Brendan Cantwell
So I want to partly say that, I agree that a lot of what’s happening is noise, and we, you know, it will come. It will be super important. It’ll consume us, it’ll fade away, but often not entirely. And so the worst case scenario sometimes is avoided, but a bad case scenario is something that actually happens. And so what I think is happening is that this flood the zone strategy or reality, is creating space for lots of opportunities for for actors and to take advantage of in order to sort of accelerate long term projects of retrenchment and retreat and decline.

Heather Shea
Welcome to Student Affairs NOW the online learning community for Student Affairs educators. I’m your host, Heather Shea, this month, we are returning to current campus context. This episode was recorded at 5:17pm, on Monday, September 22 and as always, things might have changed by the time you listen. As new academic year gets underway, higher education finds itself at a critical juncture. Shifting federal and state policies, heightened political pressure on campuses and urgent questions about academic freedom, or just freedom of speech in general, student success in the future of our institutions. None of this feels actually new to me. This is kind of the perpetual state. But today, we’re going to be taking stock of this landscape and consider what lies ahead. Student Affairs now is the premier podcast and learning community for 1000s of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We hope you will find these conversations that make a contribution to the field and are restorative to the profession. And we release our regular episodes every week on Wednesdays, and you can find us at Student Affairs now.com, on YouTube or anywhere you listen to podcasts. As I mentioned, I’m your host for today’s episode, Heather, Shea. My pronouns are she her and hers, and I am broadcasting from the ancestral, traditional and contemporary lands, the Anishinaabe, three fires Confederacy, Ojibwe, Ottawa and botawatomi peoples, otherwise known as East Lansing, Michigan, home of Michigan State University where I work. Super excited to welcome back both Dr crystal Garcia and Dr Brendan Cantwell, I have read both of your BIOS multiple times, so I’m not going to read them today. People can find them on the website, but I’d love to hear each of you do a quick intro, name, position, anything else you’d like to share, but then maybe tell us a little bit about a current research project that has you excited, or what are you starting this semester with in your academic roles on campus? So, Crystal, I’ll start with you.

Crystal Garcia
Yeah. So Crystal Garcia here, pronouns are she her and hers? I’m an Associate Professor and the PhD program coordinator at the University of Nebraska Lincoln in our Department of Educational Administration. And I think what I would say I’m very excited about is, you know, I’ve been doing some work over the past couple of years. Now, actually, I it was, it was not planned, but I had the opportunity to tag along on an education abroad trip to Brazil a couple of years ago, and then I led a trip last year, and I hope to lead one again next year, but it really opened my eyes to the parallels between the context in education and society, more generally within Brazil and the United States. And I’m especially interested in looking at the ways that far right movements influence activism and advocacy within higher education and Brazil, and looking across, again, at parallels between us context and so kind of taking a little bit more of an international and comparative scope. And it’s, it’s exciting work to me. It’s troubling for a lot of reasons that we will probably unpack today a little bit more, but at the same time, I think that it’s meaningful work that I’m excited to pursue.

Heather Shea
Wow, that’ll be fantastic. I can’t wait to read more about that shortly. Brendan, welcome back.

Brendan Cantwell
Hi. Hi Heather. Great to be here, and nice to see you as well. Crystal, I’m Brendan Cantwell. I’m Professor in the Department of Educational Administration at Michigan State University, and I teach in the higher adult and lifelong education programs in that department. And what I’m been focusing on this semester is wrapping up a book project with my colleague, Barrett Taylor, who’s at the University of North Texas, and we have completed, or just about completed. I’ve been saying it’s done for a couple of months, and it’s been true the whole time, but we’re finishing a book called The Post liberal university that’s under contract with Harvard education press, and it is about the sort of partisan takeover of higher education governance that we started to see in the states in the 2010s and that has sort of culminated with a federal action that I think probably prompted this podcast series, and so really focusing on wrapping up, putting the final touches on that book project, to get that off to the press. By the end of the semester.

