Brendan Cantwell: My impression is that a lot of it is happening the same way that communities are responding in Minneapolis, how they responded in Chicago and elsewhere, where communities are taking it upon themselves.

To develop networks, to help move people around, to help keep people safe, to provide accommodations and resources for vulnerable people. And I think, that’s there’s been reports of that happening, for example, at the University of Minnesota. What I have not seen is a lot of campuses taking positions making statements.

Supporting their students. Supporting their faculty, acknowledging the very troubling is one way to put it, but actually horrific events. And the seizure Minneapolis is under siege. And you have not seen lots of statements about that like we did after the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Heather Shea: That’s wild. All right, let me get back to my beginning. All right. Welcome to Student Affairs Now, the Online Learning Community for Student Affairs Educators. I’m your host, Heather Shea. It’s January, 2026, and this week we are returning to our monthly current campus context series. This episode was recorded at 4:48 PM on Thursday, January 22nd, 2026.

As always, things might have changed once you listen. We are now just over one year into a new federal administration a year that brought with its significant disruption, uncertainty, and political pressure for colleges and universities. As we entered the spring semester, higher education continues to navigate overlapping challenges including ice.

A heightened ICE presence or immigrations and customs enforcement president presence on campus mounting, financial strain and program elimination and. Broader questions about whether and how institutions are willing to speak up. So today’s conversation is really gonna be reflective as well as some forward-looking.

We’re gonna look back at what has actually changed over the past year and what turned out. To be more bluster than impact and what has quietly reshaped campus life in ways that student affairs professionals are now living every day. Joining me are two returning correspondents who each time help us make sense of this moment from different but deeply connected vantage points.

Welcome back Dr. Brendan Cantwell and Dr. Crystal Garcia. I’m glad to have you both here. Yeah, and if you aren’t familiar with Brendan and Crystal, definitely go to our website and you can read all about their bios. So when I think back to those first weeks of the administration, exactly one year ago, I think many of us experienced it as a kind of constant crisis.

There was executive orders and talk of Doge style efficiency mandates and cuts or threats to executive agencies. Cuts to research funding, and I think that pace created a lot of fear, but we’re now one year in and beyond the noise and the headlines. I’m curious about what you both think feels meaningfully different on our college campuses.

Brenda, I’m gonna start. With you what early threats or policy moves generated a lot of fear and attention, but ultimately didn’t have as much impact as expected?

Brenden Cantwell: That, that’s an interesting question. Certainly some of the most aggressive initial moves that the administration made ha turned out to be.

Pulled back a little bit. It was literally almost a year to the day when the federal government froze all federal grants of all kinds, and it was unclear would this even include Pell Grants and things like that, and people were terrified that maybe the federal government would abruptly try to shut down higher education and they pulled back from that.

It doesn’t mean that there weren’t serious disruptions from that pause. And certainly there have been major disruptions to research funding, for example. And so the kind of research that’s happening on your campus is likely quite different. And the financial strain that. That, that cut, that, that pause.

And then the subsequent cuts have put on campuses likely have had a lasting impact in terms of budget cuts and reorganizations that your campus may be feeling. And then there was the Dear Colleague letter in February, which said that basically any kind of race conscious activity on campus was illegal.

Anything that acknowledged differences by race or gender. Was considered to be, outside of the scope of civil rights law based on the 1964 Civil Rights Act and on the students for fair admissions versus Harvard case. That’s what they, used as their justification for this campuses made a huge number of changes.

As you, we were talking before Heather, people, offices changed names. They changed, their focus programs were discontinued. Some people lost their jobs, their duties were shifted. They moved offices so enormously disruptive. We know that that dear colleague letter does not have the full force of law.

And in fact, as we also just discussed before recording the administration yesterday stopped its legal appeals to try to. Prove or demonstrate in court that it did have the full force of law. And so we have had a lot of compliance with with executive desires from from campus leadership from boards that turned out to be not legally necessary.

And so we definitely learned that the administration could get a lot. Threats and rhetoric. Even if they didn’t have the capacity to follow through with legal enforcement. One of the things that I do wanna highlight that is a big change that we will see shake out more over the coming years. Is changes the student loans through the big beautiful bill that will cap, especially graduate borrowing. And so you might definitely see changes to the availability to offer graduate programs in your institution. And that can have an effect because especially master’s degree programs tend to be fairly lucrative and that might mean that there’s less funding for other things.

