John O. Harney: Remembering my brother; ‘safe for blueberrying’

Robert Harney

My oldest brother Robert, historian, social observer and role model, died nearly 35 years ago after an unsuccessful heart transplant. One doctor quipped that there was not a heart big enough to replace Bob’s.

Memories of my childhood feature Bob’s summer visits to the North Shore … Essex clams, tennis, various adventures on the coast. Also my visits to him in Toronto, where he led the Multicultural History Society of Ontario and introduced me to seemingly limitless exotic culinary experiences.

I still often have questions I wish I could ask Bob on issues ranging from family history to world tensions. I can imagine his presumably sharp and funny take on the explosion in amateur ancestry.

After being surprised at how little Bob’s important work intersected with the age of the Internet, I was recently cheered to see many references to Bob’s work.

But even with all his fascinating work in multiculturalism, it’s Bob’s humanity that sticks with me. Check out this poem of his …

Blueberries

It took the better half of the day
to reach the woods and piggery
up beyond the Lynn road
blueberrying with Capt.
He knew the route. the sun,
prickly shrubs and soggy spots.
He knew the granite outcroppings
beneath the berry bushes
the snakes nesting there—
garter, milk, and copperhead.
He overturned the stones with sticks
making startled humus steam
and baby snakes wriggle
like green tendrils at low tide
of shorewall seaweed.

Beyond the ledge was the piggery fence.
Sows and swill, the farmer’s share
of Salem’s scavenger economy.
The sun made us giddy, the brambles stung
we dreamed Capt.’s tales of bears and lynx,
and so a grunting sow, a piglet’s squeal,
a towhee rustling through the leaves
made the stooping berrypickers freeze.
My sister and I believed in bears
in Salem’s woods.
The old man’s stories made us surer,
gave circumstances and color to the dream.
The fear we knew to be untrue,
for what they didn’t convert,
the Puritans drove away or slew,
and that included beasts as well as men.

Then to show our own descent,
our links in time and space to them.
We threw the little snakes by handfuls
as morsels for the hungry sows
propitiating bears and
exorcizing woods.
Making the ledge
forever safe for blueberrying.

John O. Harney is a writer and retired executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

John O. Harney: My new parcels of volunteer life

The author overseeng coneflowers at the Rose Kennedy Greenway

Inspired by the story of George Orwell caring for his roses while writing masterpiece essays, I looked forward to a retirement spent partly watching over the plants on Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway. Sure, I got a bit stressed over whether the fading white blooms I saw were Virginia Sweetspire Itea Virginica or Witch Alder Fothergilla. As I had earlier over whether the purple perennials were Salvia or Veronica. But for the most part, my most stressful dilemma would be choosing which dim sum joint to hit near the Greenway’s Chinatown “parcel.”

As for my own essays, never brilliant like Orwell’s, they’ve slowed to a crawl since the beginning of this year, when after 30-plus years, I left the editorship of The New England Journal of Higher Education and began volunteering in phenology at the Greenway. (Regrettably, I may have planted a kiss of death on the journal, where you’ll see few new postings since my departure.)

Fearing America’s increasing flirtations with nationalism and Us vs. Them politics, I also began volunteering in English language teaching at the Immigrant Learning Center, in Malden, Mass.

On the Greenway

Early on, a Greenway staff member gave me her cell number in case I needed help ID’ing plants or, she quipped, if I needed to report anything unusual on the Greenway, “like a body.” A staffer mentioned during an earlier volunteer pruning day, “the Greenway is enjoyed by all kinds of people so watch out for needles as you clean up around plants.”

Then Greenway retirement gig also reminded of my work days, attending economic conferences at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, directly across the street from Parcel 22. That Dewey Square stretch of gardens was then housing Boston’s version of the Occupy Wall Street movement. (Sometimes, feeling out of place in my ill-fitting suit, I wished that I was helping their cause rather than returning to my office.) By now, though, the whiff of rebellion had yielded to a riot of pink and white Coneflowers Echinacea and a Boxwoody imperial fragrance in the parcel near the Fed.

Sunflowers on the Greenway

Earlier in the summer, the Greenway folks worked with local nonprofit groups from Roxbury to plant massive stands of Sunflowers, the unofficial flower of my daughter-in-law’s war-torn Ukraine. In August, the Sunflowers bloomed gloriously around the vent and mural on Parcel 22. But more recently, it looked like some force had crashed into the middle of the main patch, pushing the Sunflower stocks outward like the Tunguska event in Siberia.

Nearby, I’m fascinated by the Pawpaw tree because of my childhood memory of a nursery rhyme that went: “Where, oh where oh where is Johnny [personalized for me], way down yonder in the Pawpaw patch.”

I’m also drawn to the paver my kids and I placed at the corner of Milk Street for my wife, saying “Joanne Harney We Love You.” I still check on the paver when I go to visit my “parcels.” And it looks sharp, as if a good angel has been coming along and buffing it. A half-joke in my house was that we could all meet there in case of disaster (though the urban location 500 feet or so from a rising sea may not be a safe haven forever).

I am also heartened by the Greenway’s small steps in food equity. In the edible garden, a sign reads:

ATTENTION GARDEN VISITORS: Please help us share the harvest!
The produce grown here is specifically cultivated and donated to our local homeless shelters.
Kindly refrain from picking the food to ensure it reaches those in need.
Your cooperation will help us make a difference in our community.

I’ve noted the ferny asparagus and carrots as well as strong corn and tomatillos. One day, a woman emerged from near a small houseless encampment and asked me if there was any mint in the garden. I said I thought there was some in Parcel 22, to which, she seemed relieved, saying that her husband, who camps out with her, eats it from time to time. A staffer suggested some of the Milkweeds in the gardens were planted secretly by visitors hoping to encourage Monarch Butterflies on the Greenway.

Ricinus

But I assume all know the stay clear of the purplish-leaved Ricinus growing in a galvanized bucket on Parcel 22 … host of the castor bean but also of famously deadly ricin.

My confines became Pearl, Congress and Purchase streets and Atlantic Avenue. The key reference points in my geographic descriptions were: the restaurant Trade, the Brazilian consulate with its national flag, the Native American Land Acknowledgment, the various Greenway maintenance sheds (and hangouts for the houseless), the Fed, the Red Line plaza, the Purchase Street tunnel (a reminder that the Greenway sits just a matter of a few feet over an interstate highway) and my favorite landmark, the Japanese Umbrella Pine in Parcel 21.

At the Immigrant Learning Center

Given America’s xenophobia, I also wanted to use my newly found time to help marginalized people in immigrant communities. I had tried to cover their predicament editorially in the journal. But retirement brought a new commitment. Reasoning that my decades of editing was something like teaching English, I applied for volunteer teaching of adults at the Immigrant Learning Center.

It has been a great pleasure to work with new immigrants from Haiti, Vietnam, China, Syria, Rwanda and elsewhere. When I helped one Syrian student read a children’s book about Winnie the Pooh, the description of the One Hundred Acre Wood reminded me of the Greenway work.

Many of the countries of origin of students at the center share a history of exploitation by the U.S., where these innocents fervently want to settle.

I have covered a few subjects probably too subtly for non-English speakers. Holidays, for example. I explained that Memorial Day was a day to remember people who had died. Sure, it was originally people who died in wars, but really anyone who’s died. Back to my old view that people who resisted the Vietnam War were as worthy of honor on Veterans Day as those who served.

Of Juneteenth, I tried to explain that while Americans say that they believe all are created equal, the concept of slavery clearly ran counter to that. And I reminded the many Haitians in the class that Haiti was among the many countries that abolished slavery before the U.S. I also mentioned to the Haitian students that I was rooting for the Haiti women’s national soccer team in the World Cup. To which, I was asked to explain the meaning of “rooting for.”

The immigrant lessons also teach much about the U.S. economy. One exercise focuses on occupations such as dishwasher, house cleaner, delivery driver and “manager.” One student noted getting a pay raise of 50 cents per hour—a modest honor. In one lesson, my lead teacher, himself a Haitian immigrant, drilled students on the difference between odd from even numbers … somewhat unimportant I thought until he noted smartly that Americans increasingly were getting shot knocking on the wrong doors.

Too much analytics

My aversion to analytics—clearly taking over the worlds of higher education and journalism that I recently fled—hobbles me even in volunteer life.

The Greenway folks prefer describing bloom progress with number rankings rather than comments. To make matters worse, the rankings are not the usual, 1 is best and 5 is worst, or vice versa. Instead, 3 is the best. It is peak flowering, then 4 is much less and 5 about done. 1 signifies just starting to bloom and 2 is progressing. Even an amateur like me can take a stab at peak flowering, but discriminating between 1 and 2 and between 4 and 5 is much tougher. And what to think of the Lamb’s Ear whose foliage graced two large banks in Parcel 21 but only shot out one flower on my watch.

The ranking snafu is familiar to anyone pestered by evaluation requests whenever you buy a product or service these days. As a former writer and editor, I’m happier with my rough notes than my arbitrary rankings.

I tell myself I may be a small part of a grand repository of plant info, or at least some effort to introduce identifying plant tags, which the Greenway lacks. Or an “interactive bloom tracker,” which sees to be always out of order when I try it. Of course, the data may be going into a black hole. But for me, the exercise is worth it.

The immigration educators understandably discourage use of synonyms, puns and anecdotes that may just confuse new English learners. All tough for a guy who considered himself “thoughtful,” but may have really been “wordy” and “unfocused.”

John Harney: Many thanks, New England

John O. Harney

From, The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

BOSTON

In October, I wrote to NEBHE colleagues to let them know I would be retiring from the organization and the editorship of its New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE) in early January 2023.

While NEBHE has been my job, NEJHE has been my passion. I joined NEBHE in 1988 and, in 1990, became editor of NEJHE (then called Connection: New England’s Journal of Higher Education and Economic Development).

Thirty-four years for one outlet. Sometimes I forget I’m even that old.

I looked at the journal editions, printed on paper until 2010, as pieces of art (albeit imperfect ones) as much as a news service. The best issues I thought were like our own “Sgt. Pepper’’ album. Today, reminds me a bit of Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm.’’

I’ll miss working with our distinguished authors, sometimes goading them into writing their bylined commentaries—usually for no fee. Those writers also happened to be our readers … a community of policymakers, practitioners and regionalists we described variously as “opinion leaders” in the old days, “thought leaders” more recently. All bound together by an interest in higher education and New England (which I recall was a tough audience to quantify for analytically retentive advertisers).

I’ll also miss the editorial “departments” we developed, such as Data Connection, a sort of spinoff of the Harper’s Magazine Index, but with a New England and higher education flavor. Reflective of a certain “NEJHE Beat,” these items—like a lot of NEJHE content—track along a unique constellation of issues anchored in higher education but also moored to social justice, economic and workforce development, regional cooperation, quality of life, academic research, workplaces and other topics that, together, say New Englandness.

In our print days, I was especially invested in my Editor’s Memo columns that opened every edition from 1990 to 2010.

A few of these Editor’s Memos noted the transition from Connection to NEJHE, an illness that forced me to take leave in 2007 and the journal’s shift from print to all-Web in 2010.

Many pieces looked at the future of New England. One touched on our mock Race for Governor of the State of New England. That exercise helped midwife New England Online, an attempt by NEBHE and partners to take advantage of then-new networking technologies to provide something of a clearinghouse of all things New England—a bit unfocused perhaps, but poignant in a region where, the “winner” of that fantastic New England governor’s race, then state Rep. Arnie Arnesen of New Hampshire, quipped that the capital of New England should not be, say, Boston or Hartford, but instead something along the lines of “www.ne.gov.” (See our house ad.)

The House that Jack Built focused on the first NEBHE president I worked with, Jack Hoy, who passed away in 2013. Jack was a mentor who pioneered understanding of the profound nexus between higher education and economic development that is now taken for granted and that served as the basis for the journal’s name, Connection.

Among other of these commentaries and columns, several focused on the magical relationship between higher-education institutions and their host communities. Even in the emerging age of a placeless university, there is no diminishing the correlation between campuses and good restaurants, bookstores, theaters and other amenities, driven by faculty, students and otherwise smart locals.

In this vein, I was personally sustained for more than three decades by NEBHE’s home in Boston. Despite its difficult racial past (which NEBHE and NEJHE have attempted to address), the Hub, and next-door Cambridge, comprise Exhibit A in such college-influenced communities. Indeed, our street in Downtown Crossing has offered a lesson in the region’s changing economy, being transformed from a strip of small nonprofits that wanted to be close to Beacon Hill, to dollar stores, to, most recently, chic restaurants and bars. The foot traffic, meanwhile, has become much more collegiate as Emerson College and Suffolk University have expanded downtown.

I noted in my letter to colleagues that I strongly believe that the regional journal is a key strength of NEBHE that should continue to be appreciated and bolstered.

For years, we characterized Connection and NEJHE as America’s only regional journal on higher education and its impact on the economy and quality of life. In addition, the topics we’ve covered are just too important to cast our gaze elsewhere. New England’s challenging demography—where some states now see more deaths than births—means there are fewer of us to nourish a workforce and exercise clout in Congress. This all makes our historic strength in attracting foreign students and immigrants to build our communities and industries all the more important. Growing chasms in income and wealth between chief executives and employees, meanwhile, agitate antidemocratic and racist forces. While too many critics diss snowflakes, dangerous trauma grows among students and staff. And a pandemic (that is not over) exposed our fault lines, but also showed the promise of joining together behind scientific breakthroughs … and behind one another.

NEBHE President Michael Thomas and I agreed that the weeks leading up to my retirement will provide opportunities to celebrate the journal’s four decades of contributions to the region—as well as to think about its future and the ways NEBHE can best inform and engage stakeholders going forward.

But these are tough times for independent-minded journalism—especially in the quasi-free press world of association journalism, where the goal is to be objective, but for a cause (and ours is generally a good one). NEBHE has launched a job search for a director of communications and marketing. To be sure, my functions at NEBHE also included PR and media relations and style maven (editorial style that is), and those too are key tasks that NEBHE must continue to fulfill. (Full disclosure, I always urged NEJHE authors to make their pieces “issue-oriented” and “avoid marketing.” The goal for the journal was to be thoughtful and candid.)

Just keep it real.

Here’s to the future of NEBHE and NEJHE.

John O. Harney is the executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

Editor’s note: New England Diary’s editor, Robert Whitcomb, is a former member of the Advisory Board of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

John O. Harney: Some intriguing N.H. and other indices

“The View from Andrew’s Room Collage Series #8″, by Timothy Harney, a professor at the Monserrat College of Art, Beverly, Mass.

