Addressing the rising prevalence of mental health issues, particularly among young people.

Mental Health

Examining innovations that help young people thrive.

Teaching &amp; Learning

Creating a more just world through higher education.

Access &amp; Inclusion

An end goal for learning and life.

Flourishing

Opinions leading to positive change.

Perspectives

This month, Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation released a <a href="https://www.gallup.com/analytics/506663/american-youth-research.aspx">report</a> examining happiness among Generation Z (12- to 26-year-olds), highlighting key drivers of Gen Z’s happiness. The survey revealed that while 73% of Gen Z-ers consider themselves happy (somewhat or very), the percentage declines substantially as they reach adulthood. The report identified the strongest predictors of happiness to be: a sense of purpose in school and work, positive social connections, and having enough time to sleep and relax. We asked Stephanie Marken, the senior partner of Gallup's education division, to explain the findings and their implications.&nbsp;



LearningWell: The research reveals that the most influential driver of Gen Z’s happiness is their sense of purpose at school and work. However, just 48% of Gen Z-ers enrolled in middle or high school feel motivated to go to school, and only 52% feel they do something interesting every day. What does that say about curriculum and school-based experiences?&nbsp;



Stephanie Marken: We know from our research at Gallup, that many students are less engaged in their schoolwork as they progress through schooling. We anticipate much of this is that students are unfortunately not specializing in topics that excite them as they progress through their educational experiences. We need more relevant, applied experiences in the K12 student experience to further engage and excite students about what they’re learning and how it will prepare them for the real world.&nbsp;



LW: The report also shows a relationship between love and support and happiness, which perhaps isn’t surprising. Combined with the finding on a sense of purpose, do you see a reflection of previous Gallup work in the wellbeing area, specifically the Alumni Survey and the Forging Pathways to Purposeful Work study at Bates College. It seems that a sense of purpose and supportive relationships are key drivers of wellbeing across groups.&nbsp;&nbsp;



SM: Supportive relationships are difference makers. In our prior, related research we find students who have a mentor and feel cared about as a person are more likely to be engaged in their work upon postsecondary completion and more likely to thrive in their wellbeing. We all need support, but given staggering mental health needs among Gen Z members nationally, we need that more than ever. This will only become increasingly important as this current generation continues to struggle with mounting mental health needs.&nbsp;



LW: The report shows that Gen Z’s sense of love and support declines as they age. It seems like there is a turning point around 18-21, when typically young people would be leaving the house they grew up in, considered to be adults. Is this a pattern that is typical during this age range or is there something specific about Gen Z in that they are experiencing a decline in feelings of support and connection as they get older, more so than previous generations?



SM: We know that launching into the “real world”, whether that be from high school into the workforce, or high school into college, is a very stressful and complicated experience for many students. We should always expect students to report emotional stress, anxiety and worry during this difficult time. However, we also need to make sure they have a net to catch them when they struggle—mentors, and people in their postsecondary pathway and workplace—can be that net. This also reminds us that we need to prepare Gen Z members with resilience building activities and experiences early on in their development so that they can bounce back when they experience these setbacks and challenging times (because they will inevitably come).&nbsp;



LW: The report also finds that feelings of significance and purpose decline as Gen Z gets older. Survey items like “My life matters” and “My life has direction” go from 69% and 85% for 12-14 year olds to 55% and 65% for 24-26 year olds, respectively. Is that replicating a pattern that you’ve seen in previous years or in previous generations? Do you have any hypotheses about why that may be happening?



SM: Unfortunately, we don’t have historic data on these important questions so we cannot compare generation to generation on these particular items, but we do know that this generation craves purpose in their workplace in a way that we do not find for prior generations. In their workplace, Gen Z workers, as an example, are seeing opportunities at work to learn and grow and looking for opportunities to work at organizations that make a difference. This crave for purpose, impact and significance shows up in these important data, as well as other research we’ve conducted.&nbsp;



LW: Many young people in Gen Z report that they don’t get enough sleep and don’t have enough time to relax during the week, which are stronger predictors of happiness than physical or financial safety. Are there policies that workplaces or schools could implement to allow for their employees and students to have more time to unwind during the week, which would potentially have great impact on their happiness, thriving and wellbeing?&nbsp;



SM: We know that technology, and our relationship with technology, is having an impact here. We see a lot of students struggling to manage their relationship with technology—not necessarily social media itself, but sometimes with social media—and that technology can make sleep, restful sleep, and positive sleep habits challenging. We need to teach young people—and older people too—these tools, so that they can detach and reset as we all need to do in order to sleep restfully.&nbsp;



LW: There is a substantial piece of the report dedicated to social media, and related to that, comparison with others. The survey found that social comparisons have a clear negative relationship with happiness. 40% of happy Gen Z-ers say they often or always compare themselves to others, compared to 55% of those who are not happy. And 12–15-year-olds who spend more than 3 hours per day on social media were two times as likely to exhibit symptoms of depression and anxiety. Those two findings are clearly related. Could you speak to those findings?&nbsp;SM: It’s a great question. The comparison with others is a really critical and concerning finding—we know that social media is a tool that can allow for that comparison which is problematic. Many people who are tuning to social media are comparing their every day to someone else’s best day and that can cause a lot of self-hatred and sadness for many who feel like they are insufficient.

Happiness, Gen Z style

In 2023, the <a href="https://sheeo.org/">State Higher Education Executive Officers Association</a> (SHEEO) and <a href="https://jedfoundation.org/">The Jed Foundation</a> (JED) launched a learning community across state higher education agencies and systems&nbsp; to better support college student mental health and determinants such as equity and belonging. In late April, SHEEO and JED will host a convening in Minneapolis, “The Wellness Blueprint: Cultivating Foundations for Statewide Student Mental Health Policy,” with the purpose of continuing the development and implementation of state- and system-wide policy recommendations to advance student mental health and wellness. The hope is after a year-long collaboration, states will have moved the needle on a problem that lies at the intersection of each organization’s area of advocacy and expertise: mental health challenges remain the <a href="https://www.gallup.com/analytics/468986/state-of-higher-education.aspx#ite-612095">number one reason</a> students stop out or consider stopping out of their post-secondary programs.



Dr. John Lane is the Vice President for Academic Affairs and Equity Initiatives at SHEEO, where he leads policy and project development in educational equity, academic programs, and student success. SHEEO works with state higher education officers to promote equitable higher education attainment for all Americans.&nbsp;



“Whether these challenges are crisis circumstances or are accumulated over time and hidden, students identify mental health as the primary challenge to their academic persistence and achievement,” says Lane. The issue is exacerbated for low-income students, many of whom will never return to school, and are often laden with debt and the result is no degree to show for it.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Last year, states submitted grant proposals detailing their plans and commitments to mental health as a facet of equity in higher education, as well as their efforts to engage internal stakeholders, such as a state Department of Public Health. Five states —&nbsp;Arizona, Louisiana, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Texas —&nbsp;were selected to receive $25,000 grants to support their work to implement mental health solutions tailored to their unique contexts over a 15-month period. The objective of the partnership was to provide states with the resources to explore how mental health and equity are being addressed and to share their findings through cross-state collaboration.&nbsp;



The Jed Foundation brings decades of research and expertise in suicide prevention and student mental health to the table. It is also another example of an expanding focus for the non-profit, which has recently added a public affairs and advocacy component to its work with colleges and high schools.&nbsp; The JED Equitable Implementation Framework and the JED Campus Program will be used to guide state policymakers in creating a space for states to identify best practices, refine strategies, and work toward inter-state collaboration. The Jed Foundation has a longstanding precedent of centering student mental health as an academic issue, making its partnership with SHEEO an opportunity for the organizations to implement robust, research-supported policy change, study best practices as tailored to states’ unique resources and needs, and improve student outcomes by working directly with policymakers.&nbsp;



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
“There is no rulebook right now for investing in student mental health at the state level. We are building as we climb.”
</blockquote>



<a href="https://learningwellmag.org/article/questions-and-answers-with-dr-zainab-okolo">Dr. Zainab Okolo</a> is the Senior Vice President of Policy, Advocacy, and Government Relations at the Jed Foundation. Okolo says the mission of the learning community is to help guide state systems in centering mental health in state and federal policy. “What we found at JED was a gap and an opportunity,” she says. “In response to the mental health crisis that was exacerbated during the pandemic, we saw many state-level leaders begin to directly invest in mental health. Governors had clear new line items around mental health — but there wasn’t any guidance on how to actually move the needle on mental health, or whether or not the investments being made at the state level were answering the questions around how we destigmatize mental health, how we expand resources, and how we ensure that students, particularly within school settings, are having their mental health needs met so they can continue to thrive as they pursue their degrees.” In having conversations with their partners at SHEEO, an imperative emerged to ensure that state policymakers had the means to support the work that they were already investing in. The priority was there, Okolo says, but procedural clarity wasn’t: “There is no rulebook right now for investing in student mental health at the state level. We are building as we climb.”



A Just Design



The mental health learning community comes at a time when mental health is a steadfast feature of public discourse and a topic of conversation on the federal stage. “There is a great opportunity here to take advantage of the attention that is being rightly paid to this work, as recently as the President’s State of the Union address,” says Lane.“We are so fortunate to do this work now; we have the Surgeon General whose platform is mental health, and the Secretary of Education who cares about the wellbeing and mental health of college students, and wants to know how to best sustain support for students and for systems that are supporting them.”&nbsp;



According to Okolo, bringing states together on these issues highlights the similarities of their positions even as they navigate different political landscapes. “They're all grappling with very similar questions. How do you scale crisis response? What specific policy levers need to be in place in order to continue this work, even beyond this kind of mental health Renaissance moment? How do we flag for our federal stakeholders and leaders that we need harder lines of funding to continue on even beyond these next couple of years? The learning community creates a space for states to collaborate and learn from each other.”



The five states selected for the learning community project — Texas, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Louisiana — represent a diverse range of education policy, resources, and student demographics. “We were deliberate about the variety of states,” says Lane. “The topography of the states is representative of a deeper conversation about how we tailor our work to the unique circumstances of each state. The political landscape varies greatly across these five states. So does the availability of resources, the governance model and the engagement profile. So, states work really hard to build consensus among their stakeholders, and regardless of the model, try to provide direction to help set important way points.”



Texas is one of several U.S. states to implement changes to its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies within the last year. Senate Bill 17 banned all DEI programming from public colleges and universities in the state, creating&nbsp; potential <a href="https://learningwellmag.org/article/counselors-concern">mental health risks</a> for students who relied on affinity groups and identity-based spaces to cultivate a sense of inclusion and belonging on campus. These changes to DEI policies went into effect after the launch of the learning community, Okolo points out, and only reinforce the importance of adaptability and community engagement. When mental health initiatives find themselves in the crosshairs of fraught political divides, they reveal a unique area of bipartisanship.&nbsp;



“The interesting thing about working within these political contexts is that this work remains bipartisan,” Okolo explains. “We see clarity around the importance of mental health echoed across states. What's not bipartisan is the approach to issues around parental access, data, and funding. So the approach is not bipartisan, but the issue and the framing of the issue remains undoubtedly bipartisan. We want to keep it that way and lean into that opportunity by learning about how to do this work no matter the political ground that we find ourselves in.”