And so that’s a big change to keep an eye out. Mo moving forward, other like really wonky things is the board in the Department of Education that oversees accreditation virtually. Completely turned over. And so in the future, like they laid the groundwork for really interfering with the way accreditation works and that could have profound changes to your work moving forward.

So while. The absolute fury of the first days didn’t carry through for the entire year. And perhaps, it may even feel like the administration was pulling back after its October compact gambit failed. They tried to get these campuses to sign up a bunch of campuses to sign up for a compact that would give the government a lot of control over campus operations in exchange for the promise of increased access to federal funding that kind of fell on its face.

And so it might feel like the, and the, the administration is in retreat and maybe we can just go on as businesses in a business as usual way, but I would hesitate to get too comfortable. Administration’s gonna come back in 2026 and try more things. It’s gonna continue to be disruptive and some of the more profound changes that it has been able to make will take years to for us to fully feel.

Heather Shea: Yeah. Yeah. What strikes me is that even when policy stalled, softened. Or were blocked or frankly, they fell flat on their face, as you said about the compact, there’s still this uncertainty, right? And the fear that what could still happen and some of that fear has resulted in pre-compliance or anticipatory compliance.

So Crystal, I wanna turn to you here. So from where you sit. How did that piece of sustained uncertainty, not just the policy outcomes really shape institutional decisions, morale and priorities over the last year. And if you wanna talk about the piece, particularly about the dear Colleague letter just being overturned, that would be that would be great too.

Crystal Garcia: And Brendan did such a great job of identifying all of these different throwing the spaghetti at the wall, so to speak, efforts at the national level. And whenever we think specifically about all of these anti DI efforts and more broadly, efforts to control curricula, efforts to control faculty, to control speech on campuses, some of those things may not have legally gotten the grounding that they wanted to at that national level. But from my perspective, I think that it really opened the doors to conservative controlled states to have an excuse to do away with a lot of the things that they wanted to do away with the whole time.

We had a lot of. Board of Regents who were making decisions left and right around removing language and instructing behind the scenes to institutional leadership to take down websites, to rename offices, to even eliminate offices in some cases. And I think the Chronicle of Higher Education has been doing a really good job of tracking the.

State by state legislation that has been rolling through. And then last year they tacked on this additional task of also trying to track individual institutional changes that campuses were making. And I think that is such an important distinction because we can also oftentimes look at. The national legislative level, then we look at the state, landscape, and then we think, oh, this must be happening and this must not be happening.

When in reality, if you look at the tracker, for example, for my state, Nebraska, you would see that we have tabled, DEI, anti DEI efforts at our state level. But in reality, within our campus spaces, we’re seeing a lot of changes that are happening and sometimes they’re behind the curtain. So for example, one that’s not publicly really been discussed at all yet and was only made finalized in December, was that our, ethnic studies department was dismantled and they can still offer classes, but they’re not gonna no longer gonna be offering majors. They’re no longer gonna be considered a department. Ethnic studies at UNL was established in 1972, so you can tell me. Any of these administrators can tell me that it had nothing to do with the political landscape.

But the timing of this is, it would be absurd to think anything, but, right? And and this was really done under the table at, within our institution, details of it weren’t even made public until. This official vote in December. But essentially faculty were threatened, their jobs were threatened if they didn’t dissolve the institute.

And we’ve seen that with other programs and things within our campus spaces. I’ve talked on here before too, about changes to websites and demands to erase words to completely band words from our jargon. And whenever I think again about this distinction between what legally is happening, but then what is actually happening, right?

There’s they’re disjointed and unless you’re experiencing it and feeling it and seeing it within campus spaces, you might not even know that these things happen because again, a lot of these decisions are just made under the table.

Heather Shea: Yeah. Yeah. I think the case with the US Department of Education dropping this appeal kind of embodies for me how this is a significant legal action, right?

And it leaves the court, the pre prior court’s ruling in place, which. If we take that from a positive stance, underscores the limits of federal overreach when challenged, but I think for me it raises an important question about when the legal threats retreat do institutional behaviors follow? And I think what you’re saying, crystal, and what I’m hearing from you, Brendan, is that.