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

BOSTON
Percentage of U.S. counties where more people died than were born in 2021: 73%  University of New Hampshire Carsey School of Public Policy analysis of National Center for Health Statistics data

Number of additional births that would have occurred in the past 14 years had pre-Great Recession fertility rates continued: 8,600,000 University of New Hampshire Carsey School of Public Policy analysis of National Center for Health Statistics data

Percentage of Americans who told the Annenberg Science Knowledge survey in July 2022 that they have returned to their “normal, pre-COVID-19 life”: 41% Annenberg Public Policy Center

Percentage who said that in January 2022: 16% Annenberg Public Policy Center

Percentage of teenagers who reported that their post-high school graduation plans changed between the March 2020 start of the COVID-19 pandemic and March 2022: 36% EdChoice\

Change during that period in percentage of teenagers who said they planned to enroll in a four-year college: -14% EdChoice

Ranks of “Self Discovery,” “Finances” and “Mental Health” among reasons for change in plans: 1st, 2nd, 3rd EdChoice

Percentage of college students who say they will pay their education expenses completely on their own: 67% Cengage

Percentage who say they have $250 or less left after paying for education costs each month: 46% Cengage

Ranks of “lower tuition,” “more affordable options for course materials” and “lowering on-campus costs, such as housing and meal plan costs” among actions students say their colleges could take to lower education costs: 1st, 2nd, 3rd Cengage

Percentage of Americans who graded their local public schools with an A or a B in 2019: 60% Education Next

Percentage who gave those grades in 2022 after two years of COVID-related disruption: 52% Education Next

Percentage of aircraft pilots and flight engineers who are women: 5% U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Percentage of aircraft pilots and flight engineers who are Black: 4% U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Percentage of aircraft pilots and flight engineers who are Asian: 2% U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Percentage of aircraft pilots and flight engineers who are Hispanic: 6% U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Approximate percentage increase in sworn personnel in New Hampshire State Police, from 2001 to 2020: 30% Concord Monitor

Percentage of New Hampshire State Police personnel who are white: 95% Concord Monitor reporting of N.H. Department of Safety data

Percentage of New Hampshire State Police personnel who are men: 91% Concord Monitor reporting of N.H. Department of Safety data

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

John O. Harney: Marketing abortion ruling; armed youth; ‘don’t say gay’ in Greenwich; not the ‘Flutie Effect’

Map by Tpwissaa

Greenwich, Conn., High School

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

BOSTON

Could the anti-choice, forced-birth culture of the U.S. Supreme Court and many U.S. states present an advantage for New England economic boosters?

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker told reporters that he had heard from a lot of companies that the recent Supreme Court decision removing the federal protection of the right to abortion may offer a big opportunity for Massachusetts to attract some employers whose employees would want access to reproductive-health services. Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont called on businesses in states that limit abortion access to consider relocating to Connecticut.

In the context of choosing where to start or expand a business, big employers have occasionally written off New England as “old and cold” compared with economically and meteorologically sunnier spots. However, a 1999 poll by the University of Connecticut’s Center for Survey Research and Analysis, while admittedly dated, found an interesting niche for New England. International site-selection consultants, accustomed to Europe’s pricey, regulated environments, were less concerned with New England’s notoriously high costs than domestic site-selection pros. Key issues for the international consultants were access to higher education, an educated workforce and good infrastructure. 

Peter Denious, chief executive of Advance CT, a business-development organization, recently told the Connecticut Mirror that such issues as diversity, equity and inclusion—and the state’s commitment to clean energy—could all help Connecticut align with the corporate goals of certain companies.

Our culture of active government, unionization and especially our human- resource development, could bode well once again in relatively enlightened New England.

Anti-semitism rising: The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported 2,717 anti-semitic incidents of assault, harassment and vandalism in 2021 in the U.S., the highest number since the ADL began tracking anti-semitic incidents in 1979, according to the group’s annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents. These included more than 180 anti-semitic incidents in New England. And nationally, 155 anti-semitic incidents were reported at more than 100 college campuses. Meanwhile, tension between anti-semitism and anti-zionism, including the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, is challenging on campuses and beyond

Packing heat. More than 1 million U.S. adolescents (ages 12 to 17) said they had carried a handgun in 2019-20, up 41% from about 865,000 in 2002-03, according to a study by researchers at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development, using data from the National Survey on Drug Use & Health. The socio-demographic profile of the gun carriers also changed. Carrying rates grew from 3.1% to 5.3% among white adolescents, from 2.6% to 5.1% among higher-income adolescents, and from 4.3% to 6.9% among rural adolescents between, while rates among Black, American Indian/Alaskan Native and lower-income adolescents decreased.

“Don’t Say Gay” here? In April, Mount Holyoke College President Sonya Stephens wrote here that Florida legislation dubbed by opponents the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, was part of a nationwide wave of proposal laws linking divisive issues of race, sexual orientation and gender identity to parents’ concerns about what their children are being taught in public schools. These bills not only undermine the real progress that LGBTQ+ people have made in society over the past 50 years, Stephens wrote, but they also further erode trust in some of our most under-compensated public servants: school teachers and administrators.

On July 1, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona noted that the Florida parents and families he’d spoken with said the legislation doesn’t represent them and that it put students in danger of bullying and worse mental health outcomes.

In Cardona’s home state of Connecticut, meanwhile, the Greenwich School Board adopted a new Title IX policy unanimously, but not without controversy. Edson Rivas and Colin Hosten of the Fairfield County-based Triangle Community Center Board of Directors wrote in Connecticut Viewpoints that the policy adopted by the Greenwich School Board “conspicuously removes any language referring to gender identity and sexual orientation” which was part of the original version of the policy introduced last fall. The board replied that “this policy covers all students, whether or not certain language is included.” But Rivas and Hosten aren’t buying it. “If the substance of the policy remains the same, as they say, then the only effect of removing the language about gender identity and sexual orientation is the linguistic pseudo-erasure of the LGBTQ+ community in Greenwich Public Schools.”

Truth to tell: Recently, the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) named 75 higher-education institutions to participate in the 2022 Institute on Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) Campus Centers as part of an effort to dismantle racial hierarchies.

As we at NEBHE and others have wrestled with a “reckoning” on race, gender and so many other wrongs, the “truth and reconciliation” concept has always made sense to me. Check out, for example, the thoughtful book Honest Patriots exploring how true patriots in post-World War II Germany, post-apartheid South Africa and the U.S. in the the aftermath of slavery and the genocide of Native Americans loved their country enough to acknowledge and repent for its misdeeds.

Under the AAC&U initiative, campus teams develop action plans to advance the parts of the TRHT framework: narrative change, racial healing and relationship building, separation, law and economy. The institute helps campus teams to prepare to facilitate racial-healing activities on their campus and in their communities; examine current realities of race relations in their communities and the local history that has led to them; identify evidence-based strategies that support their vision of what their communities will look, feel and be like when the belief in the hierarchy of human value no longer exists, and learn to pinpoint critical levers for change and to engage key stakeholders.

Among participating New England institutions: Landmark College, Middlesex Community College, Mount Holyoke College, Suffolk University, the University of Connecticut and Westfield State University.

Another problem with over-incarceration. NEBHE has published a policy brief about the effects of higher education on incarcerated people in New England prisons and jails—and increasingly broached conversations about the dilemmas created by the world’s biggest incarcerator — America. Now, another byproduct surfaces: Children with an incarcerated parent have exceedingly low levels of education. The most common education level for respondents from a low-income family who had an incarcerated parent was elementary school, according to research by a group of Wake Forest University students who put together an article for the Nation Fund for Independent Journalism. The students set out to understand how the academic achievement, mental health and future income of children of incarcerated parents compare to those with deceased parents. Just under 60% as many respondents with an incarcerated parent completed a university education compared to the baseline of respondents with neither an incarcerated nor deceased parent.

Acquisition of Maguire: I first heard the term “Flutie Effect” in the context of former Boston College Admissions Director Jack Maguire. The term refers to the admissions deluge after the BC quarterback Doug Flutie threw the famed Hail Mary pass (caught by the less-famous Gerald Phelan) in 1984. Flutie won the Heisman Trophy, then pursued a pro career, first with Donald Trump’s New Jersey Generals in the USFL and then in the Canadian Football League, with a few bumpy stops in the NFL.

But Maguire attributed BC’s good fortune not to the diminutive quarterback but to the college’s “investments in residence halls, academic facilities, and financial aid.” In 1983, Maguire, a theoretical physicist by training, founded Maguire Associates and introduced the concept of “enrollment management,” combining sophisticated analytical techniques, customized research and deep experience in education leadership with a genuine enthusiasm for client partnerships. Maguire became a sort of admissions guru whose insights we have been pleased to feature.

Now, higher-education marketing and enrollment strategy firm Carnegie has announced it is buying Maguire Associates. Not to be confused with the foundation that administered the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, which recently moved to the American Council on Education, nor the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which has encouraged disarmament, this Carnegie, also founded in the 1980s and based in Westford, Mass., is formally known as Carnegie Dartlet LLC. Its pitch: “We are right definers. We are your intelligence. We are truth revealers. We are your clarity. We are obstacle breakers. We are your partners. We are audience shapers. We are your connection. We are brand illuminators. We are your insight. We are story forgers. We are your voice. We are connection creators. …”

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

The status of youth engagement in American democracy

At the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate at the UMass Boston campus, on Columbia Point: Inside the replica of the U.S. Senate chamber.

From The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE), a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

In the following Q&A, NEJHE Executive Editor John O. Harney asks Mary K. Grant, president of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, in Boston, about the institute’s work connecting postsecondary education to citizenship and upcoming elections. Edward M. Kennedy (1932-2009) was U.S. senator from Massachusetts in 1962-2009. He became known as a “liberal lion” of that body.

Harney: What did the 2016 and 2018 elections tell us about the state of youth engagement in American democracy?

Grant: We are seeing a resurgence of interest in civic engagement, activism and public service among young people. From 2014 to 2018, voter turnout among 18- to 29-year-olds increased by 79%, the largest increase among any group of voters.

The 2016 election was certainly a catalyst for galvanizing renewed interest. Since 2016, we have seen increases in people being more engaged in organizing platforms, messages and movements to motivate their peers and adults. The midterm elections brought a set of candidates who were the most diverse in our history, entering politics with urgency and not “waiting their turns” to run for office. One of the most encouraging findings was that those who felt most frustrated were more likely to vote.

While young-voter turnout in the 2018 election was historically high, it was still just 31% of those eligible to vote. Democracy depends on the voice of the people. And a functioning democracy depends on participation, particularly in polarized times. Senator Kennedy said “political differences may make us opponents, but should never make us enemies.” He envisioned the Edward M. Kennedy Institute as a venue for people from all backgrounds to engage in civil dialogue and find solutions with common ground.

As a nonpartisan, civic education organization, the institute’s goal is to educate and engage people in the complex issues facing our communities, nation and world. Since we opened four years ago, we have had more than 80,000 students come through our doors for the opportunity to not only learn how the U.S. government works, but also to understand what civic engagement looks like. All of us at the Kennedy Institute see how important it is to give young people a laboratory where they can truly practice making their voices heard and experience democracy; our lab just happens to be a full-scale replica of the U.S. Senate Chamber.

Harney: How else besides voting do you measure young people’s civic citizenship? Are there other appropriate measures of activism or political engagement?

Grant: Voter turnout is one measure, but civic engagement is needed every day. Defined broadly, activism and civic citizenship are difficult to measure. We engage in our local, state and national communities in so many ways.

Our team at the institute values reports like “Guardian of Democracy: The Civic Mission of Schools” that discuss how the challenge in the U.S. is not only a lack of civic knowledge, but also a lack of civic skills and dispositions. Civic skills include learning to deliberate, debate and find common ground in a framework of respectful discourse, and thinking critically and crafting persuasive arguments and shared solutions to challenging issues. Civic dispositions include modeling and experiencing fairness, considering the rights of others, the willingness to serve in public office, and the tendency to vote in local, state and national elections. To address the critical issues and make real social change, we need a better fundamental understanding of how our government works. And we need better skills for healthy, respectful debate.

Harney: What are the key issues for young voters?

Grant: The post-Millennial generation is the most racially and ethnically diverse generation in our history. Only 52% identify as non-Hispanic whites. As they envision their future livelihoods in an increasingly automated workplace, they are concerned about climate change and how related food security may affect the sustainability of daily life and they are concerned about income inequality, student debt, gun violence, racial disparities, and being engaged and involved in their communities.

The institute’s polling data indicated that interests for 18-34-year-olds were reflective of society as a whole, but gun rights and gun control, education and the economy would be among the most important as they are deciding on congressional candidates in the next election.

Young people are focused on the complex global issues that concern us all but with added urgency. A Harvard Institute of Politics Youth Poll this spring found that 18-29-year-old voters do not believe that the baby boomer generation—especially elected officials—“care about people like them.” And, they expressed concern over the direction of the country.

Harney: Are there any relevant correlations between measures of citizenship and enrollment in specific courses or majors?

Grant: In a democracy, we need all majors. And more importantly, we need students and graduates to know how to work together. In a global economy, people in the sciences, business and engineering work right next to people in the fields of social sciences. I had the privilege of leading two of the finest public liberal arts college and universities in the country. I am a firm believer that regardless of disciplinary area, problem-solving requires us to ask questions, to be curious and open-minded, to think critically and creatively, incorporate a variety of viewpoints and work in partnership with others. We need to understand how you take an idea, move it along and make it into something that can improve the common good.

Harney: Are college students and faculty as “liberal” as “conservative” commentators make them out to be?

Grant: From my own work in higher education, I can say that there is diversity of perspectives and viewpoints on college campuses, which is encouraging and exciting. Liberals and conservatives are not unique in the ability to hold on quite strongly to their own viewpoints. Anyone who has ever witnessed a group of social and natural scientists discuss research methodologies can attest to that. We all need to learn how to listen to ideas other than our own.

Harney: What are ways to encourage “Blue-State” students to have an effect on “Red-State” politics and vice versa?

Grant: Part of the country’s challenge in civil discourse is that we stop listening or we are listening for soundbites to which we overreact. One of the most important skills that we can develop is the ability to listen actively. It’s truly remarkable what can happen when students have an opportunity to get to know and work and learn with their peers across the country and around the world.

What we’re finding in our programs is that people are hungering for conversation, even on difficult matters. It’s similar to the concept of creating spaces on college campuses where you can intentionally connect with people. This coming fall, we’re using an award that we earned from the Annenberg Public Policy Center, at the University of Pennsylvania, to pilot a program called “Civil Conversations.” The program is designed to help eighth through 12th grade teachers develop the skills necessary to lead productive classroom discussions on difficult public policy issues. We’re starting in Massachusetts and plan to expand to all the blue, red and purple states.