The public spirit, Lane and Okolo say, has not changed even where laws have. DEI “is directly adjacent to our mental health work, and it influences the scope of our reach when it comes to identifying needs based on race,” says Okolo. “What I'm happy to see, though, is that Texas made a commitment to making mental health resources accessible to all. What the ban might mean is that the language, how we frame it, what we call it, may change. But it doesn't change the intent of the work.”



The mental health learning community leans into designing equitable futures within the contexts of each state. This, Lane says, calls for new approaches to address the systemic biases and inequity that are known contributors to the lack of access to mental health supports and can therefore serve as deterrents to student success and degree attainment. As a result, new projects at SHEEO include more dialogue about “just design.” According to Lane, “If you know pre-existing structures, and best efforts in the past have resulted in the need for current work and equity to try to mitigate disparities, then, if we have new solutions without addressing those original systemic circumstances, we could accidentally perpetuate the disparities that equity efforts are meant to close.”&nbsp;



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“The topography of the states is representative of a deeper conversation about how we tailor our work to the unique circumstances of each state. The political landscape varies greatly across these five states. So does the availability of resources, the governance model and the engagement profile.”
</blockquote>



In order to address systemic discrimination and avoid repeating previously unsuccessful — and potentially harmful — initiatives, Lane says states must raise questions about designing systems and environments. A just design, he says, is one that centers community engagement, student voices, and adaptability to different states and institutions. The SHEEO/JED collaboration is currently building a student panel to foreground the student experience in policy reform. The goal is to not only amplify student voices, but to give students a seat at the table of changemaking.&nbsp;



“Our goal to center student voices goes beyond the traditional model, which often includes bringing on students who share a narrative in the first-person,” Lane says. “My feeling is that too often we resume the policy work without taking an important next step, and that next step is giving students a sense of agency so that they are at the table with us as thought partners and are mentored in collaborating around policy in a way that helps us in the present, that gives them development opportunities for the future and really enriches the work that we’re doing.”



Lane and Okolo are looking forward to the late April conference to collectively assess how much has been accomplished and to provide a best practices guide. “What we are hoping to achieve with the best practices guide is a bit of a north star and a guardrail context on what to consider when implementing and scaling mental health work within your state,” Okolo says. “What are the blind spots? Who are the unsung heroes and key stakeholders that should be at the table when making these decisions? What opportunities do you have to triage off campus? What community-based organizations do you have at your fingertips to close the gap between resources on your campus and ensuring that students get the support that they need? Those kinds of strategic levers are what we hope to outline, so that if the state never engages with us directly, they have a way of navigating this work within their state context.”

The Jed Foundation/SHEEO Mental Health and Equity Initiative

The Furman Advantage

In a 2022 <a href="https://scholarworks.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1192&amp;context=oracle">study</a> published in the Journal of Sorority and Fraternity Life Research and Practice, sorority- and fraternity-affiliated college students reported higher positive mental health and lower rates of anxiety and depression. While the analysis indicates the need for further research to fully understand this disparity, it is reasonable to observe that fraternities and sororities offer members several key requisites for wellbeing: a sense of belonging, purpose, identity development, and social support.&nbsp;



The study’s findings are promising and highlight the Greek system’s potential to build positive outcomes for students, alumni, and institutions. But most fraternities and sororities do not open their doors to all students. Many have rigorous recruitment protocols that make pledges compete for limited spots in the most elite organizations. Dangerous hazing rituals, substance use and sexual assault have damaged Greek life’s reputation, which obviates its many benefits. So how can colleges and universities keep the good and discourage the bad when it comes to sororities and fraternities?&nbsp;A look at the systems’ storied history suggests that its expansion into culturally-based organizations may be Greek life’s redemption.&nbsp;&nbsp;



If Greek organizations cultivate a sense of community and belonging for members, they also dictate who is afforded the social capital of belonging. That social capital and its <a href="https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/takeaway/segments/going-greek-inside-look-fraternities#">lifelong reverberations</a> are staggering: 40 of 47 male U.S. Supreme Court Justices since 1910 have been fraternity men, as well as 85 percent of Fortune 500 executives and 76 percent of all Congressmen and senators. It is clear sororities and fraternities offer a range of benefits, including community, networking opportunities, leadership development, social events, and philanthropy. But Greek affiliation does come with a number of drawbacks. Joining a sorority or fraternity costs money in the form of membership dues, event fees, and other expenses, which can exacerbate their exclusivity and may be prohibitive for some students. Critics of Greek life argue that sororities and fraternities can perpetuate social exclusivity, social conformity, and elitism, creating divisions within the campus community. That elitism may even be a contributing factor to positive mental health among members: the 2022 Journal of Sorority and Fraternity Life Research and Practice study notes that “The social class that exists within fraternity and sorority communities is built on social capital that may indicate that the positive mental health experiences of fraternity and sorority members could stem from a community of students who come from more privileged backgrounds.”



A culture of elitism and antiquated gender norms dominates the most public depictions of Greek life, from 1978’s Animal House to TikTok’s “Bama Rush.” But the preppy, chauvinistic, boozy side of sorority and fraternity life is not the whole picture. Since the mid- to late-<a href="https://nationalmgc.org/about/history/">twentieth century</a>, culturally-based organizations have emerged as sites of belonging and social development for students historically excluded from or underrepresented within predominantly white sororities and fraternities.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
If Greek organizations cultivate a sense of community and belonging for members, they also dictate who is afforded the social capital of belonging.
</blockquote>



Dr. Crystal Garcia is an associate professor in the College of Education and Human Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research includes critical analysis of culturally-based sororities and fraternities and anti-racist practice in sorority and fraternity life. Garcia says she looks at sororities and fraternities as “microcosms of the greater university.” As an undergraduate student at Texas A&amp;M University-Commerce, Garcia joined a historically white sorority and was an active presence in sorority life on her campus, even being awarded Greek Woman of the Year. As she progressed in her studies and began conducting research on higher education, Garcia found herself questioning why she, as an involved member and leader of her undergraduate institution’s Panhellenic community, never knew about the culturally-based organizations on her campus. That realization prompted a career of academic inquiry into culturally-based sororities and fraternities and the experiences of minoritized college students within those groups.



As an ethnographic researcher, Garcia is interested in the role of “narratives, storytelling, and the power of individual voices and perspectives” to bring light to lived experiences within environmental and cultural contexts and “the ways that power, privilege, and oppression take effect” in student organizations. “At predominantly white institutions, culturally-based sororities and fraternities can provide a space where students’ voices are affirmed, often for the first time within their campus communities,” she says. Garcia also notes that the support systems embedded in culturally-based sororities and fraternities help students persist to graduation by cultivating social, academic, and personal development, all of which contribute to positive mental health and wellbeing.&nbsp;



The process of joining a culturally-based sorority or fraternity looks completely different from the rush process of historically white organizations, Garcia explains. The Panhellenic recruitment process is formalized, receiving attention and support from the university, while culturally-based organizations typically do not receive the same institutional or financial support.



Garcia has worked alongside Dr. Antonio Duran, a professor of education at Arizona State University, to examine minoritized students’ experiences in campus life. Anti-racist practice in the context of sorority and fraternity life, Garcia says, means “taking intentional steps to recognize historical and contemporary ways that race and racism play a role in our society — and, in turn, in the organizations that we’re a part of.” Garcia urges all student organizations, Panhellenic or otherwise, to think deeply about their practices of recruitment, the events they host, and their membership criteria, interrogating places where race and racism may be embedded into the organizational culture. “The purpose of sororities and fraternities is to foster community and connection,” she says, “and we can’t do that if we are harming our members.”



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
“At predominantly white institutions, culturally-based sororities and fraternities can provide a space where students’ voices are affirmed, often for the first time within their campus communities.”
</blockquote>



Sexual violence is more prevalent among Greek-affiliated students than their non-affiliated peers, with both <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31984858/">fraternity men</a> and sorority women reporting higher incidence of sexual assault compared to non-members of the same gender. “For historically white sororities and fraternities, the issue of sexual assault is particularly salient, given that we have created a culture where sorority members are essentially dependent on fraternities for spaces to consume alcohol, since they are usually not permitted to do so within their own houses,” Garcia says. In culturally-based sororities and fraternities, those structures tend to look quite different. 



Often, these organizations do not have formalized housing designated to their members. “Whereas historically white sororities and fraternities were able to purchase land and build homes — more than a century ago in some cases — culturally-based organizations largely did not have those opportunities,” Garcia says, adding that by the time cultural sororities and fraternities had opportunities to purchase homes or land, the price tag made doing so virtually impossible. The conditions that led to the prevalence of binge drinking and predatory sexual behavior in historically white Greek organizations were largely absent from the making of culturally-based ones; however, Garcia adds, no student organization is without flaw, and those harmful behaviors can and do exist in every area of campus life.



Dr. Robin Zape-tah-hol-ah Minthorn is a professor and chair of the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Department at the University of Oklahoma. A citizen of the ​​Kiowa tribe of Oklahoma and a descendant of the Umatilla, Nez Perce, Apache, and Assiniboine Nations, Minthorn co-founded the University of Oklahoma’s first Native American sorority, Gamma Delta Pi, Inc., as an undergraduate in 2001. “We didn’t have a sorority that honored our culture and our ways of being,” Minthorn says. “We did some research on another Native American sorority, Alpha Pi Omega, Inc., which was founded in North Carolina. The tribes are different in North Carolina than they are here, and the tribal composition of our founders was different. We decided to create our own sorority that represented our tribal community and culture.” Students were receptive to the new sorority, Minthorn says, reflecting the need for a cultural space dedicated to belonging and connection among Native American college students. In the decades since its founding, over 300 Native women have joined Gamma Delta Pi. “The impact extends beyond our undergraduate years and into our professional lives,” Minthorn says, “because we develop a lifelong bond of sisterhood that we carry throughout our lives.”



Historically Native American fraternities and sororities (HNAFS) like Gamma Delta Pi have the potential to transform student lives and foster whole-person wellbeing. “We have always been intentional about connecting to the local tribal communities,” Minthorn says, noting that civic and community engagement provides cultural connection on and off campus. Gamma Delta Pi’s philanthropy has previously included organizations working to support Native women experiencing domestic violence and addressing Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) in Native American communities. Today, their philanthropic work focuses on missing and murdered Indigenous people. “That visibility helps our sisters feel seen, both collectively and as individuals.”&nbsp;



For the twentieth anniversary of Gamma Delta Pi’s founding, Minthorn and her sister/colleague Dr. Natalie Youngbull and doctoral students James Wagnon and Amber Silverhorn-Wolfe conducted talking circles with sorority members, as well as interviews with the Elders who serve as advisors of the sisterhood. The founding chapter at the University of Oklahoma has had the same advisors since its founding in 2001, an uncommon occurrence in sorority and fraternity life that speaks to Gamma Delta Pi’s dedication to “fostering intergenerational connection.” Minthorn and her colleagues also collaborated with Phi Sigma Nu, the nation’s oldest and largest Native American fraternity, and Iota Gamma, Inc., a Native American fraternity founded at the University of Oklahoma, to conduct research into the impact of HNAFS on students and communities. Minthorn says their survey data found that “members’ involvement in HNAFS fostered not just leadership, but whole personhood. They create a space of belonging where Native men and women can explore what Indigeneity looks like in sorority and fraternity life and develop a sense of culture on campus —&nbsp;which is, for us, often missing.”



