Defending Higher Education with Kevin McClure

On two recent episodes of this podcast, we talked about an essay titled "Higher Ed Is Adrift" by Kevin McClure. In the essay, Kevin outlines some of the many attacks the current U.S. presidential administration is leveraging against higher ed, and he notes that many faculty and staff are finding their institutional leaders' responses lacking. 

Today on the show, I talk with Kevin McClure, who is a professor of higher education and chair of educational leadership at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, about his essay and the responses it has generated. Kevin comes to this conversation as a faculty member and as a former student affairs staffer and as someone who studies higher education. He’s the author of a new book, The Caring University: Reimagining the Higher Education Workplace After the Great Resignation, published this year by Johns Hopkins University Press. In our conversation, we talk about individual and collective action in the current moment, higher ed’s “communication battle,” and his advice for academic leaders.

Episode Resources

Kevin McClure’s website

The Caring University: Reimagining the Higher Education Workplace After the Great Resignation, Kevin McClure, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025

“Higher Ed Is Adrift,” Kevin McClure, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 25, 2025

“Five Steps to Defend Higher Ed,” Kevin McClure, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 3, 2025

Transcript

Derek Bruff: 0:00

Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff.

Derek Bruff: 0:15

Regular listeners know that on two of my recent Take It or Leave It panel episodes of the podcast, my guests and I discussed an essay called Higher EdI is Adrift, a written by Kevin McClure and published in the Chronicle of Higher Education in April 2025. In the essay, Kevin outlines some of the many attacks the current U.S. presidential administration is leveraging against higher ed, from ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, to canceling ongoing research grants, to making it very hard to attract and keep international students. And that was written before they started pressuring higher ed presidents to quit. Kevin notes that many faculty and staff in higher ed are looking to their leaders in this moment to, well, lead, and they're hearing crickets. My Take It or Leave It panelists and I had lots to say about this essay and about how individuals and institutions can respond to this current, very challenging moment in higher ed.

Derek Bruff: 1:09

I reached out to Kevin McClure, who is a professor of higher ed and chair of educational leadership at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, to see if he would come on the show to talk about his essay, and the responses it has generated. He was very glad to do so, and I'm excited to share our conversation here on the podcast today. Kevin comes to this conversation as a faculty member, but also as a former student affairs staffer and as someone who studies higher education. He's the author of a new book, The Caring University, Reimagining the Higher Education Workplace After the Great Resignation, published this year from Johns Hopkins University Press. In our conversation, we talk about individual and collective action in the current moment, higher ed’s “communication battle,” and his advice for academic leaders.

Derek Bruff: 1:45

Before we go to the interview, I’d like to remind listeners that I send out an email newsletter most weeks on Thursday or Friday, and I’d love to have you subscribe. You can do so by visiting derekbruff.org or following the link in the show notes. Now, my conversation with Kevin McClure, author of The Caring University.

Derek Bruff: 2:14

Thank you so much for being on Intentional Teaching. I'm very excited to talk to you today about your new book and about the state of higher education today. Thanks for being here.

Kevin McClure: 2:22

I am very excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Derek Bruff: 2:26

I'll start with my usual opening question. I think it helps us get to know our guests a little bit here on the show. Can you tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to be an educator?

Kevin McClure: 2:38

I love this question. I have been on multiple podcasts and nobody has ever asked a question like this, so I'm excited to answer it. I am the child of a teacher. My mom was a special education teacher in Canton City Schools for over 30 years. and single parent household. And so I grew up in schools. When I was not in school as a student, I was often at schools with her. One of my very, very earliest memories actually was before she started her full-time teaching job, she was doing part-time adult literacy education connected to a church ministry and i remember being in the church while she was doing um literacy education for for adults um and so you know that was just a formative part of my childhood my best friend's mom was a teacher in principle and so it was always the case for me that this was honorable work and something that i i looked up to teachers and and saw them as mentors and just kind of pillars in in my personal life the pillars in our community as well was blessed to have an incredible incredible history teacher in high school absolutely loved the study of history and so as i entered college i always had in the back of my mind the idea that i might be a history teacher and so I studied history. That was my major. I also studied Spanish. In Virginia at the time, I don't know if this is still the case, there wasn't an education major. You would study your content area and then you would minor in education. I actually did everything to be a teacher short of student teaching as part of my undergraduate education. There was just always something there about wanting to be an educator, being a part of students' lives. And I ended up going in a different path, slightly different path. So I ended up going into graduate school for student affairs right after my undergraduate career, spent time as a staff member in higher education. before pursuing my doctorate and becoming a faculty member teaching in a higher education administration program. And so I got to teaching eventually, but even early on as a staff member, I was doing teaching with alternative break programs and I worked for a living learning program. And so there is something of a continuity there where I've just always really loved being in the classroom.

