Demetri L. Morgan: Yeah, so without being messy, I, I have it under, good understanding that I think we should also be asking questions about the pre-process. So before this was rolled out were there more institutions approached? Why were some institutions even named?

And were there institutions that were approached that declined to be named? And so what does that say about if some were able to decline to be named about the sort of theater? So when I learned that aspect that there were some institutions that were, that were not declined to be in, involved even in the rollout of it.  And then subsequently others, were named in this initial offer, but then declined. It made me more suspicious of the theater that is going on here.

Heather Shea: All right. Okay. Welcome to Student Affairs Now, the Online Learning Community for Student Affairs Educators. I’m your host, Heather Shea. This month we returned to our current campus context series. This episode was recorded at 5:04 PM on Monday October 27th, 2025. Things might have changed by the time you listen as this fall semester unfolds.

Higher education, once again finds itself navigating rapid change from prolonged federal government shutdown and a controversial new compact for academic excellence to ongoing debates about the future of diversity, equity, inclusion, and academic freedom on our campuses. These stories are, as we’ve said multiple times, not just headlines.

They have real consequences for students, educators, and institutions. And so today we are unpacking what is happening right now, why it matters, and how student affairs professionals can respond thoughtfully and effectively within their spheres of influence. Student Affairs now is the premier podcast and learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs.

We hope you find these conversations make a contribution to the field and are restorative to the profession. We released our regular episodes every week on Wednesdays, and you can find us@studentaffairsnow.com, on YouTube, or anywhere you listen to podcasts. As I mentioned, I’m your host today, Heather Shea.

Pronouns are she, her and hers. I’m broadcasting from the ancestral, traditional and contemporary lands of the NBE three fires, Confederacy of Ojibwe, Ottawa, and Bawa me peoples otherwise known as East Lansing, Michigan, home of Michigan State University where I work. So let’s get into the conversation. I am so ba so excited to welcome back three of our five expert correspondents.

Joining me today are Dr. Crystal Garcia. Crystal is an associate professor and PhD program coordinator in the Department of Educational Administration at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. Her research critically examines how racially minoritized college students experience campus environments, especially campus climate and the role of student affairs in those experiences.

Welcome back Crystal. Good to see you. Thank you. Glad to be back. Second, Dr. Felicia Commodore is an associate professor in education, policy, organization and leadership at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. She’s an expert in leadership, governance, and administrative practices in higher education with particular focus on historically black colleges and universities, minority serving institutions and black women in higher ed leadership.

Welcome back, Felicia.

Felecia Commodore: Hi, welcome. Thank you for having me. Excited.

Heather Shea: Okay. And finally Dr. Dmitri Morgan Dmitri is associate professor of education at the University of Michigan, and his work investigates how higher education institutions function in a diverse democracy. His research focuses on student political engagement, institutional governance, transformation, and how students and systems navigate and resist institutional power.

Welcome back to all three of you. Welcome back, Dmitri.

Demetri L. Morgan: Thank you. Thank you. All folks say it’s good to be seen.

Heather Shea: So we as I was thinking about today’s episode and where to start I decided to start with the federal government shutdown and its impact on higher ed. Partially because we had thought about it as a potential future risk on the previous episode with Brendan and Crystal.

And we are now here in day 27. It doesn’t seem like there’s an end in sight. And crystal, I’ll let you pick up that thread. What immediate challenges are our colleges and universities facing because of the federal government shutdown?

Crystal Garcia: It’s a lot. There are a lot of things that are going on and I know personally, even whenever I hear information about potential government shutdowns looming I am thankful that. In terms of my job as a faculty member, staff members through the university, that our jobs aren’t paused.

Our pays aren’t paused, but there are a lot of folks whose salaries are most definitely impacted those who are paid directly with federal funds. And there’s a lot of other ways that federal funding really implicates colleges, universities. And I may not go over all of them, but I’m gonna try to highlight some things that folks have been reporting on.

So obviously it’s incredibly problematic for institutions that receive large amounts of federal research dollars. And of course at this point in time, funding approvals and reviews for federal grants are also on pause. That’s also, it’s not only delaying funds that should be received right now, but could potentially delay.

Future receipt of funds which is really important to note. And, based on the type of research that folks are doing that timeline can really matter and can make a difference. But, inside higher ed reported on this and they shared a couple of notable examples. So one, they talked about the Georgia Institute of Technology that has received or experienced some delayed federal funding payments.

I believe that the report showed that they’re actually the third ranked in terms of being the highest in receiving federal funds. Oh. And that accounts for more than a hundred million dollars of their monthly expenses. Wow. So they originally were like, if this goes on too long, we’re gonna start taking some measures.

And they have started taking some measures to cut back on spending preserving their cash, doing things like significantly limiting consulting services, job offers, significant non-personnel expenses and even non-essential travel regardless of the funding source of those costs. And again, this was from inside higher ed.

They also reported that the University of Hawaii system is spending $20 million every two weeks out of their internal funds to pay thousands of federal workers during the shutdown. So the effect on higher ed institutions is already being felt, and the longer that it sustains the more difficult it’s gonna be for institutions and they are gonna have to make some decisions around how they manage their funds moving forward.

And not only that, but there’s also other things that are implicated. Education week is another outlet that has been tracking the shutdowns effects on education kind of more broadly. A lot of their stuff focuses on P 12 settings, but there are some notable things in there that pertain to higher ed.

So for example, number one, the Department of Educ or education department employee furloughs and reduction in force during this time. Using the shutdown as a really a guise to carry out the plan to really continue to weaken. The Department of Education, there’s over 2000 employees that have been furloughed and 466 so far.

As of, I think it was today or yesterday that I looked that have been included in this reduction of force which very much so impacts, I believe all of their office of Civil or their division or however they frame it. Civil Rights Enforcement branch has been. Part of that. And so that work is also halted during the shutdown.

So whenever we think about, who’s enforcing civil rights cases in education right now, that’s really challenging. Also they’ve halted litigation against the Trump administration, which they have tracked more than 50 lawsuits right now in varying stages of litigation. And that’s important because again, we’re pushing back in a lot of ways on some overstep and overreach from the federal government.

And those can potentially see delays in outcomes due to this. And then also. Just at a bigger picture, different types of supports that students and faculty and staff may depend on, such as Medicaid or SNAP or wic are also going to be impacted moving forward. For example, SNAP and wic, a lot of folks have been discussing the implications of these benefits expiring as soon as what Sunday, it’s November 1st would be the impact.

