Tag: opinion

  • 4 Ways Chairs Can Develop Relational Attention (opinion)

    4 Ways Chairs Can Develop Relational Attention (opinion)

    It can be tempting for department chairs to think about their role as a series of tasks on a to-do list: managing faculty and staff reviews, running department meetings, implementing a new university policy, dealing with unexpected emergencies. After all, it’s an ever-changing list that demands attention.

    But focusing only on tasks misses the ways that chairs shape how department members interact with one another and the quality of relationships that result. Meetings are a common example. Chairs have choices about how to organize meetings, help staff feel included or excluded, coach new assistant professors about participation norms, and assign people to committees. How chairs do these routine tasks can have powerful effects on how department members relate to one another and the quality of relationships that develop. Cumulatively, small moments of interaction have a profound influence on a department and its culture and can be an important ingredient in helping to make departments healthier places to work.

    However, many chairs aren’t used to noticing all the ways their everyday chair work impacts work relationships. To take advantage of the opportunity to positively impact relationships in departments, chairs need to develop their relational attention, or ability to notice opportunities to impact how people connect. Two years ago, I developed a six-part workshop series, Healthy Relationships at Work Fellowship, for chairs at University of Massachusetts Amherst, for a small cohort to work on just this issue. By engaging with research-based practices, they were able to develop competence and confidence as leaders while improving the quality of relationships in their departments.

    Below, I describe four ways chairs can develop their relational attention and increase the occurrence of positive, inclusive relationships in their department. In describing these four suggestions, I share examples from two cohorts of chairs I’ve had the pleasure to work with.

    1. Invest in one-on-one relationships with department members.

    It is easy for department chairs to take for granted that they know the faculty and staff in their departments—and that they know you. After all, as a faculty member you have likely had many casual conversations and sat in many meetings with them. But relying on your past knowledge can leave chairs with an incomplete view. We all inevitably have some faculty or staff we favor and those we avoid, leaving us with uneven relationships and information about their work, motivations and lives. Similarly, faculty and staff may have a hard time viewing you as an impartial department chair unless you take the time to demonstrate it. After all, making visible efforts to cultivate relationships is a cornerstone of inclusive leadership.

    One important way to create the foundations for positive inclusive relationships with your department members is to re-establish your relationships with them. You can do this by holding 30-minute one-on-one meetings with every member of your department. Given that chairs often have very little idea about what staff do and how they contribute to the department, it is important to meet with staff as well as faculty. In some departments, it may be important to meet with students as well.

    Before beginning these one-on-one conversations, try to get in a mindset of openness, humility and genuine curiosity, no matter your relationship history. Ideally these meetings can occur in their workspace (versus your own office) so you convey that you are interested in them and are willing to come to their space. Ask open-ended questions about their interests, their motivations and their jobs. In smaller departments, these meetings can happen over the course of a month, while in larger departments it may require a whole semester. In larger departments, where one-on-one meetings seem impractical, you can hold meetings with small groups of people in similar roles or ranks. These meetings demonstrate that you want to hear from everyone, no matter your past relationships.

    You may also learn new things that you can use to make your department a healthier place. For example, you may learn that two faculty unknowingly have a shared research or teaching interest. By connecting them, you can help to strengthen the connections within the department and potentially spark new collaborations.

    What you learn in these meetings can also help to address unhealthy relationships. For example, one chair learned new information about a curmudgeonly faculty member who frustrated his colleagues (including the new chair!) because he had a reputation for not pulling his weight on committees. When the new chair asked him, “How do you want to contribute to the department?” she learned that the one thing he cared about was graduate education. With this new information, she placed him on a committee that matched his interests, and he contributed to the committee fully. By crafting his job to his interests, the faculty member was more intrinsically motivated to participate, and his colleagues were no longer annoyed by his behavior on committees.

    1. Learn about the diversity of your faculty, staff and students and demonstrate your interest in learning from them.

    Departments, like all organizations, are diverse in visible (race and gender) and invisible (political, neurodiversity) ways. While there is lots of debate about DEI these days, learning about the diversity of your faculty and staff helps you become a better leader because you can understand how to help everyone succeed. To develop positive inclusive relationships, chairs have to make visible effort to demonstrate respect and express genuine interest in people different from themselves.

    To build chairs’ foundational knowledge, you can learn about the experiences of diverse groups in your department, school or university by reading institutional resources, such as climate surveys, or by having a conversation with college or university-level experts. For example, a conversation with a school DEI leader can speak to the experiences of your faculty, staff and students. A university’s international office can provide insight into immigration-related issues, which may be useful for understanding the complexity of managing immigration for international faculty, staff and students.

    Bolstering your own knowledge can help contextualize issues that come across your desk. For example, if a student comes to you to complain about a faculty member’s teaching, and you have learned that members of that group have to fight for respect in your university’s classrooms, your knowledge about the broader climate can help you think of this complaint in light of the larger context as you consider what an appropriate response might be.

    If you have more confidence in your knowledge, skills and abilities to manage DEI, you can connect more publicly. For example, if there are on-campus employee resource groups or off-campus community organizations, reach out and tell them you would like to learn from them; ask if there are any events that would be appropriate for you to attend. Given your stronger foundation in terms of the local DEI landscape, you can offer to connect marginalized faculty and staff with on-campus mentors and communities.

    The ability of chairs to engage publicly with DEI issues will depend both on their own expertise and their institutional and local contexts, as DEI work grows more fraught in many parts of the country. Some chairs who have expertise in DEI or related topics may be comfortable hosting activities in their departments. For example, one chair hosts a monthly social justice lunch and learn, a voluntary reading group for faculty and staff. Given her expertise, she chooses the article and is comfortable facilitating the discussion herself.

    Chairs can also create opportunities for critical feedback for the department. For example, if there is tension between groups within the department, instead of ignoring it, create a game plan for how to receive critical feedback about what’s causing the tension and how it might be addressed. Faculty and staff exert a lot of energy withstanding such tension; finding ways to address it can be a huge relief and release of energy.

    Remember, faculty and staff evaluate a leader’s inclusivity based not just on one-time events, but instead search for patterns in terms of the leader’s efforts around inclusion. You don’t have to have all the answers about how to serve the diversity of members in your department, but you can strengthen your networks to include those with knowledge and expertise.

    1. View committees as connection opportunities.

    Chairs can use committees, meetings and other routine ways that faculty and staff gather as opportunities to build higher-quality connections. By focusing your relational attention on these routine interactions, you can improve relationship quality. For example, people often don’t know why they’ve been placed on a committee or task force, nor do they know what other people bring to the table. As a chair, you can use introductions strategically. Publicly communicating your view of faculty and staff strengths and potential contributions to committees, task forces and meetings helps them feel respected and makes it more likely others will view them that way. This can increase the chances that these routine ways of interacting will result in positive connections.

    Committees and meetings are also opportunities to create greater inclusion of staff and to spread knowledge about their work. University staff too often feel like second-class citizens and that faculty don’t know or care about their expertise. To counter this tension, one chair introduces staff members as experts in their respective areas and provides them with opportunities to present in their areas of expertise in meetings. This chair reported that these innovations created new positive connections between faculty and staff; faculty had a new appreciation for staff work, and the staff felt seen and valued.