Not necessarily right, and the governance of those institutions, whether it be at the state level, which I know there’s not very many states that have statewide. Arizona Board of Regents. I was at Arizona and you were too, Brenda. So I know that they have a statewide governance process, here in Michigan, every single institution has its own governance, which really leaves that up to institution by institution to implement.

So I’m thinking about all of those things as we dial into a specific situation that I think is impacting impacting all of us, impacting our students. And I think when we think about uncertainty in policy terms I think it’s important that we recognize how individual people are experiencing that in their daily lives.

And I think. The real world frame I will put on this around fear and uncertainty is what’s happening in Minneapolis and St. Paul over the past several weeks. The murder of Renee Goode and this large federal immigration enforcement operations that has really drastically altered the daily rhythms of the city.

And I was looking up a couple of articles about how that’s impacted the colleges that are located in those spaces, because I can imagine. Similar to COVID, like they’ve had to rethink, are they teaching classes online now? Do students feel safe and outdoor? Spaces even going into going into classroom buildings.

And I, in this one article. The Chronicle, it talked about how students at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities were talking about using skyways and tunnels to move around their campuses and carrying their passports just to feel safe. And this really change fundamentally changes how college feels, so Crystal, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how fear and uncertainty like this is impacting students’ sense of safety and their ability to engage in their education. And I think it’s permeating other campuses, not isolated just to Minnesota right now.

Crystal Garcia: Absolutely. And I don’t see how it couldn’t possibly have some effect on the ways that students are feeling and how they’re considering their safety in relation to space in place.

And, we used to have semblance of laws of spaces, educational spaces, churches, that could, entities like ICE could not enter. And now that we’ve done away with those laws that were so important to protecting human rights and access to education and other spaces yeah I’m really worried about the bigger effects that it’s going to continue to have on students, especially, i’m on social media, I’m on TikTok, and I know that folks, younger generations certainly are as well. And see the videos, the very violent and explicit videos of harm that’s happening to. So many people to high school students. Yeah. I saw a video of a high school student wearing a backpack, perhaps yelling or shouting at eyes, right?

Some, saying get out, whatever the case might have been. I don’t know what they were doing, but to be shot in the face with a, a mace type of shooting device. And again, the. The amount of violence that we’re seeing is unfortunately horrific. Horrific, and at the same time is becoming normalized in a sense because we see these atrocities happening and it’s becoming more and more normal.

Oh, another horrible ice incident. There was a man who was shot with a, an instrument from ICE and had to undergo surgery, removing like even glass and other things from his face and was close to dying. You mentioned Renee Goode. Keith Porter was another individual that was killed that I believe I saw a video that referred to another man who was killed by ICE agents and has not made the news media and the same.

Right as Renee, good have an anti-blackness, and racism has a role in these things, particularly in thinking about Keith Porter in relation to that conversation. But nonetheless, all of this violence, there’s it’s impossible to think that students aren’t seeing this. They’re embodying it, internalizing it and that it affects not only their ability to get to class, but also their wellbeing and ability to engage in learning while.

All of this is happening around them. And folks in particular that have to worry about family members or maybe their family members were taken by ice, maybe. They have friends or community members. And so it’s just a lot to unpack. And then, I also think about just, we were talking about this in class the other day, and it’s related to student sense of safety.

But then again, not, I think. The difficult thing that is such a tension in these conversations is that so many people will say it’s the law, legally. People who are not here with documentation should not legally be here. So they should be subjected to, some form of some type of justice, right?

And I always go back to thinking about, what we know about humans and how humans should interact with each other, and how we should treat each other. And that the law is not always the guide of what is human humanizing and what what is right, what is ethically good. And I think that tension of understanding the distinction between just because something is a law does not mean necessarily that it is not right, is a difficult one to grapple with in these conversations.

It was once legal to enslave humans. It was once legal to segregate people by race. It was once legal to do all sorts of atrocities. And I wonder, years from now, when we look back at this moment and we think about the legality of what’s happening and perhaps what’s, what’s not legal but is still happening.