Derek Bruff: 5:39

Yeah. Well, and that's a really interesting perspective to have been in student affairs for a time and now move to a faculty position. Well, and I think that's a nice segue to the essay I want to talk with you about today that you published in the Chronicle of Higher Ed back in April, Higher Education is Adrift. And I won't ask you to kind of recap the whole essay, but I'm going to quote a line and then ask you to kind of elaborate a little bit here. One of the defining features of working through this moment is feeling rudderless or adrift, feeling like our institutions have suddenly lost their sense of identity or direction. And you're really speaking to this moment in 2025 when higher education is facing a whole new set of challenges, largely as a result of the new US presidential administration and their actions. And you say that we're rudderless and adrift. And I'm wondering, as you talk to faculty and staff, what does that look like? What does it look like for faculty and staff working in higher ed right now?

Kevin McClure: 6:43

Yeah, there's a couple of different levels that we can, along which we can think about this. One is more at an individual level. And for me, even speaking personally, there have been a lot of moments over these last couple of months where I have been uncertain about what my immediate steps are What does a logical response or a necessary response to this moment look like? And so there is a certain sense for me, even personally, of having felt somewhat rudderless in the sense of, I know that I am feeling upset. I'm feeling angry. I'm feeling disappointed. I haven't always known how to channel that. into meaningful action. So there's that sense. And then at the institutional sense, I think many of us have felt as if it's unclear what our institutions stand for. And that presents its own type of being rudderless or adrift because it's unclear kind of what's anchoring us. what are the things that we believe in what are the values that we're going to stand by and to what extent are those values steadfast versus values that are malleable or something that will shift rather easily with political dynamics and financial expediency and so that's the other way in which i've been thinking about this where And the two are related to some extent. I think if I were to work in an organization that I had a much stronger sense of, this is what we're all about, these are the things that we're going to fight for, it might allow me or enable me in a different way to say, okay, then this is the project that I'm part of too. And I can see how my work fits within that. However, in the absence of that at an institutional level, again, it kind of then trickles down and it falls on individuals to try to sort out, well, what am I going to do? And my institution is opting to not really do anything or to be silent. And so I don't feel like that's an option. So I'm going to have to figure out how to do this by myself. Now, I have since, you know, come to a place of learning and in conversation with other people where it is not the case that you have to go it alone or figure this out all by yourself. But there are some moments in there where you feel that a lot of this has been individualized. And I have a lot of admiration for the people who in this moment woke up and said, I knew this was coming. I know exactly what I'm doing and where I'm going. But that's not where I was at. And so I've had to do a lot of reflection and learning.

Derek Bruff: 9:47

Stacey Johnson gave some very good advice. Find the people who thrive in times of crisis like this one and channel some of that energy or at least see what they're doing and support them. I'm not someone constantly imagining worst case scenarios, but I know people who are and they often have less anxiety when the worst case actually shows up. So I often look to them for leadership. Something else you wrote in your Chronicle essay was this. Colleges are having an incredibly difficult time articulating their values, let alone protecting them from an onslaught of attacks from the new administration. When we discussed that line in our first panel, Brian Dewsbury asked a question that put a fine point on it. How did we so decisively lose that communication battle? How do you answer that question?