And, when we think about obviously students, faculty, and staff access these things. But I think particularly of our students who are, navigating a very difficult climate, given everything else that’s going on. And in higher ed I’ve already seen calls for folks to increase their donations to local food banks and to their local campus pantries.

Because we are gonna see an increased need there. And the unfortunate thing is that at the individual level that is meaningful and everybody should absolutely do that. But to be able to make up for, insurmountable dollars it’s just really difficult to see where that will end up.

So I’ll stop there.

Heather Shea: Yeah. Felicia, Dmitri, you wanna. Get in on this topic.

Demetri L. Morgan: Yeah,

Heather Shea: yeah,

Demetri L. Morgan: Dr. Garcia did great job. The only other thing I would add is that speaker Johnson is also choosing to hold the House of Representatives out of session while the shutdown is happening. And, putting the sort of political theater of it aside, there is important work that the house could be and should be taking up that impacts higher ed in terms of things like holding hearings.

And even if, a particular party or the party in power gets to set the hearings, the minority party still gets to also call their own their own people to give testimony, witnesses, for lack of a better word. And those things get formally entered into the congressional record.

And often those are things that create soundbites. We of obviously saw multiple presidents presidents lose their jobs over a congressional hearing. So it’s an important part of the discourse and narrative that is set through these hearings that are not happening right now on education.

And then all of the sort of, the colloquial terms the sort of sausage making of policy, but marking up bills the advocacy and lobbying that happens. And we saw some of it effectively happen during the big beautiful Bill where there was really effective advocacy and lobbying by, different higher ed associations.

To make the bill not be as bad as it could have been, had some of the amendments and some of the proposals. And so all of that work is really important and it’s not happening right now. And because of the shutdown even though it’s they’re linked. And so they could be meeting the Senate is meeting and holding votes but they’re not.

And so that sort of gets skated over the, all of the work of the house is not happening right now. And we’re gonna also feel the impact of that when this happen, when this is over, because then you’re gonna see a, an influx and a rush to engage in lobbying and engage in all these processes that you need time to play out.

And so it’s gonna go to the loudest voices, to the most wealthy voices. And I’m really worried about the impact of the shutdown on just like the legislative making process already when one particular party has, way more power because of controlling all three branches.

Heather Shea: Oh, thank you for saying that.

Felecia Commodore: I just wanted to add also some other perspectives and I really appreciate crystal talking about students that are possibly on SNAP and Medicare. ’cause I think we forget that we have students who use assistance to meet to, to live. And so that I think from an institutional standpoint will also begin to cause stressors on institutions.

In terms of student support student support services, which are already stretched thin at a lot of institutions. I think we’re gonna see even more stress on those spaces as students will have more needs because of the shutdown. And I also, in that same vein, thinking of ways we don’t always see the intersections, but we have a number of.

Families now whose who the parents or the guardians are government workers who are not getting paid. So how will this all flesh out when it comes time to pay financial aid or pay tuition? So are we going to start to see some attrition because of this or some some slowing down in credit accumulation for students because they’re gonna have to work or maybe not be able to take as many credits if their families are, subsidizing their education. Likewise, I think of institutions that are in predominantly military areas who have a large percentage of their students who are military dependent or military themselves who are, or veterans who are counting on government assistance to be able to go to school and who are, may not now be receiving that money.

And if you’re at a school that’s at 17, 25, 30% military dependent student population, that’s gonna also have an impact again, on institutions that we may not see immediately, but we may see have some impacts as time goes on. And the shutdown continues. And so I think institutions also are going to, institutional leaders are gonna have to have some tough conversations about mission.

About what student support looks like, what support for staff. And look like as well in the midst of this shutdown and also revisiting some of these, their funding models and if they ha are able to sustain a government shutdown, the, maybe not the direct impacts, but the indirect impacts financially as well.

Demetri L. Morgan: Yeah. And just one more quick point on that, because I think again, whether run the Democrat side of whose fault it is or the Republicans, the conversation that the Democrats are trying to have is around health insurance subsidies for the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare.

And that is a very specific issue, but the bigger conversation around health insurance cost and premiums for employers rather we see higher ed institutions as employers. We employ people one of the biggest, if not the biggest, variable cost year to year. So even if you don’t give anybody any raises,

Heather Shea: yeah.

Demetri L. Morgan: It’s still a variable cost to cover people’s health insurance. And then if we to toggle into the graduate students and graduate student unionization, one of the biggest things that graduate students are unionizing around is health insurance benefits and premiums. So this conversation that the Democrats are trying to scaffold into using the using the affordable care access subsidies and how they’re set to go up is a microcosm of a much larger conversation we need to be having as a society about health insurance, how expensive it is, and as employers, how difficult it is to manage that cost.

And that is also something that, hi, higher ed leaders are watching very closely because it’s a very difficult piece to talk about because it means, health insurance for some, for others, there’s tons of different things you can do with sliding scales and different salaries.

But at end of the day, it’s raising for everyone and yeah, and in higher ed as an employer. And so that conversation that the Democrats are trying to force just has huge implications for our sector that we need to be mindful about. Yes, there’s this sort of shutdown theater and everything, but the substance of what we need to be talking about as a society is huge.

And this is just one way into that conversation. And I’m sorry Heather, just to add one more thought. I love it. Keep going. ’cause I think all of this is so important and I so appreciate Dr. Commodore’s comments, and really the humanizing piece of all of this. And I think sometimes, whenever we say things like.

Crystal Garcia: Students depend on, snap benefits. It just feels so vague and intangible and it’s hard to even put like numbers to things. But even whenever I think about, like WIC for example I just, I literally was so curious because I was like, I haven’t, I am an aunt and I haven’t been privy to the formula buying process for a long time.

And so I just did a quick Google search of what a can of baby formula cost these days. And the range is

Felecia Commodore: expensive. So

Crystal Garcia: expensive from 35, I see some that are like $50 cans. I don’t know. And I’m just like a $50 can of formula, like even in a week that one item is, could be devastating to someone who is literally.

Making it penny to penny each week. And so just to think about, yeah, how difficult this is gonna be for so many people. But then how that translates to the classroom, right? Like, how can I show up if I don’t have food? My family doesn’t have food, my baby doesn’t have formula. It’s just these very real ramifications on people that yeah.

Are so important. So yeah, just adding that. Yeah.

Heather Shea: Yeah. I, this is my day job, right? At Michigan State is overseas student support programs. And we have instituted last year a pantry where we supply and we are seeing huge demand. And this is just one small thing, right? As you note this not solving the larger societal issue.

