John O. Harney: Update on college news in New England

At Wheaton College, which has done very well in facing COVID-19. Left to right: Emerson Hall, Larcom Hall, Park Hall, Mary Lyon Hall, Knapton Hall and Cole Chapel.

BOSTON

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

Faculty diversity. In the early 1990s, NEBHE, the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) and the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) collaborated to develop the first Compact for Faculty Diversity. Formally launched in 1994, with support from the Ford Foundation and Pew Charitable Trust, the compact focused on five key strategies: motivating states and universities to increase financial support for minorities in doctoral programs; increasing institutional support packages to include multiyear fellowships, along with research and teaching assistantships to promote integration into academic departments and doctoral completion; incentivizing academic departments to create supportive environments for minority students through mentorship; sponsoring an annual institute to build support networks and promote teaching ability; and building collaborations for student recruitment to graduate study. With reduced foundation support, collaboration among the three participating regional education compacts declined, but some core compact activities continued through SREB.

Now, NEBHE and its sister regional compacts are launching a collaborative, nine-month planning process to reinvigorate and expand a national Compact for Faculty Diversity. Under the proposed new compact, NEBHE, the Midwestern Higher Education Compact (MHEC), SREB and WICHE would collaborate to invest in the achievement of diversity, equity and inclusion in faculty and staff at postsecondary institutions in all 50 states. Ansley Abraham, the founding director of the SREB State Doctoral Scholars Program at the SREB, has been instrumental in the design and execution of that initiative. He recently published this short piece in Inside Higher Ed.

Fighting COVID. As the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned of the roughest winter in U.S. public-health history, Wheaton College has stood out. Our Wheaton, in Norton, Mass. (not to be confused with the Wheaton College in Illinois) developed a plan based on science that has kept positive cases low on campus and allowed in-person classes during the fall semester. Wheaton was able to limit the college’s overall fall semester case count to 23 (a .06 positivity rate among 35,000 tests) due to strong protocols, rigorous testing through the Cambridge, Mass.-based Broad Institute and a shared commitment from the community, especially students. In early November, as cases were spiking across the U.S., the private liberal arts college had its own spike of 13 positive cases in one day. But thanks to immediate contact tracing in partnership with the Massachusetts Community Tracing Collaborative, only one positive case resulted after that day, notes President Dennis Hanno. Part of Wheaton’s success owes to its twice-a-week testing throughout the semester. The college also credits its work with the for-profit In-House Physicians to complement internal staff in managing on-campus testing and quarantine/isolation housing.

New England in D.C. The COVID-19 crisis should make national health positions crucial. Earlier this week, President-elect Joe Biden tapped Dr. Rochelle Walensky, an infectious disease physician at Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, to lead the CDC and Dr. Vivek Murthy, who attended Harvard and Yale and did his residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, to be surgeon general. They’ll work with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor and College of the Holy Cross graduate who has served six presidents.

Last month, as Biden’s transition team began drawing on the nation’s colleges and universities to prepare to take the reins of government, we flashed back to a 2009 NEJHE piece when Barack Obama was stocking his first administration. “As they form their White House brain trusts, new presidents tend to mine two places for talent: their home states and New England—especially New England’s universities, and especially Harvard,” we noted at the time. Most recently, two New England Congresswomen have scored big promotions on Capitol Hill. Rosa DeLauro (D.-Conn.) became Appropriations chair and Katherine Clark (D.-Mass.) was elected assistant speaker of the House. Richard Neal (D.-Mass.) was already chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.

Indebted. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D.-Mass.), long a champion of canceling student debt, called on Biden to take executive action to cancel student loan debt. “All on his own, President-elect Biden will have the ability to administratively cancel billions of dollars in student loan debt using the authority that Congress has already given to the secretary of education,” she told a Senate Banking Committee hearing. “This is the single most effective economic stimulus that is available through executive action.” About 43 million Americans have a combined total of $1.5 trillion in federal student loan debt. Such debt has been shown to discourage big purchases, growth of new businesses and rates of home ownership among other life milestones. Warren has outlined a plan in which Biden can cancel up to $50,000 in federal student loan debt for borrowers.