Kevin McClure: 10:42

It's a great question. I think there's internal communication versus external communication. And one of the challenges I think higher education faces is that we are largely using the same communication strategy for both, which is to say we often, I think, use our externally oriented communication strategy even internally. And those should be different. They are different audiences. And so we are trying to kind of get faculty and staff on board with what is sometimes mainly a marketing campaign, when in reality, we need to be having a different kind of conversation with our own people about who we are, how we want to go about our work and how we are going to work together, how we are going to treat one another. Those are what our values as an organization are all about. Our values as an organization, arguably, have nothing to do with other people out there. This is about how we are going to do our work, how we are going to show up for one another, and it's what guides us internally. And then we may decide that we have a different type of narrative or story that we want to share externally. But to be honest with you, obviously there's a place for effective storytelling and having a narrative out there. I have some questions around whether that's really the core issue here. I do think that a lot of what needs to happen begins with us internally as organizations, that we start by building trust internally, and then it is able to radiate externally, which is to say when we get excellence as organizations in our processes, in our teaching, and therefore in some of our outcomes, trust externally is much easier to come by. But the other piece of this that's really important is you have to have, to some extent, a public that is willing to listen to and accept the story. And in the current information economy, I just don't think that it's there. And so we can tell the story until we're blue in the face, but I just don't know that the audience is willing to receive it. And so it doesn't mean we give up on that project. I think there are likely some very, very gifted people who know what they're doing in that space and are really thinking about how we might rebuild trust with the public. I tend to think that our focus ought to be on building trust within our organizations first, strengthening the work that we do with each other, and I believe through that we might see dividends externally. But that question around how we so thoroughly lost that communication battle is one that in my opinion, has been thrusted upon institutions. And it is not purely institutions that are involved in this. We've got, of course, technology and social media and policymakers and popular media. We are one player in this ecosystem. And yet so often, people in higher ed, people adjacent to higher ed, pundits, they want to say institutions are really flubbing this. And Why can't they get this communication thing right and just tell people about their value? Listen, you can put billboards up and radio ads and TV spots and do everything under the sun and have a really charismatic leader, and we're still going to have a large slice of the American public that thinks that we are indoctrinating people. It's not the case necessarily, I think, that we have so thoroughly lost the battle per se, I think that we are, as I said, just one entity in a whole hub. And on some level, we're going to need the other entities in the ecosystem to figure out to what extent they're ready to accept the importance of higher education in American life. There is a role to play in higher education, certainly. about making sure there's value there to begin with and communicating that value. I'm not saying that we abandon that. I just think that we put an awful lot of onus on institutions to justify their existence and to say this is important stuff and we ought to be investing in it. And we are not necessarily having the same conversation about all of these other entities that are constantly undermining and critiquing and saying that this is a waste. Um, and so I think that's, there's a problem there as a society when we have so thoroughly abandoned just the slightest sense of possibility that what we're doing in higher education is good and worthwhile and valuable. Right,

Derek Bruff: 15:52

I'm reminded of what I often tell faculty who are maybe teaching a class that deals with hard issues around race or gender and We're teaching that class in a culture that has lots of complicated, hard things to say about race and gender. And so there's only so much of that dynamic you can affect in your own classroom because you're in this much greater environment. And so similarly, higher ed, particularly individual institutions. And in fact, I imagine there are a lot of individual institutions that are doing a great job communicating their value to their local communities but that's not the discourse that's shaping events right now, right?

Kevin McClure: 16:34

For sure, yeah. And I think part of it too is obviously there is this regional, national, global sort of bubbling effect that goes on. I do genuinely believe that if you were to ask most people in my community of Wilmington, North Carolina, if the University of North Carolina, Wilmington is valuable, they would say yes, and that they have confidence in the institution. They send their kids to our summer camps. They attend our sporting events. They get their MBAs there. So it's still a thing. It is a fabric of the community. But then you ask them a general question about higher ed, and it's so much easier at that point to tap into the tropes and to say, I don't know, maybe they are too woke or... they've abandoned meritocracy or these other things that you've read about. And so in some cases, perhaps this continues to be a lesson for us that a lot of this work should remain local. And the more that we can continue to develop relationships, do good work in our communities, it may help to, over time, counter some of those narratives.

Derek Bruff: 17:51

Well, I want to shift gears, but still play with metaphors a little bit, because you ended your piece in the Chronicle with this metaphor. If things are very not normal, perhaps it's time for all of us to paddle perpendicular to the prevailing flow and try out new ways of being and doing. Now, you ended your piece with that, and it was a great ending, but you didn't elaborate on what that might mean much. So what might that look like, this perpendicular paddling?