But I think the other piece is that. My colleagues who are running emergency funds or, have access to assisting students to, to get emergency funding from our campus, various pots of money. They are seeing huge increased demand. And the Medicaid piece is concerning. I have, one of the programs whose Medicaid benefits were cut so much that her medication went up to $8,000 a month.

And there’s, and this is like lifesaving medication, right? But Medicaid is just chosen, they, or will only cover, up to a certain amount. And she’s I don’t think I could stay in school anymore. So this is the type of thing that I don’t know if we’re following the individual as the implication for the larger system.

Yeah, the shutdown is is really scary and it does not seem like there’s an end in sight. However, during the shutdown. There was this thing that came out on a Friday evening called the Compact for Academic Excellence. This particular compact the, it’s from the White House, but also from the Department of Education.

Proposed offering universities preferential federal funding in exchange for policy concessions, like limits on international students, changes to DEI many other things. Required standardized testing, limit limits on all kinds of different other metrics. And to date, as far as I could tell, now this data might be old.

By the time people listen, only two universities have not officially issued statements rejecting the compact. And there were nine. I think that was also variable. Total institutions who were originally given this compact. So Felicia, I’m curious if you wanna pick it up for those who are not as Yeah.

Familiar because their school isn’t one of the chosen nine. Let’s give a let’s give a quick overview of what the compact entails.

Felecia Commodore: Yeah. Heather, I’m really great glad you brought the story up. It’s actually not to sound like weirdly giddy, but it’s been one of my favorite stories out of this whatever we’re in tornado of, shock and awe.

Because it brings together so many things and I think it really gives us some insight into how this administration sees higher education. And I think if we pay attention it, it can really show us how they see institutions as part of. Their political strategy. And so ultimately the, this compact early October, the administration sent this letter.

We love letters. The sent this letter to these nine universities pretty much saying, if you do this, these things we ask of you sign onto this compact. You’ll get priority access to federal funding. And this is important because we have to put this in concert with all of the federal funding that has been frozen or taken away from institutions between some of our institutions some of the minority serving institutions had their discretionary grants taken away.

We’ve had trio programs canceled. We’ve had the NSF funding, the NIH funding the IES funding. All of this has been frozen, or a lot of it has been taken away. The concept right, is that some of these institutions are very thirsty for funding from the government. And it’s almost like we took it away to then now offer you at a premium, right?

And so in that premium for us is you signing on and making a agreement to abide by these things. And it’s a wide, if you read the document, it’s a wide range of things from not considering race, sex, these things in or gender in admissions to firing folks who do who don’t teach certain things or present certain things in classrooms.

So there is a number of areas that are challenged from shared governance to academic freedom. And ultimately it is. In ways compromising institutional autonomy in order to receive this funding. Heather, my, from what I’ve read, it’s the same thing you’ve read. There were nine original institutions.

Seven have outright said, no, two have said, we’re just gonna be quiet and maybe no one will ask us any more questions. And and so this is what’s been really interesting to me. I I do think this is a way to squelch institutional autonomy and pretty much make institutions beholden to gov federal kind of mandates that have not been vetted out, right?

But through a representative democracy pro or democratic process. This is just what this institu administration would like. But I also think. Two, two things really stuck out to me. One, this is to me what happens when business people are put in charge ah, of government, right? To me, this is the, a priority Federal funding program is nothing more than a very fancy rewards program, right?

It is. It is saying we are going to give you, if you sign on and agree to these terms, we will, we will ultimately give you the version of a, a platinum Amex card, right? You will get a priority here. We’ll push you to the front of the line here. These are things that work well in business.

Like we’ve seen these kind of priority access or membership has its privileges, approaches to getting people. Into these kind of interesting contractual agreements to get preference. Or to get a privilege of sorts. And so to me it was a very business strategy to approach to higher education.

The other thing I also stood out is that to me, this administration understands. I institutional is isomorphism place in the higher education landscape. Because there are institutions with leaders and boards that this administration know are sympathetic to them. Yeah. They know that are aligned to them and very well could have gone to those institutions first and said, Hey, sign on to this thing.

And they would’ve loved to do it, right? They’re already aligned some ways they are showed a alignment with the administration. They did not go to those institutions per se. They went to institutions that have some kind of, in our ecosystem privilege, elitist personality positioned in a particular type of way with influence.

And I thought that was very telling. And to me it spoke to if we can get these institutions into the compact first, everyone else will follow. So we need institutions that have money. We need institutions that have influence. We need institutions that are perceived as elite, right? But the challenge happened in that seven of these institutions anyway, we’re like, yeah, we don’t know.

We don’t, no, we don’t need that. And I actually think it caught the administration off guard. And I actually think there was a microcosm of institutional isomorphism that happened inside. I, for, I have no proof, this is just my opinion, but I believe all these presidents called each other. Because there was a pause, right?

There was a delay in response and it took one institution to do it first, and then we just saw a domino of the other six, right? And so I think it was like if they do it and nothing happens to them, then we will also follow suit. So it’s been really interesting to watch. To me it is a spotlight on that this administration sees institutions as a way to get their political agenda execute it but to do it through influence like influencer culture as opposed to actually trying to figure out how to link it to federal law because they can’t.

Because all they had was the grant money and the funding money, and it didn’t seem to work the way they thought it was gonna work. So now there’s new strategies. I also, I talked to someone, I said, it’s like a wedding where you have your A list and then you have your B-list when your A-list folks don’t RSVP.

And so you fill, you wanna fill the role. We just need, we need somebody at the party, right? And because we paid for the party and now you’re seeing the second wave of institutions that have gotten invited to the compact. And I’m interested to see how they will respond. Because how do you respond when you’re the B-list guest at the party, but I also imagine all this money they froze up is still earmarked money.

Yeah. They have to do something with. Yep. And I, it’s really been interesting to me. I think there’s been a lot of plans that have not gone the way that they expect them to go, because I think there is a lack of understanding of the complexity of how higher education institutions work and also how much of the US higher education is institution higher education system is locked up in institutional autonomy.

Yeah. We don’t have a real federal system of higher education like many of our counterparts in other countries. And so we’re finding out that as much. As we thought we could control institutions federally the unique elements of our system is that it’s hard to do. Yeah.