Culturally-based sororities and fraternities, such as National Pan-Hellenic Council (NPHC) organizations, were created in response to discriminatory practices at a societal level, including exclusionary clauses that barred students of color from belonging in historically white Greek organizations. “They were founded on the principle of access and supporting students who were denied support from the larger institution,” Garcia says. “They have long histories of leading activism efforts, including during the Civil Rights Movement.”&nbsp;



Garcia says she hopes that today’s students will continue to call upon those histories as they push for inclusivity at their institutions. In order for all students to thrive in their colleges and universities, she says, “Culturally-based sororities and fraternities have to be resourced to ensure that students within them can enjoy their experience. Often, our research finds that these organizations don’t receive the same level of institutional support in terms of personnel; they certainly don’t always have the same financial resources; they simply don’t have the same alumni networks that predominantly white organizations often have.”&nbsp;



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
“HNAFS create a space of belonging where Native men and women can explore what Indigeneity looks like in sorority and fraternity life and develop a sense of culture on campus —&nbsp;which is, for us, often missing.”
</blockquote>



Additionally, she warns that ongoing legislative efforts to undermine diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in some states may compound the problems of under-resourcing. “Sometimes, culturally-based sororities and fraternities are not housed within a ‘Greek Life’ or ‘Fraternity and Sorority Life’ office,” she explains. “Often, they are designated within a cultural center or an office of diversity and inclusion. In states that have banned those offices, I am very concerned that these organizations will be further harmed and left with even fewer resources, losing the support systems they have in place.”



To Pledge or Not to Pledge



Advocates for banning sororities and fraternities often point to Panhellenic organizations’ history of hazing, substance abuse, discrimination, sexual assault, and academic neglect. Daniel R. Schwarz, a professor of English Literature and Presidential Fellow at Cornell University, wrote in a 2022 <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2022/11/10/colleges-should-abolish-greek-system-opinion">op-ed</a> for Inside Higher Ed that Greek life is “an antiquated, sexist, classist, elitist, discriminatory system” that “contributes to long-lasting physical and emotional injuries.” Schwarz echoes some sentiments from Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) CEO David J. Skorton in a 2011 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/24/opinion/a-pledge-to-end-fraternity-hazing.html">op-ed</a> for the New York Times.&nbsp;



Despite efforts to eradicate hazing, incidents <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2023/01/24/university-settles-hazing-case-family-dead-student">still occur</a>, leading to injuries and even deaths. Additionally, as Schwarz highlights in his evaluation, Greek organizations continue to be criticized for perpetuating discrimination based on factors such as race, ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status. This can contribute to a campus culture that fosters inequality and marginalization. Excessive partying and alcohol-related incidents are more <a href="https://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/2015/04/dean_of_students_says_alcohol.html">common</a> on campuses with active Greek communities. And, because sororities and fraternities are often perceived negatively in the public forum, the media attention they receive reinforces stereotypes about privileged, elitist, and irresponsible behavior. These stereotypes can harm the reputation of both individual members and the institutions they represent, though they tend to ignore the existence of culturally-based sororities and fraternities altogether.



It is crucial to recognize that not all sororities and fraternities embody these negative qualities, and many members find valuable social development, leadership opportunities, and lifelong friendships within them. Some argue that instead of banning Greek life altogether, efforts should focus on reforming and regulating these organizations to address their shortcomings while preserving their positive contributions to campus life — and, importantly, universities’ <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/21492167/abolish-greek-life-campus-covid">financial incentives</a> to keep them.



For those who get to belong, sororities and fraternities can be a ticket to flourishing on campus and in post-graduate life. Alumni networks, job placement services, and mentorship programs can set members up for career success. Philanthropy encourages nurture civic engagement and finding meaning beyond oneself. But perhaps the most enduring benefit of sorority and fraternity affiliation is the opportunity to form lasting friendships that extend past college and, Garcia says, serve as a “place of joy.” In a system that still shows signs of its troubled past, culturally-based Greek organizations are making joy a place for everyone.

Pledging Well

Interview with Paul Tough, journalist and author of “The Inequality Machine”

As graduates consider the next chapter of their lives, a new book provides inspiration and guidance through the unfolding story of a career well spent. Paul Grogan was a student at Williams College when the anti-Vietnam and civil rights movements set the pathway for his life and career. “What, if anything, can I do about this?” said his younger self. Mentors, who saw something in him he couldn’t see, encouraged him to become a “change agent.” It was a term that was unfamiliar to him at the time but one he would live to embody in his fifty years in public service.&nbsp;



In “Be Prepared to be Lucky,” Grogan imparts lessons about leadership, mentorship, and agency as relevant today as they were when he and his co-author Kathryn Merchant were both young graduates working to make a difference in the world. Among his many roles, Grogan has been a political staffer, a CEO of a national nonprofit, and a giant in philanthropy. His career is capped by his presidency of the Boston Foundation, one of the nation’s oldest and, arguably, most successful community foundations, providing a unique combination of policy and philanthropy that has shaped what Boston is today.&nbsp;



Readers follow along as Grogan tells the story of his ambitious career: a combination of opportunity, intentionality, and grit. From navigating the emotional politics of the desegregation of the Boston public schools; to building public/private partnerships to save American cities in the 1970’s and 80’s; to helping heal the town/gown tensions between Harvard and Boston, Grogan provides powerful examples of how to make a positive impact on your community, and in turn, how to live a meaningful, fulfilling life.&nbsp;



MM: Paul, you've spent your whole career devoted to public and community service and this book has so many lessons about that from your decades of experience. But let's start by talking about the young Paul. You went to high school in a very small town, Clinton, New York, and then went off to Williams College. How did your college experience influence your career choices?&nbsp;



PG: My father was a lifelong educator -- a public school teacher and administrator throughout his career -- so I had a lifelong interest in education and education policy. And then two giant phenomena, the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement, brought me to that path of service. Growing up in a very small town with zero diversity, I was not anywhere close to these issues except through the nightly newscast. It was a religion in our family to sit down and watch at least one of the national newscasts, and I continued that habit throughout college. Obviously, the news was just devastating for much of that period. It led me to ask,&nbsp; “What, if anything, can I do about this?”



A pivotal conversation I had was with an uncle of mine who was a dear counselor throughout my early adult life. He said to me in one of our long talks, “It really sounds to me like you ought to think about being a change agent.” I had never heard that term, but we talked about it, and I came to understand what it meant. It was not just reading the newspapers as a knowledgeable person or voting as an involved citizen. I wanted to do more than that. And I was excited about that prospect.



MM: What experiences in college helped you develop that part of yourself?



PG: We had a number of quite powerful faculty student committees at Williams in those days, and I ran for office and was elected chairman of one of them. We took a proposal to one of our meetings with the faculty as a whole to stop grading creative writing courses as a limited experiment. But Williams is a conservative place, and this was quite a debate which ultimately occurred in front of the entire faculty of the college. It took place in a hall, one of these double decker halls with a balcony going all the way around. Some of the faculty were down on the floor and many of them were up above me, and I had not said anything in the discussion, which was not going terribly well. Finally, the chairman of the committee, a psychology professor, leaned over and whispered, “If you don't speak, this is going down.” So I gave a speech. It went extraordinarily well, and the faculty went from a unanimous no vote to a unanimous yes on the proposal. I think it was one of my first brushes with public speaking that mattered and seeing that we came back with something and won the day, that was a tremendous experience for me.&nbsp;



MM: Were there other people – like your uncle – who believed in you back then?&nbsp;



PG: Yes, and it was so important, particularly in college where, if you're intimidated by the whole experience, not sure of yourself, you wonder how you're going to do and you think you're probably not going to do very well. Certainly, that was confirmed by the grades I got my freshman year: horrendous. But in fact, you almost always know more than you think you do, and other people see things in you that you may not see in yourself. In this case, there were two history professors who took an interest in me — I couldn't have told you why, but they did. And they became my mentors through the rest of college and early in my career. I gained a new level of confidence as a result. They pushed me to do an honors thesis, which I had not thought of before, which became my first book, and it just put me on a higher, more ambitious path.



MM: Kathy, what’s your take on that?



KM: I just want to add that things can be very different depending on where you go to school. I went to a very large public university – there are 40,000 people who go to Indiana University in Bloomington — and finding a mentor is like hunting for a drop of water in a rainstorm. I think the point of encouragement here is also: Don’t wait for a mentor to find you – go looking for one.&nbsp;



MM: Why did you choose the title Be Prepared to be Lucky?&nbsp;



PG: “Be prepared to be lucky” is an adaptation of my favorite quote that originated in 1949 with E.B. White, the famed essayist and poet. He was talking to a young man who was about to go to New York City to make his fortune. White said to him, “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.” And the first time I heard that, which I think was in college, it just stunned me as a unique insight into how the world really works. It wasn't just good luck, it wasn't bad luck. It was an acknowledgement of a complex process, which is not controllable, but which can be harvested in a certain way. And so we adopted that and we tried to apply it. Certainly, if I look at my career, I can see time after time where being alert, being watchful for opportunities, led to great things, not every time, but often enough to really justify that kind of state of mind.&nbsp;



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“You almost always know more than you think you do, and other people see things in you that you may not see in yourself.”
</blockquote>



MM: If I'm understanding the interpretation, it's a combination of luck, fate, and being open to opportunities that may come your way. And it’s about agency too, correct?&nbsp;&nbsp;



KM: The agency part is really important. When Paul and I were both still very young in our careers, we were often given responsibilities that were way beyond what we were probably qualified to do. As we say in the book, “always say yes, even when you want to say no, and then you’ll open up opportunities for yourself.”&nbsp;



PG: I call it “the virtue of hanging around.”



MM: There’s a lot that you thread through the story of your career: working for two city mayors, running the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), resolving town/gown issues between Harvard and Boston, and then transforming the Boston Foundation – you mention the importance of ambition, leadership, and courage. What are some other big lessons from all these experiences?&nbsp;



PG: I think just about everything you're asking about has to do with how ambitious you want to be in the world. Certainly, the social and community service world is full of wonderful organizations doing great work. Much of that work though, is confined to a small space because those institutions lack the resources to take their idea to scale. The people I attracted to work with me, we wanted real impact at scale. We didn't just want to feel good about having helped some people. We wanted to look at some of these institutions that were greatly important in the lives of people and say, how could this be different? How could we be doing much more than we are currently doing?



MM: I love that point. As a message to young people, focusing on impact is different than just developing your purpose or working on something you care about – it is actually working towards outcomes. You seemed to reach a lot of outcomes through partnerships. Can you give some examples?



PG: One example is when I got into the housing field. When you looked at the landscape, you had federal housing programs, state housing programs, and local housing programs, and they were not coordinated in any way or were directed at a particular narrow goal. Everybody had their own idea about it. But we managed to put together a new partnership, which became a permanent institution called the Boston Housing Partnership and had as its aim fostering collective and cross-sector efforts to improve the housing situation. Then to execute, you have to figure out how to get everybody credited for their support and participation. Particularly in the public sector realm with elected officials, they need to get credit for doing good things. And that's where the non-politicians have to be attentive to their political partners, not by being political or partisan, but by understanding that politicians are dealing with a different kind of accountability than regular citizens. And there has to be a sophistication about making it rewarding and accountable for elected officials.