How we’ll look back in this moment in history. I teach history of higher ed and so we engage in these conversations about history pretty often. But I also wanna add one more note that, we’re talking about students safety, sense of belonging, their ability to engage just. Last week we had a department meeting, and one of my colleagues said they did not feel safe, that they were unsure of if they should come to campus because there was an ice raid within our community the night before.

And this person is. Has, documentation. They’re legally here, but we know that doesn’t matter. People have been picked up by ice. People have been targeted, people have been harmed. Renee Good was a US citizen. She was murdered. And so again, just thinking about the complexities of this, yes, for students, but also for our colleagues, for professional staff members, for faculty, it’s a lot.

Heather Shea: Yeah, it really is a lot. And I’m curious, Brendan, if you have seen any institutions responding proactively, or are we defaulting to this we’re gonna manage the potential risk over care and then what’s the balance and where can possibly student affairs folks? Play, what kind of roles can they play to support students and shape that climate?

Brenden Cantwell: So I guess I don’t know of exactly how institutions are responding.

Crystal Garcia: I.

Brenden Cantwell: Of it is happening the same way. My impression is that a lot of it is happening the same way that communities are responding in Minneapolis, how they responded in Chicago and elsewhere, where communities are taking it upon themselves.

To develop networks, to help move people around, to help keep people safe, to provide accommodations and resources for vulnerable people. And I think, that’s there’s been reports of that happening, for example, at the University of Minnesota. What I have not seen is a lot of campuses taking positions making statements.

Supporting their students. Supporting their faculty, acknowledging the very troubling is one way to put it, but actually horrific events. And the seizure Minneapolis is under siege. And you have not seen lots of statements about that like we did after the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement.

There was a kind of, there were a lot of statements made and that we can de have critical conversations about how useful those statements were, how sincere they were that, but we haven’t seen them now. Yeah. And we haven’t seen much action, I don’t think, from colleges and universities. And I think it’s easy for colleges and universities at this point to keep their head down to not, provoke the attention of state or federal officials. I think that they are instinctively more comfortable saying this is not a higher ed issue. We’re just, and it. Neutrality policies and all of these things. On the other hand, I think that we ought to we have an obligation as scholars and I think higher education leaders also have an obligation to start to draw some of the connections between things that are directly happening to higher education and the broader.

Environment, including what’s happening in Minneapolis, and that is a concerted effort to segregate society.

Crystal Garcia: Yeah.

Brenden Cantwell: And to reestablish segregation and the the requirement that the federal government has put on institutions to report their admission data disaggregated by race and sex.

With scores and grades and the threat, the implicit threat, that any gaps in averages are going to provoke investigations and that campuses should try to eliminate these gaps in averages is a plain effort. To segregate campuses, just like the terror that ICE is imposing on Minneapolis is a plain effort to not only apprehend and deport people who are undocumented, but to force people of color.

Into their homes, outta their street, out of work, out of school, and these are not they’re not directly related administratively, but they’re all part of the same political project. And so higher education can’t escape this. And we’re part of, this political project. And I think it, simply acknowledging that is the first step.

And I haven’t seen campuses do that.

Heather Shea: Yeah. Yeah. I have not seen it as, as well. And I think what I have been observing is just a lot of caution, a lot of, risk management, centered approaches to addressing larger concerns. And it’s playing out in really I mean we’ve discussed in depth, right?

Disturbing ways. And over the course of last year we talked through several different. Examples of the ways that institutions are responding through financial strain and what they’re willing to fund or defund or quietly let go of. And some of these, programs that have become on the chopping block are mechanisms through which that institutional risk is being managed.

So I’m really curious about when this guidance happens. What are institutions actually doing and Crystal, I know you’ve experienced this moment not as an abstraction, but personally and professionally. Our hearts go to you and to your colleagues at Nebraska. And I think. The power of the voice of the faculty in that case.

I’d love to hear your reflections on just how do we continually uplift those who are being silenced, and what does that communicate to the larger society about the work that we’re doing around belonging and value in the future of the field.

Crystal Garcia: Yeah, it’s a lot.

Heather Shea: Yeah,

Crystal Garcia: that one’s a lot to unpack. What I will say is, our department was one along with several others who were slated for elimination and that went to the Board of Regents in December, and they voted to move forward with those eliminations, the Board of Regents meeting. Was, I wanna say about six hours of testimony from students, community members, alumni, faculty.