Heather Shea: Crystal Dmitri, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

And particularly if it gets rolled out more widespread. I was following this because I used to work at the University of Arizona, which that was one of the nine schools. The president of the U of A wrote a letter that I’ll link in our show notes that I think was the counter, it was like, we’ll take your compact and reframe it as the principles of higher education.

And it was like, we won’t do that. We won’t do this, we won’t, but it was also like, this is what we do believe in. So I’m curious if either of you have thoughts about the more widespread implementation of this compact or, will it just fizzle.

Crystal Garcia: Yeah, I can hop in. First of all, I think that comparison of the wedding and the wedding guest is so hilarious.

And honestly, this administration is very much about trying to create this sense of elitism and it’s not working in the ways that they hope it does. Which I mean, I find comical, so I was just laughing as you brought up that example. But unfortunately, I don’t think that we’re gonna continue to see that path of a full out rejection of this compact move forward.

And in fact, I think it just today new College of Florida, ah, yeah. Announced that they’re going to sign on. There you go. You always like to the point of the party, like you always have that eager person that’s I don’t care if I was invited I’m waiting outside just in the hopes that I could possibly get in the wedding Crasher.

Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like that’s potentially what’s happened. So they, their office of the vice president of communications, chief marketing Officer, and this was reported in press wire EIN press wire. And I got this from a LinkedIn post and I’m gonna give credit to that person in a second, but.

They, they pretty much came out and it sounds like they said, the compact outlines propose federal standards to promote academic rigor, accountability, and institutional transparency. Several of the principles described in the compact are already reflected in reforms. New College has undertaken during the past two years, including eliminating DEI, eliminating gender studies, eliminating discrimination at admissions, keeping COSO for students, and committing to free speech, eliminating everything about speech.

But we’re committed to free speech other than what we just said that we eliminated and civil discourse. So anyway, it sounds like they were really excited about this vision of eliminating things that the administration deems as, unnecessary or whatever to higher ed and that they are excited.

They literally said that they are. Cited to to do this. And Robert Kelton is actually the one that I saw this post from on LinkedIn and just to give him credit, he talked about isomorphism, which is funny that you also brought up that word. But said that, given that kind of like tendency that we see in higher ed, that this could possibly push other institutions that want to be like new college to also sign.

Like he argued the challenges not many institutions are striving to be like new college. As what he shared here, spending tops 130 K per FTE and peer reputation drops. So I think it is interesting to think about it in that way of, we. They targeted this elite group of folks first to try to get the cool crowd in the popular kids, so to speak.

That didn’t work. So now they’ve opened it up to anyone. So very much like of this kind of cliquey business of who falls in line with who, whose visions and missions of their institutions really align with what this is calling for. Maybe those folks will be excited to join this institution as well.

And it will be interesting, I think more so to see. Yes. Who else signs, but then what are the immediate and long-term ramifications of what that means for these campuses? Will we see, and I would assume we would more faculty, more staff purged out of institutions students blocked from educational opportunities by, eliminating majors and things that they deem as controversial while holding onto this kind of guise of free speech.

Heather Shea: Yeah.

Crystal Garcia: Dmitri,

Heather Shea: what are your thoughts?

Demetri L. Morgan: Yeah, so without being messy, I, I have it under, good understanding that I think we should also be asking questions about the pre-process. So before this was rolled out were there more institutions approached? Why were some institutions even named?

And were there institutions that were approached that declined to be named? And so what does that say about if some were able to decline to be named about the sort of theater? So when I learned that aspect that there were some institutions that were, that were not declined to be in, involved even in the rollout of it.

And then subsequently others, were named in this initial offer, but then declined. It made me more suspicious of the theater that is going on here. Yeah. And to this point of now institutions like New College willingly jump in you, you create this theater where it’s like, we tried, like we, offered these institutions and they declined.

And so to me I located then in this bigger conversation where I think one of the most effective. Discourses and resistance that we’ve seen over the nine, last nine months is institutional autonomy. And, this is overreach and these sorts of things. And this gives some theater to that.

This makes it more complicated, where it’s look, we did this thing and these seven institutions said no. So you can’t, as an institution or as the discourse around our administration, you can’t say that we’re just, barreling over higher ed. We put this thing out here. Look, these seven institutions said no.

And potentially even more declined to even be involved. And so I’m worried about, I think this institution or this administration is very calculated and they don’t leave things to chance. And so it, it is, to me, the like theater of, oh, we rolled this out. They said to me is all anticipated to then create this next wave of activity, but also to now have in their sort of political repertoire look, we tried to do this and these institutions don’t want to be reformed.

They don’t want to sign on to these things. And so I would not be surprised if in 2026 then the legislative, cycle it, this compact comes back to be part of the discourse about why we need to continue in this direction because higher ed is not ready to come to heal around some of these issues and topics.

And then the other thing that I think, again, from that vantage point of the political theater is there are some things really around the institutional autonomy and free speech. Although Crystals pointed out the irony in that. Where you also then can make appeals to people to say whoa, why didn’t these institutions sign on to, being in supportive academic freedom and free speech.

Like that’s, that was part of the compact. And so you’re trying to be nuanced and say there are aspects of the compact that we don’t agree with and others that we support, like you mentioned with the U of A response. But in our media ecosystem it, you don’t, you lose that nuance.

Heather Shea: Yes.

Demetri L. Morgan: And then things can be portrayed in any particular way to say oh, these institutions are against, the compact.

And the compact for some purposes will be about, academic freedom. So I just think that’s an important. Part to take stock of just how this will potentially be used, both in the immediate that, my colleagues covered, but also the afterlife of this compact and how it can now be used as, a sort of wedge issue when it when higher ed needs to be, a focus, this, look at this thing that we tried to do and nobody wanted to sign on.

Felecia Commodore: So I think this is a good point because I think it’s also what I always remember is that as also in addition to we’re dealing with a lot of business people engaging in policy work. And I think sometimes we are operating under the the normal or the norm of policy, people doing policy work.

But that’s not what we’re dealing with. I think the other element that we often don’t talk about enough is that we’re also dealing with. How do I put this? Diplomatically a people who are very well versed in entertainment and media who are engaging in this work around education. And so to me, the compact, and I didn’t even think about what you shared, Dmitri.

I think it’s great. I also saw the compact as a part of a media strategy. It, it brought this attention at a time where we wanted to divert attention to certain ways. It gives this again, to, to Dmitri’s point, this like allure of a, we’re trying to give you priority. We’re trying to, there is a showmanship.