Jobless recovery? Everyone knew the public health crisis would be accompanied by an economic crisis. This week, Moody’s Investors Service projected that the 2021 outlook for the U.S. higher-education sector remains negative, as the coronavirus pandemic continues to threaten enrollment and revenue streams. The sector’s operating revenue will decline by 5 percent to 10 percent over the next year, Moody’s projected. The pace of economic recovery remains uncertain, and some universities have issued or refinanced debt to bolster liquidity. (As this biting piece notes, “Just as decreased state funding has caused students to go into debt to cover tuition and fees, universities have taken on debt to keep their doors open.”)

The name of the game for many higher education institutions (HEIs) is coronavirus relief money from the federal government. NEBHE has written letters to Congress calling for increased relief based on the many New England students and families struggling with reduced incomes or job loss and the costs associated with resuming classes that were significantly higher than anticipated. These costs have been growing based on regular virus testing, contact tracing, health monitoring, quarantining, building reconfigurations, expanded health services, intensified cleaning and the ongoing transition to virtual learning. Citing data from the National Student Clearinghouse, NEBHE estimated that New England’s institutions in all sectors lost tuition and fee revenue of $413 million. And that’s counting only revenue from tuition and fees. Most institutions also face additional budget shortfalls due to lost auxiliary revenues (namely, from room and board) and the high costs of compliance with new health regulations and the administration of COVID-19 tests to students, faculty and staff. (When the relief money is spent and by whom is important too. Tom Brady’s sports performance company snagged a Paycheck Protection Program loan of $960,855 in April.) Anna Brown, an economist at Emsi, told our friends at the Boston Business Journal that higher-ed staffers working in dorms, maintenance roles, housing and food services have been hit hard, and faculty will not be far behind

Admissions blast from the past. I’ve overheard too many conversations lately with reference to “testing” and wondered if the subject was COVID testing or interminable academic exams. Given admissions tests being de-emphasized by colleges, we were reminded me of a 10-year-old piece by Tufts University officials on how novel admissions questions would move applicants to flaunt their creativity. The authors told of how “Admissions officers use Kaleidoscope, as well as the other traditional elements of the application, to rate each applicant on one or more of four scales: wise thinking, analytical thinking, practical thinking and creative thinking.” Could be their moment?

Anti-wokism. The U.S. Department of Education held “What is to be Done? Confronting a Culture of Censorship on Campus” on Dec. 8 (presumably not deliberately on the anniversary of John Lennon’s assassination). The hook was to unveil the department’s “Free Speech Hotline” to take complaints of campus violations. The event organizers contended that “Due to strong demand, the event capacity has been increased!” The department’s Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education Robert King began noting that we’ll hear from “victims of cancel culture’s pernicious compact” where generally “administrators cave to the mob and punish the culprit.” He noted, “Coming  just behind this are Communist-style re-education camps” and assured the audience that the department has launched several investigations into these kinds of offenses like those that land awkwardly in my inbox from Campus Reform. Universities are no place for “wokism,” one speaker warned, adding that calls for diversity and tolerance actually aim to squelch unpopular opinions.

Welcome dreamers. Last week, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restore the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to how it was before the administration announced plans to end it in September 2017. DACA provides protection against deportation and work authorization to certain undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. DACA participants include many current and former college students. NEBHE issued a statement in support of DACA in September 2017 and has advocated for the initiative’s support.

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

M. Gabriela Torres/Claire Buck/Cary Gouldin: At Wheaton College, making the sudden leap from in-person teaching to virtual

Panorama of Wheaton College’s campus, in the small town of Norton, south of Boston

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

As our computer screens filled with tiny squares of faces of students and faculty alike, we watched them fidget with their chairs and screens and heard their voices ring in our earphones … Social distancing measures took hold at Wheaton College, in Norton, Mass., forcing the same screen encounters that are now spreading across higher education nationwide.