    1. Design social events as connection opportunities.

    We are in a moment in which many people want, and some have, the ability to work remotely. At the same time, faculty and staff desire more connection from work. As an architect of social relationships, chairs have the opportunity to hold meaningful social events that will bring people together. There is no one-size-fits all for designing such events: The goal should be to make events magnets, not mandates.

    To start, think creatively about what will bring people together in your specific department. For example, one department chair knew all faculty would come together to support their students. In his department, faculty wanted their undergraduates to have a good experience in the major because they genuinely valued undergraduate education. Accordingly, the chair organized an open house event for faculty and students. In the process of connecting with students, faculty also deepened their connections to each other.

    Another chair created a social event around the dreaded faculty annual reviews. The day before the reviews were due, she reserved a conference room and brought snacks so that faculty could trade tips about how to complete the cumbersome form. Still others hosted department parties at their homes, used departmental funds to host monthly lunches or upgraded the department’s shared space to make it more conducive to shared interactions.

    Improving the quality of relationships through social events in a department doesn’t have to rely on the chair alone; it can also be the work of a culture committee that can brainstorm social events that will resonate. Ideally, these events will become part of the rhythm of the department. One caveat: It is not advisable to use workplace socializing to try to repair relationships between warring internal factions. In fact, it can make things worse.

    Each of these four approaches can help chairs invest in and improve the health of relationships in their departments. It is, of course, also important to contain and manage negative relationships in them (that is another topic I address in the Healthy Relationships at Work program). But taking advantage of these everyday opportunities through strategically investing in your relationships, your knowledge and the ways people connect provides important sustenance to support departmental relationships and ultimately a positive departmental culture.

    Emily Heaphy is a professor of management, a John F. Kennedy Faculty Fellow and an Office of Faculty Development Fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She developed the Healthy Relationships at Work Fellowship for department chairs when she was a Chancellor’s Leadership Fellow affiliated with OFD in 2023–24.

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  • Rejecting the Compact Is an Opportunity (opinion)

    Rejecting the Compact Is an Opportunity (opinion)

    The Trump administration’s initial effort to convince universities to join its “Compact for Academic Excellence” did not go well. Of the original nine colleges and universities, so far none has signed it, and seven—Brown University, Dartmouth College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Universities of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Southern California and Virginia—have loudly and forcefully rejected it, citing “our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone” (MIT) and “the government’s lack of authority to dictate our curriculum or the content of academic speech” (Brown).

    The Trump administration made more headway with its earlier efforts to force a “deal” on one university at a time. But that was never going to be enough. An authoritarian needs to establish control over the entire higher education sector, not just a handful of institutions. But the truth is, this government does not have the legal leverage or even the staff to negotiate bespoke agreements with the thousands of colleges and universities in the United States.

    The compact is an effort to overcome that problem. But it is also a gift. It has flipped the default: Now collective action does not necessarily require affirmative acts like banding together to file a lawsuit (although several are warranted). Collective action can simply take the form of nonacquiescence. All university leaders need to do is … nothing.

    Last week, the Trump administration—apparently unafraid to look desperate—decided to open the compact to any American college or university that will accept its terms. Suddenly, literally anyone affiliated with any college or university—faculty, staff, students, parents, alumni, trustees, donors—has the opportunity to use their voice to help persuade their institution not to sign, as their counterparts at the original nine invitees have been doing rather vociferously and, in six cases so far, successfully. By opening the compact so broadly, the government is risking, or inviting, an equally broad response: a recognition throughout the vast American higher education sector that the integrity and value of our whole enterprise depend on independence from government control.

    Regardless of their politics, every university leader should reject this compact. University leaders have a fiduciary responsibility to plan ahead on a time scale longer than three years. As Sally Kornbluth, the president of MIT, explained, “America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition,” not special “preferences” for institutions that submit to government control. Future federal governments are much more likely to embrace Kornbluth’s view than Trump’s. It does not put a university in a strong position to compete for future faculty and students if the university enthusiastically agrees to toe one administration’s political line.

    To sign the compact is to invite a breathtaking degree of federal government control. Colleges signing it agree that in the future, if the Department of Justice—perhaps acting on orders from the president—“finds” that the university is disobeying any one of the compact’s many ambiguous commands, the department can take away all the university’s federal funding for a year or more. That includes not only scientific research grants but also student loans or Pell Grants, potentially even the university’s 501(c)(3) status—and not only future funds but also, incredibly, funds already spent that must somehow be returned.

    The ambiguous rules that signing institutions must avoid transgressing are numerous. Signing universities must “abolish” or “transform” academic departments that “belittle” “conservative ideas.” They must screen out foreign students with “anti-American values” and those with “hostility” toward any of America’s “allies.” They must punish students or faculty whose speech, in the DOJ’s opinion, “support[s]” any group the government deems a terrorist group, which would include “antifa” as well as Hamas (and the government has a long recent record of defining “support for Hamas” extremely broadly, so that it encompasses much pro-Palestinian speech).

    They must commit to “defining” and “interpreting” gender in the government’s preferred way, which denies that transgender people exist. Signing institutions must obtain, to the DOJ’s satisfaction, “a broad spectrum of viewpoints” not only in the university as a whole, but “within every field, department, school, and teaching unit.” They must admit students on the basis of sufficiently “objective” criteria. Leaders of signing universities must avoid speaking out about “societal and political events” beyond those that directly affect the university.

    Not a single one of those terms is self-defining. The arbiter of whether a university is fulfilling these vague promises is a Department of Justice that has a record of acting in bad faith and takes orders from a notoriously mercurial president. No university leader or trustee can truthfully say that it fulfills their fiduciary responsibility to sign their school up for this.

    The compact is also blatantly illegal. The Trump administration has cited no statutes that give it the authority to boss universities around in this way, because there aren’t any. Many of the compact’s provisions listed above—and others—violate the First Amendment. Clear black-letter law holds that what the government cannot impose by law, it also cannot impose as a condition of receiving government funds.

    It is crucial to keep in mind the larger context here: the rise of an authoritarian regime that seeks to undermine the independence of many types of civil society institutions, not just universities. The national governments in both Turkey and Hungary have increased political control over their universities as part of their consolidation of power, but neither has gone as far as this compact would go in putting universities under the government’s thumb. To sign the compact is to participate in an authoritarian project.

    Any university leaders still inclined to join the compact should consider a final argument: The dollars and cents simply don’t add up. The compact requires, among many other things, a five-year tuition freeze. In the high-inflation environment of the second Trump administration, this is very costly. (At today’s 3 percent inflation rate, it amounts to a 16 percent cut in real terms over five years; if inflation continues to rise, that could easily become a 20 to 25 percent cut.)

    The government offers a vague, nonbinding promise that it will give signing institutions extra research grants, but such grants do not easily make up for lost tuition in an environment of rising costs. The grants require doing the research; that eats up most of the money. Any college that becomes dependent on extra grants, beyond those they would have been qualified to receive without the compact, is going to be in big fiscal trouble down the line.

    This compact has vast implications, which deserve careful study. For faculty, staff, students, parents, donors and alumni hoping for a no but willing to settle for silence, time is your friend; inaction is your goal. A faculty committee would certainly be in order. If you do nothing, and most other universities do nothing, the government will have no more leverage over your institution than over any other, and academic freedom and the pursuit of knowledge and truth will continue for another day.