Kevin McClure: 18:21

yeah so first of all some of your previous guests had put forward a really interesting idea which is that well to take it take a step back okay so i'm in coastal north carolina i'm surrounded by water all the time so water metaphor has come in a lot i was talking about when you are in the water and there's a rip current the guidance that you get is do not try to swim against the currents to try to get closer to shore you exhaust yourself and and that's not a good situation to be in. And instead, the guidance is that you should swim out of the current by swimming kind of perpendicular to the shore. And then that will enable you to get closer back towards the shore. So that was the metaphor I was playing with. And one of your guests made the very good point, which is this is kind of assuming that you're going alone. But maybe as a collective, as a group, if we are paddling against the current and fighting the good fight, that we might be able to get through that current and find ourselves in a place that we're collectively happy with. I think that's a great idea and something that I fully subscribe to that we ought to be doing more as a collective. And I'm not saying that that means that we are joining up necessarily with hundreds of people. It could be something as simple as starting to have conversations with the people that we're closest to and you know starting book circles thinking about what it would look like to try to develop one small initiative at our institution around educating folks connect about principles of academic freedom or something along those lines what i was thinking about as part of this was in a lot of ways my existing playbook about what kind of faculty member i am what kind of leader i am may not match the moment and and that may be part of the reason why i was personally feeling unsure about what to do because my go-to is generally to sit back and be observant try to ensure that i am creating space for nuance and that In many cases, I'm much more heavily focused on my own family and my colleagues and my own little space and doing good work there. And I was simply wondering if maybe my go-to and maybe other people's go-to is not sufficient right now and that we might need to get uncomfortable and try out some other things. So... Case in point, there's been conversations on my own campus about starting an AAUP chapter, not as a union because we can't collectively bargain, but a chapter that serves an organizing purpose. And that still is slightly uncomfortable territory for me because I am not by nature someone that is generally involved in advocacy. I am much more of a introverted academic than perhaps my public persona might suggest. And so I have been involved in some of those early conversations about seeing what it would look like to start something like this, even though it makes me uncomfortable to some extent, because I suppose there's a part of me that just isn't convinced that the status quo is going to protect what I really value. And I'm concerned enough about people close to me i'm concerned enough about higher education institutions that perhaps we need to try out some new things and that that could be that's going to look different for each person but but they're that's that's what i was thinking about when i said we might have to paddle perpendicular

Derek Bruff: 22:32

one of the things i really appreciated you wrote a follow-up piece um kind of that was that explored this, kind of what can you do as an individual in this moment. And you talked to Karen Costa and Jessica Riddell and others whose voices I respect a lot. And one of the suggestions that came out of those conversations was to lean into your strengths. And I have found that helpful to say, what am I good at in this space? I can podcast. I know I could do that well, right? So how could I use that set of strengths and skills to make some small difference in the current challenge, right? And so that's why I'm talking to you. That's why I did these panels, right? And it's what I'm hearing from you now, which is, I think, very helpful is to say, what are your strengths and how might you turn those into actions?

Kevin McClure: 23:28

Right.

Derek Bruff: 23:28

not to just lean into your strengths, but to think about how might I repurpose these a little bit so that I am coming from a place of strength and confidence, but I'm channeling it in maybe a direction I haven't channeled it before.

Kevin McClure: 23:41

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. You know, in a lot of ways, what they were advising was bees don't have to be huge leaps for you because they're likely going to be less likely successful or maybe less sustainable if you were to do that and so for me personally for example i am not yet someone that you're likely going to find at a protest and that doesn't mean that it would never happen or that i haven't considered it but but it's not something that i i generally am doing and find comfortable my wheelhouse what where i find where i get a lot of strength or where i'm able to exercise my strength more is in being kind of a voice of calm, bridging folks that may be coming from different perspectives. And so what that looks like for me on a personal level is I'm heavily involved in my faculty senate. There are these kind of initial conversations around an AAUP chapter. I will likely be a bit of a bridge between, I have very close relationships with our campus administration. I don't mind inhabiting these spaces, where there might be conflicts in some cases, but I have relationships across the board and I can say, I don't think that we're that far off here. I think that there is common ground here and ways that we can compliment each other. And so that's a way that I'm going to try to lean into my strengths. Similar to you, having some voice out there where I'm writing and trying to pose good questions for us, trying to bring forward some practical solutions that could be helpful. That's a strength that I'm hoping to be able to leverage. Most days, it doesn't feel like enough. But I am trying to listen to the voices of the people that I spoke to who said, I think that those types of voices in your head that this isn't enough are the types of kind of self-defeating cynicism that's going to get us into trouble and keep us stalled.