Many of the politicians that we were dealing with around the country had a zero sum mentality. They assumed that if a “such and such” nonprofit was getting their name in the paper in a positive way, then that would take away from the opportunity for the elected official to get recognized. What we were able to demonstrate after a period of time was that these partnerships were a way to add value that wasn't there before. So you didn't have to take something away from somebody in order to get their cooperation.&nbsp;



MM: Speaking of partnerships and politics, tell us more about your experience at Harvard.



PG: Sure. Well, as we all know, Harvard is sort of the college and university capital of the United States, the pinnacle of higher education. But the whole Boston area or indeed New England is populated with just an enormous number of institutions of higher education. So it's a big issue for the future of Boston and for the region. And despite the importance of those institutions and the need to make sure that they are going to be healthy going forward, the relationships that should have developed between the colleges and universities and cities and state government, and the corporate sector for that matter, really hadn't developed before the turn of the last century. They were out of sync with the reality of it or they didn't acknowledge how important these relationships were. So relationships that should have existed -- strong, cooperative, knowledgeable relationships between government and higher ed, for instance -- were just truncated in some way until there were problems.



One set of problems, but not the only one, is the whole question of land and value. Because when institutions of higher education get land, it comes off the tax rolls and gets used primarily for the higher ed community. So that's where there is the kind of thinking that if this land is going to go to the universities, it's going to be taken away from the community. And, particularly in the low-and moderate-income neighborhoods, there was a real fear that people were going to be forced out of their homes by the rising value of the real estate. So there was one particular transaction where the university was trying to acquire a very large plot of land in Allston, which is a neighborhood of Boston, to create a major new science and technology district.&nbsp;



This was hung up for years because the city was refusing to approve the sale of this land, which was held by a railroad company. And it was just stuck as the years went by and the university didn't seem to have the wherewithal to do anything about it, which you’d think is so odd. These institutions are so big and powerful. But in Harvard's case, they really hadn't made any real effort to understand the local political scene in order to engage people who might help them. But that finally did happen. A couple of very active Harvard trustees went to the president of Harvard and said, we have got to have a capacity developed here at the university to relate to the mayor (then Thomas Menino), to relate to folks who are going to be important to this process. Knowing I had a long-standing relationship with the mayor, Harvard asked me to help with this and I built a department focused entirely on external issues like this. After that, the meetings just went to a different level of seriousness and purpose, and with relative ease, we secured the approval.&nbsp;



MM: Here's a question from the last chapter of the book. Why would you encourage students to go into either public service or community work, besides just it being a good thing to do?&nbsp;



PG: Well, again, I come back to this word impact and a sense of what you want your life to be about. Are you going to be a change agent? To be willing to dwell on those questions with trusted friends, advisors, and family members is a very important thing to do if you have friends and family who are willing to do that. So I think that's a big piece of it in terms of why do it, it really has to do with what you want your life to be about. Senator John McCain was very fond of saying “believe in something larger than yourself.”



I think this is really fundamental. I've met too many people throughout my life who have been very successful in conventional terms but have just a sad feeling that they haven't done anything that's really helped anybody else or been an effort to lift someone else up. It is a uniquely satisfying thing to do and it makes society healthier at the same time. So I think it does come down to that kind of existential construct you decide to devote your finite resources to.



KM: An important point to add to that is that working in public service doesn’t have to be forever. If you have other things that you want to do, the skillset that you acquire working in those sectors are increasingly attractive to the corporate world. The opportunity to make partnerships and the fungibility of being able to move from one sector to another throughout a career is very valuable.&nbsp;



MM: My last question is related to the fact that a lot of the impact that you have made in your career was largely based on listening to the other side. That appears to be a very big problem right now. Is there any advice that either of you would give to the graduates of today on that?&nbsp;



PG: I think everybody should move to Massachusetts. That's the fastest way to reduce polarization.



MM: Well, Massachusetts does have an out-migration problem, so that would be good.



PG: I'm only half kidding. We have a huge stake in the immigration outcome. It's not something that would just be nice, it's something that is absolutely essential. If we don't do a better job of attracting young people and convincing people not to leave the state, things are going to be very dire in Massachusetts. And one of the positive things about Massachusetts bears directly on the ability to do the kind of partnerships that we've been discussing -- the lack of polarization. There are conflicts, but they don’t involve the bitter, divisive, and hateful politics that we see in city, county, and state after state. Our elected officials of whatever party seem to find a way to work together, although they too need to be more ambitious than we're being. But it is a fundamentally different environment.&nbsp;



KM: Call me a Pollyanna, but I think that what we're experiencing right now, this too shall pass. We're now old enough that we've seen cycles and waves of this over time where there's divisiveness and an inability to listen and act together, and then that calms down and we can get more things done. So I really don't know how to stop what's going on right now. It's alarming. Very scary. It seems worse than it's ever been, but every moment that's been like this seems worse than it's ever been. I am going to borrow Paul's phrase, we need to practice defiant optimism.

“Be Prepared to Be Lucky”

The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed seismic transformation in education, particularly for Health Professional Education (HPE). Following a decade of imaginative innovations, the pandemic disrupted education systems everywhere, accelerated adoption of online technologies, forced major institutional rearrangements to accommodate hybrid instructional models, and laid bare pre-existing inequalities in access to educational resources within and among countries.



In the report <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)02092-X/fulltext">“Challenges and Opportunities for Health Professional Education in the Post-Pandemic Era”</a>, recently published by The Lancet, my co-authors and I evaluated how transformative developments have emerged, including in competency-based education, interprofessional education, and especially the large-scale application of information technology to education.



By tracking institutional and instructional reforms, we pose two crucial questions: What has happened to Health Professional Education over the past decade, and how has the Covid-19 pandemic altered the education process?



While the pandemic did not initiate such transformations, it greatly accelerated them, and they are likely to have a long-term impact on HPE. These educational developments converge with broader societal shifts exposed and fostered by the pandemic.&nbsp;



The challenge is not merely to adapt to a new normal, but to proactively build a better normal. The first step in this endeavor is to develop novel ways of conceptualizing the models that could shape Health Professionals Education in the post-pandemic era.



Two main forces are driving this transformation. First, advances in educational technologies rooted in cognitive sciences are revolutionizing how we teach and learn. Second, the rapid evolution of health systems, marked by technological and organizational complexities, demands a more dynamic approach to education. The traditional notion of completing education before entering the workforce is no longer viable, as new jobs emerge and existing ones evolve faster than educational programs can keep pace.



This means that initial instruction is not sufficient to assure successful performance, either in terms of professional proficiency or of personal well-being. At the same time, new educational technologies make it possible to extend competency development beyond the traditional confines of formal full-time instruction, thus blurring the borders between the previously separate life stages of learning and work.&nbsp;



Taken together, the two drivers of change demand a strategic shift in higher education towards a model that could be called Education for Life, with profound implications for both instructional and institutional design.



Based on our assessment, we offer three core recommendations, the first of which highlights the importance of adopting Education for Life as a guiding principle for health professional education. The concept of Education for Life encompasses three dimensions—learning throughout life, learning to promote and restore healthy lives, and learning to live one’s own life.



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The challenge is not merely to adapt to a new normal, but to proactively build a better normal.
</blockquote>



Learning throughout life refers to education that lasts a person’s entire lifetime, rather than merely during a defined period. Traditional educational models divide the life course into separate stages for learning, work, and retirement. Closed educational systems that front-load the content and cost of education before learners enter the labor market should be complemented and eventually superseded by open systems designed to meet the evolving needs for new competencies along the entire career trajectories of health professionals.



Learning to promote and restore healthy lives is at the heart of the substantive content of HPE, which centers on developing the competencies to preserve and improve the lives and well-being of individuals, families, and communities. In other words, this is education to help the lives of others through the technical expertise and service ethic of health professionals.



The final dimension, learning to live one's own life, highlights that part of the educational experience should enable learners to preserve their sense of purpose and mental well-being. This involves learning to balance work life and family life. It also means learning to cope with stress and adversity. Preventing burnout, however, is not only a matter of developing these individual capabilities but also of learning how to transform the organization of work in ways that promote the well-being of all team members, while promoting equity among the different categories of the health workforce.&nbsp; In the face of increasing workloads, adequate staffing is essential for freeing up time to manage the stress and pressures that compromise wellbeing.&nbsp;



If institutions providing HPE are to effectively implement the three dimensions of Education for Life, they must face the challenges and leverage the opportunities presented by technological innovations and health system disruptions, which were already present before the pandemic but have since become even more crucial drivers of change.



Health Professional Education will continue to be challenged to respond to societal concerns over health equity and to strengthen a new professionalism that incorporates concern for the individual and the community. Meeting these challenges while nurturing the core values of the healing professions should remain a vital goal for health educators.



Julio Frenk is a global public health expert and president of the University of Miami.

Adopting Education For Life as a Guiding Principle for Health Professional Education

In his book Languishing, psychologist Corey Keyes describes burnout as “finding it hard to bring joy or meaning to activities that you once found greatly fulfilling.” This flattening out of your emotions takes many forms: the parent struggling to read a bedtime story to his child; the graphic artist unable to remember the thrill of creation; or the mid-career physician who wonders, “How did I get so removed from the work I once loved?” In the medical profession, burnout is particularly insidious. Its hold is both personal and systemic, moving from institution to practitioner to patients, families, and communities.&nbsp;



Fortunately, that same causality can work in the reverse. The Kern National Network for Flourishing in Medicine (KNN) has started a movement to bring connection and fulfillment back to the medical profession in the hope of transforming a system that, in many ways, is putting the health of its stakeholders at risk. The KNN is infusing a framework for flourishing into medical schools and academic medicine so that what is taught, learned and practiced is not just skill and competency, but also models of character, ethics and purpose. Recognizing the interconnectedness of medicine, and its relationship to public health, the KNN is also working with health systems and within health professions to rethread medicine’s frayed social compact.&nbsp;



“With the ever-changing demands in healthcare, physicians are met with complex challenges testing their ability to make the best decisions for their patients, communities and their own flourishing as practitioners, said Dr. Cheryl Maurana, the Founding Director of KNN and professor and senior vice president at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW). “KNN places an intentional focus on character, caring and practical wisdom to ensure that physicians are best positioned to successfully navigate these demands.”



The theory is that centering these values and behaviors within individual students, faculty, residents, and practitioners will have a cascading effect on the profession and health systems overall. It’s not about payment reform, though market dynamics are a consideration. And it’s not about individual wellbeing, though that, too, is a part. The KNN’s framework for flourishing in medicine is inherently relational and rooted in connection with others. Though it addresses deficits in the system, it adopts an asset-based approach that involves drawing from one’s own strengths and values when making some of the most ethically challenging decisions any professional can make.&nbsp;



The movement, which began several years ago, may just now be reaching its tipping point, thanks to a number of factors including two large grants from the Kern Family Foundation and the global pandemic which exposed long simmering issues within the healthcare system. As early as 2012, Foundation leaders were meeting with a group of medical educators, including Maurana, who were struggling to address growing problems within medical schools and academic medicine. These included burnout characterized by the deterioration of hopefulness and vigor in medical students and faculty. Studies have demonstrated that high rates of burnout correspond with lower levels of physician empathy and altruism in caring for patients. “We were looking for an antidote to that,” said Maurana.