In the wake of the effort to control the rapid spread of COVID-19, the conversations we have been having with students and faculty are not as different as you might imagine. Both groups described new contexts in which they would be learning: now sharing confined spaces at home with others, unable to have all the answers they needed to understand the future of their work, working through the differences among themselves and the others who now inhabited their unexpectedly virtual classes.

The virtual technologies for connection have included many tools that are now ubiquitous in higher education such as Google Meet and Zoom, a doubling down on course-management system use (in our case, Moodle), shared documents and worksheets, as well as immediate connection tools such as slack and project management tools like Trello.

But perhaps most importantly, this transition has enabled us to see continuity in three key issues that Wheaton’s Center for Collaborative Teaching and Learning (CCTL) has been addressing since it launched a year ago: inclusion and diversity, the educator as learner, and the strategic importance of centers for teaching and learning in the educational mission of colleges and universities.

When students were surveyed about their access to technology, their ability to focus on school projects in their relocated settings and changes in their autonomy to manage their schedule, the inequalities were stark. While some students had stable connections and multiple devices, others were only able to access phones and had no privacy. Similarly, as we got a sense of faculty familiarity with technology and how the changes compelled by social distancing affected child and elder care, it became clear that the move to remote teaching and learning was fraught with inequities.

Differences in access arising from a wide variety of inequalities are always present in higher education, and the transition to our work in the cloud only clarified these. Our work in a close-knit liberal arts college with a social justice bent moved us to pay attention to inclusion. The CCTL was already mandated in its mission to focus on inclusion. To this end, we regularly work with the educators in our college to maximize the access for all learners in classrooms and co-educational spaces such as peer advising and residential life leadership trainings. We work based on the idea that to enable inclusive teaching, we begin by viewing ourselves as learners.

In the past two weeks, we have lost our ability to ignore how much we need to learn about technology and the changing world, but most importantly, to learn about one another. Reframing educators as learners central to our mission was no longer a difficult sell. In the transition to remote teaching, learning to sustain connections with our students is critical as we manage the need for physical distance. A college like ours that has for the past 186 years prided itself as being a community where relationships between faculty and students are fostered and valued is remaking itself anew driven by the need to sustain our connections—albeit, now at a distance. To honor our legacy, our work in teaching and learning is focused on the intentional creation of connection and community. Today, in the midst of physical distancing measures that have been misnamed as “social distance,” and the isolation of lockdowns, this heritage is more important than ever.

A humanized virtual experience

Strategically, our problem became less about learning the tools to make us virtual and more about creating courses where students and faculty alike have the possibility of being successful through a rapidly morphing global crisis. In other words, our problem was how to create a more humanized virtual educational experience that enables our students and us to withstand the unknowns that are to come.

To provide a sustainable and humanized educational experience, the work of the CCTL is grounded on our values: We view our students as full persons, we prioritize our relationships and collaboration with each other, and sustain our commitment to thoughtful and impactful teaching.

In practice, this has meant that, in less than a week, we consulted individually with 25 percent of our faculty with more consultations scheduled in the weeks ahead. We have also facilitated a network of colleagues willing to support their peers with learning new technologies—relationships that we hope will yield as much community as they do technological capacity. Our approach is based on the understanding that proficiency in software tools is not the same as knowing how to use tools to further pedagogical goals. Next week, we begin communities of practice where we can discuss pedagogical strategies as they emerge. Pedagogical practices will require sharing, problem solving and iterative revision as we transition to remote teaching that communities of practice enable. Before COVID-19, Wheaton College did not offer any online courses with regularity. Supporting educators as fully social persons at a time of physical distance, we believe will yield fruit in the student experience.

Though the strategic work of our CTL has moved quickly constructing offerings curated tools, a menu of pedagogical strategies in the span of a week, and one-on-one support, our pre-existing toolkit focused on inclusion, collaboration and connection has been invaluable to our rapid take off.