It was. To say that it was compelling to keep these programs is an understatement. And particularly, I actually wanna highlight it wasn’t even ours. I don’t think our program that was most compelling in all of that. Because unfortunately for us, we have a lot of educators that are students and that are our grads, and they work as superintendents, they work as principals.

They work. In the NU system that is doing the eliminations. And so unfortunately for us, so many of our students felt it was unsafe for them to even speak out about their programs. And that’s something for folks to, to think about in the future. As hopefully none, no other programs face this, but in the case that other higher ed or educational administration programs do, that’s something that, that was a challenge for us.

But I specifically wanna, highlight our Earth and Atmospheric Sciences program that was among, those chosen for elimination. I would say, if. I’m saying there were 120 speakers, then I would probably say maybe 80 of them were for Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and they talked about everything that they do for our state from tracking volatile weather patterns.

They’re the only program that can, that trains future, climatologists, meteorologists, people that are ensuring our groundwater is safe. Like all of these things that are so critical to our state. And there was no reason from our regents to hear it. And unfortunately for me at this point, I, I.

Again, it’s hard not to think that these things are politically influenced whenever. There was just no budge on it. When the case was so clear, at least for them, I was like, if anybody’s gonna make it out of this, they are no doubt about it. And then to see it continue to be eliminated almost unanimously was shocking.

And, to me, it goes back whenever we think about climate, when we think about, folks that are researching weather patterns, this that’s not desirable from this administration. And it’s hard, again for me to believe that those things aren’t intricately linked. And yeah, whenever I think about all of these things, I think we’re going to continue to see programs targeted that aren’t favorable to this administration.

And there will be reasons why they, choose these programs for elimination. But as was the case within our campus, you can use any data that you want to make decisions. And it doesn’t matter how flawed it is, it doesn’t matter if statisticians say that it’s flawed, it’s it’s data that you used and you can move forward with that decision, right?

Depending on how your power structure works within your state, so all of that to say, not oh, let’s just throw in the towel. It’s all useless.

Brenden Cantwell: Yeah.

Crystal Garcia: But to say we should be aware that this could happen to anyone, to, to any program, in any state. And I really would like to see though that our colleagues are prepared in the case that they do need to defend their programs, their departments, the things that they’re doing.

This all kind of goes full circle too. We need buy-in again from our communities. We are so detached as scholars, as these academic elites that. It’s really difficult for people then to say, to see how we relate to our communities. And we do. We’re so intricately tied and so I don’t know if there could be more bridges that are built there to start to, to begin to repair that relationship that we have with our communities.

And this isn’t everyone and everywhere, right? And certainly some institutions and places have done this better than others, but I just think. That’s one step that I think could be really useful. But most of all, I think that having community is so crucial for us and advocating for these programs more broadly, it was very helpful that we already had established connections and community through our A UP through.

Other organizing me mechanisms that we’ve engaged before, because otherwise it really would’ve been difficult to start rallying people up. So another lesson that I would say folks should really take from this is, you’re organizing is always important. Whether it’s advocating for your pay or advocating for your programs or your mere existence within the campus spaces.

So anyway, those are just some things, and I don’t even know if I answered your question actually.

Heather Shea: I don’t know what if there was a question really in there. It just meandered around. But you did a beautiful job of outlining maybe where, what people elsewhere should take from this case.

’cause I think that’s the larger that’s the larger concern. Brendan, I’m curious from your perspective, how we make sense of this moment. How do we, from a policy and governance perspective, and as Crystal noted, the, there’s, there is, it feels like a deeper shift in how higher education is both.

Defining or refining its public role and responsibility in this moment. And again, having to talk about the value of higher education as a public good and discussing what that means for our democracy. Thoughts on. Where we go from here with these institution decisions and politics.

Brenden Cantwell: I’ve been thinking about this in various ways for a while.

I’ve probably mentioned on one of these podcasts that I have a co-authored book coming out on governance that, that kind of argues that the, doesn’t argue that argues that the new the emerging governance model that US higher education is operating under is one that gives a great deal of weight to partisan outcomes in.

In governing higher education. And delivering delivering outcomes that are consistent with the preferences of the political party that is in charge of the federal government or state state. And this is asymmetric with Republicans doing this far more aggressively than Democrats is the kind of operating paradigm for governance right now.