And for those coming to the institute, we convene diverse perspectives through daily educational and visitor programs where people can talk with and listen to others who might be troubled or curious about the same things you are. Our public conversation series and forums bring together government leaders with disparate ideologies and from different political parties who are collaborating on a common cause; we host special programs that offer insight into specific issues and challenges facing communities and civic leaders, and what change-makers are doing about it.

Harney: What role does social media play in shaping engagement and votes?

Grant: Social media has fundamentally changed not only how we get our information, but how we interact with each other. According to a Harvard Institute of Politics Youth Poll, more than 4-in-5 young Americans check their phone at least once per day for news related to politics and current events.

As social media reaches more future and eligible voters, and when civic education is lacking, those who depend on social media platforms are at risk of consuming inaccurate information. This underscores not only the need for robust civic education programs, but also those in media literacy.

Harney: How can colleges and universities work together to bolster democracy?

Grant: Anyone who spends time around young people or on a college campus feels their energy and can’t help but come away with a renewed sense of hope. Colleges can continue to work together and advocate for unfettered access to higher education for students in all areas of the country. More specifically, they can engage with organizations like Campus Compact, a national coalition of more than a thousand colleges and universities committed to building democracy through civic education and community development.

Harney: How will New England’s increased political representation of women and people of color affect real policy?

Grant: The increasingly diverse representation helps to broaden and deepen the range of perspectives, ideas and viewpoints that influence public policy. There is also a renewed energy that is generated and it encourages next generation leaders to get involved, run for office, work on campaigns and make a difference in their communities. The institute has held several Women in Leadership programming events that highlight the lack of gender equity and racial diversity in public office and provide opportunities for women to network and learn more about the challenges and the opportunities.

Harney: Do young voters show any particular interest in where candidates stand on “higher education issues” such as academic freedom?

Grant: Students may not be focused on “higher education issues,” per se, but they do have a lot to say about accessibility and affordability. This generation is saddled with an enormous amount of student loan debt. That is certainly one of their greatest concerns, particularly when it comes to the 2020 presidential race.

Academic freedom is important in making colleges and universities welcoming to the exchange of differing ideas, which is a bedrock of democracy. As a former university chancellor, I believe that it is essential to create an environment where we welcome a diversity of opinion. We need to model the ability to listen to and consider viewpoints that may be very different from our own. We need to show students that we can sit down with people who think differently, find common ground, and even respectfully disagree. That’s a key part of what the Edward M. Kennedy Institute is all about.

John O. Harney: Some big changes at the top

The (Brutalist) Federal Reserve Bank of Boston tower, at the edge of the Boston financial district.

— Photo by Fox-orian 

(New England Diary is catching up with this report, first published Feb. 15.)

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

BOSTON

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston named University of Michigan Provost Susan M. Collins to be the bank’s next president and CEO. An international macroeconomist, Collins will be the first Black woman to lead a regional bank in the 108-year history of the Fed system. In addition to being the University of Michigan’s provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, Collins is the Edward M. Gramlich Collegiate Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics. She holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard University and a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She will succeed Eric Rosengren, who retired in September after 14 years leading the Boston Fed.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology President L. Rafael Reif announced he will leave the post he has held for the past decade at the end of 2022. A native of Venezuela, Reif began working at MIT as an electrical engineering professor in 1980, then served seven years as provost before being named president in 2012. Among other things, he presided over a $1 billion commitment to a new College of Computing to address the global opportunities and challenges presented by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and oversaw the revitalization of MIT’s physical campus and the neighboring Kendall Square in Cambridge, Mass. Reif said he will take a sabbatical, then return to MIT’s faculty in its Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Tufts University President Anthony Monaco told the campus that he will step down in the summer of 2023 after 12 years leading the university. A geneticist by training, Monaco ran a center for human genetics at Oxford University in the U.K. and, at Tufts, worked with the Broad Institute on COVID-19 testing programs that helped universities return to in-person learning. Among his accomplishments, Monaco oversaw the university’s 2016 acquisition of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as well as the removal of the “Sackler” name from its medical school after the Sackler family and its company, Purdue Pharma, were found to be key players in the opioid crisis.

The Biden administration tapped David Cash, dean of the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at UMass Boston and former commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, to be the regional administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in New England.

John O. Harney is executive editor of The England Journal of Higher Education.

John O. Harney: The state of the New England states as COVID winds down (for now?)

Regions of New England:

1. Northwest Vermont/Champlain Valley
2. Northeast Kingdom
3. Central Vermont
4. Southern Vermont
5. Great North Woods Region
6. White Mountains
7. Lakes Region
8. Dartmouth/Lake Sunapee Region
9. Seacoast Region
10. Merrimack Valley
11. Monadnock Region
12. Aroostook
13. Maine Highlands
14. Acadia/Down East
15. Mid-Coast/Penobscot Bay
16. Southern Maine/South Coast
17. Mountain and Lakes Region
18. Kennebec Valley
19. North Shore
20. Metro Boston
21. South Shore
22. Cape Cod and Islands
23. South Coast
24. Southeastern Massachusetts
25. Blackstone River Valley
26. Metrowest/Greater Boston
27. Central Massachusetts
28. Pioneer Valley
29. The Berkshires
30. South County
31. East Bay
32. Quiet Corner
33. Greater Hartford
34. Central Naugatuck Valley
35. Northwest Hills
36. Southeastern Connecticut/Greater New London
37. Western Connecticut
38. Connecticut Shoreline

From The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE), a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

BOSTON

“This Covid-19 pandemic has been part of our lives for nearly two years now. It’s what we talk about at our kitchen tables over breakfast in the morning, and again over dinner at night. It gets brought up in nearly every conversation we have throughout the day, and it’s a topic at nearly every special gathering we attend,” Rhode Island Gov. Daniel McKee noted in his recent 2022 State of the State address.

Indeed, that was a consistent theme among all six New England governors’ 2022 State of the State speeches. As were plugs for innovation in healthcare, especially mental health, housing, workforce development, climate strategies, children’s services, transportation, schools, budgets and, with varying degrees of gratitude, acknowledgement of federal infusions of relief money.

Here are links to the full New England State of the State addresses, highlighting some key points from the beat:

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont’s 2022 State of the State Address

“Our budget invests 10 times more money than ever before in workforce development—with a hyper focus on trade schools, apprentice programs and tuition-free certificate programs where students of all ages can earn an industry-recognized credential in half the time, with a full-time job all but guaranteed.

This investment will train over 10,000 students and job seekers this year in courses designed by businesses around the skills that they need.

This isn’t just about providing people with credentials; this is about changing people’s lives.

A stay-at-home mom whose husband lost his job earned her pharmacy tech certificate in three months and now works at Yale New Haven Hospital.

A man who was homeless was provided housing, transportation, a laptop and training. He’s now a user support specialist for a large tech company.

These are just two examples of opportunities that completely change the course of someone’s life.

We are working with our partners in the trade unions to develop programs for the next generation of laser welders and pipefitters. Building on the amazing partnership between Hartford Hospital and Quinnipiac University, we are also ramping up our next generation of healthcare workers.

I want students and trainees to take a job in Connecticut, and I want Connecticut employers to hire from Connecticut first! To encourage that, we’re expanding a tax credit for small businesses that help repay their employees’ student loans. More reasons for your business to hire in Connecticut, and for graduates to stay in Connecticut—that’s the Connecticut difference.”

Maine Gov. Janet Mills’s 2022 State of the State Address

“It is also our responsibility to ensure that higher education is affordable.

And I’ve got some ideas to tackle that.

First, I am proposing funding in my supplemental budget to stave off tuition hikes across the University of Maine System, to keep university education in Maine affordable.

Secondly, thinking especially about all those young people whose aspirations have been most impacted by the pandemic, I propose making two years of community college free.

To the high school classes of 2020 through 2023—if you enroll full-time in a Maine community  college this fall or next, the State of Maine will cover every last dollar of your tuition so you can obtain a one-year certificate or two-year associate degree and graduate unburdened by debt and ready to enter the workforce.

And if you are someone who’s already started a two-year program, we’ve got your back too. We will cover the last dollar of your second year.”

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker’s 2022 State of the State Address

“We increased public school spending by $1.6 billion, and fully funded the game-changing Student Opportunity Act.

We invested over $100 million in modernizing equipment at our vocational and technical programs, bringing opportunities to thousands of students and young adults.

We dramatically expanded STEM programming, and we helped thousands of high school students from Gateway Cities earn college credits free through our Early College programs.”

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu’s State of the State Address

“Our way of life here in the 603 is the best of the best.

We didn’t get here by accident—we did it through smart management, prioritizing individuals over government, citizens over systems, and delivering results with the immense responsibility of properly managing our citizens tax dollars.

As other states were forced to buckle down and weather the storm, we took a more proactive approach in 2021. In just the last year, we:

• Cut the statewide property tax by $100 million to provide relief to New Hampshire taxpayers
• Cut the rooms and meals tax
• Cut business taxes—again
• Began permanently phasing out the interest and dividends tax

And while we heard scary stories of how cutting taxes and returning such large amounts of money to citizens and towns would ‘cost too much’, the actual results have played out exactly as we planned, record tax revenue pouring into New Hampshire, exceeding all surplus estimates, allowing us to double the State’s Rainy Day Fund to over $250 million.”

Rhode Island Gov. Daniel McKee’s State of the State Address

“We all know that the economy was changing well before the pandemic. A college degree or credential is a basic qualification for over 70 percent of jobs created since 2008. Although we have made great progress over the last decade, there’s more to do.

Let’s launch Rhode Island’s first Higher Ed Academy, a statewide effort to meet Rhode Islanders where they are and provide access to education and training, that leads to a good-paying job. Through this initiative, which will be run by our Postsecondary Education Commissioner Shannon Gilkey, we expect to support over a thousand Rhode Islanders helping them gain the skills needed to be successful in obtaining a credential or degree.

Having a strong, educated workforce is critical for a strong economy—and Rhode Island’s economy is built on small businesses. Small businesses employ over half of our workforce. As these businesses continue to recover from the pandemic, we know that challenges still persist. That’s why in the first several weeks of my administration, I put millions of unspent CARES Act dollars that we received in 2020 into grants to help more than 3,600 small businesses stay afloat.

My budget will call for key small business supports like more funding for small business grants, especially for severely impacted industries like tourism and hospitality. It will also increase grant funding for Rhode Island’s small farms.

As our businesses deal with workforce challenges, I’ll also propose more funding to forgive student loan debt, especially for health-care professionals, and $40 million to continue the Real Jobs Rhode Island program which has already helped thousands of Rhode Islanders get back to work.”

Vermont Gov. Phil Scott’s State of the State Address

“The hardest part of addressing our workforce shortage is that it is so intertwined with other big challenges, from affordability and education to our economy and recovery. Each problem makes the others harder to solve, creating a vicious cycle that’s been difficult to break.

Specifically, I believe our high cost of living has contributed to a declining workforce and stunted our growth. As we lose Vermonters who cannot afford to live, do business or even retire here, that burden—from taxes and utility rates to healthcare and education costs—falls on fewer and fewer of us, making life even less affordable.

With fewer working families comes fewer kids in our schools. But lower enrollment hasn’t meant lower costs and from district to district, kids are not offered the same opportunities, like foreign languages, AP courses or electives. And with fewer school offerings, it is hard to attract families, workers and jobs to those communities.

Fewer workers and fewer students mean our businesses struggle to fill the jobs they need to survive, deepening the economic divide from region to region.

And for years, state budgets and policies failed to adapt to this reality. …

Let’s start with the people already here and do more to connect them with great jobs.

First, our internship, returnship and apprenticeship programs have been incredibly successful, not only giving workers job experience, but also building ties to local employers. To improve on this work, the Department of Labor assists employers to fill and manage internships statewide and we’ll invest more to help cover interns’ wages.

And let’s not forget about retired Vermonters who want to go back to work and have a lot to offer. I look forward to working with Representative Marcotte and the House Commerce Committee on this issue and may others.

Next, let’s put a greater focus on trades training. And here’s why:

We all know we need more nurses and healthcare workers. And as I previewed with {state} Senator Sanders and {state} Senator Balint earlier this week, I will propose investments in this area. But if we don’t have enough CDL drivers, mechanics and technicians, hospital staff won’t get to work; there will be issues getting the life-saving equipment and supplies we need; and we will see fewer EMTs available to get patients to emergency rooms. If we don’t have enough carpenters, plumbers and electricians, or heating, ventilation, air handling and refrigeration techs, there are fewer to construct and maintain the facilities in our health-care system or build homes for the workers we are trying to attract.”

John O. Harney is the executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

John O. Harney: An early look at 2022’s college-commencement season in New England

BOSTON

From The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE), a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE.org)

Long before COVID changed everything, NEJHE and NEBHE’s Twitter channel kept a close eye on New England college commencements. “The annual spring descent on New England campuses of distinguished speakers, ranging from Nobel laureates to Pulitzer Prize winners to grassroots miracle-workers, offers a precious reminder of what makes New England higher education higher,” we bragged. “It is a lecture series without equal.”

In the past two pandemic years, we tracked a lot of postponements and virtual commencements on this beat, as well as Olin College of Engineering’s March 2020 “fauxmencement” ceremony right before coronavirus shut down the campus. Some medical schools at the time moved up graduation dates so graduates could join New England’s COVID-fighting health-care workforce. Dr. Anthony Fauci addressed graduates of the College of Holy Cross, his alma mater.

Going virtual meant hard times for some small New England communities where college-commencement days were crucial to local hospitality providers and the economy. Not to be confused with such larger commencement hosts as the Dunkin Donuts Center for Rhode Island College and Providence College and TD Garden for Northeastern University (switched to Fenway Park during COVID).

This year, as we all hope the pandemic is easing, some New England colleges plan to celebrate not only the class of 2022, but also the classes of 2020 and 2021—for the most part, in person.

Many years, we would pay special attention to the first few announcements of the season. When there was a season. Generally it was spring in the old days. But today’s nontraditional student pursing higher ed on a nontraditional academic calendar might just as easily graduate in January … or any other time for the matter.

As with other stubborn aspects of higher ed, the richest institutions often announced the heavy hitters, though sleepers at quieter places add special value too (think Paul Krugman at Bard College at Simon’s Rock or Rue Mapp at Unity College).

Harvard University, for its part, announced that the principal speaker at its 369th commencement, on May 26, would be New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Not a bad pick. Ardern has been lauded for her work on climate change and gender equality and, lately on how she has guided New Zealand through COVID. Harvard noted she will be “the 17th sitting world leader to deliver the address.”