Heather Shea
Awesome. Well, we do a lot of book talks on Student Affairs NOW, so we will definitely have to have you both on to talk more about that. And we love broadening our conversation, right? It’s not just about student affairs. It’s about the broader institution of higher education as well as the larger context in which we do this work, speaking just really quickly, a little off the cuff, Crystal, one of the things that I get to do is lead an Education Abroad program for students who are studying to be teachers primarily. And I had a student this past year, this past summer, do her area of inquiry project on how American politics is perceived in the Netherlands. So that was the comparator, but it was a fascinating piece, and she and my co leader and I are working on how we might get this out to a broader audience, just to share, but how students are discovering that, wow, the rest of the world is asking us all kinds of questions about what is happening. Well, so as we’ve kind of thought about this series, and as as you all know, we did record an episode in August, we’ve moved it to monthly partially so we can keep tracking the news and keep you know our pulse on what is happening. And as two scholars who are paying close attention to all of it, I would love to hear from you both. How are you thinking about what is happening as a signal with all serious, long term implication, as contrasted with noise just meant to overwhelm Brenda. Do you want to kick us off with this question, and then we’ll sure I

Brendan Cantwell
can. So I want to partly say that, I agree that a lot of what’s happening is noise, and we, you know, it will come. It will be super important. It’ll consume us, it’ll fade away, but often not entirely. And so the worst case scenario sometimes is avoided, but a bad case scenario is something that actually happens. And so what I think is happening is that this flood the zone strategy or reality, is creating space for lots of opportunities for for actors and to take advantage of in order to sort of accelerate long term projects of retrenchment and retreat and decline. And so, for example, I think about international education. We’ve been talking about that today. There have been, there was a big proposal that came out at the end of last week suggesting that there might be an enormous fee, $100,000 fee for H 1b visas, which are skilled worker visas universities use frequently to hire faculty and staff that would if it applied to higher education, and you know, if it gets implemented, would be something that would make it very difficult for particularly highly internationalized departments to operate, to operate effectively. And that’s coupled with a proposal to to to restrict, to put fixed lengths on student visas, so F visas, that and J visas, so that students, who are saying doctoral students from out of the country, would have four or five years to complete their degree. And if they didn’t do it in that time, they’d lose their visa, there would be no extension. And so we’re seeing like this effort to reshape the international internationalization on campus and the global engagement in higher education. And that comes along with reports that are coming out of the House of Representatives. It has this select committee on the Chinese Communist Party that is demanding that collaborations between us and Chinese universities close, declaring them a threat to national security. My read of the report that they released a couple of days ago is that they don’t provide a tremendous amount of evidence for that, but they’re pretty firm in their conclusions. And so while you know, these visa rules might not take hold exactly as they’re initially announced. As the you know, Congressional investigations into foreign donations and international collaborations may yield mixed results in terms of their ability. To force some universities to change course and others not. The aggregate effect will be the closing down of international engagement in US higher ed and so I’ll just highlight that as one example of a kind of long term contraction that is happening through these sort of dramatic events that may or may not be partially noise,

Heather Shea
yeah, yeah. And then part of the noise is also just there, there, there. You know, sometimes these things happen, and then they kind of bubble down a little, and then the next thing happens, and that overshadows the impact that might continually be. And then, yeah, I think that’s definitely how I’m seeing noise crystal. What would you add to this idea of signals versus noise?

Crystal Garcia
There’s just so much right to work through and to think through, and what I keep trying to remind myself to do and what whenever I’m in spaces with other colleagues, and, you know, even leaders on campus, I try to refer back to is, let’s take a step back and not think about the specific. But what does this mean in a larger picture? And so as a couple of examples, you know, over the past few weeks, we’ve seen mass firings, essentially, of folks who have spoken out about Charlie Kirk and ways that, you know, administrators either a signaled as hostile or violent or, you know, the antithesis of their University’s values, or whatever the case might be, but dismissed the process of what you know those employment terms should entail, in terms of a review, in terms of fair ground in that administrative process. And so those things were bypassed. So if you focus too much on the specific you’re focusing on who Charlie Kirk was, what type of speech it was, but really that’s to me, not the issue here. The issue is, do we have free speech, and what are the parameters around that speech, and what are the grounds for dismissal from our positions, right? And so putting aside arguments around was the speech Good? Was the speech bad? It’s that bigger picture of is the speech right? And likewise, whenever we think about campus censorship, this is something that if I was on the last round of the podcast, I would have brought this up, because this came up over the summer. So I’m kind of cheating and drawing on some things from the summer, not just totally fine, but like many other campuses, our university went through yet another round of reviewing institutional websites and asking for the erasure of certain words or the modification of certain words on these websites, and those words were Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or any combination thereof, right? And so again, I was in a space with other colleagues who are, you know, leaders within their respective colleges across our campus. And you know, many of them were talking about this process that we went through of having to erase our websites, etc, and how they were responding to it within their college. And I just pause. I mean, I probably sounded a little bit frantic if I had had the recording of that meeting. I’m sure I did, but I said I honestly feel like I’m in the twilight zone here. What are we talking about? Why are we erasing anything? Is that not censorship? And if they were any other words, would we not ask or push back on our college leaders and say, What are we doing here? Like, what’s the plan? What laws are we breaking that violate, you know, any sort of statute, any sort of law, any sort of agreement, any sort of policy through the university that says we can’t use these terms in these ways. But no, we’re not. We’re just simply making the changes. We’re moving on. But again, I go back to what is the bigger issue for me? I’m like, Okay, if you tell me not to say potato and you tell me to say tomato instead, I guess I can adjust and do that, but at the same time, we’re not asking the bigger questions of, should we be censoring ourselves, and should we allow censorship to be happening in this way? And so to me, those are the bigger issues. It’s not a matter of, should we use the word diversity that’s we’re getting in the weeds, right in the noise. Essentially, it’s. So much as thinking, should we have parameters around any words that we use, and what are those parameters? And why are we allowing those parameters to exist? And what does it mean, right? So, yes, those are just a couple things that I’m kind of like waiting through. I don’t know the answer. All that I know is that none of it feels good, right now, if I’m being honest,