And I think that the kind of long-term thing we ought to be thinking about is, I is reforming governance and I have some pie in the sky ideas about, amending state constitutions so that governing boards are, fewer than half of the members of governing boards are politically selected.

And you get faculty and. Students as voting members on governing boards and things like that. That’s like long-term structural reform that I think would help insulate higher education from these political pressures. In the shorter term, there are things that people should probably do, which is pay attention to who your board members are, try to understand what they’re thinking.

Maybe try to, lobby institutions can do this in a more, in, in a more formal way. Individuals can, go to your state reps write to your governor about the importance of maintaining institutional independence and having people who understand and value higher education on these boards. I don’t know that has immediate impact, but it is a way to activate a sort of a consciousness and mobilize political activity around defending public colleges and universities.

And that’s, people who are working in in higher education, in student affairs roles and student facing roles and other roles. Could think about having more conversations about governance in their professional associations. Organize a panel at your professional association so that everybody is more tuned in to the consequences of governance.

And also has a little bit of a better idea about the mechanisms, how this works, how these people are picked. And I think that would be helpful.

Heather Shea: Yeah. Yeah it astounded me, and this was not until I moved to Michigan that we have, as boards of trustees and regents and elsewhere and other parts of other institutions that are publicly elected as Democrats or Republicans.

They’re voted on by the entire population of the state of Michigan. And I didn’t really thought of that as a concept before. They’d be so explicitly labeled as such. I love, I can’t wait for your book. That sounds like a something that we should feature as a future episode just on the podcast generally, because I do think radical times, call for radical measures and rethinking how we engage.

I also feel like. The electoral college can use some updating and discussion, we’ll, we will, we wanna make all of these changes. And hopefully in 2026 we have a turnabout, right? In some ways with the midterm elections coming this year. So I am curious in our final reflections as we look ahead, what are some of the early signals that you’re watching most closely?

That might help us tell where higher education is heading next, and what is personally helping you stay grounded in this new year and clear about your purpose in this work. Crystal, do you wanna start us off?

Crystal Garcia: Sure. So I’m gonna cheat and give two things. The first question, just because I feel like so much of the conversation is so heavy.

And

Heather Shea: yeah.

Crystal Garcia: Which as it should be, but also there are glimmers of hope, right? One thing that I’m particularly paying attention to for now is all of the drama as it’s unfolding at a and m and within their system where, they have their particular bands around conversations that pertain to race and gender and sexuality and you probably saw the headlines about the Play-Doh reading that was banned and then there was, I believe, an ethics course that was completely taken off the docket because the professor essentially said, no, I can’t pinpoint exactly where these topics come up in my syllabus because they’re integral to the entire conversation.

We talk about aspects of identity throughout this class, and so they just. Canceled the class. So I am curious to see how control over curricula continues to unfold for other institutions. I’m also thinking about, as I’m teaching the class that I’m teaching right now, should I go ahead and record online social media lectures that follow my entire class and just have things that are available out there in the case that I can’t teach the class in the way that I know it should be taught, or the content that it should include. What are some alternatives that I can consider for the future?

So I’m already thinking about those things. And if not, maybe it’ll just be free content for somebody at some point which, could be a helpful thing too.

Heather Shea: Yeah.

Crystal Garcia: But then in terms of signals, I’m also thinking about the positive things and the ways that people are pushing back. Like whenever we talk about Minnesota.

The videos of violence, like the, all of those things are horrible and they are happening, but Minnesotans are really coming out in community. Yeah, they are. Establishing mutual aid funds, they’re getting food. Donations together. They’re at like capacity for donations in some cases. I saw that they had like their sleigh racing thing, which I assume is an annual thing.

I really don’t know what it was. All that I saw was that they had messages that brought them joy in their slaves that they sent down the hill. And that said something and you know that they could have community and it was. It’s important to remember that in times when the goal is to burn you out and the goal is to terrify you, and the goal is to make you fear for your life that you really need to embrace joy all that much for right?

And so for me, those are some things that I’m thinking about. The other aspect of staying grounded and clear about my purpose in this work is I keep returning to what am I giving my time, my capacity, my energy to, and what do I need to stop? Giving my time, my capacity, my energy to, because there’s only so much of me, right?