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

John O. Harney: Latest people moves at N.E. colleges

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

BOSTON

The New Commonwealth Racial Equity and Social Justice Fund named Makeeba McCreary to be the first president of the fund launched by 19 local Black and Brown executives a few weeks after the killing of George Floyd. McCreary recently served as chief of learning and community engagement at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and, before that, as managing director and senior advisor of external affairs for the Boston Public Schools.

University of Maine System Chancellor Dannel Malloy said he would ask system trustees to approve the appointment of Vice President of Academic Affairs and Provost Joseph Szakas as interim president at the University of Maine at Augusta (UMA), while the system searches for a permanent replacement for UMA President Rebecca Wyke. In July, Wyke informed the UMA community that she would step down to become CEO of the Maine Public Employees Retirement System. Szakas will continue in his VP and provost roles while serving as interim leader.

Mark Fuller, who became interim chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth in January, was named permanent chancellor this week. He previously served for nine years as dean of the UMass Amherst Isenberg School of Management.

Ryan Messmore, former president of Australia’s Campion College, became the fifth president of Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in Warner, N.H.

Sharale W. Mathis joined Holyoke Community College as vice president of academic and student affairs. A biologist, she previously was dean of academic and student affairs at Middlesex Community College in Connecticut and STEM division director at Manchester Community College. Mathis was an early adopter of Open Educational Resources (OER), utilizing online resources for supplemental instruction designating that course as no cost to students.

Middlebury College appointed Caitlin Goss as its vice president for human resources and chief people officer. Goss previously served as the director of people and culture at Rhino Foods in Burlington, Vt., and as the team leader for employee engagement in global human capital at Bain & Company.

Johnson & Wales University appointed former Norwich University Executive Vice President of Operations Sandra Affenito to be vice chancellor of academic administration, and Mary Meixell, an industrial engineer and former senior associate dean of Quinnipiac University’s School of Business, to be dean of JWU’s College of Business.

Berkshire Community College appointed Stephen Vieira, former chief information officer for the Tennessee Board of Regents and at the Community College of Rhode Island, to be director of information technology at the Pittsfield, Mass., community college.

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

John O. Harney: New England and other experts address racial and economic reckoning'

Logo of the Color of Change reform group

BOSTON

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

Even in this time when people presume to be having a “racial reckoning,” signs of enduring racial inequity pop up everywhere. From nagging disparities in health—Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) die at higher rates than other groups from COVID-19 and are underrepresented in medical research (except in vile experiments such as in the Tuskegee study) … to the steep declines in Black and Latino students submitting the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) … to Black food-service workers experiencing disproportionate short-tipping for enforcing social-distancing rules … inequality reigns. These persistent forces should be a big deal for New England’s Historically White Colleges and Universities, which are rarely called out as HWCUs.

Some help is on the way. Beside targeting $128.6 billion for the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, $39.6 billion to the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund, $39 billion for child care and $1 billion for Head Start, the new $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan does other less visible things to begin to address structural racism. For example, the package provides Black farmers with debt relief and help acquiring land. Black farmers lost more than 12 million acres of farmland over the past century, attributed to systemic racism and inequitable access to markets.

I’ve been trying to monitor the racial-equity conversation mostly via Zoom since the pandemic began. This mention of aid to Black farmers reminded me of something I heard Chuck Collins say at a webinar convened last month by MIT’s Sloan School of Management via Zoom titled “The Inclusive Innovation Economy: Amplifying Our Voices Through Public Policy’’.

Collins is the director of inequality and the common good at the Institute for Policy Studies and a white man. He told of his uncle getting a 1 percent fixed-rate mortgage in 1949 to buy an Ohio farm—a public investment that led his cousins to get on “America’s wealth-building train.” Black and Brown people did not get the same benefits. Collins suggested that systems such as CARES relief should be examined with a racial-equity lens, as should policies such as raising the minimum wage or forgiving student loans. Unquestionably, Black students struggle more than whites with student debt. But with Capitol Hill debating the right amount of debt to forgive, Collins suggested we need to test how well these changes would affect racial inequity.

Dynastic wealth

Noting that we’re living through an updraft of “dynastic wealth,” Collins asked why the U.S. taxes work income higher than income from investments. He pointed out that “50 families in the U.S. that are now in their third generation of billionaires coming online and that represents a sort of Democracy-distorting and market-distorting concentration of wealth and power.”

That distortion could be partly cushioned with a “dignity floor,” said Collins. “It’s not a coincidence that a society like Denmark has much higher rates of entrepreneurship than the U.S. per capita because they have a social-safety net and because they have social investments that create a decency floor through which people cannot all. So if you want to start a business, you know you can take that leap and not end up living in your car.”

We need to disrupt the narrative of “everyone is where they deserve to be,” said Collins. So many entrepreneurs tell their story from the standpoint of I did this. We need to talk about the web of supports and multigenerational advantages behind their ability to take the step they took.

Color-coded

An audience member asked if a bridge could be built to connect the rich and poor. To this, one of the conversation moderators, Sloan School lecturer and former chief experience and culture officer at Berkshire Bank Malia Lazu, quipped that in the U.S., there’s another dimension: The sides of the bridge are “color-coded.”

Lazu and co-moderator Fiona Murray, associate dean for innovation and inclusion at Sloan, agreed that ironically this is how the policies were designed to work. That’s why we need to change how the systems are wired.

It’s not that Black people are less likely to get loans from banks, but that banks are less likely to give loans to Black people, explained Color of Change President Rashad Robinson. Shifting the subject that way, he said, has led to remedies like financial literacy programs for Black people, rather than changes in the policies of big banks.

Color of Change was formed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which, like COVID-19, disproportionately hurt Black and Brown people. Narrative is not static, Robinson said, reminding the audience of what people might have unabashedly said in the workplace about LGBT people just 15 years ago.

Moreover, budgets are “moral documents,” Robinson pointed out. So if you say you’re going to prosecute more corruption crimes than street crime, that has to be reflected in budgets. People of color are not vulnerable, they’ve been targeted, added Robinson, who is working on a report that will look at not only Black pain, but also Black joy and how BIPOC are portrayed in stories on TV.

An audience questioner asked which policies actually embed structural racism. Lazu pointed to the U.S. Constitution’s original clause declaring that any person who was not free would be counted as three-fifths of a free individual. For a more modern example, Robinson noted minimum-wage laws that exclude certain kinds of work, originally farm workers and domestic workers, now work usually done by people of color and women. Structural racism is rooted in how our economy is designed, said Robinson. “An equity focus means we’re not just trying to undo harm but we’re trying to create systems and structures that actually move us forward.”

Afraid to bring children into the world

Also last month, the Boston Social Venture Partners convened a Zoom webinar with affiliates in San Antonio and Denver to discuss how nonprofit leaders have struggled to implement strategies that funders require for diversity, equity and inclusion.

The conversation was moderated by Michael Smith, executive director of the Obama Foundation’s My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, based in Washington, D.C. The alliance was created in 2014 in the aftermath of the killing of Trayvon Martin and aimed at addressing opportunity gaps. It works today against the backdrop of the COVID pandemic and resulting school closures, an economic downturn and police violence in communities of color.

Another Obama fellow, Charles Daniels, the executive director of Boston-based Father’s Uplift, explained: “We have a shortage of clinicians of color in this country—sound, qualified  therapists who are able to provide that necessary guidance,” he said. “One of the main requests of single mothers bringing their children to us or fathers entering our agency is that they want a clinician of color, someone who looks like them,” he said. “There are conversations they don’t know necessarily how to have with their loved ones about racism, about oppression, about maintaining their dignity and self-respect.”

Daniels noted that constituents are grappling with what to tell sons about getting pulled over by the police and daughters about what their school may say about hairstyles. “These are conversations that people of color dread this day and age. They wake up trying to parent their inner child and also parent the child who they brought into this world.” He notes that some constituents are actually afraid of having children for these reasons.

A young Black man told Daniels that if he had a choice to be white, he would take it: “I wouldn’t have to worry about my life every time I go to school,” the child suggested, or “an administrator being on my back in school because she’s assuming I’m not doing my work because I don’t care as opposed to me not being able to feed my stomach because I’m hungry.” Daniels said these are real-life situations that young men and single mothers struggle with on a daily basis.

When the federal government recently sent relief stipends, many men of color were left out for not paying child support as if they just didn’t want to pay, when the real reason was they couldn’t afford it.

Growing up as a person of color, you’re taught that you have to be near perfect. You can’t get away with things other populations can, said Daniels. He added: “If someone of color who you’re vetting sends an email with an error, it doesn’t mean they’re incompetent; it probably means they’re doing more than one thing or wearing two hats.” He said he likes funders who offer technical support, as well as authentic conversation, and who don’t avoid the word “racism.”

Giant triplets

Meanwhile, the Quincy Institute, led by retired U.S. Army colonel and noted critic of the Iraq War-turned Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich, held a virtual “Emergency Summit” of public intellectuals to reflect on America Besieged by Racism, Materialism and Militarism—the “giant triplets” identified by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam.”

Against the backdrop of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, Bacevich began by asking the panelists how those triplets continue to threaten democracy.

One panelist, New York Times contributing writer Peter Beinart, noted that one of the triplets, materialism, while an enormous cultural problem, might not rank as one of the three main ones today because, unlike in the 1960s when people assumed that American living standards would be going up, many today suffer from a lack of materialism and hold very little hope that their situations will improve.

Militarism and racism, however, do persist. As a foreign-policy term, however, “militarist” has been replaced by euphemisms such as “muscular” or “tough-minded.” But militarism is plain to see in the degree to which domestic policing has been affected by military equipment, and veterans return home without decent healthcare. (As an aside, the military has been lauded for well-run coronavirus vaccine sites while the civilian counterparts are often cast as failures. Asked why this is on a recent television news show, Alex Pareene, a staff writer for The New Republic, offered a simple explanation: The U.S. has never disinvested in the military.)

One panelist, the Rev. Liz Theoharis, who is co-chair with Rev. William Barber, of the Poor People’s Campaign, said she would add to King’s triplets, two more demons: ecological devastation and emboldened religious nationalism evidenced on Jan. 6.

Regarding militarism, Theoharis noted that while there’s no military draft per se, there is a “poverty draft” because for many young people, it’s the only way to put food on their table and get an education. Yet, they come home to a lack of opportunity. The majority of single male adults that are homeless in our society are veterans. The military system is “not about the ideals of a democracy and opportunity and possibility and freedom for all, it’s sending poor people, Black people and Latino people to go and fight and kill poor people in other parts of the world,” she said, noting that the U.S. has military bases in more than 800 places. The coronavirus threat has spread in the fissures that we faced before in terms of racism and inequality, which were already claiming lives before the pandemic.

Neta C. Crawford, a professor and chair of political science at Boston University, said democracy is the antidote to militarism, extreme materialism and racism. Members of Congress are tightly connected to military bases and defense contractors in their districts based on the belief that the military-industrial complex creates good jobs. Crawford said we need break this misconception with solid analysis that shows military spending actually produces fewer jobs and what we could be doing instead.

Daniel McCarthy, editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and editor-at-large of The American Conservative, noted the irony that U.S. military adventures abroad are framed as antiracist. When he opposed the Iraq War, he was accused of being against Arab democracy and therefore racist. He lamented that we need to find something for the part of industrial America that has been declining, not necessarily related to militarism but to make things that people want to buy.

Justice and belonging in New England

This webinar surfing spree came as NEBHE renewed its focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. The terms “justice” and “belonging” are sometimes also added to the collection of values that used to be disparaged as so much p.c. Moreover, “diversity” is not enough on its own because, as one New England college president recently told his colleagues, people can feel welcomed but also disadvantaged. NEBHE has also looked at the concept of “reparative” justice as a way to recognize that fighting racial oppression should not be responsive to specific past wrongs, but rather, driven by the understanding that the past, present and future exist together.

To be sure, New England will thrive only if its education systems promote inclusion and excellence for learners of all backgrounds, cultures, age groups, lifestyles and learning styles in an environment that promotes justice and equity in a diverse, multicultural world.

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

John O. Harney: Update on college news in New England

At Wheaton College, which has done very well in facing COVID-19. Left to right: Emerson Hall, Larcom Hall, Park Hall, Mary Lyon Hall, Knapton Hall and Cole Chapel.

BOSTON

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

Faculty diversity. In the early 1990s, NEBHE, the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) and the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) collaborated to develop the first Compact for Faculty Diversity. Formally launched in 1994, with support from the Ford Foundation and Pew Charitable Trust, the compact focused on five key strategies: motivating states and universities to increase financial support for minorities in doctoral programs; increasing institutional support packages to include multiyear fellowships, along with research and teaching assistantships to promote integration into academic departments and doctoral completion; incentivizing academic departments to create supportive environments for minority students through mentorship; sponsoring an annual institute to build support networks and promote teaching ability; and building collaborations for student recruitment to graduate study. With reduced foundation support, collaboration among the three participating regional education compacts declined, but some core compact activities continued through SREB.

Now, NEBHE and its sister regional compacts are launching a collaborative, nine-month planning process to reinvigorate and expand a national Compact for Faculty Diversity. Under the proposed new compact, NEBHE, the Midwestern Higher Education Compact (MHEC), SREB and WICHE would collaborate to invest in the achievement of diversity, equity and inclusion in faculty and staff at postsecondary institutions in all 50 states. Ansley Abraham, the founding director of the SREB State Doctoral Scholars Program at the SREB, has been instrumental in the design and execution of that initiative. He recently published this short piece in Inside Higher Ed.

Fighting COVID. As the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned of the roughest winter in U.S. public-health history, Wheaton College has stood out. Our Wheaton, in Norton, Mass. (not to be confused with the Wheaton College in Illinois) developed a plan based on science that has kept positive cases low on campus and allowed in-person classes during the fall semester. Wheaton was able to limit the college’s overall fall semester case count to 23 (a .06 positivity rate among 35,000 tests) due to strong protocols, rigorous testing through the Cambridge, Mass.-based Broad Institute and a shared commitment from the community, especially students. In early November, as cases were spiking across the U.S., the private liberal arts college had its own spike of 13 positive cases in one day. But thanks to immediate contact tracing in partnership with the Massachusetts Community Tracing Collaborative, only one positive case resulted after that day, notes President Dennis Hanno. Part of Wheaton’s success owes to its twice-a-week testing throughout the semester. The college also credits its work with the for-profit In-House Physicians to complement internal staff in managing on-campus testing and quarantine/isolation housing.

New England in D.C. The COVID-19 crisis should make national health positions crucial. Earlier this week, President-elect Joe Biden tapped Dr. Rochelle Walensky, an infectious disease physician at Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, to lead the CDC and Dr. Vivek Murthy, who attended Harvard and Yale and did his residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, to be surgeon general. They’ll work with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor and College of the Holy Cross graduate who has served six presidents.