And an understanding of the. The viewer or the people who intake media’s psyche. And how some of these things are being rolled out and approached. And I always try to remember that’s why I use the wedding like party thing, right? Like we, there is a perception and a psyche that’s being played on and how these things are rolled out and presented to usually to Dmitri’s point to some benefit politically later.

And I think that’s important to remember. I think another, and I wanted to point this out ’cause I didn’t bring up, another interesting thing that I’m seeing happening, or murmurs that I’m hearing are state legislatures are considering making it codifying it so that there’s public institutions cannot sign the impact and receive state funding.

And so that is an interesting development that I’m curious about in thinking about how maybe institutional leaders who don’t want to have a bullseye put on them by saying no, will use their state legislature or lobbying to say, Hey, if you guys say, if you folks say we can’t do it, then I’m like, oh, our hands are tied.

As opposed to a write out rejection. But yeah, I think to Crystal’s point, that’s what I was saying earlier. Like we know what new college and the, and I won’t name other institutions, but we know other institutions are aligned with this administration’s value systems. It. They could have very easily gone to them first, but they didn’t.

And so they’re, we have to interrogate the why. I also don’t know how much influence New College has on being able to create an isomorphic kind of reaction. Other than its peers who are like, okay, they’ve stepped out there. We can come out of the shadows too. But it’s gonna be interesting to see, I think things like this, to my point of those presidents probably calling each other I think we’re gonna start to see the informal networks of higher education institutions become more apparent than we knew they were.

And the intricacy of. Coalition building and lobbying and all of these things that are the behind the scenes, behind the curtain of higher ed, things like this compact are bringing that stuff out into the forefront and it’s gonna be interesting to see how we react to it as a society.

Heather Shea: Yeah.

Yeah.

Demetri L. Morgan: The last thing I’ll say quickly, and it’s something that, I think Felicia has done a good job of at least in our conversations with student affairs now, not losing sight of, I, I also see this compact as a trial balloon for accreditation reform. And you say okay, and literally it is what accreditation is, espouses to do in terms of access to, title four funds and federal dollars.

And but you can’t change. Accreditation without getting into the legislative process. And so this creates a trial balloon and does some of the pre-work of saying, Hey, look, institutions want to be, engaged in quality assurance around this. Why don’t we just codify it?

And I think you see that a lot with how part of the administration strategy is to quite frankly be lawless and do a lot of things by executive order and then, say Hey, Congress codify things a around, around this, effort that we’ve already done.

And I think this has a lot of elements of accreditation. Yeah. And just gives a really, if, at least from the administrative side of things a really important framework to say let’s build our accreditation reforms around a compact. And we think we can then move things in that way.

Felecia Commodore: Yeah, like let’s push the boundaries to find out what people will let us, how far people will let us go. So we didn’t know where to set the boundaries. Yeah

Heather Shea: yeah. I think it’s a fascinating larger conversation for for folks to have and be aware of. And it may or may not influence the student affairs folks who are directly working alongside students, but this last topic absolutely does.

And this is a topic we’ve talked about multiple times on current campus context around DEI policy, how the offices and then the student groups and all of those who are supporting or integrating diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging initiatives into their campuses are being impacted. And recently this came up for me because our campus is, I think our student affairs folks are doing the most, they are trying to lead and partner with students.

They’re trying to help. All of the campus understand the changes to policy and funding. But I think it’s having a, they’re, we’re getting a lot of student backlash, frankly. And so I’m curious, Dmitri, if you could talk a little bit about managing that tension because these student expectations of what they were going to be able to do and receive as for as far as funding, that was the norm right before January of this year.

And so now we have all these regulatory constraints and institutional shifts. How do we help students understand the broader policy implications, but so that they can be engaged and target their anger towards the, a different audience? Because I think it’s being unfairly put upon our, at least on my campus, on my student affairs colleagues.

Demetri L. Morgan: Yeah I’m glad we have a few minutes to talk about this because I think it, in terms of not only the audience of student affairs now, but for a lot of people on campus it, these, as these policies have taken hold and different institutions have interpreted them in different ways, the, we’re now starting to see the second order impacts and the third order impacts as it makes its way down.

And we then sometimes forget where these things emanated from. And so I appreciate the way you teed it up because I do think it’s important to link all of these things. So that’s, one second I think the the role of student organizations as part of the campus life is it creates a really challenging unique dynamic within this particular issue because you have the same first amendment that, talks about like freedom of speech and that oftentimes, and sometimes people get into, freedom of religion and freedom of media, but the freedom of assembly, right?

Like we for are assembling right now. And student groups are in a really important exer exercise of that particular right within the First Amendment right, the freedom to assemble. But that does not get into the allocations that institutions do or do not owe institutions. The policy frameworks that impact impact them.

And so I, on the one hand feel for students, right? Because it’s like we, especially if you’re a senior or you’ve been, in the institution for a few years and you can see and feel the difference in ways that maybe first year students might not be accustomed to. But at the same time, institutions have to walk really important lines where, you still are able to assemble.

But how we think about our policies or our resources have to be, engaged against other concerns that institutions are navigating, connected to all the things we’ve talked about earlier and thinking about the relationships that institutions have to the federal government across fed financial aid, research dollars all of those things.

So I think it, it’s, part of it is just trying to understand the landscape and the context, and I think honoring the student frustration, which I think a lot of people do well and helping walk them through the different tensions that are at play is important. I think the other thing I’ve been thinking a lot about, and I really actually want to hear from all three of you is I wonder, and this is maybe the controversial take of the day, but I wonder what the right ratio is in terms of what we expect for institutions.

And what we expect from each other as a student, as student groups, so we think a lot about like mutual aid or peer support or other other. Agencies or other groups within our society, whether it be like faith institutions, church institutions, social civic organizations, what roles they have in supporting student success in student life, and what we lose by only, or primarily turning to institutions to support us in this moment.

That’s not always in a, an absolving of institutions, but I’ve just been thinking a lot about where others are being activated to step up and to step into this moment. And then to the last point in terms of what I would encourage, student first impressions to think about how are we helping students?

Those supports that exist around them, that are simultaneously saying, yes, keep pushing on the institution. ’cause this won’t always be like this. But also what other resources, areas of expertise contexts exist within our community, within our larger ecosystem that in this moment you can also engage to get it what it is that you need.

And while also continuing to push for things against the uni against and for, and with the university. And that sort of stakeholder mapping the sort of mutual support in this moment. I wonder if that is a somewhat, workable. For right now. Alternative. But I also could see how people would be like that takes the institution off the hook.