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  • Normalize the Gap Year (opinion)

    Normalize the Gap Year (opinion)

    We’re two admissions leaders working to reframe how families and institutions think about the gap year. I’m Carol, a former college admissions dean with more than 20 years in higher education, and I’m also a therapist who works with teens. My co-author, Becky Mulholland, is director of first-year admission and operations at the University of Rhode Island. Together, we’re building a new kind of gap year model, one that centers on intention, purpose and career readiness for all.

    The gap year concept is overdue for a cultural reset. Most popular options on the market focus on travel, outdoor adventure or service learning, but they rarely emphasize self-exploration in conjunction with career readiness or curiosity about the future of work. The term itself is widely misunderstood and sometimes dismissed. Despite its reputation as a luxury for the privileged, it’s often the families juggling cost, stress and uncertainty who stand to gain the most from a well-supported pause.

    For many families, college is the most expensive decision they’ll ever make. Taking time to pause, reflect and plan shouldn’t be seen as risky—it should be seen as wise. At 17 or 18, it’s a lot to ask a young person to know what they want to do with the rest of their life. A 2017 federal data report found that about 30 percent of undergrads who had declared majors changed their major at least once, and about 10 percent changed majors more than once. These shifts often lead to extra courses and sometimes an extra semester or even a year. That’s a lot of wasted money for families who could have benefited from a more intentional pause.

    And yet for many parents, the phrase “gap year” still stirs anxiety. They imagine their child lying on a couch for three months, doing nothing, or worse, never learning anything useful and losing all momentum to return to school. The idea feels foreign, risky and hard to explain. They don’t know what to tell their friends or extended family. We push back on that fear and work to normalize the idea of intentional, structured time off. It’s not just for the elite—it needs to be reclaimed as a culturally acceptable norm. That’s why we champion paid, structured earn-while-you-learn pathways such as youth apprenticeships, paid internships, stipend-backed fellowships and employer-sponsored projects that keep income stable while skills grow.

    We personally promote the value of intentional pauses when talking with families and prospective students about college, helping them reframe what a year of growth and clarity can mean. We also strongly support programs with built-in pause requirements before graduate school. I’ve read thousands of applications as a dean and witnessed how powerful that year can be when it’s well guided.

    Gap years, when framed and supported correctly, can foster self-discovery, emotional growth and direction. But the gap year industry itself also needs to evolve. The industry should move toward models that prioritize intentional career exploration, rooted not only in personal growth and self-awareness but in helping students find a sense of fulfillment in their future careers and lives. If colleges acknowledged the value of these experiences more visibly in their advising models and admissions narratives, they could relieve pressure on families and students and potentially reduce dropout rates and improve long-term outcomes.

    We believe it’s time for higher education to actively support and normalize the gap year, not as an elite detour, but as a practical and often necessary path to college and career success. It’s time to give students and their families permission to pause.

    Carol Langlois is chief academic officer at ESAI, a generative AI platform for college applicants, and a therapist who specializes in working with teens. She previously served in dean, director and vice provost roles in college admissions.

    Becky Mulholland is director of first-year admission and operations at the University of Rhode Island.

    Becky and Carol both serve on the Policy Subcommittee of the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s AI in College Admission Special Interest Group.

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  • Framework for GenAI in Graduate Career Development (opinion)

    Framework for GenAI in Graduate Career Development (opinion)

    In Plato’s Phaedrus, King Thamus feared writing would make people forgetful and create the appearance of wisdom without true understanding. His concern was not merely about a new tool, but about a technology that would fundamentally transform how humans think, remember and communicate. Today, we face similar anxieties about generative AI. Like writing before it, generative AI is not just a tool but a transformative technology reshaping how we think, write and work.

    This transformation is particularly consequential in graduate education, where students develop professional competencies while managing competing demands, research deadlines, teaching responsibilities, caregiving obligations and often financial pressures. Generative AI’s appeal is clear; it promises to accelerate tasks that compete for limited time and cognitive resources. Graduate students report using ChatGPT and similar tools for professional development tasks, such as drafting cover letters, preparing for interviews and exploring career options, often without institutional guidance on effective and ethical use.

    Most AI policies focus on coursework and academic integrity; professional development contexts remain largely unaddressed. Faculty and career advisers need practical strategies for guiding students to use generative AI critically and effectively. This article proposes a four-stage framework—explore, build, connect, refine—for guiding students’ generative AI use in professional development.

    Professional Development in the AI Era

    Over the past decade, graduate education has invested significantly in career readiness through dedicated offices, individual development plans and co-curricular programming—for example, the Council of Graduate Schools’ PhD Career Pathways initiative involved 75 U.S. doctoral institutions building data-informed professional development, and the Graduate Career Consortium, representing graduate-focused career staff, grew from roughly 220 members in 2014 to 500-plus members across about 220 institutions by 2022.

    These investments reflect recognition that Ph.D. and master’s students pursue diverse career paths, with fewer than half of STEM Ph.D.s entering tenure-track positions immediately after graduation; the figure for humanities and social sciences also remains below 50 percent over all.

    We now face a different challenge: integrating a technology that touches every part of the knowledge economy. Generative AI adoption among graduate students has been swift and largely unsupervised: At Ohio State University, 48 percent of graduate students reported using ChatGPT in spring 2024. At the University of Maryland, 77 percent of students report using generative AI, and 35 percent use it routinely for academic work, with graduate students more likely than undergraduates to be routine users; among routine student users, 38 percent said they did so without instructor guidance.

    Some subskills, like mechanical formatting, will matter less in this landscape; higher-order capacities—framing problems, tailoring messages to audiences, exercising ethical discernment—will matter more. For example, in a 2025 National Association of Colleges and Employers survey, employers rank communication and critical thinking among the most important competencies for new hires, and in a 2024 LinkedIn report, communication was the most in-demand skill.

    Without structured guidance, students face conflicting messages: Some faculty ban AI use entirely, while others assume so-called digital natives will figure it out independently. This leaves students navigating an ethical and practical minefield with high stakes for their careers. A framework offers consistency and clear principles across advising contexts.

    We propose a four-stage framework that mirrors how professionals actually learn: explore, build, connect, refine. This approach adapts design thinking principles, the iterative cycle of prototyping and testing, to AI-augmented professional development. Students rapidly generate options with AI support, test them in low-stakes environments and refine based on feedback. While we use writing and communication examples throughout for clarity, this framework applies broadly to professional development.

    Explore: Map Possibilities and Surface Gaps

    Exploring begins by mapping career paths, fellowship opportunities and professional norms, then identifying gaps in skills or expectations. A graduate student can ask a generative AI chatbot to infer competencies from their lab work or course projects, then compare those skills to current job postings in their target sector to identify skills they need to develop. They can generate a matrix of fellowship opportunities in their field, including eligibility requirements, deadlines and required materials, and then validate every detail on official websites. They can ask AI to describe communication norms in target sectors, comparing the tone and structure of academic versus industry cover letters—not to memorize a script, but to understand audience expectations they will need to meet.

    Students should not, however, rely on AI-generated job descriptions or program requirements without verification, as the technology may conflate roles, misrepresent qualifications or cite outdated information and sources.