Last month, as Biden’s transition team began drawing on the nation’s colleges and universities to prepare to take the reins of government, we flashed back to a 2009 NEJHE piece when Barack Obama was stocking his first administration. “As they form their White House brain trusts, new presidents tend to mine two places for talent: their home states and New England—especially New England’s universities, and especially Harvard,” we noted at the time. Most recently, two New England Congresswomen have scored big promotions on Capitol Hill. Rosa DeLauro (D.-Conn.) became Appropriations chair and Katherine Clark (D.-Mass.) was elected assistant speaker of the House. Richard Neal (D.-Mass.) was already chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.

Indebted. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D.-Mass.), long a champion of canceling student debt, called on Biden to take executive action to cancel student loan debt. “All on his own, President-elect Biden will have the ability to administratively cancel billions of dollars in student loan debt using the authority that Congress has already given to the secretary of education,” she told a Senate Banking Committee hearing. “This is the single most effective economic stimulus that is available through executive action.” About 43 million Americans have a combined total of $1.5 trillion in federal student loan debt. Such debt has been shown to discourage big purchases, growth of new businesses and rates of home ownership among other life milestones. Warren has outlined a plan in which Biden can cancel up to $50,000 in federal student loan debt for borrowers.

Jobless recovery? Everyone knew the public health crisis would be accompanied by an economic crisis. This week, Moody’s Investors Service projected that the 2021 outlook for the U.S. higher-education sector remains negative, as the coronavirus pandemic continues to threaten enrollment and revenue streams. The sector’s operating revenue will decline by 5 percent to 10 percent over the next year, Moody’s projected. The pace of economic recovery remains uncertain, and some universities have issued or refinanced debt to bolster liquidity. (As this biting piece notes, “Just as decreased state funding has caused students to go into debt to cover tuition and fees, universities have taken on debt to keep their doors open.”)

The name of the game for many higher education institutions (HEIs) is coronavirus relief money from the federal government. NEBHE has written letters to Congress calling for increased relief based on the many New England students and families struggling with reduced incomes or job loss and the costs associated with resuming classes that were significantly higher than anticipated. These costs have been growing based on regular virus testing, contact tracing, health monitoring, quarantining, building reconfigurations, expanded health services, intensified cleaning and the ongoing transition to virtual learning. Citing data from the National Student Clearinghouse, NEBHE estimated that New England’s institutions in all sectors lost tuition and fee revenue of $413 million. And that’s counting only revenue from tuition and fees. Most institutions also face additional budget shortfalls due to lost auxiliary revenues (namely, from room and board) and the high costs of compliance with new health regulations and the administration of COVID-19 tests to students, faculty and staff. (When the relief money is spent and by whom is important too. Tom Brady’s sports performance company snagged a Paycheck Protection Program loan of $960,855 in April.) Anna Brown, an economist at Emsi, told our friends at the Boston Business Journal that higher-ed staffers working in dorms, maintenance roles, housing and food services have been hit hard, and faculty will not be far behind

Admissions blast from the past. I’ve overheard too many conversations lately with reference to “testing” and wondered if the subject was COVID testing or interminable academic exams. Given admissions tests being de-emphasized by colleges, we were reminded me of a 10-year-old piece by Tufts University officials on how novel admissions questions would move applicants to flaunt their creativity. The authors told of how “Admissions officers use Kaleidoscope, as well as the other traditional elements of the application, to rate each applicant on one or more of four scales: wise thinking, analytical thinking, practical thinking and creative thinking.” Could be their moment?

Anti-wokism. The U.S. Department of Education held “What is to be Done? Confronting a Culture of Censorship on Campus” on Dec. 8 (presumably not deliberately on the anniversary of John Lennon’s assassination). The hook was to unveil the department’s “Free Speech Hotline” to take complaints of campus violations. The event organizers contended that “Due to strong demand, the event capacity has been increased!” The department’s Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education Robert King began noting that we’ll hear from “victims of cancel culture’s pernicious compact” where generally “administrators cave to the mob and punish the culprit.” He noted, “Coming  just behind this are Communist-style re-education camps” and assured the audience that the department has launched several investigations into these kinds of offenses like those that land awkwardly in my inbox from Campus Reform. Universities are no place for “wokism,” one speaker warned, adding that calls for diversity and tolerance actually aim to squelch unpopular opinions.

Welcome dreamers. Last week, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restore the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to how it was before the administration announced plans to end it in September 2017. DACA provides protection against deportation and work authorization to certain undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. DACA participants include many current and former college students. NEBHE issued a statement in support of DACA in September 2017 and has advocated for the initiative’s support.

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

John O. Harney: Pressing on through the pandemic

BOSTON

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

A little of what we’ve been following …

Counting heads. New enrollment figures show higher education reeling under the weight of COVID-19 and a faltering economy on top of pre-existing challenges such as worries that college may not be worth the price. A month into the fall 2020 semester, undergraduate enrollment nationally was down 4 percent from last year, thanks in large part to a 16 percent drop in first-year students attending college this pandemic fall, according to “First Look” data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. In New England, the early data suggest New Hampshire and Vermont were among the handful of U.S. states enrolling more undergraduates than last fall, while Rhode Island reported a nearly 16 percent drop.

At community colleges, freshman enrollment sunk by nearly 23 percent nationally, the clearinghouse reports.

Interestingly, before COVID hit and when so-called “Promise” programs were in full stride, 33 public community college Promise programs across the U.S. showed big enrollment success with their free-college models, according to a study released recently in the Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association. Such programs were “associated with large enrollment increases of first-time, full-time students—with the biggest boost in enrollment among Black, Hispanic and female students,” the study found, adding, “The results come as the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic is leading states to tighten higher education budgets, as low-income students are forgoing their postsecondary plans at higher rates this fall than their wealthier peers, and as community colleges are experiencing larger enrollment declines than four-year universities.”

On the other hand, a report from our friends at the Hildreth Institute examines 22 statewide, free-tuition programs established in the past decade, and finds that most do not address the real barriers that prevent many students from getting a higher education credential. The report notes that tuition and fees represent just 24 percent of the cost of attending a community college and 40 percent of the cost of attending a public four-year university. Beyond tuition, students struggle with necessities like textbooks, computers, software, internet access, housing, food and transportation. Moreover, “the lower the income of a student, the less likely they are to benefit from existing tuition-free programs, known as ‘last-dollar’ scholarships, which cover only the portion of tuition and fees that are not covered by existing financial aid,” the Hildreth report notes.

Digital futures. The ECMC Foundation awarded the Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF) $341,000 to fund the Connecticut Digital Credential Ecosystem Initiative, in partnership with NEBHE. A network of companies, community colleges, government agencies and other stakeholders, led by BHEF, will develop new pathways to digital careers, particularly for individuals unemployed due to COVID-19. BHEF will help community colleges issue industry-validated credentials to support transparent career pathways across Connecticut and the surrounding region. Participating employers will approve the knowledge, skills and abilities for these credentials, thus building recruitment and hiring links for students who complete the credential. The idea owes much to the work and recommendations of NEBHE’s Commission on Higher Education & Employability.

Organizing. I was happy to attend the virtual annual conference of the Hunter College National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, its 47th annual conference, this time held virtually due to COVID. The topic was “Inequality, Collective Bargaining and Higher Education.” It was a goldmine of perspectives on equity, antiracism and labor rights.

Among bright spots, talk of a possible student loan debt jubilee and increasing moves by campus CEOs to resist pay raises. Bill Fletcher, former president of the advocacy group TransAfrica and senior scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, recounted the formation of labor organizing in the U.S. from America’s original sins of annihilating Native Americans and enslaving Africans through the birth of trade unionism and social justice efforts like Occupy and the National Education Association’s Red for Ed. We don’t need white allies, he added, but rather white comrades like John Brown on the frontlines.

Touting Joe Biden’s higher-education platform, Tom Harnish, vice president for government relations at the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association and a faculty member at George Washington University, offered basic advice: If you want better higher-education policy, get out and vote and put better people in office.

In a session on the evolution of labor studies, speakers noted that many labor-education programs have been folded into management schools or sometimes taught under the guise of the history of capitalism so as to attract students. We have to warn students that this is not the place if you’re aspiring to an HR position, one said.

Purdue dropping program in Lewiston, Maine. No higher-education models seem immune to COVID-19. Recently, Purdue University Global announced it is dropping its physical presence in Lewiston, Maine, when its lease expires in March. In spring 2017, Purdue University acquired most of the credential-granting side of the then-for-profit Kaplan University, as part of the Indiana-based public research university’s effort to engage the fast-growing adult student market. Kaplan had about 32,000 students taking courses online or at one of more than a dozen physical campus locations, including Lewiston and Augusta, Maine. The Lewiston building had been empty due to COVID. The Augusta building reportedly will continue to house the nursing program. Kaplan University, by the way, converted to nonprofit status as part of the deal.

See you in better times …

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

John O. Harney: 'Emergency remote'; a WPA for humanists?; defense workers kept on job

From The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE), a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org):

A few items from the quarantine …

Wisdom from Zoom. COVID-19 has been a boon for Zoom and Slack (for people panicked by too many and too-slow emails). Last week, I zoomed into the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) Leadership Series conversation with Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) President Paul LeBlanc and HGSE Dean Bridget Long. LeBlanc notes that the online programs adopted by colleges and universities everywhere in the age of COVID-19 are very different from SNHU’s renowned online platform. Unlike SNHU, most institutions have launched “emergency remote” work to help students stay on track. Despite worries in some quarters about academic quality, LeBlanc says the quick transition online is not about relaxing standards, but ratcheting up care and compassion for suddenly dislocated students. The visionary president notes that just as telemedicine is boosting access to healthcare during the pandemic, online learning could boost access to education.

Among other observations, LeBlanc explains that “time” is the enemy for traditional students who have to pause classes when, for example, their child gets sick. If they are students in a well-designed online program, they can avoid delays in their education despite personal disruptions. He also believes students will want to come rushing back to campuses after COVID-19 dissipates, but with the recession, he wonders if they’ll be able to afford it. Oh and, by the way, LeBlanc ventures that it’s unlikely campuses will open in the fall without a lot more coronavirus testing.

Summer learning loss becomes COVID learning loss. That’s the concern of people like Chris Minnich, CEO of the nonprofit assessment and research organization NWEA, founded in Oregon as the Northwest Evaluation Association. The group predicts that when students finally head back to school next fall (presumably), they are likely to retain about 70% of this year’s gains in reading, compared with a typical school year, and less than 50% in math. The concern over achievement milestones reminds me of the fretting over SATs and ACTs as well as high-stakes high school tests, being postponed. Merrie Najimy, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, notes that the pause “provides all of us with an opportunity to rethink the testing requirements.”

Another WPA for Humanists? Modern Language Association Executive Director Paula M. Krebs recently reminded readers that during the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration, though commonly associated with building roads and bridges, also employed writers, researchers, historians, artists, musicians, actors and other cultural figures. Given COVID-19, “this moment calls for a new WPA that employs those with humanities expertise in partnership with scientists, health-care practitioners, social scientists, and business, to help shape the public understanding of the changes our collective culture is undergoing,” writes Krebs.

Research could help right now. News of the University of New Hampshire garnering $6 million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to build and test an instrument to monitor space weather reminded me of when research prowess was recognized as a salient feature of New England’s higher education leadership. That was mostly before jabs like the “wastebook” from then-U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) ridiculed any spending on research that didn’t translate directly to commercial use. But R&D work can go from suspect to practical very quickly. For example, consider research at the University of Maine’s Lobster Institute trying to see if an extract from lobsters might work to treat COVID-19. Or consider that 15 years ago, the Summer 2004 edition of Connection (now NEJHE) ran a short piece on an unpopular research lab being built by Boston University and the federal government in Boston’s densely settled South End to study dangerous germs like Ebola. The region was also a pioneer in community relations, and the neighborhood was tense about the dangers in its midst to say the least. But today, that lab’s role in the search for a coronavirus vaccine is much less controversial.

Advice for grads in a difficult year. This journal is inviting economists and other experts on “employability”  to weigh in on how COVID-19 will affect 2020’s college grads in New England. What does it mean for the college-educated labor market that has been another New England economic advantage historically?

Bath Iron Works will keep its employees at work.

Defense rests? One New England industry that is not shutting down due to COVID-19 is the defense industry. In Maine, General Dynamics Bath Iron Works ordered face masks for employees and expanded its sick time policy, but union leaders say the company isn’t doing enough to address coronavirus. More than 70 Maine lawmakers recently asked the company to consider closing temporarily to protect workers from the spread of the virus. But the Defense Department would have to instruct the shipyard to close, and Pentagon officials say it is a “Critical Infrastructure Industry.” About 17,000 people who work at the General Dynamics Electric Boat’s shipyards in Quonset Point, R.I., and Groton, Conn., are in the same boat, so to speak. They too have been told to keep reporting to work. In New London, a letter in The Day pleaded with Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont to shut down Electric Boat. Critical Infrastructure Industry. If only attack subs on schedule could help beat an “invisible enemy.”

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

Below, “Wong’s Pot with Old Flowers,” by Montserrat College Prof. Timothy Harney.

'America's Best Social Critic' looks at academia, civil society and democracy

Chapin Hall, at Williams College, in Williamstown, Mass.

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

“It’s time, as the phrase goes, to ‘take control of the narrative,’ or at least tell our story better than we have been doing—to convey how hard most faculty work, how modestly most are paid, how little job security they enjoy, and, most broadly, that higher education remains an indispensable public good in a democratic society.”

Andrew Delbanco is a professor of American Studies at Columbia University, author of several books, including 2012’s College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, and president of the Teagle Foundation. His latest book, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War, will come out in paperback in November. In the following Q&A, NEJHE Executive Editor John O. Harney asks Delbanco about the state of higher education and intellectual life today.

Harney: Among your many honors, Time Magazine several years ago called you “America’s Best Social Critic.” Are “social critic” and other kinds of “public intellectual” occupations missing from what we urge today’s college students to include among their aspirations?

Delbanco: I’ve been very lucky to be able to make a living by doing what I love—teaching, writing, speaking on issues that matter to me. I’m afraid that opportunities for all of the above are shrinking as academia, publishing and journalism are all going through severe economic turbulence. Still, there will always be young people determined to follow their passions. We need their voices more than ever, so let us hope they will find ways to be heard—in both traditional venues and through new media.

Harney: You’ve said the college classroom is a “rehearsal space” for democracy. Colleges should allow you to walk in with one point of view and walk out with another. How best to enhance that quality in an age of political correctness and backlashes against it?