No, we want to focus on the institution. So I cannot rebuttal myself, but I have just been thinking a lot about that. And I would love to know what you all think about what are the ways we’re activating the broader community to help support students, student groups in this particular moment?

Heather Shea: Yeah. Crystal, you wanna weigh in? Or? Felicia? Go ahead, Felicia. Oh,

Felecia Commodore: okay. So I really love that question and I have a complicated answer to it Sha there. So I, I think a couple of things have been going on. For a while that this kind of, that you are shining a light on Dmitri One. I wanna say that I think there are a number of institutions that rely on community partnerships to support students.

I just don’t think they’re the institutions that we look at to as models of student affairs work. If you look at a number of HBCUs, community colleges, these places usually heavily rely on partnerships and relationships with community groups faith institutions in that community different other educational groups, work, working association, business industries to help create things for students outside of the institution for supports.

I just think that all. Usually in those cases it’s a more organic relationship that has come about. Yeah. From the kind of foundation of the institution and its relationship with that community. I think one of the challenges we need to really think about for some of our more well-resourced institutions or larger institutions is what has been your relationship with the community to even begin to think about relying on the community for support for the students.

If the, if what is communicated to your students is that you all are the light on the hill for the community and actually don’t wanna go over there and to the bad lands then why would your students look to the community for support? So I think there’s can sometimes be at institutions.

We, we create a situation where we become everything to the students because we perpetuate an idea that everything here is good for the student and everything outside of here is not good for the student. That we are there is an anti, there’s a them and an us. And I think that can make it hard to bridge that gap.

But the other thing I think too, we and I think it’s a both end, like you said, Dmitri, right? We don’t wanna let institutions off the hook. We wanna make sure institutions are hard lining supports for our students through student orgs and student leadership opportunities and organizing opportunities.

But I also wonder if we have, because of pressures of regulation because of pressures of. Funding and fine fiscal policies and legalities and liability if we have created an environment where students don’t know how to organize.

Heather Shea: Yeah,

Felecia Commodore: we have corporatized student organization, and so when students, are met with barriers through policies and practices, they don’t even know how to organize outside of those policies and practices because in some ways we’ve taken that learning away from them.

And so I also wonder. What this, what’s happening now and again, I want to also reiterate, institutions need to be on the hook, but I also wonder if we’re going to see more informal student organization, which I don’t know would be a bad thing. Because it is that informal student organizing that got higher ed to where it is now.

And for many marginalized groups, they have always had to informally organize. They have always had to find their own spaces. They have always had to figure out ways to get people to speak to campus that couldn’t go through formal channels. They’ve had to find community outside of the institution for safety purposes.

So I do wonder if we’re. We’re missing actually an opportunity for students to get out of the corporate model of organizing and back to a more organic way of organizing. That’s just my thoughts around that.

Crystal Garcia: Yeah. And I am so glad that you went first because I’m going on a different kind of route with this in that I continue to see this as a leadership issue of failure to name the cause of harm.

Ah, it hap it’s happening on my campus over and over again. I think I said in the last podcast that this summer we were all directed to do some website erasure of all of these terms and it was so under the like radar I don’t even know if students even know that this happened, by the way.

And the fact that, our chancellor has now proposed to eliminate all of our programs has caught up the attention of our campus. So that’s gone by the wayside, but it’s this like insidious taking away of something from the students, right? Like the. The resources that they had available to them are now no longer there.

The staff members that were so important to them. Yeah, were just covertly fired the, and in some cases it’s more over, but a lot of times these things are done, like under the table, so to speak, and our university leadership is operating in this fear. Mode, right? Like of we’re just afraid of everything.

We don’t want anybody to know that we are doing this, but we actually are doing it because we’re appeasing the administration, but we don’t want the administration to know we’re appeasing them. ’cause then they might ask us for more things to appease them with. So we just don’t wanna talk about it. And so not talking about it places zero blame anywhere.

So it makes complete sense to me that students would be upset at whoever is directly giving those services or whoever’s directly doing the erasure whenever they’re, those people are being told to do it from someone else. So it’s like the failure of understanding who in this chain of command is actually at fault for what’s happening And.

Again, I, who know, what do I know? I’m not a university president. If I were, I probably would be having $0 of funding right now because I just don’t understand how they’re not coming out and saying, this administration is compelling us to do this to our students. And they are withholding this because of this.

Just the transparency of that just seems so much to ask. Everybody’s being so polite and kind, and this administration is not polite or kind. And so I think it’s to our demise. So that’s a whole other issue. But also I wanted to add in here that Dmitri, on your earlier point about the framing around like the theater and in institutions I did a quick search too, and why do I do this to myself?

But it’s important to know, like just two days ago, for example, Fox News had a headline that says Universities Defiant on Trump’s Academic Excellence Compact. So that’s. Clearly you’re like exactly on the right track of now they can be villainized as these institutions are defiant, they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing.

And so again, this kind of ties back to this because I’m so frustrated that this administration is so willing to rake universities and university leadership over the coal, so to speak. And what happens is our leaders, to a big extent, not all of them, continue to protect them and not call them out for things that they’re doing that are harmful.

And that goes not only at the national level, but also at the state level as well and otherwise.

Felecia Commodore: Yeah, and I think Crystal, because I always say this when I talk to folks about presidents and communications, that I think is really important because we often frame presidential communications as an individual.

Approach and it never is, right? Outside of wondering if their board is going to fire them for what they say I always tell folks like when presidents put out statements, what should be happening is that on one side of them is legal counsel and the other side of them is communications, right?

And often what I have found in talking with presidents is they start out with a particular stance and statement. And those two entities, the legal entity and the communications entity is let’s massage this, right? Because I don’t want you to be liable for a certain thing. I don’t want you to put the institution at reputational risk.

I don’t want you this is how this will play out in communications this got, and so by the time we get the statement. Yeah. It has been massaged so much. It’s not even actually what the, that particular president first attends saying. And I think to your point now there is a lot of let’s not say more than we have to because and I think that’s a communication strategy and that the more you talk, the more you open the door to say something that could trigger something else.

So we say as much as we need to say, and no more than we need to say. I think also, and I’ve experienced this being on some different committees institutions a lot of folks making the decisions, in my opinion, that impact students don’t actually have any contact with them. Yep. And so to your point.

I don’t even think that I need to tell the students what happened or what we’re doing, because I have totally forgotten that the students will be impacted by this, or I just believe they’ll go along to get along. And I think that we need to talk about that more how student affairs professionals, those staff those people that work directly with students, faculty who work directly with students, are often kept out of those spaces to say Hey, this isn’t gonna rock well with the students.

