the students relish taking up the invitation.
Second, the cake experiment fits with discussions about hidden curriculum. This has been a learning point for me as I have reflected on the semester. In our Leadership class we have discussed issues of power and ethics, developing culture, teams, vision and strategy, and patterns and styles of leadership; and the students have brought case studies from their contexts that have prompted excellent discussions. Yet I wonder if the most important thing I taught was through baking cakes. If the hidden curriculum are the behaviors, relationships, and values modelled and emphasized (Shaw, 2022), then perhaps baking cakes aligned with our discussions of how we use power as leaders, how we develop culture as leaders, how we embed vision as leaders and so on. The formal curriculum was reinforced by the hidden curriculum. And the hidden curriculum always overrides the formal curriculum!
It has been a(nother) semester of learning for me: yes, at heart of education is the relationships I enjoy with the students, and who I am is so much of what I bring to the classroom. Speaking of learning, I will need to learn some new cake recipes to expand my range for next semester.
David Wright is Dean of Students and Practical Ministry Lecturer at Bible College SA, Adelaide, Australia. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses for the last thirteen years. His current research interests include gradeless learning and personal formation, and he is writing a book on the training and equipping of people to complement his earlier work on Integration in theological education.
References
Cranton, P. 2016. Understanding and Promoting Transformative Learning: A Guide to Theory and Practice. Sterling: Stylus.
Grantham, A., Robinson, E. E., Chapman, D., 2015. “That Truly Meant a Lot to Me.”: A Qualitative Examination of Meaningful Faculty-Student Interactions. College Teaching 63: 125-132.
Shaw, P. 2022. Transforming Theological Education: A Practical Handbook for Integrative Learning. 2nd edition. Carlisle: Langham Global.