Delbanco: I believe more than ever that under the guidance of sensitive teachers who know how to combine intellectual rigor with open inquiry, the classroom is more likely than social media or a public rally to foster civil discourse about charged issues. My guess is that relatively few classrooms fit the description promulgated by those who think academia is rife with intolerance and “political correctness.” The method practiced by good teachers since the beginning of time still works: Show passion for the material you are teaching and respect for the students to whom you are teaching it, and good things will follow—including civil debate about controversial questions to which there are no easy answers.

Harney: Teagle has supported NEBHE’s work to develop affordable options for community college students to attend an independent institution, develop and promote liberal arts transfer opportunities at independent colleges for community college graduates, and increase the number of community college transfer students who earn a bachelor’s degree at an independent institution. How does this fit with your worldview?

Delbanco: America’s community colleges are immensely important institutions. They are gateways for millions of first-generation, minority and “nontraditional” (that is, older students seeking marketable skills in a rapidly changing economy), who represent the future of our country. Yet community colleges are woefully underfunded, and often underappreciated by people for whom college means the pastoral residential campus offering amenities of which most community college students can only dream. Community colleges serve many constituencies who bring many different aspirations to their studies. Students who come out of community college with an associate degree are well-served by these institutions, as are others who attend not necessarily to obtain a degree but in order to gain a specific skill or perhaps a certificate signifying completion of a course or program. Still others hope to move on to a four-year institution to earn a bachelor’s degree. We owe it to them to support, encourage and help them realize their hopes by building bridges from two-year public to four-year private institutions. This will require improved advising, clearly articulated pathways, more rational portability of credits and generally better coordination among institutions with different structures and cultures. The Teagle Foundation wants to support these efforts, which are gaining momentum not only in New England but throughout the nation—in part because independent colleges, especially those that are less selective, are seeking new pipelines to fill seats in their classrooms.

Harney: What do you see as the future of collaboration between public and independent higher education institutions?

Delbanco: The future must include the kind of cooperation I just spoke about between two-year publics and four-year privates. But that is only one dimension of this question. For example, research universities (both private and public) must do a better job of preparing graduate students for teaching careers in public open-access institutions as well as in independent liberal arts colleges. We are in the midst of a full-fledged crisis of employment for Ph.D.’s, especially in the humanities, who are often unprepared for, and even unaware of, opportunities outside the kind of research universities that have trained them. In general, colleges and universities also must become more responsive to the needs of their local communities. I often find myself saying that there is really no such thing as a private college or university—in the sense that all institutions benefit from public subsidies in the form of tax exemption, tax-deductible donations and other forms of philanthropic support, as well as federal support for research and tuition-paying students. In short, taxpayers have a right to expect that the local college or university—whether public or “private”—will find ways to serve them as well as their own students, by engaging constructively with the public schools, for example. In this respect, community colleges are among the leaders of the higher education sector, while some of the best-endowed private universities are among the laggards.

Harney: You talked a bit about what used to be a cross subsidy from students who could afford college to those who couldn’t. Is that a reasonable system?

Delbanco: Well, I’ve suggested that the discounting system used by some institutions—those with “need-based” financial aid programs—might be thought of as a dash of socialism mixed into our capitalist system. By this I mean that differential pricing determined by the ability of families to pay is an outlier in a consumer society that generally sets prices by calculating what price the market will bear. Of course this analogy does not mean that discount pricing is always motivated by a “Robin Hood” impulse to take from the relatively rich in order to give to the relatively poor. For most private institutions, even those that are relatively well-endowed, discounting is necessary not only for reasons of equity or for the educational value of enrolling a class with some socioeconomic diversity, but also for the practical imperative of recruiting enough students who bring at least some tuition dollars with them. This complex system—where for one reason or another, the “sticker” price exceeds what many students actually pay—is under increasing stress and seems likely at some point to give way to something different. But I doubt that we will see fundamental change until and unless the federal government takes a larger role in financing higher education. Perhaps the current talk of universal “free” college—in some respects a regressive idea because it would increase subsidies without means-testing the beneficiaries—marks the start of a more serious discussion.

Harney: Public disinvestment is often viewed as a chief reason for rising college prices. Why is it so hard to argue for higher education funding?

Delbanco: Another complex question. Part of the answer is that the growing disparity between public resources and public obligations has squeezed the ability of state governments to maintain the subsidies on which public higher education depends (the left would cite such factors as the tax revolt that began in California in the 1970s and the privatization of services previously regarded as a public responsibility; the right would cite putatively excessive benefits granted to unionized public workers and the rising cost of Medicaid). But the distribution of resources is also partly a function of who makes the better arguments—and there is no doubt that public confidence in higher education has declined (even though competition has never been as fierce as it is now to gain admission to the most prestigious institutions). Unfortunately, we live in an age of sound-bites and platitudes disseminated by talk-show hosts and spread on social media—so while there are certainly ways in which higher education should strive to educate students better at lower cost, it’s hard to combat the perception that we are a wasteful, inefficient “industry” with little accountability. Much of this is a grotesque distortion. But overpaid presidents and coaches, admissions bribery scandals and stories of dissolute students don’t help. It’s time, as the phrase goes, to “take control of the narrative,” or at least tell our story better than we have been doing—to convey how hard most faculty work, how modestly most are paid, how little job security they enjoy, and, most broadly, that higher education remains an indispensable public good in a democratic society.

Harney: You’ve quoted Melville’s claim that a whale ship was his Yale and Harvard. What’s the application of that today?

Delbanco: Despite all our challenges, I still believe that college can be a place where students widen their horizons, learn to appreciate the wonder of the natural world and the complexity of the social world, and grow into a sense of human interconnectedness. Those are among the things that Melville learned by going to sea and opening himself to experiences he had never dreamt of on land.

Harney: You’ve mentioned the importance of “diversity.” How does the momentum toward online distance learning accommodate that?

Delbanco: I’m a “distance learning” skeptic—by which I don’t mean that there is no value in the efficient and economical delivery of information to students who cannot be personally present in a traditional classroom or who have reached a certain level of learning proficiency so they can make good use of online resources. But I worry that the new digital technologies may become another force for stratification: i.e., poor kids will be led toward the “virtual” classroom while rich kids will get the real deal. Of course it’s not that simple—and we should continue to experiment with new pedagogies and test their effectiveness, equity and potential value for cost control. But for now the evidence seems to suggest that the most vulnerable students, sometimes described as “unconfident learners,” need all the personal human attention they can get.

John O. Harney: The latest in the N.E. 'free college' movement

2008–2012 bachelor's degree or higher (5-year estimate) by county (percent)

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

The New England Board of Higher Education recently honored Hartford Promise and the Rhode Island Promise Scholarship with 2019 New England Higher Education Excellence Awards. And NEJHE has been paying close attention to innovations—and challenges—facing such “free college” programs.

In June, the Campaign for Free College Tuition (CFCT) lauded NEBHE delegate and Connecticut state Rep. Gregg Haddad for his work helping the land of steady habits become the 13th state to meet CFCT’s criteria for having a robust free college tuition program for its residents.

Under the budget signed by Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, eligible students at the state’s 12 community colleges will be able to attend without paying any tuition or fees starting in 2020. Haddad co-chairs the Legislature’s Higher Education and Employment Advancement Committee. He worked on the issue with Sen. Mae Flexer, Senate vice chairman of the Higher Education and Employment Advancement Committee, after the two heard of the enrollment success at Rhode Island Community College under its Rhode Island Promise program. Sen. Will Haskell and Rep. Gary Turco also helped make the legislation happen. Connecticut’s program will provide a “middle dollar” scholarship to all recent high school graduates with at least a 2.0 HS GPA who fill out FAFSA and take at least 12 credit hours each year. “If the student’s Pell Grant fully covers tuition, they will still get a $250 per semester grant to spend on other costs of attending college. The revenue to pay for this new program is expected to come from online lottery sales which have not yet been legally approved. But the budget directs the Governor and the State’s Board of Regents for Higher Education to find alternative sources of revenue should that idea not work out,” the CFCT reports.

Meanwhile, the 2019 Education Next Poll found 60% of Americans endorse the idea of making public four-year colleges free, and 69% want free public two-year colleges. “Democrats are especially supportive of the concept (79% approval for four-year and 85% for two-year). Republicans tend to oppose free tuition for four-year colleges (35% in support and 55% opposed) and are divided over free tuition for two-year colleges (47% in support and 47% opposed).”

A paper from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research explains that while college promise programs offer invaluable opportunities, “eligibility requirements and rules on whether funds can be used to cover non-tuition costs, can exclude students who are older, working, or who have children.”

Writing in The Conversation, William Zumeta, professor emeritus of public policy and governance and of higher education at the University of Washington, notes that “Washington state’s new college affordability initiative differs from the ‘free college’ efforts being undertaken by other states such as Tennessee and Oregon. In other states, such as these, Rhode Island and, soon, Massachusetts, the ‘free college’ initiatives are mostly limited to tuition-free community college for some students. But in Washington state, the Workforce Education Investment Act provides money for students to attend not only a community college, but four-year public and private colleges and universities.”

In a Chronicle of Higher Education piece titled “The Fight for Free College Is Your Fight Too,” Ann Larson, co-founder of the Debt Collective, called on academics to help win back the promise of college as a necessary and vital public good.

There are also critics of free college schemes. They include some families who had to scrimp and save for their children to earn degrees. And Bloomberg recently published this piece by Karl W. Smith, a former assistant professor of economics at the University of North Carolina, under the headline: The Hidden Cost of Free College.

More recently, College of William & Mary economics professor David H. Feldman and Davidson College visiting assistant professor of educational studies Christopher R. Marsicano wrote in USA Today: “While free college has its benefits, its simplicity makes it a regressive policy that will most help the wealthy.”

Feldman and Marsicano propose instead: increasing the maximum federal Pell Grant by 50%; partnering with states by offering a federal block grant for higher education if states appropriate at least a certain dollar amount per full-time student; offering nonprofit colleges and universities that work with significant numbers of lower-income students a small operating subsidy equal to a percentage of the Pell dollars their students receive; and tying any additional grant subsidies and student loan interest rates to accountability measures such as graduation rates and gainful employment for students upon graduation.

Two other key resource for the movement are The Campaign for Free College Tuition and the clearinghouse for College Promise Programs at UPenn.

Expect to hear more about free college as the 2020 elections approach and student indebtedness grows. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaigned for free college in 2016. Most of the other candidates now call for at least two years of free college.

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

The past and future of young people in politics

The replica of the U.S. Senate Chamber in the Edward M. Kennedy Institute. in Boston

In the following Q&A, New England Journal of Higher Education Executive Editor John O. Harney asks Mary K. Grant, president of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, about the institute’s work connecting postsecondary education to citizenship and upcoming elections.

(Last month, NEJHE posted a similar Q&A with Nancy Thomas, director of the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life.)

Harney: What did the 2016 and 2018 elections tell us about the state of youth engagement in American democracy?

Grant: We are seeing a resurgence of interest in civic engagement, activism and public service among young people. From 2014 to 2018, voter turnout among 18- to 29-year-olds increased by 79%, the largest increase among any group of voters.

The 2016 election was certainly a catalyst for galvanizing renewed interest. Since 2016, we have seen increases in people being more engaged in organizing platforms, messages and movements to motivate their peers and adults. The midterm elections brought a set of candidates who were the most diverse in our history, entering politics with urgency and not “waiting their turns” to run for office. One of the most encouraging findings was that those who felt most frustrated were more likely to vote.

While young-voter turnout in the 2018 election was historically high, it was still just 31% of those eligible to vote. Democracy depends on the voice of the people. And a functioning democracy depends on participation, particularly in polarized times. Senator Kennedy said “political differences may make us opponents, but should never make us enemies.” He envisioned the Edward M. Kennedy Institute as a venue for people from all backgrounds to engage in civil dialogue and find solutions with common ground.

As a nonpartisan, civic education organization, the institute’s goal is to educate and engage people in the complex issues facing our communities, nation and world. Since we opened four years ago, we have had more than 80,000 students come through our doors for the opportunity to not only learn how the U.S. government works, but also to understand what civic engagement looks like. All of us at the Kennedy Institute see how important it is to give young people a laboratory where they can truly practice making their voices heard and experience democracy; our lab just happens to be a full-scale replica of the United States Senate Chamber.

Harney: How else besides voting do you measure young people’s civic citizenship? Are there other appropriate measures of activism or political engagement?

Grant: Voter turnout is one measure, but civic engagement is needed every day. Defined broadly, activism and civic citizenship are difficult to measure. We engage in our local, state and national communities in so many ways.

Our team at the institute values reports like “Guardian of Democracy: The Civic Mission of Schools” that discuss how the challenge in the U.S. is not only a lack of civic knowledge, but also a lack of civic skills and dispositions. Civic skills include learning to deliberate, debate and find common ground in a framework of respectful discourse, and thinking critically and crafting persuasive arguments and shared solutions to challenging issues. Civic dispositions include modeling and experiencing fairness, considering the rights of others, the willingness to serve in public office, and the tendency to vote in local, state and national elections. To address the critical issues and make real social change, we need a better fundamental understanding of how our government works. And we need better skills for healthy, respectful debate

Harney: What are the key issues for young voters?

Grant: The post-Millennial generation is the most racially and ethnically diverse generation in our history. Only 52% identify as non-Hispanic whites. As they envision their future livelihoods in an increasingly automated workplace, they are concerned about climate change and how related food security may affect the sustainability of daily life and they are concerned about income inequality, student debt, gun violence, racial disparities, and being engaged and involved in their communities.

The institute’s polling data indicated that interests for 18-34-year-olds were reflective of society as a whole, but gun rights and gun control, education and the economy would be among the most important as they are deciding on congressional candidates in the next election.

Young people are focused on the complex global issues that concern us all but with added urgency. A Harvard Institute of Politics Youth Poll this spring found that 18-29-year-old voters do not believe that the baby boomer generation—especially elected officials—“care about people like them.” And, they expressed concern over the direction of the country.

Harney: Are there any relevant correlations between measures of citizenship and enrollment in specific courses or majors?

Grant: In a democracy, we need all majors. And more importantly, we need students and graduates to know how to work together. In a global economy, people in the sciences, business and engineering work right next to people in the fields of social sciences. I had the privilege of leading two of the finest public liberal arts college and universities in the country. I am a firm believer that regardless of disciplinary area, problem-solving requires us to ask questions, to be curious and open-minded, to think critically and creatively, incorporate a variety of viewpoints and work in partnership with others. We need to understand how you take an idea, move it along and make it into something that can improve the common good.

Harney: Are college students and faculty as “liberal” as “conservative” commentators make them out to be?