We have worked to assuage what one college termed “the pressure of feeling that you have to go at it alone.” This work has involved colleagues at all stages of online-readiness. We work with colleagues who have decades of excellence in teaching but who are now just learning to turn on the camera on their computers, as well as with colleagues who are ambitiously trying to recreate classroom discussions through novel use of collaborative mapping tools such as Mural. In both cases, the work we do together revolves around core values: how to teach effectively and compassionately, and keeping the varied student experience that each approach will yield at the center of our concern.

The value of a pedagogy focus offered to colleges and universities by centers for teaching and learning has, in our experience, provided a sense of calm and clarity. Instead of fearing new technologies, our one-to-one approach to a pedagogy-centered transition gave faculty members we heard from the agency they had originally thought they had lost in moving to the cloud. Enabling colleagues to repurpose their expertise as teachers, albeit in a different venue, empowered one colleague to now feel that she can “continue to find the right balance for my students.” Finding balance can sometimes be a challenge, one that she realized she is familiar with in a face-to-face class. In both settings, online and traditional, we balance tools to best support our students’ learning.

M. Gabriela Torres, Claire Buck and Cary Gouldin are co-directors of the Center for Collaborative Teaching and Learning at Wheaton College.

Ferocious in fiber

“Dream Team: Forrest Bess, Cave Painter, and Hieronymous Bosch’’ (textile), by Caroline Wells Chandler, at Wheaton College’s Beard and Weil Galleries, Norton, Mass., Jan. 30-March 28.

This show features the unique textile work of seven contemporary artists, Caroline Wells Chandler, Pilar Sans Coover, Gabrielle Ferreira, Sean Paul Gallegos, Sarah E. Jenkins, Saberah Malik and Sarah Zapata.

Touba Ghadessi: We must rethink the dialogue on the role of the humanities

16th Century anatomist Andreas Vesalius has lessons for talking about the humanities.

Via The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

NORTON, Mass.

As we see more U.S. higher education institutions dropping their humanities majors, we also read about the need for academia to actively defend the humanities. A number of colleges, including my own, are linking humanities and liberal arts majors with career-preparation programs. Some welcome this trend. Others view it as another reason to defend the traditional teachings of humanities in an era of change.

Many of us may ask ourselves: Exactly what is the role of the humanities in higher education and in American society in 2018? And why all this defending?

It’s no secret that we live in a careerist age. We may actually want to use this notion of professionalism to reassess the path that we humanists in academia are following. Already, I hear the cries of my colleagues at colleges and universities across the country, claiming that the drop in the numbers of students and the threat to funding requires a defensive approach if we are to survive. It’s less a need to defend turf, they argue, and more a calling to protect the classical legacy of inquiry in its purest form.

I know. I too am, at heart, an intellectual who can spend hours musing on etymological differences and their significance or on the elegant complexities of an intricate iconological program. I understand why defense matters and I also have a good sense of how that translates on the ground. When I am interviewed on the radio, or when I speak to senators and representatives in Congress, I understand the need for direct talking points that can be brought to the floor to defend the intrinsic value of the humanities for successful communities.

Defending the humanities is in the best interest of all in academia, as well as of those who hire and employ college graduates. The truth is, if we don’t stand up for what makes our society intellectually richer and better informed, we will lose ourselves—and lose the respect of other nations by forgetting the responsibility to culture and history that comes with this country’s leading innovative and economic position in the world.

I firmly believe that the humanities offer historical warnings that help us navigate the complex choices we make every day. Without them, we lose our collective memory and are doomed to repeat distressing patterns and endanger our world. Isolationist policies are not new. Repression of the press is not new. The use of popular media to promote specific messages is not new. We have seen what happens when these tactics have been in place—history has given us a road map to behaving with integrity and when we ignore it, ignorance wins.

But a defensive approach is not the only way to protect and promote the humanities. Even though statistics show that students in the humanities are gainfully employed and satisfied with their positions post-graduation, those who lead majors and programs in the humanities are still losing numbers in the classroom. Indeed, we are struggling to prove we are not only relevant but that we are, in fact, as successful as many other fields of study.