    Build: Learn Through Iterative Practice

    Building turns insight into artifacts and habits. With generative AI as a sounding board, students can experiment with different résumé architectures for the same goal, testing chronological versus skills-based formats or tailoring a CV for academic versus industry positions. They can generate detailed outlines for an individual development plan, breaking down abstract goals into concrete, time-bound actions. They can devise practice tasks that address specific growth areas, such as mock interview questions for teaching-intensive positions or practice pitches tailored to different funding audiences. The point is not to paste in AI text; it is to lower the barriers of uncertainty and blank-page intimidation, making it easier to start building while keeping authorship and evidence squarely in the student’s hands.

    Connect: Communicate and Network With Purpose

    Connecting focuses on communicating with real people. Here, generative AI can lower the stakes for high-pressure interactions. By asking a chatbot to act the part of various audience members, students can rehearse multiple versions of a tailored 60-second elevator pitch, such as for a recruiter at a career fair, a cross-disciplinary faculty member at a poster session or a community partner exploring collaboration. Generative AI can also simulate informational interviews if students prompt the system to ask follow-up questions or even refine user inputs.

    In addition, students can leverage generative AI to draft initial outreach notes to potential mentors that the students then personalize and fact-check. They can explore networking strategies for conferences or professional association events, identifying whom to approach and what questions to ask based on publicly available information about attendees’ work.

    Even just five years ago, completing this nonexhaustive list of networking tasks might have seemed an impossibility for graduate students with already crammed agendas. Generative AI, however, affords graduate students the opportunity to become adept networkers without sacrificing much time from research and scholarship. Crucially, generative AI creates a low-risk space to practice, while it is the student who ultimately supplies credibility and authentic voice. Generative AI cannot build genuine relationships, but it can help students prepare for the human interactions where relationships form.

    Refine: Test, Adapt and Verify

    Refining is where judgment becomes visible. Before submitting a fellowship essay, for example, a student can ask the generative AI chatbot to simulate likely reviewer critiques based on published evaluation criteria, then use that feedback to align revisions to scoring rubrics. They can A/B test two AI-generated narrative approaches from the build stage with trusted readers, advisers or peers to determine which is more compelling. Before a campus talk, they can ask the chatbot to identify jargon, unclear transitions or slides with excessive text, then revise for audience accessibility.

    In each case, verification and ownership are nonnegotiable: Students must check references, deadlines and factual claims against primary sources and ensure the final product reflects their authentic voice rather than generic AI prose. A student who submits an AI-refined essay without verification may cite outdated program requirements, misrepresent their own experience or include plausible-sounding but fabricated details, undermining credibility with reviewers and jeopardizing their application.

    Cultivate Expert Caution, Not Technical Proficiency

    The goal is not to train students as prompt engineers but to help them exercise expert caution. This means teaching students to ask: Does this AI-generated text reflect my actual experience? Can I defend every claim in an interview? Does this output sound like me, or like generic professional-speak? Does this align with my values and the impression I want to create? If someone asked, “Tell me more about that,” could I elaborate with specific details?

    Students should view AI as a thought partner for the early stages of professional development work: the brainstorming, the first-draft scaffolding, the low-stakes rehearsal. It cannot replace human judgment, authentic relationships or deep expertise. A generative AI tool can help a student draft three versions of an elevator pitch, but only a trusted adviser can tell them which version sounds most genuine. It can list networking strategies, but only actual humans can become meaningful professional connections.

    Conclusion

    Each graduate student brings unique aptitudes, challenges and starting points. First-generation students navigating unfamiliar professional cultures may use generative AI to explore networking norms and decode unstated expectations. International students can practice U.S. interview conventions and professional correspondence styles. Part-time students with limited campus access can get preliminary feedback before precious advising appointments. Students managing disabilities or mental health challenges can use generative AI to reduce the cognitive load of initial drafting, preserving energy for higher-order revision and relationship-building.

    Used critically and transparently, generative AI can help students at all starting points explore, build, connect and refine their professional paths, alongside faculty advisers and career development professionals—never replacing them, but providing just-in-time feedback and broader access to coaching-style support.

    The question is no longer whether generative AI belongs in professional development. The real question is whether we will guide students to use it thoughtfully or leave them to navigate it alone. The explore-build-connect-refine framework offers one path forward: a structured approach that develops both professional competency and critical judgment. We choose guidance.

    Ioannis Vasileios Chremos is program manager for professional development at the University of Michigan Medical School Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies.

    William A. Repetto is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English and the research office at the University of Delaware.

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  • On Climate Action, a View From Behind the Pack (opinion)

    On Climate Action, a View From Behind the Pack (opinion)

    The University of California system recently made waves by announcing a commitment “to fully decarbonize no later than 2045.” Unlike many “carbon neutrality” or “net zero” plans that rely heavily on carbon offsets, the UC system plans to cut emissions from campus electricity and fossil fuel use by at least 90 percent from 2019 levels and to balance residual emissions by investing in projects to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

    This win for the climate did not come easy: As activists from UC San Diego relate, they spent years building a coalition across campuses. Such success marks the UC system as a leader in American higher education, well ahead of other prestigious research universities with offset-heavy carbon neutrality plans—and well ahead of Purdue University, where we teach, which has no declared plans for decarbonization.

    Here, we wish to discuss our experiences advocating for a climate action plan at Purdue, where among our peer institutions we are decidedly a laggard, not a leader, in the climate space. We hope that detailing our frustrating lack of success provides a sober counternarrative to the success story of the UC system. Furthermore, we hope that knowing about our efforts may help others who are similarly involved in advocating for climate action at campuses in red states.

    Purdue’s Climate Story So Far

    A public, land-grant university in north-central Indiana, Purdue enrolls more than 44,000 undergraduates and almost 14,000 graduate and professional students. Purdue frequently touts itself as a world leader in innovation of all sorts, from artificial intelligence to biomedical research, even highlighting research on sustainability. Due to its size, the energy-intensive nature of its research activities and its location in a climate that sees both cold winters and hot, humid summers, Purdue’s campus emits as much climate pollution as a small city—439,000 metric tons per year of carbon dioxide equivalent as of 2023, the latest year for which official estimates are available.

    The Purdue community cares about sustainability: Classes in a wide range of majors feature considerable discussion of sustainability, and researchers across campus study the causes of and potential solutions for climate change. Purdue has won awards and recognition for low-hanging fruit, such as from Tree Campus USA and Bee Campus USA. Purdue also touts being named one of the most sustainable campuses by QS, although when one looks under the hood, such rankings give remarkably little weight to emissions reductions on campus. In the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s more rigorous reporting system, Purdue scored zero out of four on clean and renewable energy and 1.08 out of eight on greenhouse gas emissions.

    Purdue faces unique decarbonization challenges. Our university’s administration ultimately answers to the Indiana state government, which has recently canceled the state’s climate action planning and enables most counties to restrict renewable energy development. Electricity in Indiana has the highest carbon intensity of any state other than three major coal producers—Kentucky, West Virginia and Wyoming—and entails almost four times higher greenhouse gas emissions per unit of energy than electricity in California. Duke Energy, the utility that serves Purdue, is the fourth largest lobby in Indiana.

    While these challenges may seem daunting, progress on climate is possible even in Indiana. In 2023, our colleagues at Indiana University launched a plan promising carbon neutrality by 2040. They aim to get there by modest changes, such as improving energy efficiency in buildings and implementing renewable energy on campus. Purdue has also made progress—which we applaud—mainly by transitioning its combined heat and power plant from coal to natural gas. In 2023, Purdue estimated that its emissions were 27 percent lower than their coal-heavy 2011 level. But this only represents a small start to the actions needed for Purdue to live up to its obligations to students, staff, faculty, the community and, ultimately, the planet.

