George D. Kuh and his research team (Kuh, Kinzie, Schuh & Whitt, 2011) profiled 20 colleges and universities in a study focused on fostering and maintaining student engagement and success. They found four common key conditions for sustaining good work in hard times, the first being that positive restlessness permeated these campuses. Essentially, these successful institutions were rarely satisfied with their performance and engaged in ongoing efforts to improve.
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