Derek Bruff: 25:57

So I do want to push on this a little bit more because one thing I noticed was that your second essay that I referred to, Five Steps to Defend Higher Ed, did focus on individual actions. But your new book, The Caring University, is very much about institutional action. and institutional culture and institutional policies, right? Things that happen at the community or the system level. And so, is it going to take institutional action to kind of change the situation? Where's the limit of kind of what we can do as individuals and where institutions and institutional leaders need to do something?

Kevin McClure: 26:44

First of all, how dare you push me like this to contend with my own ideas. No, this is a central tension in my work, something that I face all the time, which is to say, so in my work on the higher education workplace, and one of the core ideas that I advance in the Caring University is when we're looking at research on workplace problems in higher education, I think you can locate many of those problems at an organizational level which is to say they are a function of our organizational structures and our cultures and if we're going to devise solutions we ought to be thinking organizationally about those solutions as opposed to kind of pushing everything to individuals but perfectly valid question to say okay but i'm an individual what do i do what what are you suggesting that i do in this space and so one of the things that i say is that we first of all, have a tendency to kind of conflate institutions with like a collection of buildings. And the reality is that we are the institution. Our collective action is the institution. The relationships that we build with students, this is the work of a university. And so when we are talking about institutional action, I think what I'm largely talking about here is collections of people at the institution who are to continue the paddling metaphor, we're kind of paddling in the same direction. And that's what institutional action looks like, to say, we have decided that this is important, we have maybe put some resources towards it, and we have a collection of people across the organization at various levels, various units, that are all paddling in the same direction towards this goal. And so, ideally, that's what we would see in a very kind of mission-driven, values-anchored sort of way from institutions, whether the thing that we're valuing is the employee experience or the thing that we're valuing is the role of higher education in a democratic society. It's a similar dynamic. The other thing that I talk about is similar to what we just were discussing, even if I think that we need to be thinking organizationally, and devising solutions that kind of speak to our structures and our culture, there is always an individual zone of action. And whether, you know, for example, I'm going to step in as a department chair, position notorious for people feeling like you are stuck in the middle, largely have very little authority, you're yelled at from above, you're yelled at from below. And yet, And yet I can see already that there is zone of action here where I am able to take some of what I have learned in working on the Caring University, the types of changes I'm proposing, the principles on which they are based, and to say, I can see space, I can see little areas where I'm able to bring this to fruition. And yes, this is my little corner of my academic building, but there's nothing to suggest that I can't then have conversations with other department chairs and to say, here's what we're trying. We're seeing some progress here. What would it look like for you all to also experiment with this and see what happens?

Derek Bruff: 30:09

What about university leaders, the folks that are in the provost and president's office? What advice would you give them right now, particularly for supporting the faculty and staff that work for them?

Kevin McClure: 30:23

Yeah, it's a great question. I'm glad that you brought this up because even though I say there's a zone of action for everyone, we as a collective, are the university there is a special responsibility that leaders take on and a central idea of care ethics is we are attending to and addressing the needs of the people for whom we have assumed a special responsibility and leadership is the assumption of a special responsibility My contention throughout this book is that leaders especially have a role to play in attempting to bring the Caring University to fruition, which is to say that they have a special role to play in trying to prioritize the well-being of staff and faculty. What I'm trying to say is there is a long stretch of time in here where I don't know that we have done a great job of owning that we have responsibilities as employers. For a long time, I think we said, we are creating jobs. We have lots of people who want those jobs. We maybe create a good experience for people, maybe not, but there's always more people who are willing to take those jobs. And so we've done our end of it, we're good to go. And instead I'm saying, no, we have a responsibility as employers to ensure that these are places that are striving for continuous improvement where people feel a sense of dignity and mattering where it's possible for them to foresee a career path or a future and they are able to you know make a life make a life in the community and and to afford that and so my One message that I would give to leaders is simply that we have a responsibility to pay closer attention to the employee experience. And so I lay out some practical recommendations around what that can look like. One of those very simply is doing a better job at the organizational level of listening to employees and getting a better sense of who are our employees, what is their experience like in higher education, and what does that data help us do or focus our efforts on in a different kind of way. Another key message of this book is that so much of this hinges on having good, caring leaders. And as such, we need to rethink the way that we are nurturing and supporting people who step into leadership roles. We treat people in leadership roles like garbage. And there are going to be faculty listening to this who say, no, that is not true. Look at how much we pay them. And I say, that is a terrible way of framing this because it actually, it becomes this spiral that does not help us at all because we say, because we pay them so much, we should work them like crazy. And then we say, because they work so much and we work them like crazy, of course, we have to pay them more to attract people into these positions. We're having trouble convincing people to step into these roles because the jobs are insane and they're demanding. Therefore, we need to pay them more. It becomes this cycle and you talk to leaders and so many of them would say, I'm willing to not make as much money if this job was more reasonable and there was even a modicum of compassion for stepping into this. And so, Another really important message for leaders as part of this is that when I'm thinking about kind of reimagining the higher education workplace and prioritizing the well-being of employees, I am not thinking of employees as separate from leaders. I am thinking about how these changes are good for all of us, inclusive of leaders. And so if we had any chance of pulling off some of the organizational changes I have in mind, we need good people in those leadership roles who feel supported, who have been prepared, who are not feeling like they are just kind of the organizational toxin handler. And so that means that all of us, therefore, faculty and staff included, likely need to kind of take a good hard look at our own mental models around higher education leadership and say, who is this serving? Who is this mental model serving? And is it worth questioning our own thinking around some of this and saying you know what there might be a different way of thinking about this that that serves those folks better but in so doing actually serves us all better