Image problems

It’s time to realize that we have a PR problem. And that’s largely on us: humanities faculty. Many of us seem to believe that opening access to knowledge equates to its cheapening, that collaborating with other fields of studies is betraying our expertise, and that sharing resources means we are not valued for our proper worth.

All of us, especially we humanists, must reconsider this, embrace new thinking and spread the word more effectively and more widely to an increasingly varied audience. This is why I am privileged to be the board chair of my state humanities council. It is why I go to Washington, D.C. every year to advocate on the hill for increased National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) funding, because I believe that generating greater visibility and understanding of—and more support for—the humanities will help all of us and our students and make it possible to build better humanities programs. Getting actively involved can change how we see academic responsibility.

The 1965 founding legislation of the NEH recognizes the responsibilities that come with the U.S. holding a commanding position in the world. Among them is the obligation to promote knowledge and creativity, which many presidents have recognized by supporting and increasing NEH allocations, regardless of political party lines. In spite of the ideological war on knowledge waged by the current administration, Congress has recognized the inherent value of the NEH and has in fact increased its budget for this coming year. While this increase is tied to releasing other monies in the federal budget, it nevertheless speaks to the understanding that the NEH serves the common good, for both red and blue states.

Thankfully, the NEH is one of the most economically beneficial programs the federal government has implemented. It costs about $152 million per year, which represents less than 0.002% of the federal budget and less than $0.50 per year per taxpayer. Every dollar spent on the NEH brings back at least $5.

This argument alone should end any discussion regarding the necessity and the validity of investing in the humanities. This plain and clear economic case about return on investment should suffice. However, the defense of the humanities has become an ongoing exercise that grows more convoluted with each passing year. By listing the many reasons that make the humanities worthy of study, we get involved in a zero-sum game where only one field of knowledge, only one set of disciplines can rise to the top, at the detriment of all others.

Inherently, this contradicts everything about academia. Universities were created as a microcosm of the world, a world where knowledge was not to be worshipped as an untouchable and lifeless object, but was meant to ignite debates and fuel passionate exchanges.

The case of Vesalius

As an early modern historian of art and of anatomy, I have the pleasure of examining how knowledge tied to a subject changed from an inchoate idea, to a theoretical exploration, and finally to a demonstrable substantiation. And this knowledge mattered beyond the walls of academe—it changed the world because it was not limited to a restricted set of disciplinary approaches.

In the 16th Century, Andreas Vesalius used the knowledge he had acquired in his public—and private—dissections to produce and publish De humani corporis fabrica (On the fabric of the human body). In doing so, he did not limit himself by looking at the human body only through the lens of Galen’s anatomical works or only through theological disputes over divine purpose. Rather, his compendium combined knowledge he gathered from all these disciplines.

This allowed Vesalius to produce an epistemologically coherent exploration of the human body that set new standards for the understanding of anatomy as we know it today. Because he saw no disciplinary boundaries to his explorations, his understanding grew further.

I realize that a 16th-Century professor of anatomy may seem like an odd choice for a discussion on the importance of the humanities today. And admittedly I did oversimplify both his life’s work and his glaring mistakes. But in Vesalius’s work, we can see how powerful scientific knowledge becomes when it is in dialogue with humanistic fields of study.

As we are pushing for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields to grow, we forget that without an understanding of historical purpose, none of these disciplines can in fact find a lasting place in our world. If we do not determine why we are dissecting a body, accelerating particles or creating software, we fail our students, our colleagues, our fellow citizens. Relationships between various fields of knowledge have not fundamentally changed; we have. We have lost sight of those scholarly partnerships and we—humanists—have wasted our efforts in drafting defensive arguments rather than building collaborative ones.

Why are we in academia in the first place? Surely not to hoard knowledge … not to look inward and justify our own importance while closing our eyes to an ever-changing world. Let us collaborate so that we can educate the next Vesaliuses of this world. And let us welcome interdisciplinary dialogues that move beyond our divisions so that we can allow the humanities to codify and express what our human experience means, in its plentiful, diverse and beautifully chaotic way.

