The day after the 2016 US presidential election, a dean asked me whether we should send a campuswide email reminding students that the counseling center could help them through distress. Within a year, alumni asked our college president to speak out about federal policy changes that did not affect our campus. Later, students pleaded for the college’s social media accounts to condemn students whom they considered racist—without any investigation.
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
