The past academic year has not been a good one for college and university leaders. Leaders at all levels are responding to crises such as state-mandated changes to DEI policies, student and faculty protests of the enmeshment of institutional funds with the state of Israel and its military apparatus and the ongoing killing of Palestinians in Gaza, and financial worries stemming from changes in enrollment demographics. Not only are the issues to manage coming rapidly at leaders, but their responses are also undergoing deeper scrutiny from a broader swath of the public.
Beyond the Credential Factory: Why Higher Education Must Shift from Management to Flourishing
For decades, higher education leadership has obsessed over “student success” as a purely operational metric. We track retention and graduation rates and postgraduation outcomes with the same linear precision that
Yoshitaka Iwasaki
August 3, 2026