Touba Ghadessi is associate provost for academic administration and faculty affairs at Wheaton College, in Norton, Mass., where she is co-founder of the Wheaton Institute for the Interdisciplinary Humanities. She also chairs the board of the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities.

Harv Hilowitz: Social entrepreneurship goes to college

Cole Memorial Chapel at Wheaton College, in Norton, Mass., which got a $10 million gift from the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation of Bethesda, Md., to establish an endowed Professorship in Social Entrepreneurship and provide for the renovation of a business department building on campus to house SE studies at Wheaton.

Via the New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

Today, many higher education institutions are faced with declining enrollment, increasing tuitions and calls to infuse their degree tracks with more practical experiences for students, leading more directly to meaningful careers. At the same time, college students are searching for programs offering practical, academically rigorous work-related experiences that tie into their social consciousness as citizens of the world. Social entrepreneurship (SE) education, on campus and online, may offer a solution.

SE 101. Social entrepreneurs are people who create businesses with the core intention to help mitigate a social problem, using the proceeds and spinoff services derived from that business. An example of an SE enterprise is the local thrift store operation that also acts as a women’s center, training and hiring the supported women in the retail and outreach roles, while cycling the proceeds into the center’s general operations. SE’s can be for-profit, nonprofit or hybrid operations, depending on the entity’s mission.

Social impact investing, meanwhile, is most often a corporate form of SE, wherein existing companies or institutions provide funding for socially oriented projects or “cloud-seeding” funds for other SE operations. The Newman’s Own philanthropy model is a well-known form of successful social investment.

Origins. In the late 1800s, some noteworthy businessmen embraced novel approaches to combine making money with what they thought were socially transformative products. Among the trailblazers were flour mill operators J.H. Kellogg, C.W. Post, nutritionist James Caleb Johnson, inventor of granula (now Granola), and Sylvester Graham, inventor of the famous Graham Cracker. These idealists sought new food products to feed the nutritionally (and morally) starved workers caught in the horrors of the early Industrial Revolution. The social entrepreneurship concept caught on, gradually gaining traction with the social work movement of the 1880s. Today, SE is moving onto campuses as a subset of business, sustainability and other majors, educating students in the principles and practices of SE, while also potentially enhancing campus recruitment yields and student-retention rates.

The term “social entrepreneur” was coined in 1953 in Howard Bowne’s book Social Responsibilities of the Businessman. The idea certainly existed but had no special identity prior to that. Amplified in the 1990s by business consultant Charles Leadbeater, the concept has now melded with growing e-commerce and social media innovations to become a global phenomenon.

Going global. Social entrepreneurship has evolved from healthy cereals into the corporate suite, becoming the platform for a wide variety of social ventures. Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank developed his microloan concept in Asia in 1983, winning the Nobel Prize in 2006. Fair Trade is another well-known branch of social entrepreneurship. Starting after World War II by religious groups and NGOs, it blossomed in the 1970s, now accounting for nearly 2% of total global sales (7.88 Billion Euros) of major agricultural commodities coffee, cocoa, tea, fruits, sugar, flowers and numerous handicraft items. And corporate philanthropy seeds the clouds of hundreds of social entrepreneurship ventures globally.

Higher education takes the hint. Since 2008, the  Harvard Business School has developed MBA-level courses entitled Social Impact Investing, the Social Innovation Lab, Public Entrepreneurship, and Investing for Social Impact. Harvard regularly holds major conferences on social entrepreneurship and has published over 300 books, studies, theses and cases on the topic since 1997.

Oxford University’s Saïd Business School offers MBA core courses and fellowships at its Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship. Classy.org, an online platform, lists 19 universities offering degrees, certifications and courses under the SE umbrella, including the Wharton School, Yale, Stanford and Cornell. In India, several universities are jumping on board, with MBAs in Social Entrepreneurship offered at Indira Gandhi National Open University, Sri Guru Granth Sahib University, and Bangalore University’s Seshadriuram Institute of Management Studies.