Grant: From my own work in higher education, I can say that there is diversity of perspectives and viewpoints on college campuses, which is encouraging and exciting. Liberals and conservatives are not unique in the ability to hold on quite strongly to their own viewpoints. Anyone who has ever witnessed a group of social and natural scientists discuss research methodologies can attest to that. We all need to learn how to listen to ideas other than our own

Harney: What are ways to encourage “blue-state” students to have an effect on “red-state” politics and vice versa?

Grant: Part of the country’s challenge in civil discourse is that we stop listening or we are listening for soundbites to which we overreact. One of the most important skills that we can develop is the ability to listen actively. It’s truly remarkable what can happen when students have an opportunity to get to know and work and learn with their peers across the country and around the world

What we’re finding in our programs is that people are hungering for conversation, even on difficult matters. It’s similar to the concept of creating spaces on college campuses where you can intentionally connect with people. This coming fall, we’re using an award that we earned from the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania to pilot a program called “Civil Conversations.” The program is designed to help eighth through 12th grade teachers develop the skills necessary to lead productive classroom discussions on difficult public policy issues. We’re starting in Massachusetts and plan to expand to all the blue, red and purple states.

And for those coming to the institute, we convene diverse perspectives through daily educational and visitor programs where people can talk with and listen to others who might be troubled or curious about the same things you are. Our public conversation series and forums bring together government leaders with disparate ideologies and from different political parties who are collaborating on a common cause; we host special programs that offer insight into specific issues and challenges facing communities and civic leaders, and what change-makers are doing about it.

Harney: What role does social media play in shaping engagement and votes?

Grant: Social media have fundamentally changed not only how we get our information, but how we interact with each other. According to a Harvard Institute of Politics Youth Poll, more than 4-in-5 young Americans check their phone at least once per day for news related to politics and current events.

As social media reaches more future and eligible voters, and when civic education is lacking, those who depend on social media platforms are at risk of consuming inaccurate information. This underscores not only the need for robust civic education programs, but also those in media literacy.

Harney: How can colleges and universities work together to bolster democracy?

Grant: Anyone who spends time around young people or on a college campus feels their energy and can’t help but come away with a renewed sense of hope. Colleges can continue to work together and advocate for unfettered access to higher education for students in all areas of the country. More specifically, they can engage with organizations like Campus Compact, a national coalition of more than a thousand colleges and universities committed to building democracy through civic education and community development.

Harney: How will New England’s increased political representation of women and people of color affect real policy?

Grant: The increasingly diverse representation helps to broaden and deepen the range of perspectives, ideas and viewpoints that influence public policy. There is also a renewed energy that is generated and it encourages next generation leaders to get involved, run for office, work on campaigns and make a difference in their communities. The institute has held several Women in Leadership programming events that highlight the lack of gender equity and racial diversity in public office and provide opportunities for women to network and learn more about the challenges and the opportunities.

Harney: Do young voters show any particular interest in where candidates stand on “higher education issues” such as academic freedom?

Grant: Students may not be focused on “higher education issues,” per se, but they do have a lot to say about accessibility and affordability. This generation is saddled with an enormous amount of student loan debt. That is certainly one of their greatest concerns, particularly when it comes to the 2020 presidential race.

Academic freedom is important in making colleges and universities welcoming to the exchange of differing ideas, which is a bedrock of democracy. As a former university chancellor, I believe that it is essential to create an environment where we welcome a diversity of opinion. We need to model the ability to listen to and consider viewpoints that may be very different from our own. We need to show students that we can sit down with people who think differently, find common ground, and even respectfully disagree. That’s a key part of what the Edward M. Kennedy Institute is all about.

Student political engagement in New England and beyond

Student demonstration against Tufts University’s fossil-fuel investments

From The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE), a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

Nancy Thomas is director of the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life.

In the following Q&A, NEJHE Executive Editor John O. Harney asks Thomas about her insights on higher education, citizen engagement and elections. (A Q&A along the same lines has been conducted with the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate. Watch this space for more on higher education and citizen participation in this critical time for American democracy.)

Harney: What did the 2016 and 2018 elections tell us about the state of youth engagement in American democracy?

Thomas: Only 45% of undergraduate students voted in the 2016 presidential election, compared with about 61% of the general population. People on both sides of the political aisle had strong reactions to the election of Donald Trump as president, making 2016 a wake-up call. That, coupled with some intriguing, diverse candidates and growing issue activism, is a formula for youth engagement. We do not have our numbers for 2018—they will be available in September—but all signs point to a big jump in college student voting. Overall, Americans turned out at record high numbers in 2018.

Harney: How else besides voting do you measure young people’s civic citizenship? Are there other appropriate measures of activism and political involvement?

Thomas: Measuring student civic engagement is tough. In her 2012 review of civic measures in higher education, Ashley Finley at the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) concluded that although students participate in a continuum of civic learning practices, we need more evidence of their impact on student development, learning and success.

One problem is a lack of consensus over what counts as engagement. Knowledge about democracy? Intercultural competencies and other skills? Volunteering? Activism off campus? Following an issue on social media? Joining a group with a civic purpose? To measure engagement, many campuses conduct head counts of how many people took certain courses or volunteered or joined a club engaging in issue activism or attended a forum, etc.

Usually, civic engagement and development are measured by self-reported responses to surveys about behavior and attitudes. The CIRP senior survey asks whether students have worked on political campaigns or local problem-solving efforts. And the National Survey of Student Engagement,also a student survey, asks about voting, contributing to the welfare of the local community, and developing cultural understanding and a personal code of ethics.

Another approach is to administer pre- and post-experience questionnaires or require students to write reflective essays about their experiences. Some institutions survey alumni and correlate alumni engagement with learning experiences, if they have kept that record.

To my knowledge there is no objective, quantitative measure of civic engagement, much less political engagement, other than our voting study.

Harney: What are the key issues for college students?

Thomas: College students care about the same issues that most Americans care about—economic stability and jobs, health and access to healthcare, and education quality and access, particularly student debt and college affordability. They also care deeply about civil rights, discrimination and injustice, encompassing a range of concerns: immigration and the treatment of refugees at the border, DACA and, for those not threatened by the possibility of deportation, the treatment of their DACA peers; mass incarceration; criminal justice reform, racial discrimination and profiling; and hate speech and rise of hate groups and crimes. They also care about climate change and gun violence. I should note that, much like any group in the U.S., college students represent nearly all perspectives you can imagine. Right now, these are the issues that appear to be driving them.

Harney: Do they pay as much attention to local and state policy as to national and global?

Thomas: Some do, but it may be specific to the region or state. Or the institution. Around 50% of college students attend local community colleges, and nearly 85% attend college in-state. Local and state politics directly affect them, their families and communities.

It also depends on who is running for office. In Kansas and Iowa in 2018, for example, students turned out to impact the governor’s races. In the 7th Congressional District of Massachusetts, which is home to several universities, young people turned out to elect Ayanna Pressley.

Our office spent a lot of time on the phone during the 2018 midterms, and that was one trend that stood out to us—there was a great deal of feedback from administrators on campuses that students were engaging in local races more than in the past. We heard stories of local interest that often dovetailed with what was happening at the national level: local judicial elections (in the wake of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings), state representative races (amid a number of stories about state legislatures and state power structures), along with students jumping into races themselves, looking to create change.

In 2018, several students ran for local office. A sophomore at Spelman College ran for the local school board and narrowly lost. Rigel Robinson chose to run for local city councilrather than go to grad school right after graduating from UC Berkeley. He won.

That said, students are like all Americans—they care about the presidential election more. In 2014, only 13% of 18- to 24-year-old college and university students voted. That low number reflects national malaise. It also reflects the unique barriers to voting facing first-time voters and student attending institutions away from home. In midterms, students are less motivated to overcome barriers to voting.

Harney: Do they show any particular interest in where candidates stand on “higher education issues” such as academic freedom?

Thomas: They care about student debt and college affordability as significant higher education issues. I don’t think students would frame the issue as being about “academic freedom,” but they do care about speech and expression on campus and efforts by individuals and groups from off campus who come to campus to espouse discriminatory and hateful ideas. Our research on highly politically engaged campuses revealed nuanced attitudes to free expression on campus. Students want it and support it, but not if it crosses a line. The prevailing view is that students want their learning environments to be inclusive and welcoming regardless of race, ethnicity, immigrant status, sex, LGBTQ status and religion. They do not want groups or individuals with hateful ideas to have a platform on campus. Recently, the Knight Foundation published a report that confirmed this but also noted stark differences among different groups. Only four in 10 college women would protect speech over inclusion, compared with seven in 10 men. I have pushed backagainst this zero-sum-game approach of pitting speech against inclusion. The dominant narrative seems to be that speech, even hate speech, is always protected, at least at a public institution. I disagree.

Harney: How do the New England states treat voting rights for the many college students who live out-of-state?

Thomas: For most people, deciding where to vote is easy: They vote in the district in which they live. Students who attend and reside at a college away from home or out of state, however, may also vote near campus. Sounds easy enough, but it isn’t. Some states, for example, require not only evidence of residency but of permanence or intent to remain in the area. But what does that mean? A person has been living in the area for a month? A day? These kinds of standards are difficult to apply to most residents, and as a result, they tend to be applied to college students only.

Going into effect, ironically, right before the Fourth of July 2019, New Hampshire passed a law requiring students to obtain New Hampshire driver’s licenses or register their cars in state in order to register to vote near campus. The law is being challenged by the ACLU, the League of Women Voters and groups of students. Some legislators have also introduced a new bill that would create an exception for students, members of the military, and others living in the state temporarily. I doubt the law will hold up legally, but as of right now, students will need to go to a lot of trouble to vote locally.

The other New England states are not trying to suppress student voting, but there are many laws that could change to make voting easier, such as allowing for same-day voter registration and voting, early voting and longer time periods within which to register.

Harney: Are there any relevant correlations between measures of citizenship and enrollment in specific courses or majors?

Thomas: Yes! Education and library science majors vote at the highest rates; STEM and business majors are among the lowest. Gender might explain these differences to some extent. Women vote at higher rates than men, and fields that are dominated by women are likely to have higher voting rates. But that’s not the entire story. Education students study the historic and essential relationship between education and a strong democracy. The U.S. supports a public education system so that its citizens will be informed and prepared to participate in democracy. Both education and library sciences have a clear public purpose. This doesn’t mean that STEM and business fields do not have a public purpose. They do. But I am not sure the curriculum is designed to teach the public relevance of that field.

Harney: Are college students and faculty as “liberal” as “conservative” commentators make them out to be?

Thomas: Studies of college professors demonstrate that, overall, faculties lean liberal. In some fields like economics, they lean conservative, but overall, the professoriate is progressive. But that does not lead to “liberal indoctrination,” contrary to media reports or unique and inflammatory stories tracked by self-appointed watchdogs. Students do not arrive at college without opinions, nor are they easily manipulated. There is no evidence that students move left politically in college. Indeed, according to a recent study, college exposes students to new viewpoints and teaches them how to think, not what to think.

In our research on highly politically engaged campuses, we found that professors want students to think critically about their own perspectives, not just the perspectives of those with whom they disagree. They assign students projects in which the students must advocate for a position not aligned with their own. They teach using the Socratic method or discussion-based teaching to draw out multiple perspectives on an issue. They get students to work in groups reflecting diverse ideologies and lived experiences. If they do not hear a more conservative perspective expressed, they will introduce it. Do they sometimes take a stand on a political issue, like climate change or civil rights? Yes, but that’s the job. The job is not to be apolitical. Professors can’t cross the line into partisanship by telling students which candidate or party to support. But they can, and should, teach students to think critically about and even take a stand on political problems and solution.

Harney: What are ways to encourage “blue state” students to have an effect on “red-state” politics and vice versa?

Thomas: For better or worse, political polarization is a strong motivator for activism and voting. Young voters believe that they can make a difference and that government can solve public problems. I am confident that energy will continue through 2020.

I worry, however, that other forces like gerrymandering, money in politics, and the way politicians now cater to their “base” rather than all their constituents, will reinforce distrust in our political system. Many Americans believe that their vote doesn’t count or that their elected representatives do not represent them or their views. This leads them to ask, “why bother?”

Unfortunately, they may be right. In June 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court once again rejected efforts to stop partisan gerrymandering, leaving the drawing of districts to state legislators. Many state legislatures (both red and blue) gerrymander their districts to ensure dominance of their party. It is unlikely that politicians will voluntarily give up that power.

What’s the solution? One way to fix this problem is to get people to force their legislators to appoint nonpartisan redistricting commissions. In most states west of the Mississippi, residents can force a change to laws or state constitutions through ballots or referenda. Massachusetts is the only New England state that allows citizen-initiated statutes and amendments to the state constitutions. In 2018, voters in Michigan, Missouri, Colorado, Utah and Ohio passed initiatives to end partisan gerrymandering.

Young people can do the same on issues such as money in politics and extremism in policymaking. Educators should teach about these issues. Remember the old civics courses that taught “how a bill becomes a law?” Let’s resurrect that in college through experiential learning.

Harney: What role does social media play in shaping engagement and votes?

Thomas: Social media plays a significant role in shaping participation by young people. It’s how they get their news and information, find groups and people who care about their issues, and communicate with their peers. At its best, political engagement is a collective, and even social, act. Social media facilitates that.

The downside to social media, however, is misinformation and fake news. Manipulation through social media is a frightening truth. Colleges and universities should teach all students how to distinguish facts and fiction and to identify reliable news sources.

Harney: What do you think of an idea broached in NEJHE about ranking colleges based on the percentage of their students who vote?

Thomas: Some voter competitions compare basic voting rates; others compare election-to-election improvement. I have mixed feelings about using voting rates to compare one institution to another.

On one hand, voter competitions generate enthusiasm. They can be fun, and our research suggests that activities around elections should be spirited and celebratory. Again, engagement, including voting, is a social act. Students vote if their friends vote. Competitions can draw diverse groups to an activity, not unlike sporting events.

On the other hand, voting rates need to be critically examined. We know who the more likely voters are and what predicts voting: gender (women vote at higher rates), age (older people vote at higher rates), race (white, and some years, black Americans vote at higher rates), and affluence (wealthy people vote at higher rates). External factors also affect voting: Is it a battleground state or is student voting suppressed? Competitions will be won by institutions that admit older, affluent white women in states with same-day registration and voting.

The better approach is to calculate expected voting rates for a campus and then compare their actual with the expected, and then recognize campuses that overperform. We’re working on that, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. Student populations and voting conditions change every election. We’ll keep watching this.

We published a set of recommendations for colleges and universities interested in fostering student learning for and participation in democracy, actions that we believe will positively impact voting rates. I’d prefer to see a system that recognizes colleges and universities for how well they educate students about their responsibilities in a participatory democracy. Voting would be a factor, but it would not be the only factor.

