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;



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“There is no rulebook right now for investing in student mental health at the state level. We are building as we climb.”
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<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.



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If Greek organizations cultivate a sense of community and belonging for members, they also dictate who is afforded the social capital of belonging.
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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.”



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“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.”
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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;



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“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”

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.
</blockquote>



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

“Embrace Your Freedom”

<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.”



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
The questions themselves are designed to empower the agency of students by encouraging intrinsic thinking as opposed to skill-building.
</blockquote>



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;



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
“When we share our opinions, we don’t divide ourselves.”
</blockquote>



“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.

Questions to Live By

<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.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
“It’s a very special type of person who wants to work here.”
</blockquote>



“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.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
“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.”
</blockquote>



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

In 2015, colleagues at the University of Washington designed a novel framework to promote wellbeing on campus. The UW <a href="https://wellbeing.uw.edu/unit/resilience-lab/">Resilience Lab</a> aims to cultivate a culture of resilience that goes beyond the individual and reaches across the university’s three campuses and surrounding communities. A member of the <a href="https://lists.virginia.edu/sympa/info/fan">Flourishing Academic Network (FAN)</a>, the lab drives systemic change through pedagogy and curriculum, interdisciplinary collaboration, research, strategic projects, and community engagement – all designed to help students thrive.&nbsp;



The lab’s collective approach joins faculty, staff, and students with a wide range of academic backgrounds — Buddhist studies, economics, medicine — into conversation with one another. It is a living example of how, when bringing different people and departments together, colleges and universities have an opportunity to transcend individualistic ideas of wellness and instead engage community members in productive dialogue. At the University of Washington, that dialogue is driving systemic change.



Kizz Prusia, MPA, is the Community Impact Manager at the UW Resilience Lab. He describes a resilient campus as one that embodies a quality of spaciousness. “Is there space and psychological safety for students to engage in dialogue with each other and with faculty across disciplines and status or levels of hierarchy and power?” he asks. “Are there tools available to practice wellbeing and compassion?” Prusia’s work, much like the work of the lab as a whole, extends into many areas of campus life. The lab values collaboration and fosters symbiotic relationships with other offices and programs —&nbsp;the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance; the School of Social Work; the Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity; and the Center for Child and Family Development, to name a few. That collective approach sets them apart, Prusia says. “I’ve seen centers and groups, here and at other institutions, that are insular and siloed. In the Resilience Lab, we think about individual wellbeing, but we also think about our collective ability to adapt and learn together; to shift wellbeing from an individual responsibility to a community effort.”&nbsp;



Institutional Memory



Interdisciplinary initiatives maximize the Resilience Lab’s reach and impact across a large, multi-campus university. They also generate a new “institutional memory,” Prusia says, by embedding the culture of compassion and resilience into all domains of the student experience, planting the seeds of lasting change.



One such initiative, Resistance through Resilience (RTR), is the product of a collaboration between the Resilience Lab and the Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity. RTR is a new training and speaker series that engages community members on and off campus in the application of mindfulness practices to interrupt racism and its intersections. One example is discussions on examining the meaning of resilience in the lives of minoritized students, for whom resilience often connotes “toughing it out” through challenging circumstances — “muscling through,” Prusia says, sometimes at great costs. Working to change that definition, Resistance through Resilience expands the conversation around what resilience looks like for students of color, LGBTQ+ students, and other marginalized groups by exploring “different ways to resist what exists,” Prusia explains.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
 “We are looking at how systems operate, how we can make sense of an organizational culture, and where individual actors fit inside that broader context.”
</blockquote>



“Those conversations have talked about joy, about rest, about resilience, and about radical listening,” he says. RTR promotes wellbeing through conversations around power, privilege, and the environments in which students and community members develop, learn, and thrive. The initiative highlights the Resilience Lab’s commitment to understanding the roles of both individuals and systems: with regard to anti-racist pedagogy, whole-person wellbeing, and community engagement, Prusia explains, “We are looking at how systems operate, how we can make sense of an organizational culture, and where individual actors fit inside that broader context.”



The Resilience Lab also provides seed grants in partnership with the Campus Sustainability Fund. The grants are an opportunity for anyone in the community, including students, faculty, staff, and community partners, to apply for grant funding for a proposed project relating to sustainability, mindfulness, resilience, or anti-racism. <a href="https://wellbeing.uw.edu/resilience-lab/seed-grants/seed-grant-prev-projects/">Examples</a> of recent grant recipients include the Critical Conversations Collective (CCC), a space for interdisciplinary doctoral students of color to engage in peer mentoring, and Embodying Abolition, a faculty-led project designing innovative pedagogy and curriculum that challenge systems of incarceration.



The <a href="https://ccfwb.uw.edu/bereal/">Be REAL</a> initiative is a collaborative project from the Resilience Lab and the Center for Child and Family Development. Be REAL (REsilient Attitudes and Living — the name predates the popular app) got its start as a research project in undergraduate residence halls studying the efficacy of “preventative tools to help students manage stress, understand their own needs and relate to others with compassion,” Prusia explains. The six-week program equips students and staff with cognitive skills and mindful techniques that help them flourish in their daily lives and respond mindfully to challenging situations. In partnership with the Center for Child and Family Development, Be REAL’s curriculum is in the process of being adapted to fit the needs of high school students and extend the culture of wellbeing beyond campus.