Derek Bruff: 35:26

well i'm going to ask one more question if you've got a couple more minutes and this is kind of a hard question um but i but i've been hearing it asked and so i'd like to get your take on this what would you say to a faculty or staff member Who is maybe now for the first time considering a career outside of higher ed? Because this is a different landscape we're in right now.

Kevin McClure: 35:50

For sure. So honest answer is I don't begrudge anyone who is considering options, who might be thinking about a plan B. developing skills that could be helpful to them in a different career or a different industry, asking questions about what the right fit is for them. I think the onus is on us as organizations and for those of us that are working at organizations to create opportunities for people. and to demonstrate through our practices how this is a space where you can grow, where your talent will be recognized, and where you can expect to be compensated in such a way that you can make a living here. If we don't do that, then we don't simply get to keep people or simply appeal to passion or vocation, there has to be more than that. There has to be more than that. And these, I think, are some of the realities of being a human and living in a society. And so if folks have tried to make a go of this, they put time in, they have invested in themselves and invested in institutions, and they are finding an organization that is just simply not living up to the standards that they themselves have set, then I think I understand completely why they may look elsewhere. And so what I guess I'll end by saying is I don't want that to happen. I don't want that to happen. I don't want good people to leave. I want... You hear of institutions saying, I want to be a talent magnet. I want us to be a talent magnet. I want the very best and brightest in the world who love students and they love teaching. They love creating. I want them to look at higher ed and say, this is a place unlike any other where I can do good work. And so that's part of our job too. It's not just about the students. It's not just about educating students. If we're going to be any good at that, then we have to do the other stuff too. And so that's what I'm here for.

Derek Bruff: 38:28

That's great. That's great. Well, Kevin, I'm going to leave it with that. That was a beautiful place to end. Thank you so much for spending a little time with us and sharing your perspectives on the current moment in higher ed. I've really appreciated this and I think our listeners will too. Thank you.

Kevin McClure: 38:42

It was a pleasure. Thank you also so much. And Derek, this hopefully is the first of many conversations.

Derek Bruff: 38:49

Yeah, I look forward to it.

Kevin McClure: 38:51

Thanks.

Derek Bruff: 38:54

That was Kevin McClure, professor of higher education and chair of educational leadership at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and author of The Caring University, Reimagining the Higher Education Workplace After the Great Resignation, published this year by Johns Hopkins University Press. See the show notes for links to more about Kevin and his work. Thanks to Kevin for coming on the show to talk about the state of higher ed. I look forward to more conversations in the future.

Derek Bruff: 39:20

I'd love to hear from you, dear listeners, about today's episode. What do you make of higher education’s response to the current political moment? Would you want to hear more episodes like this one that aren’t so squarely focused on teaching and learning? Let me know what you think. You can email me at derek@derekbruff.org or click the link in the show notes, right there on your podcast player, to send me a text message. Just be sure to include your name if you do.

Derek Bruff: 39:23

Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association. In the show notes, you'll find a link to the UPCEA website, where you can find out about their research, networking opportunities, and professional development offerings. This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Bruff. See the show notes for links to my website and socials, and to the Intentional Teaching newsletter, which goes out most weeks on Thursday or Friday. If you found this or any episode of Intentional Teaching useful, would you consider sharing it with a colleague? That would mean a lot. As always, thanks for listening.