    Community Will and Administrative Inaction

    Many Purdue community members want substantial climate action. In 2020, more than 2,000 Purdue students signed a petition calling for Purdue to develop a climate action plan and create a universitywide, stand-alone sustainability office. The university’s president at the time, Mitch Daniels—Indiana’s former Republican governor and a noted climate change skeptic—dismissed the petition.

    In the fall of 2022, students and faculty formed the Purdue Climate Action Collective (PCAC), aimed at pressuring the university to develop a climate action plan and to be transparent in reporting emissions. In the spring of 2023, the Purdue Student Government, the Graduate Student Government and the University Senate each passed resolutions calling on the university to commit to a climate action plan. The Senate resolution also called upon Purdue to join the Greater Lafayette Climate Action Plan, developed by the surrounding county and cities. Once again, Purdue ignored these calls.

    Since then, PCAC has mounted numerous protests, spoken at student events, peppered campus with signs, reached out to the administration and attended Board of Trustees meetings to express our concerns. Our board is entirely appointed by the governor of Indiana. PCAC has also launched a new petition, now at 1,600 signatures.

    Despite the Purdue community’s advocacy for climate action, our new president, Mung Chiang, has authorized no comprehensive, campuswide climate action plan. The nearest thing is the Campus Planning, Architecture and Sustainability office’s Sustainability Master Plan for 2020–25, which aims to reduce Purdue’s emissions from electricity and fossil fuel use 50 percent below 2011 levels by 2025 and to pursue 500 kilowatts of renewable energy. While we applaud these near-term goals, and the incomplete but significant progress toward achieving them, decarbonizing Purdue will require making a long-term plan to outgrow natural gas and Duke Energy’s carbon-intensive electricity.

    On this topic, the Purdue administration told the University Senate in 2024 that “Purdue has a climate action plan consisting of two parts,” referring senators to the Sustainability Master Plan and to a joint study with Duke Energy on the feasibility of a small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) for the campus. While nuclear might play a role in Purdue’s energy future, SMRs are an unproven technology and should not be used as an excuse to delay the decarbonization of our campus.

    The SMR study’s 2023 report states, “whether SMRs will be an economic option for Duke Energy Indiana’s customers is unknown given current technology, timing and cost uncertainty.” The report cites a likely cost range of $1.1 to $2.25 billion (for context, Purdue’s endowment currently totals $4.1 billion) and discusses design technologies that may only become “commercially viable in 2035–2040.” A responsible climate action plan could certainly include nuclear energy down the road, if it proves successful, but the urgency of the climate crisis demands that institutions address their greenhouse gas emissions now.

    Possible Paths Forward

    Preliminary studies of decarbonization at Purdue suggest that climate action is feasible and affordable. Today, Purdue could take a number of proven, cost-effective actions, such as improving the efficiency of its building operations (for example, by using software to avoid heating or cooling unoccupied spaces), or increasing parking fees and investing the proceeds in infrastructure and incentives for buses and electric vehicle charging. In the next five to 10 years, Purdue could electrify its vehicle fleet and arrange power-purchase agreements with clean electricity generators in the area, as has been done successfully at places like the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota.

    Long-term pathways to deep emission reductions remain uncertain, especially when considering Scope 3 emissions (emissions that are indirectly generated by university activities, such as employee commuting and flying), but Purdue has options and plenty of experts eager to investigate them. Inclusive and transparent processes for climate action planning would draw upon Purdue community expertise to identify, evaluate and select climate action pathways. But for any of this to happen, our administration must first acknowledge the need for climate action on campus.

    Our experience at Purdue has affirmed that fighting for climate action on public red-state campuses is an uphill battle. We know that change must come from both above and below. Students, faculty and staff concerned about the future of our planet must continue to raise their voices and add to the pressure the university feels. Administrators more inclined toward shared governance—or toward maintaining a livable climate for the future generations that Purdue aims to serve—must also add their voices to the mix. As Purdue begins to act on climate, its passionate community of activists and innovators will be there to support implementation and to celebrate accomplishments along the way.

    Although we have much to learn from the success of places like UC, places like Purdue need a different set of tools and approaches. For those at similarly recalcitrant universities, we hope this message reminds them that institutions won’t take these steps without great pressure. But given the dire warnings about the future of our planet, the importance of local climate action as congressional Republicans and the Trump administration have repealed most federal support for climate action, and the important role of universities as thought leaders, we remain convinced that this is a fight worth having.

    Michael Johnston, a professor of English at Purdue University, founded the Purdue Climate Action Collective and has been involved in the fight for climate justice at Purdue since 2022.

    Kevin Kircher, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and, by courtesy, electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University, studies clean energy technologies and has worked on campus decarbonization projects at Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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  • Staff opinion of using AI – Campus Review

    Staff opinion of using AI – Campus Review

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  • The Meta-Lessons of College (opinion)

    The Meta-Lessons of College (opinion)

    What we learn in school comes in part, and perhaps the smaller part, through the manifest curriculum. We first learn skills—how to read and write and do arithmetic—and then we begin the long process of learning subject matter. This is what school is intended to impart to us. We are taught, in all manner of visible ways, how to do things and what we ought to know.

    From the start, we learn other things as well: how to follow rules, how organizational hierarchies work and how we can be held accountable for misbehavior. We learn, too, what matters to other members of our tribe—individual achievement, success in competition—and what makes some people more important than others. These are elements of the hidden curriculum, or what might be called the meta-lessons of school.

    By the time students get to college, they have already absorbed many such lessons, or they wouldn’t be here at all. But college offers a new set of meta-lessons. These are lessons about knowledge itself: how to assess it, how to identify its varieties, how it’s created. To miss out on these lessons, as can happen, is to miss out on what is most valuable about a college education.

    The meta-lessons of college come with political implications. As political scientists and others have shown, there is a diploma divide in this country. On one side is the largest and most loyal group of Trump supporters: whites without a college degree. On the other side are those with bachelor’s or advanced degrees, who tend to vote Democratic. Clearly, there is something about a college education that makes a difference in political behavior.

    Some analysts have argued that the divide reflects a feeling on the part of non-college-educated whites of being left behind in a high-tech economy. These feelings of disappointment and failure in turn make this group receptive to racist dog whistles—DEI policies are giving undeserving minorities unfair advantages!—used by right-wing politicians. Others have argued that the divide reflects an indoctrination into liberalism that students experience in college.

    Analyses of the diploma divide have been going on for nearly a decade, since soon after Trump’s first election in 2016. Sorting out this body of work would require a separate essay. Here I am proposing only that the divide owes in part to the meta-lessons of college, in that these lessons should, in theory, make people less susceptible to political hucksterism, emotionally manipulative rhetoric and the embrace of simple nostrums as solutions to complex social problems.

    And so it seems worthwhile for pedagogical and civic reasons to put the meta-lessons of college on the table. I identify seven that strike me as crucial. No doubt others’ lists will vary, as will ideas about how much these lessons matter. Yet it seems to me that these lessons, if taken to heart and applied, are what enable college graduates to sort sense from nonsense, fact from fiction and rational argument from demagoguery. Here, then, are the lessons.