Heather Shea
yeah. And, I mean, I think, you know, the whole point that it’s here to kind of overwhelm and to, you know, distract, and then maybe potentially do some things under the cover of darkness, or, you know that I think about the shadow docket and all of the things that are kind of happening with the Supreme Court, I know that there are issues that have have arisen over the past month, or even through the summer, that haven’t garnered any mainstream attention, maybe because they’ve been isolated to higher ed I mean, I think, I think Jimmy Kimmel’s well and that as of today, he’s been reinstated. Who knows what’s going to happen if you listen to this podcast later, but that brought up a whole conversation about freedom of speech that maybe hadn’t yet reached the broader conversation because folks were not really aware that speech was being curtailed. Are there other examples of things that you know haven’t garnered mainstream attention, but are part of this larger concern that for folks who are working in student affairs or higher education like we should really know that this is happening.

Brendan Cantwell
One of the things that comes to my mind are the pocket rescissions. So the administration choosing not to allocate funding that has been appropriated by Congress. And we’ve seen that with with, I believe, trio and gear up programs, and there’s some idea that might happen to McNair and other federal programs that are designed to support people you know support access to higher education, to undergraduate or graduate education, we’ve seen strange little Rules, changes, like Federal Work Study can’t be used for voter registration activities. You know, like you could have a civic center that is registering people to vote, and you know, you can’t use that that’s now somehow seen as a political activity that’s forbidden from federal work study. So these kind of unilateral funding cuts and rules changes that change the way that people can interact with students and the programs that they that they can deliver. And I you know, it’s hard to keep up with all of it, even if you’re following it closely. It’s hard to keep up with it because it’s not clear what state of finality any of these decisions are at any one time. In part, you mentioned that the Supreme Court shadow docket keeps kind of punting on things and saying, Oh, this is legal for now, but maybe it’s not. And so there’s this sort of uncertainty that makes it really, really hard to work with, with students. And I’d say that that applies to other shifting rules. You mentioned the crystal, mentioned the terminations of staff members over their speech related to Charlie Kirk, and which brought up an important question about the First Amendment, fundamental rights. It also raises question of how you can interact with students. If you’re working with students who are processing current events, what can you say and not say without risking your job, your university’s reputation, and so you know, just not ever knowing what’s what’s where, the where, the where the rule is, whether or not a congressionally appropriated program will continue, whether or not long standing law, and you know that govern the way we interact with students is in effect or not, is just terribly difficult, and it’s hard to pin it on any one thing. There’s just all these many, many little changes that are happening.

Heather Shea
Crystal How about you what’s kind of under the radar? Things that you would like to kind of let’s, let’s shine a spotlight on