By the mid 20-teens, in addition to MCW, the group included six other medical heavyweights: Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine, University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and Vanderbilt University School of Medicine; along with passionate leaders like Dr. John Raymond who was early in his presidency of MCW and dedicated to helping transform medical education towards these goals.&nbsp;



Many within the profession felt as though the pendulum had swung so far in medical education that it was concerned only about competence, and it had lost the idea of the whole person formation. The schools’ believed what the medical profession needed was a foundation for flourishing and they set about establishing the pillars that would lead to that outcome by working together and examining the literature. They eventually arrived at: character, based on the elements of the Jubilee Centre’s framework of moral, civic, intellectual and performance virtues; caring, described as “emphasizing an ongoing practice and approach that recognizes human interdependence and works toward a stronger democracy”; and practical wisdom, as noted in the work of Kenneth Sharpe and Barry Schwartz, which is continually developed through experience and critical reflection toward action, something Maurana calls “doing the right thing, at the right time, for the right reason.”



“What flourishing in medicine means is reflected in the solid framework the KNN has developed so It’s not just a nice word to hear – who doesn’t want to flourish? – it provides a research base to consider flourishing in individuals and systems and to understand practices and conditions conducive to flourishing,” said Christopher Stawski, senior program director and senior fellow of the Kern Family Foundation, which formally established the consortium as the KNN with their first investment in 2017. Another grant, approved in 2022, is helping to fuel its growth.&nbsp;



Kimara Ellefson is KNN’s National Director of Strategy and Partnership, a position that reflects the expansion of the organization’s targeted impact. She says the focus of the KNN, and the Foundation, has grown from medical education, to all medical professions, to health systems overall, in an acknowledgement of the interdependency of these domains, once again laid bare by the pandemic. She points to work KNN is now doing with hospital systems, including large, for-profits which are concerned about the wellbeing of their residents and the effect it can have on patient care. While the systems work is nascent, individuals representing over 50 organizations within the health care ecosystems are now engaged with the KNN in a variety of ways through student chapters, organizational members, and project partners.&nbsp;



“We hope that the lens of flourishing is adopted by the majority of medical schools and healthcare systems in this country so that policy decisions, education decisions, staffing decisions, and leadership decisions are made through a flourishing lens,” she said.&nbsp;



Living the Movement



When asked what “flourishing in medicine,” means to him, med student Vincent Busque said “to me, flourishing in medicine means taking pride in the authentic ways in which we take care of our patients, both through medical care and especially as fellow humans, while contributing to and being supported by the broader medical community.” 



Busque is a third year student at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and has been involved with the KNN since he arrived in both formal and informal ways. He attends KNN student conferences and has led student workshops but he also incorporates the KNN principles into everyday actions like sending congratulatory notes to his classmates at the end of the year. A natural optimist with a gift for coaching, Brusque tries hard not to let negativity, like attitudes between battle-worn educators and anxious students, get him down. But Brusque is also the first to say, “med school is no joke.” As he begins his clinical rotation when the challenges of his chosen profession become very real, he will lean heavily on the KNN framework which he says gave him a unique kind of mental toughness.&nbsp;



“I try to do something caring every day – even if it’s little things like getting someone a blanket or popping back in on a patient,” he said. “I think that is what is going to make me a better physician because when the going gets tough, you need to connect back to why you went to medical school in the first place and for most of us that’s about caring for people in really difficult and emotional situations.”&nbsp;



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“Flourishing in medicine means taking pride in the authentic ways in which we take care of our patients, both through medical care and especially as fellow humans.”
</blockquote>



As a KNN student leader, Busque helps his classmates understand what words like flourishing, caring and practical wisdom mean in a clinical scenario, particularly a challenging one. He says use of love languages like affirmation, physical touch and acts of service can help illuminate caring. Relevant questions like how best to support a struggling colleague provide relatable examples for practical wisdom.&nbsp;



“KNN has allowed me to say that it is actually OK in medical school to care about your values, your character, and your community. With time, we will all come to understand the science (of medicine), but it is these things that are going to allow us to be truly great physicians,” he said.



One of Busque’s models for professional excellence is Dr. Roshini Pinto-Powell, an educator and administrator who is co-leading the KNN curriculum development at Geisel. She is also the school’s associate dean of admissions and only partly jokes that she is personally responsible for dedicated learners like Vincent Busque. A physician for forty years, Pinto-Powell is a KNN devotee who sees the framework not so much as programming, but as a mindset shift and a pledge that permeates everything that goes into medical education. She is currently completing a masters degree, funded by the Kern Family Foundation, from the University of Birmingham at the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues.&nbsp;



Pinto-Powell will be using the KNN framework in her “On Doctoring” class, and this coming year will include a new seven-session pilot class called “Professional Values Formation.” This is a re-envisioning of Geisel’s Coaching Program which was created in 2019 to connect all incoming medical students with a faculty coach for the duration of their studies, to maintain consistent academic &amp; professional support throughout training. In this program, students connected with their coaches in small group coaching sessions, focusing on broad topics like the medical school roadmap, professional identity formation, professional enculturation, and self-regulated learning. Students also met with their coach to receive individualized support in building and reflecting on their goals, challenges, and experiences.



As Geisel dives into developing the new “Professional Values Formation” pilot, leaning deeply into the KNN framework, Pinto-Powell is particularly focused on bringing the appropriate vocabulary to this pilot program, which will be introduced with both students and faculty, in order to have a common vernacular she believes was lost with the secularization of education. She says that while biomedical ethics has an important role in medicine, a practical wisdom framework of thinking allows for nuance and particulars, critical to wise decision-making.



“The separation of church and state has sort of muddled the idea of morality and virtue in medicine into thinking its religiosity and it’s not,” she said. “I think our young people really lack moral vocabulary as a framework and we need to bring that back for them.”&nbsp;



Pinto-Powell has a strong advocate in Dr. Sonia Chimienti, the school’s Dean of Educational Affairs. In an indication of the school’s broad perspective on health care, she also oversees the masters in public health and masters of science programs as well as the MD program at Geisel. “What we are trying to do is create opportunities to do more learning together earlier in education. This will help us to understand each other better, and ultimately improve how we work together,” she said.&nbsp;



Chimienti believes Pinto-Powell’s work with faculty, as well as students, is a critical part of the KNN framework. “A focus of our work in creating our learning collaboratives is to help with the development, the nurturing, the appreciation, and the ongoing respect of our educators so they can role model and be those physicians that the students aspire to be,” she said.&nbsp;



In many ways, Busque, Pinto-Powell and Chimienti are the embodiment of the KNN movement. While they acknowledge the challenges inherent in health care, they all hope to change the conversation from burnout and blame to a renewed sense of joy within the profession itself.&nbsp;



“When I think about this as a movement, I think about reclaiming the narrative of what it means to be a professional, a physician, a public health specialist, a nurse in this era, in this time,” said Chimienti. “It’s about showing up every day and bringing the character and caring that you grew up with and developed to the moment that you are in; to the person who is front of you – whether it’s a student, a patient, or a colleague – and upholding the standards of the profession we all hold so dear.”

Physician, Heal Thyself

When Kylie Martin was studying abroad in Gdansk, Poland, she visited the Stutthof concentration camp with classmates. They walked the paths where victims took their last steps,&nbsp;and somberly regarded the piles of shoes. But the quiet detail Martin found most arresting was one that few others even noticed: In the women’s housing, wooden support beams were covered with old graffiti, messages etched in languages she couldn’t read.



“I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Here were these women experiencing genocide first-hand, yet something had moved them to carve messages on the columns. Was it an act of rebellion? A source of motivation to keep going? Or was it just a form of preservation, to nick up a beam with writing that could endure after death?” wrote Martin in the pages of her journal. As an aspiring journalist, she found herself naturally attuned to finding meaning in small details. “To me, that represented something so magnificently human — leaving behind something that’s proof to ourselves and the world, ‘I was here’.”&nbsp;



When she returned for her senior year at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, she was invited to share her reflections as part of the school’s new Digital Storytelling Program. The program had been launched with a grant from the Coalition for Transformational Education, designed to encourage Dearborn students to craft personal narratives in a multimedia format. It also allocated funds to hire the students to become digital storytelling mentors to other students, in turn teaching them the skills they’d learned.&nbsp;



Martin’s five-minute digital story included curated images of Stutthof, paired with the audio recording of her script. In its conclusion, she wondered if this was to be her role in the world — amplifying the voices of others unable to share their stories.



Using the storytelling format in an academic setting was new for her. “Digital storytelling was a method of portraying what you’ve learned that’s so much more meaningful than an academic paper. It says something very unique about the person who created it. You’re seeing a whole other side to them that you wouldn’t see if you were just reading a paper,” says Martin, who has since graduated and is working as an intern at the Detroit Free Press. “Storytelling might not come naturally or easily to some students, but it’s a strong way of getting across a message or experience. Creativity can be like a muscle — the more you work at it, the better it gets.”



The University of Michigan-Dearborn is one of a growing number of campuses recognizing the power of storytelling as a life skill worth teaching. This isn’t news for students in the arts, media, or communications, and the ability to build a compelling narrative has obvious applications and benefits across all kinds of industries — sales and marketing, law and politics, conservation and urban planning, and so on. This is what happened. This is what we need to solve. This is why it matters. In recent years, the job title “Chief Storyteller” has infiltrated the org chart in companies like Nike, Microsoft, and IBM, and narrative techniques are becoming more widely applied in STEM fields like engineering and medicine. Storytelling combines the “hard” skills of problem-solving with the “soft” skills of communication and empathy, bridging the personal and the professional. Little surprise then that campus leaders find storytelling a good tool to approach a range of important conversations including equity, career development, wellbeing, and more.



More Than a Single Story



Dr. Domenico Grasso, Chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, was first intrigued by how storytelling might influence identity formation in students when he watched, and was deeply moved by, the “The Danger of a Single Story,” the TEDGlobal talk by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie. Adichie recalls arriving on campus in the U.S. and meeting her roommate, who was surprised to learn Nigerian people spoke English and listened to more than tribal music. In her talk, Adichie warns about the risk of widespread cultural misunderstanding that occurs when people make assumptions about a group of people, thinking one version of the way they live represents the narrative of an entire place.&nbsp;&nbsp;



The message made an impact on Grasso, who saw the beneficial applications for breaking down cultural misperceptions on his suburban Detroit campus. “Storytelling is the act of considering the things we take as a given and articulating them, so that they’re out in the open,” he says. “When we put into words what we assume or presume, we put it on the table to be able to talk about it.”



Dr. Grasso worked with Dr. Maureen Linker, Associate Provost and Professor of Philosophy, to create a digital storytelling project that would solicit, hire, and train students in the art of multimedia technology. After two successful cohorts of the digital storytelling project, he had an idea: What if the skills of storytelling, and the benefits of learned empathy, could be harnessed in the service of more authentic Diversity, Equity And Inclusion (DEI) initiatives?&nbsp;



Just last month, he revolutionized the school’s DEI process, and re-established it as the Office of Holistic Excellence. An important part of the new office’s outreach takes the form of learning about other people’s perspectives through storytelling, with a model that takes inspiration from NPR’s StoryCorps.&nbsp;



“The initial concept of DEI was to bring onto campus people with diverse ideas and views and origin stories,” he said. “But in our traditional DEI approach, we never asked people to tell their stories. It was enough that they checked the box, which was African-American or Hispanic or LGBTQ or veteran, and so on. And then that was it. That was where the DEI ended. We have a very diverse and heterogeneous community, but we never asked them to enrich the campus by engaging with their stories.”&nbsp;



In the initial digital storytelling project, as in as her philosophy classes, Linker worked with the students in the storytelling cohorts—which often began with overcoming their default mode of assuming their lives weren’t “storyworthy.”