    1. Empirical claims are distinct from moral claims. To say, for example, that the death penalty deters capital crimes is to make an empirical claim. It isn’t a matter of opinion. With the right data, we can determine whether this claim is true or not (it’s not). To say the death penalty is wrong is to make a moral claim that must be addressed philosophically. Students who learn how to make this fundamental distinction are less likely to be distracted by philosophical apples when empirical oranges are the issue. Whether revenge feels like justice, they will understand, has no bearing on its practical consequences.
    2. Evidence must be weighed. Arguments gain credence when supported by evidence, especially when it comes to empirical matters. But the importance of assessing the quantity and quality of supporting evidence is less widely appreciated. To the extent that college students learn how to do this—and acquire the inclination to do it even when an argument or analysis is emotionally appealing—they are less likely to be misled by anecdotes, atypical examples or cherry-picked studies that employ weak methods.
    1. Errors often hide in assumptions. An argument can be persuasive because it sounds good and appears to be backed by evidence. Yet it can still be wrong because it starts from false premises. A key meta-lesson in this regard is that it is important to examine the foundations of an argument for logical or empirical cracks that make it unsound. To always ask, “What does this argument take for granted that might be wrong?” is a valuable habit of mind, a habit nurtured in college classrooms where students are taught, likely at the cost of some discomfort, to interrogate their own beliefs.
    2. Logic matters. Poets might want to express the contradictory multitudes they contain, but those who purport to offer serious political analysis must respect logic, the absence of which ought to be discrediting. If your theory of social attraction says birds of a feather flock together, except when opposites attract, you had better find a higher-order principle that reconciles the contradiction or admit that you’re just making stuff up. The meta-lesson that logic matters, again learned through disciplined skepticism, provides at least partial protection against toxic nonsense.
    3. Truth can be elusive, but it is not an illusion. Truth has taken a beating in recent decades under the influence of postmodernist social theories. Even so, it remains possible, unless we abandon the idea of evidence altogether, to have confidence that some empirical claims are true, in the ordinary sense of the term. Students learn this in their subject-matter courses; they learn that research can turn up real facts, that some empirical claims warrant more confidence than others and that some claims are demonstrably wrong. This meta-lesson can help ward off the nihilism—the paralyzing feeling that it is impossible to know what to believe—that often arises in the face of a blizzard of lies.
    1. Expertise is real. In college, students encounter people who have spent years studying, and possibly creating new knowledge about, some aspect of the natural or social world. These people—scientists, scholars—know more about their subject-matter areas than just about anyone else. The meta-lesson, hopefully one that sticks, is that hard-won expertise exists, and while experts might not always be right, they are more reliable sources of analysis than glib pundits and unctuous politicians.
    2. A slogan is not an analysis. Slogans that are useful as rallying cries often deliver no real understanding. “Defund the police” is as useful a guide to crime prevention as “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people” is to addressing the problem of gun violence. Other examples abound. The important meta-lesson is that a useful, sense-making analysis of a complex problem is likely to be complex in itself—and it would be wise, as college students ought to learn, not to forsake complexity in favor of a catchy sound bite.

    The suggestion that these meta-lessons inoculate college graduates against irrationality and unreason stumbles against the fact that college graduates can still succumb to these maladies. It’s hard to know whether this occurs because the lessons were not learned, or if circumstances make it expedient to forget them. I suspect that when well-educated people—the JD Vances and Josh Hawleys of the world—appear not to have learned these lessons, what we’re seeing is a cynical performance in the service of self-interest. The lessons were indeed learned, I further suspect, but are applied perversely, as when the physician becomes a skilled poisoner.

    Nonetheless, the diploma divide is real; a college education, on average, all else being equal, does seem to make people more resistant to misinformation, comforting myths, evidence-free claims about the world, irrational emotional appeals, illogical arguments and outright lies. This is as it should be; it is higher education having the effects it ought to have, effects that can impede authoritarianism. To be sure, college is not the only place where this kind of critical acumen is acquirable. College is just the place best organized to cultivate it.

    In the end, the issue is not the diploma divide. For educators, the issue should be how to do a better job of transmitting the meta-lessons of college, presuming a shared belief in the value of these lessons for the intellectual and civic benefits they can yield. Spotlighting these elements of the “hidden curriculum” of course means they are not hidden at all, and so when critics insist that our job is to teach students how to think, we can say, “Yes, look here: That is exactly what we’re doing.”

    Michael Schwalbe is professor emeritus of sociology at North Carolina State University.

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  • 4 Ways to Better Grade Team Projects (opinion)

    4 Ways to Better Grade Team Projects (opinion)

    Some professors resist using teamwork in their classes because they mistakenly believe that team projects are too difficult to grade. One issue is that, as educators, we often only evaluate the team presentation, project or paper with a grade based on how well the team has met our learning objectives.

    However, a single project evaluation at the end allows some members to potentially free ride on harder-working teammates, or enables one aggressive or dominating member to take over the entire project to ensure the team gets an A. If we simply grade team projects at the end, it is too late for our student teams to adapt or adjust and learn how to be better at working in teams, a key skill that employers look for in our graduates.

    The key to effectively grading teamwork is to set up the grading process systematically at the start of the project. In this article, we offer four ways that you can grade team projects effectively to meet your learning objectives and help students become better team members.

    1. Share your grading rubric at the start of the assignment. Students need to know at the outset of the team project how they will be graded. Many good students tell us they hate team projects because they know they will have to deal with “social loafers” who rely on one or two others to do the work. However, by sharing a rubric that highlights the expectations for each team member and how you will be combining individual and team grading, you can help students make more intentional decisions regarding how they distribute the assignment’s requirements. We not only distribute the rubric at the start of the project, but we post it on our course management system and frequently review it with the class so our expectations are clear.
    2. Include peer evaluation as a part of the evaluation process. Students are sometimes asked to rate their fellow team members, but they are seldom taught how to do it well. As a result, they tend to only give positive feedback to avoid conflict or hurting another student’s feelings. Teaching peer feedback takes only a little class time, as few as 15 minutes. It starts with clarifying your expectations about how you will use peer feedback. You can use or create a form that allows students to provide quantitative and qualitative feedback, and then you should use this same form multiple times during the project. The first time you collect peer feedback should be a low-stakes or practice situation early during the project so that students have a psychologically safe opportunity to learn how to use it. Your students should begin with self-evaluation and then evaluate their peers.
      Next, you need to summarize the peer feedback and give results to individual students so they know how they are doing. Finally, have groups reflect on how well the group is doing without naming or shaming others. There are times when students will have to give feedback to a person who is free riding or loafing. When they do, make sure they know to first ask that person for permission before they give feedback, then praise in public, and finally provide any negative feedback in private. Finally, we have a YouTube video that instructors can show during class to help students learn about how to give and receive feedback.
    1. Incorporate ongoing feedback from the instructor. We know of faculty who give out a team assignment and never mention it again until the week before the project is due. This is setting up the student teams for failure. Faculty need to check in frequently with their teams to be sure they are making progress on their work and any questions or concerns are answered. Taking just five minutes at the end of class for teams to meet can pay great dividends in a better project product. This instructor feedback can include a way to hold individual team members accountable for the work they are doing. For example, we have set up a separate Google folder for each team with instructor access. Each team member needed to post their contributions to the team project weekly. In this way, we could keep an eye on any social loafers, and provide feedback to those who were working independently instead of with the team. Instructors can also schedule a brief time to sit in on team meetings so that they get a more comprehensive update about the project and who is working toward each of the outcomes.
    2. Carefully consider the weight you give to each phase of the project. It is essential to incorporate peer assessments and the instructor evaluation about how well the project met the learning objectives into any final grade; both are important. However, the weight of these different evaluations tells students the importance of each. More weight on the individual peer assessments stresses the individual work, while more weight on the instructor grade of the project shows the team efforts are more important. At a minimum, use the 80/20 rule: At least 20 percent of the student’s grade should be based on each.
      Also, be sure to check the peer evaluations to verify that they result from real behaviors rather than personal biases. We accomplish this by looking for consistency across the times of evaluation, across team members and between peer and self-evaluations. In most cases, we find that the evaluations show consistency in all three areas (though self-evaluations are often inflated). In the rare cases when they don’t align, we always refer to supporting documentation, such as agendas, meeting minutes and information that resulted from our ongoing check-ins to help make sense of the reasons underlying any inconsistencies.