I, I was on a committee recently, I won’t say what it was where we were setting up a listening session for students and I was like, how did you contact the students? And they were like, oh, we sent an email out on the, like mass mail or like the big, university email service. I said, I think you might wanna think about another way to do that.

Students don’t read their emails. And the person was like, oh, no. Like they, and I was like, no, I’m, so we have this listening session and the first only three students show up. Oh. And the student was like, did you really want students involved? I didn’t even get this correspondence till yesterday and dah.

And I just sat there very quietly because students don’t check their email. And then they looked at the back, like the back channel and realized nobody opened the email. And we did rectify it. But again, you only know students don’t check their emails when you work with students.

And I just think a lot of times there’s an as assumption that we know how students are thinking that we have a pulse on the students. And a lot of times the people in the room making the decisions don’t have any contact with students at all. And and the students they do have contact with are student leaders who are in a privileged position on campus which gives them a different vantage point.

And I think to your point, E, even outside of transparency, if transparency can’t happen the way we would like it to happen, we could at least increase the people in the room who have direct contact with students, if not students themselves.

Heather Shea: Yeah.

Demetri L. Morgan: And just one, like I, I think, and I say this as the person that was just recently in a student group conversation and was on the receiving end of this frustration and not by any means to infantalize students, but there’s, for if anybody’s been around little ones, like there’s this idea of after daycare or after school, like students will have or kids will have meltdowns.

It’s because they’ve, had to engage in this restraint all day and follow the rules and then they get into a safe space and it’s just they lose it. And I feel to an extent there, there’s a, there’s an analogy or a metaphor there where. And at least this is what I’ve been telling myself since this, in exchange with students that there’s some safety and utility being the one who gets the frustration from students because students believe that you’ll listen.

That you care about them, that you want things to be better for them. It doesn’t make experiencing it any better or any fun. And so I wanna honor that, but I’ve tried to remind myself that relationship building with students, with student orgs, like it takes time, it takes rapport building and they can’t always engage in those spaces, whether it’s because of lack of access or whatever.

And so it’s not to absolve students, like I also wish students would be thoughtful about the positions that student affairs professionals are in. But I also wanna honor that there is that also is important. Relationship dynamics there when student affairs professionals are receiving that.

And so it, it doesn’t make it any easier, but I do want to affirm, those of us or people who have been on some of the receiving end of student’s frustration that is also a can be a sign of a important relationship management that can happen once, that frustration is released or once and to stick with it because we see the full arc of where that, both development opportunity, but also the opportunity to build rapport and trust can come when there’s opportunities to see that frustration through, and then channel it into, next steps in conversations.

Heather Shea: Yeah. Yeah, it’s been a, it’s been a really interesting opportunity to witness and as I think most everybody knows, I don’t work in student affairs anymore. I work on the academic affairs side of the house. But I have a lot of contact with students through the programs that I work with.

So it’s also interesting hearing students who are in MySpace talk about how they’re engaging with the folks who are over in student affairs. And I think when I go back to, there was this like period in time where we were calling ourselves student affairs educators. I still think that word is really important because, at the root of our role on campus, it is to work alongside students to both.

Help them learn, but also learn from them and gain that kind of broader perspective mutually. And I think it’s a really interesting kind of way that, we want students to engage in activism. It’s an, it is an opportunity for them to develop some leadership skills in that way. But are they, pushing on a place where like one they don’t really have any power two is gonna potentially backfire on the institution, right?

And lacking the understanding of the whole thing. We are just having the best conversation, and I don’t wanna wrap us up, but I’m gonna pull us to final thoughts. Today. I always like to end these conversations with. What gives you hope or what feels like progress? So I’ll put that as an option on the table that you can respond to.

What’s keeping you motivated or up at night, and any advice for folks who are working on the front the front lines and student affairs right now. So Dmitri, I’m gonna start, I’m gonna start. Final thoughts with you.

Demetri L. Morgan: Yeah. I will share this for show notes. I’m gonna give everybody some homework.

And it’s the literally the assignment that my students have in my intro to higher ed class right now. And this connects really well with what you were just saying, Heather. Where I think we’ve we describe ourselves as student affairs educators. The educator role is really important, and I think that’s also in how we are messaging and talking about higher ed right now.

And being able to be conversant in different ways with different people. Sometimes it’s talking about diversity, equity, inclusion, and the aftermath. Sometimes it’s talking, you know about their kind of current discourse. But one of the things that’s really, I think, eye-opening for people is to talk about the economic impact of higher education.

And the American Council of On Education is rolling out a tool to help people message about the economic impact of their, of institutions within their congressional district. And I think it’s just really important to understand, and it’s been cool to see my students talk about, ’cause I gave ’em assignment where they have to look up their current district and maybe where they went to school or where they grew up, and compare and contrast the economic impact of higher ed.

And it’s been cool to see the students be like, I didn’t know there was that many institutions in my district. Or, wow, I didn’t know that many students were, going to school in my district, or Wow. I didn’t know the economic impact of the institution. And so it’s given me, this is all the answers, like it’s given me hope to be like, these are master students in a higher ed program who care a lot about higher ed and here they are being surprised about, some of this higher ed data within their protection.

But then their particular district. And so how much more work do we have? But, to be more well versed in how we talk about higher ed. And it’s just an opportunity to think about it with data. ’cause everybody’s oh, we want data, or, use concrete things. And so I love that groups are trying to provide better and more accessible tools to people.

And I think then that creates a responsibility for those of us that are in higher ed to be educators and to be able to talk and point people to tools and things to help try to shift the conversation, one to one. I’m hopeful about that right now and encourage everybody to do a little homework and look up their district and just get a sense of the kind of economic impact of institutions around them.

Heather Shea: I’ll post that in the show notes. Thank you for sharing that with us. Felicia, final thoughts?

Felecia Commodore: Yeah. Couple things. Giving me hope right now. One is it’s homecoming season and I have been watching between my own friends. I don’t go to my homecoming ’cause it’s in the spring ’cause we ain’t had no football team, so we have to go to the dorm basketball season.

But that’s a whole nother thing. It’s cold. And but watching the joy of folks going back to their campuses reconnecting and then also the current students and their activity and seeing, campus Queens and kings. And also I feel like this year I’m seeing even more intergenerational interaction from what I’m seeing from homecoming.