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“We have students who say, ‘Those aren’t my skills. I can’t do that.’ And we say, ‘Are you human? Then you’re a storyteller.’”
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“They could look at philosophical writing from the lived experience of people on the margins, but still say their own life was not particularly interesting. And once they started working on assignments and had to share aspects of their lives, they were fascinating and complex and full of insight,” says Linker. “It has a lot to do with our demographics as a regional campus, a commuter campus. There are so many stories and perceptions of the Detroit metropolitan area. So I used Adichie’s work as a springboard for the digital storytelling project, and I was interested in having the students address and lean into the myths and stereotypes about the area and tell stories from their point of view.”



Storytelling is as old as humanity, traced back to our earliest ancestors’ campfires and cave paintings. Narratives have always been used to pass down knowledge, traditions, and culture; they make sense of the world, foster shared identities, and ensure survival. Evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould calls humans “primates who tell stories.”



And yet we aren’t born with the ability to tell a story; we have to acquire language to communicate, and function in social circles so we have others to communicate with. It’s a basic but critical life skill to live in community with others: persuasive storytelling compels others to partner with you, listen to your vision, and avoid the dangerous path, follow your plan. Storytelling as a genre is a broad umbrella, encompassing the skills of telling a story — the rollout and pacing of critical details, sometimes incorporating humor, culminating in a relatable larger message. But it can also mean knowing how to understand and tell your story, with the self-awareness of the personal narrative.



“We have students who say, ‘Those aren’t my skills. I can't do that.’ And we say, ‘Are you human? Then you’re a storyteller,’” says Jonathan Adler, a psychology professor at Olin College of Engineering. Adler is also co-founder of The Story Lab at Olin, designing and coaching storytelling experiences grounded in literary practice, the performing arts, and psychological science. Beyond Olin, he also works with doctors in the Health Story Collaborative, a non-profit organization aimed at elevating personal stories in the healthcare ecosystem.&nbsp;



Medicine, engineering, STEM — they all rely on stories, he stresses, as much as the so-called arts. “The narrative is sort of the default mode of human cognition. Even if you’re going to spend your life writing computer code, you’ve got to be able to explain what you’re doing and why you did it that way and why it matters to the people around you. ‘Well, my goal was X, so then I did Y.’ That’s a story,” he says. “Effective communication depends on narrative fluency. And there is no profession about which you don’t have to communicate the work you’re doing.”&nbsp;



The narrative ecology we live in starts young. High schoolers need to tell their stories to get into college, and are asked in job interviews, Why do you want to work here? Why are you the best person for the job? Students might have spent their school years crafting persuasive academic essays. But the careers they’re entering require narrative powers of expression to put their goals in context. And sometimes they call for the self-awareness and insight to fit themselves into the story, making the case for their vision, and why they’re the person to make it happen.&nbsp;



“Storytelling has the potential to do something much deeper and more transformational, which is to help people articulate why they care about the things that they care about, and what they’re trying to do with their lives,” he says.&nbsp;



For Olin’s Story Lab, one of the key forums for students to perform their narratives is a story slam held during Candidates’ Weekend, when accepted undergraduates visit to decide whether this is the place they want to matriculate. It’s a bold move and an act of faith for the college to display these authentic voices at the same time the college admissions office is spinning its own persuasive narrative. In this context, student storytelling does more than entertain and inform with candor and empathy. It lets the listener in on the secret that it’s okay not to be perfect — to experience academic stress, social anxiety, identity confusion — which might just make Olin the perfect place to feel at home.



Adler recalls one impactful story — “a tell-without-telling story” — in which a student shares an episode of taking care of her little sister. In the course of the narrative, it becomes clear that the experience took place in the context of poverty, darker than expected, and that she was in fact only three years old trying to microwave a hot dog for a baby.&nbsp;



“Working with students on their stories, we’ve developed a really good attunement for what’s the right amount of vulnerability to share in a story. When it became clear that we were dealing with trauma here, it took us all by surprise, and we decided, ‘Let’s just tell the story of making the hot dog in the microwave,’” recalls Adler. “Then the story can be infused with little moments where you as the listener are like, Oh, there’s more here, it goes a lot deeper, while keeping things on this subtler level in a way that was manageable, and resulted in a really captivating story. And partly what was captivating was that you knew there were layers beneath that you weren’t getting access to.”



In this way, he helps students master this technique of understatement, telling-without-telling, to help them process the story and keep it from becoming too raw.&nbsp;



“And that’s what makes these experiences brilliant and beautiful. It’s a metaphoric way of thinking that I take for granted, because that’s the way I live in the world, but the students experience it for the first time as a superpower. Once they do that, it’s a skill that’s going to serve them for life, because they’re not going to need you sitting on their shoulder telling them where their metaphorical moments are like epiphanies.”​



Students who gain a well-developed sense of their own story benefit from the combined biological maturity and cognitive perspective to weave together the past, present, and future —and if they’re fortunate, with humor and grace. This is particularly true of young people who dealt with trauma, or shame. The act of processing the experience — and then sharing it and being received with support and understanding — helps them better appreciate variables that were beyond their control.&nbsp;



“When we share our story with others, it reorganizes our experiences, makes them more categorized, and makes sense of it,” says Laura McKowen, founder of the recovery community The Luckiest Club dedicated to substance-use disorder. McKowen is a fan of storytelling because cognitively linking our life experiences — and seeing others identify with our experience — helps de-fang the otherness and humiliation. “We are meaning-making machines, and what we can’t put into a story and don’t have words for stays disorganized and festering and causes suffering and shame.”



Stories Are Pathways to Wellbeing



Will Schwalbe is a writer whose thoughtful insights into relationships characterized his 2012 memoir, The End of your Life Book Club. Last year he published a second memoir, We Should Not Be Friends, about an unlikely and lifelong relationship between him (gay theater kid) and Maxey (ebullient jock-Navy Seal) forged in a secret society at Yale in the early 1980s. This small society’s members, hand-selected for their vastly different paths in life, share awkward meals twice weekly until a capstone storytelling experience called the “audit.” Each member is given an entire evening to tell their life story — uninterrupted, for hour upon hour.&nbsp;



“Each drew the group closer. Most of us admitted to suffering from imposter syndrome; there was relief in that admission. Inadequacy loves company,” he wrote. “It wasn’t the stories that bound us; it was the way we framed them for one another and the fact that we shared them in the first place.”



Advocates believe students who are making this cognitive leap in understanding their own stories are far better equipped to be making new connections with others — their peers, their professors, their coaches, their future bosses, and partners. They gain insight into which of their narratives land well — humility versus grandiosity. And they become far better listeners, better able to see the meaning behind the words and stories others share and respond in a way that means more than awkward small talk. The self-aware storyteller understands that the purpose of the story is connection, not painting himself as impressive.



“If you’ve got the floor in front of a group of people and go on about how great you are, or the greatest thing you did, you would really have to find some way to couch that to make it socially acceptable. For most people who have normal situational awareness, it’s going to tamp down the urge for self-aggrandizement or to boast, because it keeps you from connecting and getting anywhere,” says Matthew Dicks, a nine-time winner of The Moth GrandSLAM (the championship round of the country’s premier live storytelling competition) and author of Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Power of Storytelling. “The need to show yourself like a perfectly curated story or Instagram post is dishonest, when you’d be better off telling a story that’s funny, with a certain amount of deprecation, or a small disaster that led to moments of realization. Better knowledge of storytelling encourages people not to share their glorified moments, because those aren’t the ones that are going to connect.”



The therapeutic value of storytelling, among emerging adults, remains one of the craft’s most important benefits.&nbsp;The chronic loneliness that exists for young adults today isn’t made any easier by time spent reading their phones instead of reading the room. “Storytelling forces you to make eye contact with another human being. And then they say things that make you remember things from your own life, and connect to that person,” says Dicks. “I think the value in that is enormous for people trapped on their screens all the time. It used to be pretty normal in the world for that to happen, but I think now it actually sort of has to be coached and encouraged.”



This time in late adolescence is when young adults are laying down the first version of what scientists call their narrative identity, Adler says. So for traditionally aged college students, the college experience is happening while they are in the process of laying down the first draft of their story. “And we know that draft is going to stick around and influence their wellbeing over the course of their lives.”

What’s Your Story?

“Embrace Your Freedom”

<figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://live-learningwell-wp.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/How-to-Build-a-Global-Citizen.mp3"></audio><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Listen to this article, read by Ezza Naveed.</figcaption></figure>



The year is (sometime in the future), and a network of global leaders are working together across continents, languages, and disciplines on some of the world’s biggest problems. Be they scientists, artists, industry executives or NGO directors, they are particularly well-equipped with the skills needed to navigate a world with diverse cultures and common threats. Within their toolbox of competencies are empathy, agency, open-mindedness and grit. 



This is not a utopian fantasy, but rather the strategic vision that centers Mike Magee, PhD, and his students at Minerva University, a recently formed, selective institution aimed at developing the global leaders of the future.&nbsp;



“Our mission is to develop leaders, problem-solvers, and entrepreneurs from every corner of the globe and to weave them together as one community committed to a world that is safe, sustainable and equitable,” said Magee, President of Minerva.&nbsp;



Accredited in 2021, the university was originally called The Minerva Schools at Keck Graduate Institute, founded by Ben Nelson and operated by the Minerva Institute for Research and Scholarship, where former US Senator and President Emeritus of the New School Bob Kerry served as executive chairman. Based in San Francisco, Minerva utilizes a hybrid platform of online learning and study away to engage high achieving students from around the world in a different kind of education. Within their regular studies, students work on location-based assignments in seven international cities.&nbsp;



By design, it is the world’s most diverse university: less than 15% of its 600 students are from the US, and many come from low-income communities. Minerva has also been ranked “the world’s most innovative university,” and for good reason. To achieve a goal as ambitious as Magee describes within a system as traditional as higher education, Minerva had to reinvent pretty much everything. With minimal infrastructure, an unusual faculty profile, and a unique pedagogy, Minerva offers a fresh approach to higher education at a time of deep frustration with the status quo.&nbsp;



College — reimagined&nbsp;



One of the most obvious differences between Minerva and its elite peers is the environment in which students learn. Large, theater-style lecture halls do not exist. In fact, the school has minimal infrastructure which keeps the tuition about half that of many colleges. Classes of no more than 20 students are live and online and involve pre-class work and full participation. The goal is to create intimate learning environments that are dialogue based where students build relationships with peers and professors, even as they are mostly remote. After spending their first year in San Francisco taking the same general education curriculum, students move in cohorts to an additional 6 cities each semester: Berlin, Buenos Aires, Seoul, Taipei, and London.



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“It’s a very special type of person who wants to work here.”
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“From the beginning, we decided we were not going to build beautiful campuses. We were going to intentionally teach young people to treat economically and culturally vibrant cities as their campuses – to use their libraries, museums and labs and to immerse themselves in their cultures.”