Crystal Garcia
Yeah, and I don’t know that I would call it under the radar, but something that I just feel so alarmed by is the series of firings that happened at A and M in regard to. So, you know, what was it? A text that was being read in a classroom that was being construed as, you know, some discussion on gender ideology, quote, unquote, again, the weeds of what the content was is not what I’m focused on, right? I’m wondering, wow, what’s next? What institution is next? Which of my colleagues or myself are next? We have a student who was upset by content in their class and without engaging in questions about, what could I learn from this? Do I agree with it? Do I not agree with it? How can I push back and have meaningful conversation within a learning environment about whatever the content was the the action was immediately to demand firings and not only of the faculty member who was leading the class, but also of the department chair, the dean of the college and The President of the University and the student, you know, through social media, and not to put focus on the student. It could be anybody. It could have been a parent, it could have been a lawmaker, whoever. But the threat of saying, I don’t like this now all these people need to lose their jobs. It’s just all so real and unfortunately, is validated in this current climate, even to the point where, you know, we look at the president of the university who did all the firings they wanted, but that wasn’t enough, and it wasn’t speedy enough, and so he had to lose his job too. And so to me, I’m also seeing that takeaway of the complicity. Complicit is like your complicitness will not save you right, like you taking these actions or doing these things isn’t necessarily going to ensure that you have a job. I would like to know that we can at least keep our values and, you know, our our worldviews about what education is and what it should be intact, you know, through this process. But I think it’s becoming harder and harder for folks to hold on to that. And I will also say, you know, we have this conversation earlier, so I’ll mention it here. You know, even people like myself, you know, I’m extremely vocal. I very much align what I do with what I value and what I think we, you know, as educators, should be advocating for in this world, and I’m not embarrassed to speak out about those things and to push back. But there’s a bigger implications with that right, like I have to think about not only myself, my family, you know, if I have to find another job, if I have to relocate to another state, I’m uprooting everyone in my life, not to mention, you know, the repercussions of people all around me in my department, potentially my colleagues, other people that might feel things or be threatened because of my actions. And I think that it is something that a lot of us are navigating and trying to figure out, what do we do, what feels good to us, what we’re able to do. But also emphasize that all of that thinking, all of that heart work and mind work takes a lot of energy, and it’s, I think it’s going to be increasingly difficult to feel well in this environment, unfortunately, and we have to keep reminding ourselves of what’s most important In life, like our livelihoods, in our life, and all of those things. But, yeah, it’s kind of hard to grapple with all of it in the midst of everything going on,

Heather Shea
yeah, like our go to reaction, you know, could have real life implications for our for our sphere of, you know, connection and influence. And I think that’s that is really, that is really, it’s, it’s scary. But then you say, but how do you, how do you move forward, right? And this later this week, Ash and ACPA co sponsor the Presidential symposium, and part of the conversation is going to be about critical hope, and what do we do within these moments to maintain some level of agency, even despite what is, what is happening right? And the hopeful place isn’t like a naive Pollyanna hope. It’s really about kind of being aware and then doing your part in the broader sphere to try to make the change happen that you’d like to see. But I realized that that’s not possible for everyone. So. As you all are kind of thinking about the months ahead, what stands out for you of things that might either be giving you some level of critical hope, feels like positive policy change, and if there’s nothing that’s also totally fine, or maybe what is keeping you motivated in this moment? Because I think that’s the other part. Is, as this keeps going on, it’s hard to stay, keep that same momentum. It’s at least, I should say, it’s hard. It has been hard for me, right and hard to continually go back into that space. And both of you have been in the space doing a lot more than than me, and certainly a lot more than others. So crystal, do you want to start with what? What brings you to this space of hope now?

Crystal Garcia
Yeah, and I’m actually going to start with something that most people would probably not think would be very inspiring. So you know, sharing something very personally that’s happening to us, my department at the University of Nebraska, are our university system, unfortunately, has been in a deficit for many years. We’ve we’ve seen budget cuts year after year after year, and they have just exacerbated this year with, you know, federal funding loss throughout our university system, plus, you know, challenges in our state appropriations, our legislatures just just really don’t want to fully fund us to the level that we need. And so we at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, specifically within our system, we had to cut 27 and a half million dollars from our budget with the deadline of this year, you know, December. And so our we’ve gone through this process now, and our university has identified six programs our department included in these programs to be completely eliminated within the university. So, you know, at UNL, there would be no more Department of Educational Administration. And you know, for me, it’s extremely troubling, given that we’re the only PhD program in educational administration in the state, and that’s for P 12 side folks or higher ed side, we are the absolute only higher education doctoral program in the state. And you know, whenever we think about the folks that we produce, not produce, but that we support, that go on to just life changing work and education through our state, especially, but beyond, of course. But you know, we’re reaching rural superintendents. You know, we’re preparing those folks, those principals, those higher ed administrators, community college presidents, so many individuals that are incredibly impactful through our program. I’m a grad of our program. I should note that too. I’m an alum from our program as well. And so, you know, we’re now fighting to keep our program, you know, through this public hearing process, and trying to garner, you know, as much support through that as possible. And so it doesn’t feel good. None of that feels good knowing that you know me and my colleagues may not have our positions next year you know, or they give you, like, a year notice or something like that, but, but nonetheless, that our program could be eliminated, right? Our department. But the hope part, you’re like I asked you about hope. So the part is that, you know, we’ve done a lot of outreach, and we’ve, you know, reached out to our alums, to to current students. You know, I just led a community meeting with our students last Wednesday, you know, explaining all of these things. And you know, instead of our students saying, oh my gosh, how dare y’all let our program, you know, be subjected to this. They were saying, How can we help? What? What can we do? Like, how can, how can we support you? And they were just so supportive, so kind. And our alums are the same, you know, they say this program was life changing to me. And so, you know, I want to send in a letter of support, you know, all of these types of things. And so for me right now, I think that that is strangely incredibly hope filling for me, that, you know, I see the impact of what we’ve been doing and what people before me had been doing for so many years through our department. And sometimes we don’t hear those stories, and unfortunately, we’re hearing them in this context, but it is a reminder of how important we are and the work that we do, and how important the work that we do is I also I wrote in my letter to the I’m the editor for the Journal of sorority and fraternity. Life, research and practice, and in my letter to the Edit from the editor, I wrote about our current context and climate and things that we’re experiencing in higher ed, and something that I talked about in there is how frightening it has been to see research targeted in such malicious ways, but that at the same time, if we think about why it’s being targeted, it’s clear that there’s so much power in that work. And so whenever I think about it in that way of we have so much more at stake, and there’s so much pressure on these things because they are powerful, because they are important, and that is worth fighting for. And so that’s just kind of what I’ve been hanging on to. Of you know, they wouldn’t be attacking it if it wasn’t amazing. And so that’s worth the fight to me.