And that really gives me a lot of joy. Because I think and hope, because what I was saying earlier, I think there is, there has been some. Information lost and current students and former students not connecting as much and seeing more of this connection, I think we will have some informal transmitting of information of how do we navigate this moment?

How do we get through this moment? How do we make sure our institution is here for the next generation? And I think the fostering of intergenerational communication really helps that to happen. And it also helps for older gener previous generations to meet who’s on their campus today, so they know who they’re advocating for and who they need to advocate for.

And so that’s really brought me a lot of hope. Likewise to Dmitri’s point, I recently did an exercise in my class where I have students pick articles and they read them and then I shot surprise them and they have to talk to each other about the articles they read without me involved.

And they don’t know that’s gonna happen. And it really gave me encouragement because what I hope they get out of that is how do I engage in conversation about research in informal way, in like ways I wasn’t prepared to have to do, because I think that’s such an important skill that’s gonna be needed right now.

And so it was really exciting for me to see them work through it. And then by the time we got to the middle of the class, people were asking each other questions, people were pulling up definitions of stuff. And that gives me hope because. I think our this current generation as well as moving forward needs to be able to have kitchen table conversations about the things that we’re learning about higher ed.

The things we understand by working in higher ed, no longer will it cut the mustard for us to talk to each other. We have to be able to talk on the fly at any point with informed conversation about these things. Things keeping me up at night. One grading. I am in a grading vortex right now.

And I do this to myself every semester. And this semester I had an eight week class and I assigned just too much. I just did too much. And so I’m not getting any sleep because I’m trying to get my grades in. But two other than accreditation, y’all know, that keeps me up every night. I am.

Concerned if we are prepared for, if the bottom falls out. The and I hope the bottom doesn’t fall out. And not that I’m a doomsday prepper, although I’m getting there thinking about a bunker, but I wonder if we have mechanisms in place, networks in place have thought through what do we do if the economy tanks, if people and students lose their jobs, if the funding model completely collapses in higher education, if we believe in this.

Philosophically in the concept and project of higher education, how are we prepared to continue on with everything we know has turned on its head? And I just I don’t know. And then maybe there’s rooms, I’m just not in where we’re having these conversations, but I just I don’t feel like I’m hearing enough of what do we do?

What is our tabletop prep for scenario planning or scenario planning for if this whole structure collapses? And so that’s keeping me up at table.

Heather Shea: Crystal, that makes me like, I, it was giving me chills, so sorry to be so depressive. No,

Crystal Garcia: just you’re absolutely accurate. I’m gonna start with the keeping me up first so that I can end with something maybe more hopeful because I feel kind the same way.

Obviously there are so many things I think that, right now with what’s going on within my campus space. I’m very much, in real time witnessing I wanna say the erosion, but perhaps it’s already been eroding for some time of concepts of shared governance, of, even the value on education as a public good as opposed to, some kind of economic vehicle that has.

Dollars that are in the immediate as opposed to forward thinking. Dmitri, I think that my campus would do well to think more of that forward thinking economic impact. They have done that work, but we’re being evaluated in ways that is very demoralizing and that really feels like we’re losing focus of that.

And so for me, those are some of the things that are so distressing. And it’s so funny, Felicia, that you brought this point up of what do we do if things collapse? If these things don’t go on. I don’t know if this is like that kind of a worse case scenario, but I’m really inspired by people that I see.

On social media, on in news stories, just in every day that are doing courageous acts. And by courageous, that’s so relevant. Not so relevant. It’s so relative to the person in the context. But something that seems so seemingly small can have just this profound impact. And we see stories like that all the time.

And I think that a lot of that is lost in focusing on gesturing everywhere. Everything else that’s going on right now that it’s hard to hang on to that. But I was just talking to a colleague and saying, what if we lose our jobs? What if our department is eliminated? I think that one of the things that.

Makes me so upset about the potential loss of our department is thinking about this hub for, educational leaders. And, there are other institutions in our state, but our state, there’s a lot that’s wrapped up with that. And so I just get scared about what does the future for education look as a whole without us?

And so that’s like the sad part, but I was like what if we started dreaming right now of what we could do regardless? They can’t stop us from having our own educational hub and, thinking about. Ways that we can offer educational sessions, learning workshops of, different avenues of reaching people that may not be a formal degree but we know is important and what can that look like?

And I’ve been thinking about that more broadly with the field. As I see things happening in Texas, as I see things happening in Florida and my colleagues are also being subjected to increasing scrutiny. People are being fired just for teaching what they’re supposed to teach. And how can we create alternative spaces where that, because the point is to shut down the conversations, right?

But what happens when we have the freedom? Of knowing those conversations can’t be shut down. It feels like we lose less not the bunker level stuff that Alicia was talking about, but our departments, the preservation of things for now. So anyway, those are just some things that I’m like, I would like to continue dreaming about that and start planning it now, because I think it makes us feel like we have less at stake, less to lose when we’re the ones that are driving what that future looks like for ourselves and for the future of people and education forward. Yeah. Really well

Heather Shea: said. I saw you unmute Felicia. Yeah,

Felecia Commodore: I just, I often to your point crystal if we, even if we engage in an exercise of reframing losses, gain. Like what what do we gain in terms of freedom by losing systems that never allowed us to be free in the first place? Yeah. Yeah. And so I think that is something that I’ve been wrestling with, right? Did we romanticize what liberation look like? And what does that look like?

Even if we look historically right did liberation come easy or did it come with some things breaking down first? Yeah.

Heather Shea: Yeah. Ooh, I, really appreciate this conversation today. I feel like I learned so much from the three of you and from our other two folks, Brendan and Oyon. But also just leave these conversations with different things on my mind, then those things that have been ruminating and keeping me up at night.

So thank you all three of you so much for sharing with our time today. I also wanna just take a moment, express our gratitude to our producer. Nats gonna turn this around by Wednesday of this week so that we can have it really truly be current campus context. So thanks Nat for all that you do as we have discussed.

Higher ed is shifting very quickly, and I feel based on the response we’ve been receiving from this series, that these discussions really matter. And so we’d love to hear you share your thoughts, post your comments, tag us on Instagram. And if you know of organizations or entities that might help sustain current campus context, we are looking for sponsors for 2026.

If you haven’t yet subscribed either on our YouTube channel or to our newsletter, please do that. We send out one newsletter a week on Wednesdays, just previewing what we have coming up. So to all of our listeners, thank you so much for being here and thanks to everyone who’s listening and watching, and we’ll just keep going.

We believe in you.

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