Another feature that sets Minerva apart is the kind of people it attracts. Michael Horn is a trustee at Minerva and has been involved with the school since the beginning. “I see Minerva as a disruptive entrant into the elite higher education segment,” said Horn, who has authored several books including one with Clayton Christenson, considered the father of disruptive innovation theory. “It puts the learner and their needs first and prepares them for a complex world in a way that’s much more front and center than other higher ed institutions who are often asking themselves ‘Are we a research-first institution? Why do we exist?’ At Minerva, we are very clear. We are a learning institution.”&nbsp;



A former international relations professor at the University of Southern California, Dollie &nbsp; Davis taught in one of those large lecture halls and eventually left higher ed feeling unfulfilled. She worked in the non-profit sector until the chance to join Minerva lured her back to teaching. She is now Minerva’s dean of faculty.



“It’s a very special type of person who wants to work here,” she said. “We don’t have a publishing requirement and we don’t have tenure. Without the requirement to publish, we focus primarily on teaching. We care about our specific model of teaching and being engaged with our students.”



Davis says everything about Minerva is intentional which translates into a collective “buy-in” of the unusual culture.&nbsp;



“The students know they are coming into a challenging university where classes are taught in the active learning style,” she said. “They know that they are going to be called on so as soon as they log on, they’re ready to go. It’s on us, the faculty, to promote a strong sense of community and a safe space in the classroom so they feel comfortable sharing new ideas. That’s a big part of our training.”&nbsp;



Minerva professors are trained in an active learning pedagogy and the technology that enables it. With students and professors throughout the world, Minerva’s digital platform is critical, and the university is quick to distinguish it from the online accommodations colleges were forced to make due to the pandemic. The platform delivers real-time information to faculty and students during classroom discussion, which allows them to display material for the purpose of informing the conversation. Students and faculty see one another on a digital “stage” and can be moved around the screen. If students have worked together on a pre-class project and need to present, the professor can visually pair them with their material alongside them. Davis believes a digital theater can be more intimate than an actual classroom where it is easier to hide.&nbsp;



Magee says many schools use online learning simply for knowledge transmission when they can be working the technology around the science of learning. “The technology should enable the pedagogy you choose. What do we want the classroom experience to be like? What type of outcomes are we trying to achieve for students?” In Minerva’s case, it is the evidence that emerging adults retain more knowledge from experiences and dialogue than they do from simply receiving information.&nbsp;



An important distinction in the curriculum is the relevance of real-world problems which students work on in location-based assignments. Students in Buenos Aires taking Dean Davis’s economics class, for example, will attend a financial museum and discuss the history of the city’s economy and policies with the local experts there. Students who take sustainability courses on topics like energy or water can apply what they learn to projects they will work on in Seoul or Berlin. The variation in these experiences teaches students how different people and systems respond to similar challenges.&nbsp;



To build their cultural competencies, students learn to master what the school calls “HC’s” – 75 habits and concepts that are basic tools for critical thinking and effective communication that students will use across their lifetime. They are particularly important when working across differences – a foundational principle in global citizen-building. Students are introduced to the HC’s in their first year and are assessed on them throughout their time at Minerva. Davis says the HC’s are continuously “pulled” throughout class and are referenced by hashtags that get students to think instantaneously.&nbsp;



“When talking about a geopolitical conflict, I might say “hashtag - audience” to remind students of how what they’re saying affects others; or “hashtag - break it down” when we are working on problem-solving,” she said.&nbsp;



The HC’s include personal characteristics such as purpose and resilience, which are linked to improved mental health and wellbeing, something that is highly valued at a school that asks a lot of its students. “Our curriculum is intentionally designed to build resilience in students and have them grow in those ways,” said Horn. “Resilience is incredibly important to wellbeing because things aren’t always going to be great, and it is how you respond that is important.”&nbsp;



Magee said the challenges students face in becoming global citizens are not minimal. “I don’t want to give the impression that any of this is easy,” he said. “It’s really hard when you have young people who are by and large between the ages of 17 and 22 and they’re wary of one another and they’re still trying to develop their own sense of how the world works. And there’s a lot they still need to know about history and politics and identity.”



“If anyone wants to ‘do Minerva,’ you should be prepared that it will upend much of what you know about the world,” said Ezza Naveed, a Minerva alumnus of the class of 2021.



Naveed was a highschool student in her native Pakistan when she told her guidance counselor she was not interested in a traditional four-year university. “If it were up to me, I would have traveled the world instead of going to college – I think it would teach me more,” she said. But her mother had other ideas and so her guidance counselor suggested an alternative -- Minerva. Naveed was an excellent student, though her grades had slipped that year due to a significant personal loss. She had achieved much in her young life including working on class poverty within her community, which she wrote about in her application. She was overjoyed when she was accepted.



“I think Minerva saw in me someone who, if given this education, was going to run with it and make a difference in people’s lives,” she said.



Naveed now says Minerva was the exciting, soul- searching, transformational experience she had hoped for, building her sense of empathy and understanding of different cultures and helping her discover new parts of herself.&nbsp;



“The most formative experiences in my life happened in all of these cities around the world, in all these unique cultures where I learned new customs and made best friends for life,” she said. In Seoul, she joined the local debate team at Hanyang University and was amazed that she became a quarter finalist for the Seoul National Debate Tournament. During her trek to Patagonia whilst living in Buenos Aires, and doing solo hikes by herself, she realized something. “I, as a woman, can compete and do anything, anywhere in the world,” she remembers thinking, countering the cultural narrative she grew up with about the inferior capabilities of women.&nbsp;



“For me, Minerva was about ‘unlearning that,’” she said.&nbsp;



Naveed wrote her Minerva capstone on gender immobility of Pakistani women. “I was always passionate about this issue, but I wasn’t confident in my ability to bring that forward,” she said. “Minerva gave me that toolbox. I lived in 5 out of the 7 countries where I got to see what ‘normal’ was like for women in different parts of the world.”



When she returned to Pakistan after graduation, she sensed that her peers did not get the same opportunities and had not grown in the same ways, even those she considered “really smart.” She attributes that to a systemic and personal investment gap in their education. “At Minerva, my professors knew me so well, the staff knew me so well. They were so invested in my success, and they really cared for us, my friends cared for me, it was just a deeply caring community. I realized that’s not a universal thing.” Shortly after graduating, she formed a partnership with Codematics, a tech company in Pakistan to teach low-income students, aged 18 to 25, for her project "Young Leaders Program" at Urraan, both hard tech skills like coding but also personal, pragmatic skills like public speaking, how to pitch an idea and networking. She is particularly proud of the outcomes she has seen in her female students.



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“I think Minerva saw in me someone who, if given this education, was going to run with it and make a difference in people’s lives.”
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Naveed is now a student at Harvard Graduate School of Education where she runs the student organization, Women’s Education Movement which recently hosted a leadership forum for School of Leadership Afghanistan, Afghanistan’s first and only boarding school for girls.&nbsp; She continues to feel the personal growth that occurred when at Minerva – “My friends and I can literally go anywhere and figure it out” -- but she cautions that the school is not for everyone.



When asked about the challenges she encountered, Narveed is candid about the emotional toll it can take on students, particularly those, like her, who had suffered a loss or were emotionally vulnerable.



“The mental, emotional load of it was really tiring,” she said. “We had to uproot and reroute and establish community from scratch in all these places -- and then there was the pandemic -- it really took a toll on me, mentally, emotionally and physically.” Naveed said students, particularly in the early classes, felt particularly dependent on one another and their professors. “The only sense of stability came from our own friendship and community.”



The school has worked on strengthening its mental health services platform which included coordinating therapy appointments around countries and time zones which Naveed said was a problem early on. Her ability to put these challenges in the context of her overall experience hints at the resilience Minerva believes is a part of global leadership.



“It can be challenging but it is extremely worth it. If I could go back and do it all again, I absolutely would.”&nbsp;



Expanding the pipeline



If there was one thing Magee would change about Minerva it would be to make it available to more students around the world which reflects a deep personal commitment to and experience with educational equity. An academic for many years, Magee left higher ed to found a network of new, racially integrated public schools in Rhode Island before coming to Minerva.&nbsp;



“Since I was a child, I’ve been really fascinated by and passionate about the role that schools can play in bringing young people together from lots of different backgrounds and across many lines of difference into community and belonging with each other.”



Magee acknowledges that the rigorous pedagogy and international campus require a certain level of skill and maturity, (as Ezza Narveed points out, it’s not for everyone), but he hopes to open Minerva up to more students for whom the unique method would be beneficial. Last year, the school grew its student body by 20% and plans to do the same in the coming year. With faculty that can be onboarded anywhere in the world and ample real estate available in their host cities, Minerva’s model makes it easy to expand.



“I think it’s fair to say that none of us is satisfied with limiting this to 600 students,” said Michael Horn.&nbsp;



In regard to being a prototype for change, Magee hopes other institutions will acknowledge the value of low capital costs to solve one of higher education’s biggest barriers, the rising cost of tuition. Magee blames the current unaffordability of higher ed for many Americans, and the resulting decline in public support for it, on a growing trend toward a business model more akin to a luxury brand or a country club membership. “The elite institutions started this trend by intentionally constraining supply, astronomically raising prices, emphasizing their elitism and not thinking about how to create an experience that is more available and less alienating,” he said. Magee believes the strategy pays off for the relatively few institutions whose alumni will enjoy a lifetime of social capital but is a debilitating trend for the rest.&nbsp;



“It has really broken higher education in America.”&nbsp;



If Minerva can offer an alternative path, one that can be scaled to reach far more of the future global citizens the world needs, Magee is happy to share it. His focus on growth also reveals a desire to prove something to those who may interpret “innovative” as “experimental.”&nbsp;&nbsp;



“I think we can do a real service to higher ed by growing to a size where we’re a little less easy to dismiss.”

How to Build a Global Citizen

The average age of a college president today is sixty. That makes them too young to have participated in the major social movements of the 1960s and not too old to be keenly aware of the emotional and mental health problems reported by young people today. These leaders are now navigating the minefield of issues laid bare by student protests over the war in Gaza, including the internal and external political pressures that have pushed them into defensive positions. As they contend with conflict in the most public of ways, they should make a connection amid the chaos to something most have long advocated for: the wellbeing and personal development of their students as they stand in solidarity around an issue for which they care deeply.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Every protest movement has a wide range of viewpoints, and this does not excuse any of the bad actors or extreme views on any side of this issue. But for someone who has reported on college student mental health and wellbeing throughout the “college mental health crisis,” I cannot help but link the most active campus protests we’ve seen in years with some of the elements of emotional wellbeing we hope our young people will experience – agency, empathy, belonging and sense of purpose. The absence of these elements has created the loneliness and isolation that Surgeon General Vivek Murthy included in his young adult mental health <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-youth-mental-health-advisory.pdf">advisory</a> of 2021 and his book Together, wherein he discusses America’s loneliness epidemic and the healing power of human connection. 



For over a decade, college students have <a href="https://healthymindsnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/HMS_National-Report-2022-2023_full.pdf">reported</a> a significant <a href="https://ps.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ps.201800332">increase</a> in anxiety and depression, along with high rates of loneliness, plateauing during the pandemic and remaining prevalent today. Gen Z students, who have been dubbed “The Anxious Generation,” are also feared to lack independence, to be overly tethered to their parents, and to be unable to advocate for themselves. College administrators have addressed this problem in myriad ways, from increasing mental health support resources to experimenting with co-curricular programs designed to help students build resilience and a sense of belonging. First-year programs now frequently include reflection about purpose and meaning as a way to center anxious students and give them the grace of seeing themselves in the bigger picture. Affinity groups, often organized by the school, help socially wary young adults find their people. 