Heather Shea
So yeah, well, Crystal, thank you. I mean, among all of the things that you have going on, thank you for taking time to be here and for sharing that, because I do think you know, when you put actual faces and stories with the with the cuts, it becomes a much more present and and visceral thing to be able to talk with you today and hear the ways in which folks are are stepping up and being able To send letters of support. I mean superintendents and principals across the state of Nebraska, are that, to me, would be a powerful group right to listen to. So I will be keeping that in my back of my mind as we go forward. Brendan, how about you? What are the things that are, are out there on the horizon, or maybe, you know, keeping you motivated or up at night?

Brendan Cantwell
Well, that was a lot, you know, I want to also acknowledge crystals determination for, you know, sharing and and being here under these conditions, and say that that’s the sort of thing that gives me hope, actually, is colleagues and students and others who are working under extraordinarily adverse conditions, who are persisting In doing their daily work, who are persisting in, you know, living their lives in ways that are meaningful and important, and who are doing that while also offering their voice and expertise for Thinking about how we can rebuild from a very difficult period. This is one of the more challenging periods that US higher education has probably experienced in its history, which is something kind of, you know, kind of intense to say, but I think it’s true. And so thinking about how we can use this experience, individually and collectively, to refocus on the mission of higher education, to reimagine ways in which you can deliver that mission in a way that is hopefully better and more equitable, more sustainable, and to rebuild trust in higher education in the future is something that you know, it’s a daunting job that’s in front of us. It’s a job that can’t fully begin right now, but it’s a job that people like crystal and others are beginning right now, and that where, you know, gives me hope that this is going to be meaningful and important work for all of us in the future.

Heather Shea
Yeah, I think that’s really well said. I I’m also reflecting on what you said, Crystal about, you know, if, if, if we’re, we’re being attacked for doing this, it’s because it’s good work. And Jamie Washington was on a previous episode of the podcast and said, part of what we are seeing is the backlash of 60 years of progress, and because of the successes over that past 60 years, that’s a threat. And so we, if we hadn’t made that progress, where would we be? But also it’s evidence of the success that we’ve had. So holding on to that that was, at least for me, kind of held me in this place of like, okay, I I get that this is a part of a larger continuum, and it feels like we are sliding backward and losing ground, but perhaps the next, as you said, Brendan, rebuilding, reforming. You know, we did some of that after covid, where we were like what was no longer serving. US, and there were some innovations that came, I don’t know. We’ll see. We’ll see where everything ends up. Thank you both so much. I appreciate your time today and for our conversation and continuing these conversations monthly, as we’ve kind of discussed, I think is helpful as higher ed in the ground beneath it is shifting really quickly. I think these conversations matter because it is happening so quickly. And we’d love to hear folks are watching or listening today. Please share your thoughts, post your comments, tag us on any of the social media platforms, and if you have contacts with organizations or others who might help sustain this project. Moving forward, we would love to hear from you. And if you haven’t yet already subscribed to the podcast, please do so at our website, www.studentaffairsnow.com and I want to also just say Express huge gratitude to our producer, Nat Ambrosey. We are recording this episode on a Monday, and she is going to flip it around and publish it for Wednesday. That extra work is huge, and we’re really grateful for her ability to make that happen so quickly. Once again, I’m Heather. Shea. Thanks to everybody who’s watching or listening. We’ll talk to you soon.

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