    Grading a team project may seem like a daunting challenge, but grading is by no means a reason to avoid giving students the experience of working with a team. By following these four principles for evaluating teamwork, instructors can account for the team’s achievement of the learning objectives as well as provide students with valuable teamwork experiences that they can take to future classes, internships, co-ops and employment.

    Lauren Vicker is a communications professor emeritus, and Tim Franz is a professor of psychology, both at St. John Fisher University. They are the authors of Making Team Projects Work: A College Instructor’s Guide to Successful Student Groupwork (Taylor & Francis, 2024).

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  • IVF and the Leadership Gap for Women (opinion)

    IVF and the Leadership Gap for Women (opinion)

    After a 20-year career in higher education, including roles as a chief academic officer and faculty member, I left to have a child. I was one step away from a presidency on the higher ed career ladder, and in fact I had written my dissertation on what gets in the way of women moving into college presidencies. Yet it was not until I finally met my life partner and had the opportunity, in my 40s, to start a family that I understood how fully the higher ed career deck is still stacked against those seeking to have children, and especially those seeking to have children in nontraditional ways—largely women, LGBTQIA+ folks and anyone facing a difficult pregnancy, in vitro fertilization, adoption or fostering process.

    In the United States, 2.6 percent of all births—95,860 babies in 2023—result from IVF, a time-consuming, costly and physically and emotionally challenging process. The percentage for women academics may be even higher, given their relatively high education levels, socioeconomic status and pressure to delay childbearing for academic careers. According to Pew, 56 percent of people with graduate degrees have gone through or know someone who has undergone IVF or other assisted reproduction.

    The literature has well documented how the academy has been created by men and is designed to fit their needs and their bodies. Women who have sought professorships or academic leadership positions have, historically, needed to conform to rules written for men’s life cycles. Articles such as Carmen Armenti’s classic “May Babies and Posttenure Babies” speak to women’s attempts to give birth at the end of the academic year and after earning tenure. The tenure clock illustrates this issue well—the usual seven years in which a newly hired assistant professor has time to sufficiently publish and obtain tenure largely coincide with women’s most fertile years. Many forward-thinking institutions such as the University of California system have been addressing this issue by stopping the tenure clock for childbirth and related family formation. It is a step in the right direction that all colleges and universities should consider.

    But what happens when the usual challenges of pregnancy and childbirth are compounded by infertility, miscarriage and the sometimes years-long process of IVF?

    I met my husband during the pandemic, and we married the next year. Both of us in our 40s and having always wanted a child but neither having met the right partner, we quickly found ourselves going down the IVF route. At the time, I had completed a one-year executive interim role and was on the job hunt and doing part-time remote teaching, and this situation proved fortuitous.

    I had no idea how grueling the IVF process would be—multiple rounds of more than a month at a time of hormone pills; nightly self-administered injections for weeks on end; weekly doctor visits, blood draws and ultrasounds—and at the end of each round, a day surgery under anesthesia to retrieve eggs. Several iterations of this, followed by more of a similar process to prepare the body for embryo transfer. The journey is physically and emotionally exhausting, time-consuming, and logistically challenging. It can also be incredibly expensive, with the medications and surgeries costing into the tens of thousands for those whose health insurance does not cover it.

    My husband and I had a number of factors helping us on this journey. We had built a supportive network of family and friends. We were fortunate that I was less sick than many women are on these medications. Finally, we were privileged to have insurance (through my husband’s job, which is not in higher ed) that paid for the majority of our treatments. Due to working part-time and remotely, I had the flexibility I needed to take naps, wear comfortable clothes that fit my bloated belly without having to reveal my family-forming status to anyone at work and generally have the privacy I needed during a challenging time.

    Other women who work full-time in-person during this process navigate a daunting gauntlet of frequent doctor appointments, exhaustion and sickness at work, while trying to hide a body that can look pregnant before it is. Not to mention that few people fully understand the process, and telling a little can lead you down an uncomfortable path of revealing a lot. Because everything is timed to the menstrual cycle, seemingly innocent questions inevitably lead to awkward conversations. It’s therefore hard to share what you’re going through or ask for support at work at the time you need it most.

    And then there are the chemical pregnancies and miscarriages that can happen, and did for us. Grieving for both parents is exacerbated by the isolation and privacy of the whole process. Some companies and higher ed institutions, such as Tufts University in Massachusetts, now offer bereavement leave for miscarriage, something that happens in 10 to 20 percent of pregnancies but is still rarely talked about. All institutions throughout higher ed should offer similar leave.

    During this journey, I was also interviewing for full-time jobs, and I was hired into a senior leadership position. My husband and I were taking a break from the exhausting process at that point and the opportunity was once-in-a-lifetime, and so we picked up and moved two states away. My husband’s job had gone remote, giving us the flexibility we needed for my career. We wagered that if I stayed in a part-time role too much longer, it would be increasingly difficult to climb back into a full-time position. The stigma around a résumé gap is alive and well in higher education, with little understanding that this gap often reflects people’s (frequently women’s) time away for family and other care-taking needs, rather than their work experience or abilities. Yet, even when I’ve tried to explain to search committees that I’ve led how discriminatory it can be to overly focus on résumé gaps, faculty and staff often have looked askance at me. This is something else that needs to change.

    My husband and I waited almost a year before doing our next embryo transfer. I settled into the job, we settled into our home, we finally had a post-COVID celebration of our marriage. And then I was pregnant! Sadly, I miscarried again toward the end of my first trimester. I powered through at work, serving as a chief academic officer and supervising 200 people while trying to juggle meds, doctor’s appointments, exhaustion and then loss. I read students’ names at a stadium-sized graduation ceremony soon after a miscarriage.

    It became clear to me over the following months that the stress and lack of flexibility of a senior role would not lend itself to a last chance at a healthy pregnancy. It was a difficult decision to leave, but also one that I had no doubts about once made. Within weeks we were pregnant again, this time successfully so with a beautiful baby girl who is now a year old. It was not an easy pregnancy, and our daughter likely would not be here had I stayed in my role and not been able to rest as much as I did.