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The students united in protest, some in traditionally opposing camps, are their own curated affinity group.
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There is a connection here between students’ fervent reaction to the war in Gaza and their social and emotional health that is understandably buried in the severity of the issue and the thorny consequences of the protests. Participation in protests can <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/07435584231202216">improve</a> students’ sense of belonging and identity, leading to positive mental health outcomes. “In higher education, we want students to feel like they belong to a community. Participating in activism, such as protests, allows students to be in a community with other people who share their same values and can provide them with meaningful connections to others,” wrote <a href="https://learningwellmag.org/article/let-them-scream">Dr. Samantha Smith</a> in an op-ed for LearningWell.&nbsp;&nbsp;



The literature is particularly robust on the connection between purpose and wellbeing. <a href="https://www.psychiatry.org/News-room/APA-Blogs/Purpose-in-Life-Less-Stress-Better-Mental-Health">Research</a> indicates that having a purpose in life is significantly associated with lower levels of depression and anxiety and may increase resilience after exposure to negative events. To the extent that their method of protest aligns with their good intent, we should recognize that the majority of these students are standing up for the humanity of others — and that is a good thing for a generation accused of obsessing about their images on social media. 



The more the movement grows, the more valid these arguments become. Given the momentum, administrators can no longer view this as the predictable behavior of certain student groups. There is something bigger going on. Perhaps most promising is that the movement is entirely student-driven. The students united in protest, some in traditionally opposing camps, are their own curated affinity group. Their passion is evidence that the teenagers who finished high school in their bedrooms and on their screens have learned to find their outside voices. Let this be a positive element in an otherwise complex and difficult leadership challenge.

Reading Between the Lines

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<figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://live-learningwell-wp.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Questions-to-Live-By.mp3"></audio><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Read by Laura Walker, President of Bennington College and former CEO and President of New York Public Radio</figcaption></figure>



It is 8th period at the Bronx Latin School and twenty or so sophomores are taking turns attempting to answer some of life’s biggest questions: “What is purpose?” “Is life about me or is it about others?” “Why does it take courage to be yourself?” As hands go up and down across the classroom, some common themes emerge: vulnerability, interconnectedness, and acceptance. There is not a phone in sight. 



These students are taking the QUESTion Class, an evidence-based course offered in public high schools in low-income neighborhoods that gives young people the opportunity for self-reflection and personal development. Now in 10 schools in New York City, the curriculum uses a method whereby a series of questions — categorized by theme and developmentally sequenced — help students explore and form their own identities and strengthen their sense of agency in school and life. With superlative outcomes, both formal and anecdotal, the QUESTion Class may be one answer to how to prepare children to become adults in a complex and challenging world.&nbsp;



“I think the class allows students to realize they can be resilient and that they have these inner strengths to make it through difficult situations,” said Matthew DeLeo, the students’ teacher at the Bronx Latin School and a trained QUESTion Class instructor. “It helps them realize that they’re stronger and more capable than they might otherwise have thought.”



The class is part of a larger effort known as the QUESTion Project, an initiative of the Open Future Institute, a non-profit founded by Gerard Senehi and his wife Francesca Rusciani. The project is, in many ways, the result of the founders’ personal quest to provide better support for the emotional development of emerging adults, something he says “allows them to understand themselves and what they choose to do rather than simply follow a script.” The class was designed for students with less of life’s advantages but its ability to build character and confidence is widely applicable and, many would say, universally lacking.&nbsp;



“I know from my own experience, there’s not enough support out there to figure out who you are as a person and how that influences your decisions in life,” said Senehi.&nbsp;



Senehi is an academic and entrepreneur who, himself, has held a number of identities. An alumnus of Amherst College with a master's degree in education, Senehi has been a social worker, a teacher, and a successful entertainer doing mystery shows to help off-set his non-profit work. His role as a mentalist has made him appreciate the process of discovery that students experience in taking the QUESTion Class.



“One of the things we learned early on was the importance of making room for the unknown,” he said. “Questions about purpose and identity are really profound and intangible and we need to let students know they don’t need to have an answer but to be true explorers.”



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The questions themselves are designed to empower the agency of students by encouraging intrinsic thinking as opposed to skill-building.
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The QUESTion Project includes the QUESTion Academy, in which teacher training, professional development, and coaching take place and the QUESTion Leadership Program where students take leadership roles including co-teaching the class. The curriculum took four years to develop and was originally co-created and piloted with college students at the University of Florida and Amherst College, as well as students from public schools in the South Bronx where word spread to other public high schools. All of them are “Title I” schools that receive federal assistance to provide quality education to children from low-income families. A portion of the schools are college prep, where principals often look for tools to support first generation students in their transition to college.&nbsp;



“What principals tell us is that it helps students with motivation for college but also with the skills needed to stay in college, which is a big issue for public school students,” he said.&nbsp;



Senehi says the program’s approach – and the questions themselves – are designed to empower the agency of students by encouraging intrinsic thinking as opposed to skill-building. An advocate of learner-centered pedagogy, he differentiates this work from other social and emotional programs that might recommend the right choices, versus connecting them with the agency to understand those choices for themselves. It is a dynamic that can be jarring, but ultimately transformative for students.&nbsp;



“I remember in my first QUESTion class I was like ‘whoa, why am I speaking more than the teacher?’ ‘Why are other kids telling me how they feel?’” says Alexander, a graduate of the Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics, now at SUNY Purchase studying acting. “In American education, we don’t really get to see students as the captains of their learning.”&nbsp;



The QUESTion Class curriculum is 80 lessons, divided into five core units with different themes, topics and perspectives. They are Choice, Purpose, Fearlessness, Interconnectedness, and A Bigger Picture. In Choice, students might explore aspects of freedom and responsibility, and how the choices they make may affect others. Within the Fearlessness section, students begin to understand their fears within the context of others and explore the role of fearlessness in being true to themselves. Each curricular unit builds upon the others, and by the end of the course, students consider “a bigger picture” with a closing session in which they explore their place in a larger world.&nbsp;



If there is a foundational pillar, it is purpose, or bringing meaning to your life in a way that is outside yourself, for which there is a well-documented <a href="https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/df16f770-3e47-462f-8c58-10e145f4b967/QUESTion%20Class%20Impact%20Study%20Summary%20Report.pdf">connection</a> to wellbeing. Purpose scholar William Damon, whose team from Stanford did a formal assessment of the program, wrote, “Alumni demonstrated that the QUESTion Class was effective in nurturing their sense of purpose and their feeling of being connected to others through their shared humanity. They learned to see purpose as a driving force now and throughout their lives.” Damon called the students he observed in the Bronx “as insightful, engaged, thoughtful, and articulate as any group of students I have ever seen.”&nbsp;



The principal of the Bronx Latin school, Annette Fiorentino, said she had been searching for the QUESTion Project long before she knew what it was. Bronx Latin is a public high school in a low-income neighborhood of New York City with a large percentage of college-bound students. 100% of them are students of color, largely Latinx and Black.&nbsp;



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“When we share our opinions, we don’t divide ourselves.”
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“Some of our top students, going to top universities, would come back to the Bronx in between terms and just seem so lost,” she said. “Some of them wanted to drop out of school. They weren't sure who they were. They weren't sure where they were going or what they wanted to study. I knew I needed a program to better prepare them emotionally for college and a principal friend of mine said, ‘Annette, you need the QUESTion Class.’”&nbsp;



Fiorentino says the class gives students confidence in who they are and builds a resilience muscle to flex when things get tough. The process helps prepare students for the real world of college, particularly in PWI’s (Predominantly White Institutions) with cultures and norms that are unfamiliar to first generation college students whose families can’t tell them about the sudden discomfort they might experience.&nbsp;



“I grew up with mostly Black and Brown people,” said Alexander. “The way we speak to each other is very different than the way I do now, now that I am in a PWI. There are certain things I need to be mindful about within this community and certain things I need to advocate for myself about. Taking the QUESTion Class gave me the fearlessness I need to be able to go up to someone who is different from me and be able to have those conversations that may be difficult or uncomfortable.”&nbsp;



For Fiorentino, what started out as a college transition tool became so much more. She is particularly impressed by the value of the interconnectedness unit which was critical in addressing loneliness during the pandemic and helps students learn to see others through their shared humanity, not through their labels.&nbsp;



“I think after they go through this program, they really understand that we're more alike than we are different,” she said. Asked if she was familiar with other types of social and emotional learning programs, she said, “nothing as powerful as this.”



In a review of the program by Stanford’s Center for Adolescence, Senior Researcher Heather Malin wrote, “Students who participate in the QUESTion Class gain confidence in their ability to navigate a path forward through their choices, while becoming more comfortable with an uncertain future. As they engage with their most important questions with peers, their feelings of isolation start to dissipate. They connect with a sense of direction based on their own understanding of the meaning of life and the purpose they hope to fulfill. Most striking to us has been seeing their fears and concerns for the future replaced by a sense of joy, positivity and confidence about the possibilities ahead.”



Among the results of the report’s alumni survey, 89% of respondents said the class provided opportunities to think deeply about the future choices they were making, take responsibility for their choices, or explore the unlimited choices available to them; 78% said the class provided opportunities or greater capacity for being open to or accepting of perspectives of others, recognizing the humanity of others, and seeing connection with others despite our differences; 100% said it helped them improve their autonomy and agency.&nbsp;



The report cites additional research on the value of purpose education among students, particularly those who’ve grown up in poverty and the added benefit this holds for others and for society. “Society benefits when individuals pursue a life of beyond-the-self purpose. Communities benefit from the prosocial activities of their members, and from being made up of individuals who are living lives of purpose.”&nbsp;



Matthew DeLeo doesn’t need an assessment report to understand the impact the QUESTion Class has on his students, or on others. He sees it every day during 8th period when they file in ready to get to work. Sometimes students who aren’t even in the class will ask to sit in. Now in his eighth year of teaching the course, Deleo said the class has been a learning process for him personally. “It was the students’ growth and development – and the way they express what the program has done for them – that has enabled me to learn and grow as their teacher.”&nbsp;



One afternoon in March, Gerard Senehi visited DeLeo’s class to ask, “What has this class helped you with?” The first indication may have been the level of seriousness the students gave to Senehi’s question. The room was silent. All eyes were on the visitor. Slowly, the hands went up. Some students asked for clarification: “What do you mean by helped me?” Others jumped right in: “It makes you OK with who you are, who you were, and who you want to be.” Another student added, “It opens up more doors to get to know yourself.”&nbsp;



Asked if the class is a little like therapy, some answered yes, in that it allows them to share thoughts they have inside that they can’t always speak with their families about. Hearing other students share similar thoughts lets them know they are not alone. Other links to mental health and wellbeing include comments such as “there is no judgment here” and “it is a place of comfort.”&nbsp;



Senehi’s last question moves the conversation from the individual to the collective. “How is it different here than what you see happening in the world outside in terms of polarization?” The answers to this are eerily spot-on and reflect a wisdom beyond their years. “When we share our opinions, we don’t divide ourselves.” “We’re not judging and we’re able to listen.” “In this class, it feels like there is no right or wrong, just people sharing their point of view,” all said with a remarkable lack of self-importance.&nbsp;



As they burst into the crowded hallway after class, it is impossible not to hope that what they take with them that day will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

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