Acting as a facilitator of SE best practices, training and curricula for higher education institutions, the nonprofit Global Center for Social Entrepreneurship Network (GCSEN) Foundation has been working with college partners to accelerate offerings of social entrepreneurship courses, degrees, boot camps and internships. GCSEN provides curricula, resources, best practice advice and support services to colleges interested in offering innovative programs for budding social entrepreneurs. Students working in GCSEN boot camps have already started up a number of small businesses having social ventures, such as creating a Latino community center, bringing wireless internet service to schools in Nepal, and building an on-line app for isolated and depressed college students.

Founded in 2015 by Mike Caslin, a venture consultant and lecturer at SUNY New Paltz and professor at Babson College, GCSEN recently was instrumental in helping Wheaton College,  in Norton Mass., secure a $10 million gift from the visionary Diana Davis Spencer Foundation of Bethesda, Md. The gift established an endowed Professorship in Social Entrepreneurship and provides for the renovation of a business department building on campus to house SE studies at Wheaton.

Benefits of SE ed. GSCEN’s research has conclusively shown that SE education results in significant content knowledge gains retained by students; shows significant gains in self-confidence; is ranked highly as “life-changing” by students; and is highly recommended by students to their peers. Additionally, SE gained a business formulation rate near 50 percent, by students participating in GSCEN programs.

Caslin says his organization’s goal in 10 years is, “To make social entrepreneurship courses and degrees available on every college and university campus around the world.” Still, the programs face administrative hurdles—obstacles that Caslin thinks GCSEN can overcome with its innovative internship program, blended learning online courses and social entrepreneur boot camps, as well as its model SE curricula that can be easily absorbed into any college’s existing business or liberal arts programs.

“All the data shows that students are looking for skills that enhance their careers,” says Caslin. “Our SE coursework and Social Venture Internship program gives them practical business startup knowledge and field experience, as they work on their own business and social venture. The program is a career and resume builder, offering practical experience and professional references. GCSEN programs emphasize the “Four P Impacts” on People, Profit, Planet and Place, so students can jump-start right into action. Colleges offering SE programs will attract highly motivated students who want to work in the real world, and also make a difference.”

It’s clear that SE and its altruistic mission is growing steadily on and off campus. The key: millennials. By 2025, this cohort of 80 million will be 75 percent of the entire workforce. Although millennials have not been breaking any records when it comes to general entrepreneurship, they have taken to the social consciousness concept in a big way.

Millennials get it. A global conference titled "Prac-ademic Social Entrepreneurship for a Sustainable World" held at Belgium’s Namur University in 2017 was packed with faculty and administrators hailing from more than 200 Jesuit business schools and colleges. Business publications such as Forbes tout the youth movement in SE with annual feature articles, such as “Meet the Thirty Under Thirty Social Entrepreneurs Bringing Change in 2017” highlighting “young people who are all working tirelessly to creatively solve some of the world's toughest problems.”

Maybe social entrepreneurship is an answer to the lagging admissions, lack of student retention and flat-out lack of relevance our campuses are currently facing.

As Caslin says, “It is vital that a new generation of business-oriented, socially conscious millennials emerge on campus, creating with purpose a “4-P Impact” with people, profit, planet and place, to make meaning, make money and move the world to a better place.”

Harv Hilowitz is director of strategic development at the Global Center for Social Entrepreneurship Network (GCSEN) Foundation.

Poultry department

 

"Rooster and Turkey (after d'Hondecoeter),'' by SHELLY REED, in the show "Tiger in the Living Room,'' at  the Wheaton College Gallery, Norton, Mass., Oct. 23-Dec. 16.

Ms. Reed recontextualizes imagery gleaned from art-historical sources, typically combining elements from the work of such artists as Alexandre-Francois Desportes (1661-1743), Jean-Baptiste Oudry (1686-1755), Melchior d’Hondecoeter (1636-1695), and the horse paintings of George Stubbs.