As faculty, staff, and students across the country gradually returned to in-person learning as pandemic restrictions lifted, the Resilience Lab published <a href="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/uw-s3-cdn/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2021/01/20101850/WBLL-Guidebook-FINAL.pdf">Well-Being for Life and Learning</a>, a guidebook organized around four pillars of an engaged and resilient university: teaching for equity and access, nurturing social connectedness, building coping skills, and connecting to the environment. The guidebook represents a community approach to taking resilience and wellbeing from optimistic concepts to fully-realized, implementable practices. While the guide provides a framework for best practices, the Resilience Lab’s work is, by design, not one-size-fits-all.&nbsp;



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“Is there space and psychological safety for students to engage in dialogue with each other and with faculty across disciplines and status or levels of hierarchy and power?”
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“We don’t expect that every department will implement the guidebook in the same ways or at the same time,” Prusia says. “Instead, we try to work with faculty and staff in a way that works for them. Maybe it’s not the whole guidebook — maybe it’s taking one practice and building a skillset around that.” This adaptability makes wellbeing tools practical and accessible to all community members.



Pedagogy and Curriculum



Integrating resilience into university curriculum “can be a light lift and as manageable&nbsp; as professors implementing a mindfulness practice at the start of class, being intentional about co-creating the learning environment with students, or just bringing resilience into the classroom as a topic to consider,” Prusia explains. Most recently at UW, this integration has involved guest speakers and visiting artists who engage with questions of wellbeing in its many intricate forms. For some faculty, this approach has taken off — and taken their curriculum down unforeseen paths.&nbsp;



Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a poet, dancer, and <a href="https://meanycenter.org/engage/artistic-partner-2023-24-season">artist-in-residence</a> at the University of Washington’s Meany Center for Performing Arts for the duration of the 2023-2024 academic year. Joseph brought to campus his original Carnival of the Animals, a multimedia performance that “navigates the reality of the political jungle by embodying shifting societal values and our relationship to democracy” through poetry, dance, and music. Joseph’s residency at the University of Washington explores “what it means to go from art to wellness, from artistic joy to collective wellness,” Prusia says. Through multimedia performance art, Joseph hosts a conversation that asks viewers to consider art’s place in creating collective change. One professor in the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance saw a resonant connection between Joseph’s art and her coursework and invited her whole class of graduate students to the performance. From a government course to a multigenre stage production, the professor cultivated a nimble, adaptive, and innovative learning experience that embodies the Resilience Lab’s vision of the compassionate campus. 



If the University of Washington is any indication, that vision, when rigorously explored and thoughtfully implemented, can blossom into tangible change. Where wellbeing is a collective responsibility and a shared opportunity, the culture shifts to embrace it.

A Collective Approach to Wellbeing

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Andrew Delbanco has argued that, as innovations go, the American university is a pretty distinctive one. Right up there with abstract impressionism and fast food.



But Delbanco, a professor of American Studies at Columbia University, worries that higher education has increasingly moved away from one of its core obligations: to help students think deeply and collectively about life’s most profound questions.&nbsp;



Instead, he says, “colleges and universities — without quite saying so — have begun to think of themselves more and more as vocational training institutions.”



The fate of higher education has long captivated Delbanco, author of the 2012 book College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. And to be fair, as he notes in College, folks have been complaining about American higher education pretty much as long as it’s been around.&nbsp;



In 1776, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband that professors too often shirked their teaching duties; the state of education, she said, had never been more dire.



Still, for all the hand-wringing, colleges and universities in the US have been distinguished by their willingness to allow students to explore various interests, rather than — as in many other countries — immediately hone in on a very specific course of study. It’s an environment where folks from Condoleezza Rice to Bill Bradley have encountered people and ideas that changed their lives.



“Young people want an experience of self-discovery,” says Delbanco. “They want to figure out what they’re going to do with their lives. And it’s a betrayal of the American promise to expect young people to know exactly what they want to do, what they’re fit for, and what their life is going to look like at the age of 17 or 18.”



Delbanco has spent more than 40 years as a professor, penned books on everything from Herman Melville to the Puritans, and received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama. But he says he’s not concerned that <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-the-english-major">fewer students</a> now major in the humanities. Nor is he surprised that young people are drawn to science and technology.



What does worry him is that while a student is pursuing a degree, they “should be having an experience in college that allows for some kind of reflection, that allows for learning... Learning how to listen to other people with different points of view. Learning the difference between an argument and an opinion. Learning that debating with somebody is not the same thing as fighting with that person. And the classroom where those lessons are most likely to be learned is the humanities classroom.”