And so where is the, what is the thing that I want to make the most impact in? ‘Cause I can’t do it all. And I’m trying to really trust that other people have to do that too. And if we’re all doing something, then we shouldn’t all have to do everything. And I, that’s a really hard concept for people like me who want to solve.

All problems like repair everything as it’s coming up, but I’m trying to be better about that and to be more intentional about where I want to make my impact. So yeah.

Heather Shea: Thanks, crystal. Thanks so much. And I’m looking forward to our A CPA presentation. I was just pulling that up later today. And I’m thinking about places where we find community.

And I think for some of us in those spaces, professional associations are one of them. So coming together and having conversation, brendan, how about you? What are some signals that you’re seeing about 2026 that we should be thinking about for higher education? And then what’s helping you stay grounded and clear about your purpose?

Brenden Cantwell: Two things to think to look out for. One is abnormal and one is normal. The abnormal one is New York Times is reporting. It shouldn’t be any surprise to anybody that the administration, Trump administration is gonna come back with another bite at the apple on some kind of redo on the compact.

And. I wanna, I’m curious to see how this plays out. Are they able to adjust there’s a kind of just morbid curiosity. Are they able to adjust in a way that makes their efforts more directly effective? Or is this really going to expose the limit to their their capacity of coercion?

Have we reached the peak of their direct coercion over higher education? I think we might get some insights about that over the course of the year. The other thing that I am interested in. In, in, in seeing is what happens with state budgets. We’re in the early stages of seeing the effects of the big beautiful bill tax cuts, plus shifting healthcare costs to the states.

The economy seems to be not in a disaster state, but also not growing super fast. Maybe state budgets may be hit. And what’s what’s gonna happen? Is it gonna be a good, a bad, a neutral year for state higher education funding? Because I think that will matter a lot. It always matters a lot.

I think it matters a lot, maybe even more when there’s all these other stressors. Things that keep me grounded, it’s gonna be hokey, but I guess it’s just my kids. And last night my daughter and I were reading before she went to bed and then like we had a, a 15 minute conversation afterwards and she said, dad, I really like talking to you.

That was fun. And that kind of little exchange is just about is reminds you that you can continue and should, and must and have to keep living a normal life and, talking to your kids at night about all the interesting, important, but also silly things they wanna talk to about, to you about.

And so that’s what keeps me keeps me grounded,

Heather Shea: yeah. I’ll just echo that. That last point as well. I have a daughter who’s a junior in college and a senior in high school and the senior in high school. And I took a trip together over winter break, which was just delightful. And it made me reflect on how valuable it is to spend time individually with my kids.

But then you know how little time there is left with this with. Having kids around the house, right? The senior in high schools going off to college and gonna find his next way. So what does this college environment look like for him when he arrives? And I’m really, excited for him. And also, anxious for all of us as we embark upon this next academic year.

Crystal and Brendan, thank you so much again for being here for our January edition. I appreciate your time, your wisdom, you thinking ahead about some of the topics going with the flow on the spot as well. So thank you so much Nat Ambrosey, our incredible producer. Nat, thanks so much for turning this episode around so quickly.

We are excited to have this out into the world. And for those of you who are watching, if you are not already a subscriber to our newsletter, please do subscribe. We send out one weekly email that helps give you the. Scoop on what the episode that we just released and some add additional information from our archives.

And you can find every episode of the current campus context series@studentaffairsnow.na student affairs now.com/current campus context. So thanks again to our listeners and viewers for being a part of the communication and the community. I am Heather Shea. Thanks for watching and let’s make it a great year.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/2026/01/20/4-takeaways-trumps-first-year-office

https://www.chronicle.com/article/wheres-the-outrage-universities-need-to-speak-up

https://www.chronicle.com/article/tracking-trumps-higher-ed-agenda

https://www.chronicle.com/article/gops-civics-education-push-gets-boost-with-millions-from-trumps-ne

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/2026/01/20/federal-court-orders-reconsideration-canceled-trio-grants

https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2026/01/20/msi-cuts-create-barriers-indigenous-learners-opinion

https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/columns/tough-love/2026/01/20/better-defining-and-measuring-higher-eds-value