Overview

This Ain’t Over: Defending the Future of Broadening Participation 

The Office of Undergraduate STEM Education at AAC&U has taken a resolute stance in proclaiming that "This Ain't Over." With this declaration, we affirm our steadfast dedication to advancing academic leadership that leads to broadening participation success even in the face of premature termination of  numerous NSF-funded initiatives. To that end, we invite you to submit a manuscript for the next issue of the Journal of STEM Leadership and Broadening Participation, which will explore the impacts of recent shifts in funding, policy, and priorities across the U.S. STEM higher education landscape.

As highlighted in AAC&U President Lynn Pasquerella's recent article in Liberal Education, declines in federal research funding have significantly eroded the nation's scientific infrastructure. Premature grant cancellations, evolving funding priorities, and policy shifts have disrupted research programs, interrupting STEM student pathways, dissolving collaborative networks, and creating new challenges for leaders across all types of institutions. The recent cuts to federal research dollars undermine hard-won gains in broadening participation, and diminish higher education's capacity to advance the public good.

This issue of the Journal of STEM Leadership & Broadening Participation accepts all manuscripts and also invites principal investigators of federally funded broadening participation initiatives, campus leaders, faculty, and project staff to critically examine the cascading effects of funding disruptions caused by premature grant terminations, shifts in funding priorities, policy realignments, or other external pressures.

We seek manuscripts that tell the true leadership story: revealing the human, institutional, and systemic dimensions of leading in times of disruption and interruption. How have leadership decisions in the current climate changed pathways for students? Altered institutional research trajectories? Dissolved collaborations? Stalled innovation? Or challenged the morale of those at the forefront of broadening participation? Equally important, we aim to surface the stories of resilience, creativity, and persistence that continue to define STEM Leadership, despite such setbacks. By curating empirical and narrative accounts of disruption, adaptation, and resilience, this issue will serve as both historical record and leadership blueprint, documenting how STEM leaders — across institutional types — defend the future of discovery and innovation when systems falter. The goal is to illuminate leadership lessons, policy insights, and human stories that together redefine what it means to sustain research as a public trust. 

Authors may submit empirical research, first-person accounts, or scholarly leadership reflection or qualitative or narrative analysis to illuminate how their leadership responses demonstrate critical decision-making, creativity under constraint, and use of self in protecting the continuity of discovery and innovation.