Faculty in the Media

“There is a fear that people establish relationships with AI which might isolate them from human to human interactions.”

“What I’m seeing is everything from, ‘This is too hot, I can’t touch it,’ to, ‘These issues are too important for me to not take a stand.'”

"There isn’t a sense of freedom to explore a liberal arts education when people are concerned about the economy. For people who are first-gen and people from low-income backgrounds, I want them to come into any college … and feel confident in taking courses that broadly expose them to ideas."

"We need to move to a proactive, preventative model where we actually find the kids who most likely will struggle with learning to read before they struggle with learning to read, help them, then put them on the right developmental trajectory."

"The real issue, in other words, is not the existence of degree requirements, but the lack of alternative ways for workers to prove their qualifications. If political leaders really want to expand opportunities for non-college-educated Americans, that’s the problem they need to solve."

"I think a lot of parents think learning is like a rubber band, that students lost ground during the pandemic, but once they got back in school everybody was back to normal. But actually, learning is much more like a conveyor belt in that when the conveyor belt was stopped, students lost a bunch of ground, and the only way to catch up is to run the conveyor belt faster."

"I’m very worried when the state sort of says, okay, we’re investing in you, and we’re giving you curricula, what’s wrong? Why isn’t your score getting better? It sort of presupposes there’s going to be one simple solution. If there are 25 kids in a classroom, the ones who aren’t making progress may be struggling for very different reasons."

"One of the things you learn by looking at what happened in the early 1980s is that, were a president to want to eliminate the department, it would take a massive investment of political capital."

"What I really wanted was to get under the hood. Like, what does loneliness feel like to the lonely? What are the potential consequences? And what’s causing it?"

"Decisions to put cellphones in front of young people at different ages — it’s been a pendulum."

"I’m not sure that we know all the reasons why our students are struggling, but a major part of the story is that schools are spending less time on history and civics content than was typical decades ago. ... It’s an exaggeration to say that only what gets tested is what gets taught, but it’s not too far from the truth."

“The primary risk of free community college is that we will focus too much on price, and not enough on quality. … The risk is that the fiscal burden of free tuition will cause legislators to cut appropriations over time.”

"In student affairs, conventional wisdom tells us that we have six weeks to set the tone for the student experience. But what if we overestimated that window of opportunity? In a 2018 study that I conducted, I found that we have ten days. At most. Which means that orientation really matters."

"I’m not saying we’ve done a great job in the past. I’m just saying we haven’t created a crisis. We’ve just created a very stable level of mediocrity."

"For young children, it’s good to engage them with letters and letter combinations, or anything that’s related to reading, the earlier the better."

"You can be wounded but still have assets, dreams and hopes. Healing-centered engagement involves a more holistic way to support young people who experience trauma."

"If we continue to isolate learning from the rest of what life is, it will be disastrous. We need to reintegrate learning into life."

"When we engage with each other, our deficit-based mindsets about each other disappear."

"It’s not just thinking about what they need to do to reduce their impact on the environment but also thinking about what they need to do to adapt to a changing climate."

"I didn’t realize how even small changes to a system can produce outsized responses. It taught me an early lesson that any change you make will get pushback."

"I think if people want to come for you, they're going to come for you. I think the question is, why?"

"The money did contribute to the recovery, [but] could the money have had a bigger impact? Yes."

"Education can and should remain central, but we need to be very open to the form that education will take — from cradle to grave, with new kinds of roles, expertise, and options."

"With national politics dominating the discourse in education, it can be challenging for leaders to discern the true desires and concerns of their local communities. Politically savvy education leaders must regularly communicate what they are doing — and why — in plain language, while listening to and learning from more than the loudest voices."

"People in Boston, then as now, felt like they were entitled to have good, safe, nearby schools in their neighborhoods. For many parents, Black and white, the idea of busing their children to a far-away, possibly unsafe school was outrageous."

"High achievers aren’t born knowing that they want to become teachers or they’re not born knowing that teaching isn’t an appropriate career path for them. They learn it and they relearn it through a number of signals that are built into their interactions with family and friends."

"Effective education leaders must be proactive if they are to ensure a safe and supportive learning environment for every child while preserving their own integrity."

"People in general often behave in closed-minded ways, as is all too apparent in today’s world, and people high in cognitive ability turn out to be just as often closed-minded as those lower in cognitive ability, investing their ‘smarts’ in, for instance, more elaborate arguments on their favoured side of a matter."

"Summer is the most underused — and unequal — time of year educationally. I hope this study inspires more school districts to expand their summer learning options."

"On every campus there are people with both good ideas and an openness to change beyond the incremental. Too often, however, they run quickly into a wall of intransigence and retreat back into the safety of well-established practices."