Harney: How will New England’s increased political representation of women and people of color affect real policy?

Underrepresentation has been a serious problem in this country for a long time. According to the Reflective Democracy Campaign, white men make up 30% of the U.S. population and 62% of elected officials, while women of color make up 20% of the population and only 4% of elected officials. Practices like gerrymandering, special-interest money, how campaigns get funded, the power of incumbents and so forth allow leaders of political parties to serve as gatekeepers to perpetuate underrepresentation. While we saw historic shifts in 2018, we have a long way to go.

We have a partisan divide in this country that cannot be ignored. Fully 71% of Republican elected officials are white men, compared with 44% of Democrats. Only 3% of Republican leaders are people of color, compared with 28% of Democratic leaders. The historic shifts in 2018 reflect shifts in the Democratic party, not the Republican party.

Today, many politicians do not even pretend to represent people other than “their base” of die-hard supporters. They do not need to. The party in power sets their positions on issues and remains unmoved because they face no consequences for ignoring dissenters or opinion polls. It’s a maddening situation.

So, in answer to your question, increased political representation of women and people of color should affect policy, but the systems need to change to ensure that will happen.

Harney: How can colleges and universities work together to bolster democracy?

We need an industry-wide effort to increase education for the democracy we want, not the one we have. Regardless of their discipline, students need to learn the basics of our Constitutional democracy—how the government is structured, how elections work, how decisions are made and separation of power, and not just rights but responsibilities of people who a fortunate enough to live in a democracy.

I am deeply concerned by a 2019 publication by the Baker Center at Georgetown University that reports that nearly one-third of young Americans feel that living under non-democratic forms of government (e.g., military state or autocratic regime) would be equally acceptable to living in a democracy. That suggests to me a need for an educational response at the K-12 and higher education level.

But it also points to the need for systemic reform. Colleges and universities not only need to teach what a strong democracy looks like and why students have a responsibility to work for democracy’s health and future, but also need to enable student activism on electoral reform. They need to teach students how to run for office or how to effectuate policy change through laws and ballot initiatives. Students need to get involved in changing systems that underrepresent and disempower most groups of Americans. As I mentioned earlier, young people care deeply about equal opportunity and equity, along with other issue advocacy. The academy’s opportunity is now. It’s time to seize it.

Developing human+ skills in students so they can thrive in workplace

From The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE), a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

“The world will need more agile and resilient thinkers with a serious handle on various technologies and digital literacies.”

Michelle Weise is senior vice president for workforce strategies and chief innovation officer at Strada Education Network. Weise is a higher education expert who specializes in innovation and connections between higher education and the workforce. She built and led Sandbox ColLABorative at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) and the higher education practice of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. With Christensen, she co-authored Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution, a book that focuses on how to align online competency-based education with changing labor market needs.

In the following Q&A, NEJHE Executive Editor John O. Harney asks Weise about her insights on connecting postsecondary education to the world of work.

Harney: The relationship between education and employability seems widely understood now. What’s truly new in this area?

Weise: What’s different today is that with all the trending conversations about the future of work, the new narrative is that the most valuable workers now and in the future will be those who can combine technical knowledge with uniquely human skills. Over the last few decades, students have moved in large numbers to career-oriented majors, such as business, health and engineering—clearly hearing that the surest path to a meaningful, financially stable career is also the most straightforward one. Those pursuing liberal arts degrees, on the other hand, are on the decline. Policymakers have been particularly down on the outcomes of liberal arts, questioning the value of these majors as relevant to the challenges ahead.

But it’s not either/or; it’s both/and. Human skills alone are not enough and neither are technical skills on their own. This runs somewhat counter to the rallying cries in the 2000s, warning of a dearth of STEM majors to meet the demands of the emerging tech-enabled knowledge economy. But not all of the jobs will require STEM majors or data science wizards or people who fully grasp the technicalities of artificial intelligence. There are differing levels of depth and shallowness of that technical expertise needed alongside human skills that are in high demand.

With that nuance comes the need for real-time labor market data. Fortunately, with partners like Emsi, we can now extract the skills from job postings from businesses (demand-side data) and social profiles and resumes from people (supply-side data), and begin to look underneath traditional occupational classification schemes to observe how specific knowledge and skills cluster with one another. By doing this, we can more clearly diagnose the realities of work, education and skills requirements, and how skills develop and morph across regions and industries. This is essential because it gives learning providers insights that are more current and certainly more accurate, so that they may develop and refine curriculum and advise learners for a rapidly changing workplace.

Harney: Strada’s work regarding “On-ramps to Good Jobs” explicitly references “working class Americans”? Who are they and what are some of the learn-earn-learn strategies with the best traction?

Weise: We use the term “working class” to refer to people who represent the lowest quartile of adults in terms of educational attainment, earnings, and income (26%). We estimate that there are approximately 44 million working-class adults who are of working age (25- to 64-years-old) earning less than $35,000 annually and with less than $70,000 of family income.

What we call on-ramps to good jobs are programs designed, tailored and targeted for these learners with significant barriers to educational and economic success. Some of the most interesting models we found leveraged a “try-before-you-buy” outsourced apprenticeship model. Unlike in traditional apprenticeship models, the employer of record is the on-ramp, and the hiring employer acts as a client to the on-ramp. Apprentices are paid by the on-ramp but work on projects for client firms that are testing out that particular apprentice as a future job candidate. These models are great ways of building steady revenue streams that are sustainable, so that on-ramps reduce dependence on philanthropic or government dollars.

LaunchCode, a St. Louis-based tech bootcamp, hires and manages apprentices from its own program and, in turn, charges businesses $35 an hour for services. If, at program’s end, the employer hires an apprentice, the employer does not have to pay a placement fee, as LaunchCode’s overhead costs have been covered by the hourly service charge paid by employers during the training and pre-hire apprenticeship period.

As another example, Techtonic, a software development company based in Denver, has implemented an outsourced apprenticeship, now certified by the U.S. Department of Labor. Candidates are screened and then put through 12 weeks of training, akin to a coding bootcamp. After learners finish their training, Techtonic “hires” the apprentices, pays them entry-level wages, and pairs them with senior developers to work on projects for its clients. Not only do apprentices get paid for work, but they also simultaneously develop and hone the skills they will need for long-term career success. At the same time, Techtonic’s client firms have a seamless, low-stakes way of evaluating a candidate’s work before committing to full-time employment.

Harney: You also reference “good/decent jobs” … what do these entail?

Weise: We’re talking about jobs that have strong starting salaries that can move a person out of low-wage work to be able to thrive in the labor market by making at least $35k per year as an individual, and a lot more than that in many cases. This is critical for the bottom quartile of working-age adults in terms of educational attainment, earnings and income. We now have 44 million Americans who are jobless or lacking the skills, credentials and networks they need to earn enough income to support themselves and their families. We need better solutions for our most vulnerable citizens.

So when we talk about a good job, we’re not just talking about a well-paying, dead-end job; we’re looking at jobs that have mobility built into them. We want to focus on jobs with promise, or the ability to advance and move up.

Harney: What is the role of non-degree credentials in our understanding of education and employability?

Weise: We know that when people pursue postsecondary education, their main motivation is around work and career outcomes. If they can get there without a degree, is that enough for some? And what about folks who already have degrees who want to advance with just a little bit more training? More college or more graduate school will not be the answer. Flexibility, convenience, relevance … these may be attributes that are much more alluring than the package of a degree.

The business of skills-building is mostly occurring within the confines of federal financial aid models and the credit hour, but there’s an even wider range of opportunities to dream up innovative funding models and partnerships with employers. I’m eager to see more solutions that tie in with the training and development \or learning and development sides of a business rather than through the human resources side of tuition-reimbursement benefits. Where are the employers innovating new forms of on-the-job training?

This, by the way, is a huge opportunity for competency-based education (CBE) providers to serve, but everyone’s busy creating new CBE degreeprograms. What makes CBE disruptive, which is what Clayton Christensen and I pointed to in Hire Education, is that when learning is broken down into competencies—not by courses or subject matter—online competency-based providers can easily arrange modules of learning and package them into different, scalable programs for very different industries. For newer fields such as data science, logistics or design thinking that do not necessarily exist at traditional institutions, online competency-based education providers can leverage modularization and advanced technologies and build tailored programs on demand that match the needs of the labor market.

Harney: Can an employability focus go too far in terms of turning education into a purely vocational endeavor? As an English major and expert in literature and arts, what are your concerns about how steps such as gainful employment guidelines could discourage students from going into such fields and teacher prep, for example?

Weise: That was actually one of the motivations for clarifying the outcomes of liberal arts grads in the labor market. Current views on the liberal arts are often polarizing and oversimplified, and so we wrote “Robot-Ready: Human+ Skills for the Future of Work.” This paper was designed to bring more nuance and rigor to the conversation. Liberal arts graduates are neither doomed to underemployment, nor are they prepared to do anything they want. The liberal arts can give us the agile thinkers of tomorrow, but to live up to their potential, they must evolve. The liberal arts are teaching high-demand skills that can help people transfer from domain to domain, but they do not provide students with enough insight into the pathways available and the practical grounding to acquire before they graduate. In this analysis, we show precisely the kinds of hybrid skills needed in the top 10 pathways that liberal arts grads tend to pursue.

As a quick example, if we have learners considering journalism, they need to know that the roles available now resemble those in IT fields. Not only must journalists report, write or develop stories, but they must also demonstrate metrics-based interpretive skills, fluency in analytics capabilities like search engine optimization (SEO), JavaScript, CSS and HTML, and experience using Google Analytics to better understand who is accessing their content.

A liberal arts education can, in fact, enable learners to learn for a lifetime, but it’s not some magical phenomenon. It takes work, effort and awareness to identify the skills that enable learners to make themselves more marketable and break down barriers to entry.

Harney: What will future workers need to work effectively alongside artificial intelligence?

Weise: The literature on the future of work points us to the more human side of work. The research underscores the growing need for human skills such as flexibility, mental agility, ethics, resilience, systems thinking, communication and critical thinking. The idea is that with the rapid developments in machine learning, robotics and computing, humans will have to relinquish certain activities to computers because there’s simply no way to compete. But things like emotional intelligence or creativity will become increasingly critical for coordinating with computers and robots and ensuring that we are indispensable.

The question then becomes: What are we doing in a deliberate way within our learning experiences—at schools, colleges, companies, government—to cultivate these uniquely human skills? I think we can be doing a whole lot more in terms of building robot-ready learners of the future through project-based learning. It’s nothing new; It occurs in pockets but is not nearly widespread enough. Ultimately, it gets us those nimble thinkers of the future.

Real-world human problem-solving is transdisciplinary by nature, tapping into varied skills and knowledge—and yet, our postsecondary system remains stubbornly stovepiped. Students must learn—and be taught—to connect one domain of knowledge to another through what is known as “far transfer.”

But again, human skills alone are not enough: It’s human+. The world will need more agile and resilient thinkers with a serious handle on various technologies and digital literacies. Those workers will need both human and technical skills. With stronger problem-based models, it’ll be easier for education providers to stay ahead of the curve and build in new and emerging skill sets in data analytics, blockchain, web development or digital marketing that students will need in order to be successful in the job market. The integration of more project-based learning into the classroom would bring more clarity to how human+ skills translate into real-world problem solving and workplace dexterity.

John O. Harney: Atlantis in New England and other topics

Athanasius Kircher's map of Atlantis, placing it in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, from Mundus Subterraneus (1669), published in Amsterdam. The map is oriented with south at the top.

Ruminations from John O. Harney, executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

Unvites. I recently enjoyed a fascinating panel discussion on Protesting the Podium: Campus Disinvitations sponsored by the Bipartisan Policy Center. The panelists were former U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey, Harvard professor Harvey C. Mansfield, Middlebury College professor Matthew J. Dickinson and Wesleyan University President Michael S. Roth. They all had some kind of run-in with once-again radioactive speech issues on campus … and they were all smart as whips. Dickinson said he prefaces his classes now by telling students they are not in a “safe space,” but rather in a place where issues will be discussed using intellectual debate and that all students must be heard, especially marginalized students. Kerrey, also former president of the New School, worried that amidst the clamor of so much social media, people have to resort to insult to be heard. Roth, who acknowledges a certain “affirmative action” for conservative ideas, noted that students are suspicious of free speech to advance certain agendas, particularly when it is “weaponized” by money and technology.

Diversifying study-abroad. Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) enroll over 25% of all U.S. college students, but accounted for just 11% of all U.S. study-abroad students in the 2016-17 academic year, according to a report by the Center for Minority Serving Institutions and the Council on International Educational Exchange. The report focuses on the obstacles that discourage students from studying abroad, including barriers of cost, culture and curriculum, which may be worse at MSIs. A small step forward: The report highlights the Frederick Douglass Global Fellowship created by the two organizations to cover costs for 10 outstanding MSI students to participate in a four-week study-abroad program focused on intercultural communication and leadership.

Batten down the hatches. The U.S faces more than $400 billion in costs over the next 20 years to defend coastal communities from inevitable sea-level rise, according to a study done by the Center for Climate Integrity in partnership with the engineering firm, Resilient Analytics. The study looked at thousands of miles of coastline to determine areas that are at risk of being at least 15% underwater by 2040 due to rising seas and land-based ice melts. In New England, the study forecast that seawalls needed by 2040 would cost about $19 billion for Massachusetts, $11 billion for Maine, $5 billion for Connecticut, $3 billion for Rhode Island and $1 billion for New Hampshire. What does this have to do with higher ed? Of course, climate change has to do with everything. But more specifically, see NEJHE’s A Modest Proposal to Save the Planet.

Watched pot. Clark University in Worcester, Mass., this fall will launch America’s first Certificate in Regulatory Affairs for Cannabis Control, a three-course online graduate certificate program designed to help professionals, ranging from police to pot vendors, to understand the complications, opportunities and risks associated with the industry. Worcester will also be the future headquarters of the Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission—and incidentally, the new home of the Pawtucket Red Sox, Exhibit A (along with GE) in the building case of New England’s not-quite team spirit in site planning.

Benefits. A MAVY poll on behalf of the American Institute of CPAs asked “young adult job seekers” to name the employees benefits that would most help them achieve their financial goals. The top choices were: 1) health insurance, 2) paid time off, 3) student loan forgiveness and 4) working remotely. The CPA group played up the high ranking of student loan debt, and indeed, 2020 presidential candidates are energized by the issue. MAVY polls are developed by the University of Florida and partners and focused on millennials. This one defined “young adult job seekers” as millennials who graduated from college in the past 24 months or will graduate in the next 12 months and are currently looking for employment.

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.