But as college sticker prices have skyrocketed, haven’t the humanities become an increasingly unaffordable luxury? No, Delbanco argues. “One of the things that employers are telling [colleges and universities] is: We want people who can actually work together with people with whom they disagree. We want people who understand that there are multiple perspectives on the world.”&nbsp;



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“It’s a betrayal of the American promise to expect young people to know exactly what they want to do, what they’re fit for, and what their life is going to look like at the age of 17 or 18.”
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“In an increasingly diverse society, in an increasingly global economy, we don’t only want people who can code or do actuary tables. We want people who can work productively with other human beings, and who can think creatively.”&nbsp;



“And as the humanities majors have been emptying out, general education becomes all the more important. Because it’s going to be the only place where students will have an experience of reading a great novel or seeing a Shakespeare play or grappling with a philosophical concept.”



Beyond that, as institutions diversify, there are more opportunities for students to splinter into identity-based groups and organizations. Foundational humanities classes provide a place to transcend those differences, a place where everyone comes together around a common text.



Over the last few years, a wave of schools have brought back core courses designed to engage with questions around meaning and purpose. In 2020, for example, Stanford instituted a requirement for first-year students: Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE). The program echoed a century-old compulsory course <a href="https://news.stanford.edu/report/2023/07/11/100-years-ago-stanfords-first-general-education-requirement-course-citizenship/">introduced at Stanford in the 1920s</a>, amidst the backdrop of global and national upheaval (post-WWI realignments, women’s newfound right to vote, and an enormous surge in foreign-born Americans).



“An educational model that leaves no room for a core curriculum shaped by the demands of 21st-century democracies leaves students woefully ill equipped for dealing with disagreements,” Stanford’s Debra Satz and Dan Edelstein <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/03/opinion/colleges-civics-core-curriculum-culture-wars.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&amp;referringSource=articleShare">recently noted</a> in The New York Times.



In his role as president of The Teagle Foundation, Delbanco has sought to support these sorts of efforts around the country — at Stanford, Vanderbilt, Purdue, and nearly sixty other schools. It’s worth keeping an eye on, he says, “because I think this could be the beginning of a real change.”



Melinda Zook, a history professor who leads the Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts program at Purdue, agrees. “This should have always been the job of the liberal arts... To me, the point of college is to challenge you.”



The Cornerstone Program requires that first-year students — who, at Purdue, often plan to major in engineering, computer science, or business — take a sequence of two courses on transformative texts. There are usually about 30 students in each class, and texts can range across time and place, from Plato to Frederick Douglass to Virginia Woolf.&nbsp;



But Zook emphasizes that great texts only come alive in the hands of great teachers. So when she preps professors — who are drawn from the ranks of liberal arts faculty — she tells them to “create the class you always wanted to teach. So it gives them a lot of flexibility, and you know it’s going to fill up. It fills every time.”&nbsp;



Zook notes that while technical knowledge can become outdated, certain skills never will, like learning how to think, communicate, and interact with a wide range of people. One day, she recalls, “I’m walking back to the parking garage, and I bump into one of our basketball players, who you cannot miss because he’s so tall. And he’s in transformative texts. And he says to me: ‘who would have thought Plato would have been so relevant?’”



“We in the liberal arts! We thought of that,” she tells me, laughing.



But Purdue’s program has a significant, additional upside, says Zook. It creates a space in which a faculty member gets to know a small group of students. “One of the things that we do at Cornerstone is we use it as sort of a hub, where we have eyes on the students. We know their names. We know how they’re doing. And none of their other classes do, because they’re huge.”



Zook notes that, while there was a mental health crisis among students prior to the pandemic, it has gotten much worse. And building strong relationships with faculty early on can be crucial to getting students the support they need.



In Delbanco’s view, a small class that tackles big questions around a text or piece of art “can become a safe space where you can trust the teacher to teach you like a person... The teacher is not in the room fundamentally because he or she wants to show off how much they know about a given subject. They’re not in the room on behalf of the discipline. They’re in the room on behalf of the students.”



The Teagle Foundation now seeks to envelop even younger people in this effort to read great authors and ask big questions. Their “Knowledge for Freedom” program offers grants to colleges to create on-campus, humanities-focused programs for local, low-income high school students. And there are now more than 30 such programs around the country.



Delbanco sees the program changing kids’ lives. And, he says, it’s a way of “reminding them that when you go to college, you should expect this kind of experience. You should be able to ask yourself questions about justice, about how society should be organized, about what kind of life I want to lead.”

Pledging Well

Reading Between the Lines

“Embrace Your Freedom”

Questions to Live By

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Keep Learning Well

Mental Health

Happiness, Gen Z style

The Jed Foundation/SHEEO Mental Health and Equity Initiative

The Furman Advantage

Teaching & Learning

Questions to Live By

How to Build a Global Citizen

Looking for meaning in college? Try discussing a great book.

Access & Inclusion

Pledging Well

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

The Jed Foundation/SHEEO Mental Health and Equity Initiative

Flourishing

“Embrace Your Freedom”

How to Build a Global Citizen

A Collective Approach to Wellbeing

Perspectives

Reading Between the Lines

“Embrace Your Freedom”

Happiness, Gen Z style