    Since her birth, I have launched a higher ed editing and consulting business, resumed teaching part-time, and otherwise adjusted to life as a new mother. For me, leaving higher ed senior leadership was a deliberate choice. I needed more flexibility and control over my own time to be able to care for myself and my child properly. I may or may not return someday to that leadership pathway, and that door may or may not be open to me if I attempt to do so. I’ve learned, however, that to address the question my dissertation asked—Why don’t we have more women in presidencies?—we need to better understand and respond to the many women (and many men and nonbinary folks) who find themselves going through similar family-formation challenges across higher education.

    • First, we need to offer more flexibility—remote work, flexible hours, the option for extended parental leaves for new parents and foster parents.
    • Second, we need to consider not only fully paid leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act for childbirth and parental bonding, but also paid medical benefits for IVF as well as similar support for adoption and fostering.
    • Third, we need to formalize bereavement leave for miscarriage.
    • Fourth, we need to destigmatize the career gap, so that those who leave would have the opportunity to return.
    • Fifth, we need to fairly compensate those who assume the work of colleagues who take FMLA for any care-taking reason.
    • Lastly, we need to change the higher ed culture to one that understands and supports family formation in all its iterations, not just traditional pregnancy with traditional medical leaves.

    I recognize my privilege in being able to leave my job—privilege that enabled me to have a child when so many before me without the same economic resources have not been able to. My situation may seem like an outlier to those who are in their 20s or early 30s or who have had relatively easy and healthy pregnancies. But I’m sure that my story rings true for those who have delayed childbearing for their academic careers and then faced the rigors of IVF, or for people of any age who have faced infertility or more difficult pregnancies. For those LGBTQIA+ and other folks who go through the egg/sperm donation process and IVF and surrogacy. For couples and singles who may adopt or foster and face needs for legal meetings and other child-related time off that institutions do not always provide.

    Higher ed has taught me so much about antiracism, feminism, LGBTQIA+ rights and other inclusive practices. However, higher ed writ large doesn’t offer the kinds of paid leave and flexibility needed for all employees to succeed at both parenting and work.

    Higher ed is losing women with executive leadership potential. The majority of undergraduate and graduate students are women. Yet only 37 percent of full-time faculty are women. Only 33 percent of college presidents are women. Women melt away for a host of reasons. But this former chief academic officer, one step away from a presidency on the career ladder, left the executive pathway because it was the only way I could do so and have a healthy pregnancy and a healthy child.

    As long as higher ed makes having a child versus having an academic career a zero-sum choice for many women, it shouldn’t be a surprise that we still have so few women in senior leadership. When the answer becomes “yes, have both” at institutions across the board is when we might start to see the numbers change.

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  • How D.C. Public Schools Are Reimagining What’s Possible for Every Student – The 74

    How D.C. Public Schools Are Reimagining What’s Possible for Every Student – The 74


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    Every morning in the District of Columbia, nearly 100,000 students step into 251 public schools with hopes and ambitions for their future. After years of pandemic disruption, recent results show clear signs of progress in how students are recovering and advancing.

    In our roles as deputy mayor for education and state superintendent, we see something remarkable taking shape — a citywide education system leading the nation in how to reimagine what’s possible for every child.

    This year’s statewide assessment results tell a clear story of momentum. On the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment of Progress in Education, students made the largest gains in English Language Arts and math proficiency since the pandemic. Forty percent of schools raised proficiency by at least 5 points in one of these subjects, and more than 60% showed measurable progress in both. Across the city, 137 of 223 tested schools boosted English scores, while 141 schools improved in math.

    ELA proficiency has now surpassed pre-COVID levels, increasing from 37.5% in 2019 to 37.6% in 2025. Math proficiency reached a record high since COVID, rising from 19.4% in 2022 to 26.4% this year. This is evidence that students are not only recovering, but moving forward at a faster pace than before the pandemic.

    National data confirms this progress. The Harvard Center for Education Policy and Research’s 2024 Education Recovery Scorecard ranked D.C. first in the nation for learning recovery in both math and reading for grades 3 to 8 between 2022 and 2024. In that two-year period, D.C. students gained back the equivalent of half a grade level in math and a quarter of a grade level in reading. Just a few years ago, D.C. ranked 32nd in math recovery since 2019; today, it leads the country.

    Federal relief dollars helped make this possible. D.C. received more than $600 million in K-12 pandemic recovery funds, about $6,800 per student — nearly double the national average of $3,700. Research shows that targeting these dollars toward tutoring, summer learning and other evidence-based strategies contributed directly to the rebound.

    Together, these results demonstrate what families and educators across the city already feel in classrooms: Students are making meaningful, historic gains in learning.

    Several factors are driving this progress. Since 2015, local per-student funding has increased from $16,032 to $28,040 — a 75% rise — with more money provided for serving students with the greatest needs.

    D.C.’s early education stands above national enrollment levels, with 95% of 4-year-olds and 82% of 3-year-olds citywide enrolled in pre-K. At the high school level, more students are graduating in four years than in 2010-11, with nearly a 20- point increase since 2010-11, growing from 58.6% to 76.1%. These students now graduate with college credits, industry certifications and real-world experience in high-demand fields through career and technical Education programs, dual enrollment and our growing network of citywide Advanced Technical Centers, preparing them for success in their next chapter.

    The Education Through Employment Pathways initiative enables the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education to connect data from pre-K-12 with postsecondary outcomes to better identify which programs propel students forward in college and careers, helping D.C. make future investments accordingly.

    Teachers are a cornerstone of this progress. Thanks to big investments in recent years, D.C. Public School educators now earn an average salary of $109,000, among the highest in the nation, with comparable pay in charter schools. Investments in professional development, coaching, structured literacy training, high-quality instructional materials in literacy and math and high-impact tutoring have also helped to strengthen classroom instruction, so students feel challenged, supported and inspired. At the same time, D.C. is tackling barriers outside the classroom, securing school-based mental health supports, providing safe passage to schools and expanding the District’s Out of School Time programming. As a result, chronic absenteeism overall has declined 18.3% between 2021-22 and 2023-24, while profound chronic absenteeism — a student missing 30% or more of school days — is down 34.2% over the same time period. 

    The vast majority of families receive one of their top choices of district and charter schools through a universal enrollment lottery, helping drive D.C.’s national leadership in parent satisfaction. This system, combined with investments in quality and variety, has helped drive the city’s sustained enrollment growth since the 2008-09 school year and added more than 5,000 students after COVID. This is at a time when many large districts across the country experienced declines.

    D.C.’s education success isn’t just about test scores. It’s about the child who now walks into class with confidence because tutoring makes reading click. It’s about the high schooler graduating with a resume that includes a paid internship and college credits already earned. It’s about showing the nation that D.C. students — no matter their background or income — can succeed at the highest levels.

    D.C.’s experience shows how large urban education systems can rebound and thrive when funding is deep and sustained, resources meet student needs, teachers are well supported and compensated, and learning starts early.

    While challenges remain, the data show encouraging momentum that is worth studying nationally. D.C.’s educational vision invariably focuses on ensuring every child is prepared for higher education and a family-sustaining career, while making certain that the city continues to be the nation’s talent capital.

    D.C.’s public education leaders can keep proving to the nation what happens when a city dreams big for every student, invests strategically and stays the course: Students and schools will surpass expectations.

    Paul Kihn is deputy mayor for education in the District of Columbia. Dr. Antoinette Mitchell is state superintendent of education for the District of Columbia.


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