Plenary Sessions

Higher education is navigating rapid change, competing pressures, and profound uncertainty. As educators and advocates for the promise of a college degree, we face challenges that test both institutional resilience and our deepest commitments to student learning and success. In this moment, what does it mean to lead with integrity and educate with purpose?

This opening plenary panel introduces courageous care as a guiding compass for our work.

Courageous care moves us beyond comfort. It centers students’ growth and wellbeing—even when doing so requires difficult choices, candid dialogue, and the courage to challenge systems that no longer serve. But courageous care extends beyond students. It must also shape how we support educators and staff, engage our communities, and uphold our responsibilities to the broader society.

Denise Pearson, Provost at Cheyney University, will kickstart the conversation by offering her opening remarks, Organizational Culture and the Courage to Lead with Love. Drawing on diverse perspectives from across higher education, panelists will then explore what courageous care requires at different levels of institutional life.

Together, we will examine:

• Practices that deepen the undergraduate experience and expand our understanding of courageous care
• Conditions that protect academic freedom and enable inquiry without fear or intimidation
• How care is embedded in curriculum, cocurricular design, and pedagogy
• Ways to move beyond rhetoric about self-care toward policies and practices that genuinely support people
• What must change for institutional transformation itself to reflect courageous care

This session will not offer easy answers. Instead, it invites us to use courageous care as a compass—keeping students, equity, and authentic learning at the center of everything we do.

Many colleges and universities continue to experience high turnover, low morale, and questions about how to engage employees. Drawing on his best-selling book, Kevin McClure explores the roots of higher education’s workplace problems, connecting his personal experiences to the latest research on designing workplaces that attract, grow, and retain talent. The presentation shares compelling narratives from his research and introduces his model of organizational care, providing attendees with multiple concrete strategies to advance to organizational change and better support the wellbeing of staff and faculty.

Care in higher education is often spoken of as a virtue, but rarely as a practice that requires intentional positioning. Teaching care is neither neutral nor passive. Rather, care requires educators to decide what forms of attention, empathy, and connection get cultivated and, therefore, valued. In this plenary, panelists explore how higher education’s evolving missions have always reflected particular orientations of care, and how educators today can make those orientations visible and malleable. By viewing the classroom within an “Intensive Care University,” we consider how mindful, evidence-informed, and relational teaching can sustain both learners and educators through moments of uncertainty, complexity, and change.