Journal of Diversity and Equity in Educational Development

Introduction

For this issue’s Conversation, I sat with Patricia Guillen, Director, Instructional Services, Maricopa Center for Learning and Innovation Maricopa Community Colleges; Beth Luoma, Executive Director of the Center for Teaching & Learning at Sacred Heart University; and Rob Vanderlan, Executive Director of the Center for Teaching Innovation at Cornell University. The conversation occurred in March 2026, one month before the Chronicle of Higher Education published an inflammatory op-ed in which the author encouraged universities seeking to cut “administrative bloat” to consider shuttering centers for teaching and learning (Schofield, 2026). Though it would have been interesting to hear these directors’ perspectives on that piece, the conversation that actually occurred is, to me, more powerful. These three leaders offer a broader view of CTLs, describing their work, their role within institutions, and their responses to this political moment. What emerges is an implicit, but powerful, case for the value of CTLs and the expertise they house.

Going into the conversation, my central question was: What does it mean for CTLs to lead, particularly on DEI, at this moment?

As I spoke with Patricia, Beth, and Rob, what struck me was that amid widespread narratives about the “death” of DEI, these three leaders described a more complex reality. They were clear-eyed about the fact that institutional structures have shifted, language around DEI has been contested, and faculty participation in DEI-related programming has fluctuated. However, despite their differing institutional contexts, the directors described an enduring and underlying commitment to inclusive, evidence-based teaching, particularly within their teaching centers, and even within their broader institutions. In addition, they spoke to the broader context of external pressures, such as public distrust of higher education and a shifting legal landscape, which are producing subtle but consequential changes in CTL programming and faculty engagement.

Throughout the conversation, the discussants returned to the liminality of CTLs—the in-between institutional space centers occupy—and the potential that occupying this space provides centers for assuming leadership on DEI. For me, the discussion illuminated the complexity of leadership, the risks of diluting a focus on equity in educational development work, and the challenge of articulating the value of DEI in higher education in ways that are both principled and publicly legible. I left the conversation with few easy answers; however, I was enriched by the thoughtfulness, intentionality, and insight of three leaders genuinely working through these difficult questions.

In Conversations, educational developers with differing or complementary perspectives on a common topic or experience engage in dialogue. Drawing on their experiences, identities, and professional practice, participants use conversation as a way to make meaning, explore complexity, connection, and dilemmas, not necessarily to reach conclusions. This conversation occurred in March 2026 via Zoom and has been edited for clarity and brevity by the editorial team.

JDEED: I’m so curious about what you’re seeing in your institutions. Given the political climate, given the many articles in the [higher ed publications] about the death of DEI in higher education, what are you seeing as center directors? How specifically is this climate shaping DEI conversations and DEI work on your campuses?

Beth Luoma: I think the answer to that question for me lies at three levels. One, we can consider what is happening at university structural levels, two, we can consider what is happening within the realm of CTL work, and three, we can think more broadly about higher education curricula.

At the institutional level, we previously had an Office for Inclusive Excellence, which was recently disbanded. In the realm of CTL work, we have felt the impact of losing that centralized office. Over the past few years, the CTL collaborated very closely with our Office for Inclusive Excellence team on a range of initiatives, from consulting with faculty and staff on inclusive teaching practices to collaborating on university events and programming.

There are many higher education institutions that have been impacted by similar decisions, and the question then becomes structurally who carries on the work? We know that inclusive teaching is evidence-based, that cultivating student belonging contributes to student motivation and learning. And the demand and interest from our faculty in learning these practices, in my experience, has not gone anywhere, even with the current national narratives.

In current national discourse, the term “equity” has become loaded, but for us equity is about ensuring all our students have what they need to succeed. Our center mission is directly tied to the overall mission of our institution. Our institutional mission statement specifically calls out the need to be “open and welcoming,” to “embrace a vision for social justice,” to think about our students as whole people, not just statistics or demographics on a page.

For me, when we talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and when we talk about the Catholic intellectual tradition as frameworks, we arrive at the same practices. They point us to seeing our students for who they are, humans with full dignity, and so we take the time to learn their names. We ask ourselves… Are we seeing our students as whole people in the classroom, across perspectives and backgrounds? Are we being flexible and mindful in our course design, recognizing the diversity of our students? Are we making sure that students feel they belong? Are we making sure that students have a voice? Do we center accessibility? Our Catholic identity as an institution calls us to center these inclusive practices.

Finally, at the third level, there have been no directives within our institution to change the curricular content itself. Our university leadership has continued to recognize faculty expertise and agency in designing the curriculum. Inclusivity and social justice are so central to our institutional mission and our understanding of Catholic identity, that any calls or directives to move away from those values would be a shift away from who we are as an institution and as a community.

Rob Vanderlan: In most ways, Cornell has also changed very little. But there have been subtle impacts that are quite significant, in the end. Cornell has a list of its core values. One of those core values is a community of belonging. The University’s founding motto is, “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.” These commitments have long been core to the DNA of the university, to be open and inclusive. And tied to that, valuing diversity and inclusion is central to creating and nurturing that community of belonging. So far, the university has not done much to back away from those commitments.

Most of the impact to date has merely been reviewing programs to ensure that they comply with the law, as it has been understood. And so we’ve reviewed programs to make sure that we’re not being exclusionary in any of the things that we do. So no real changes.

That said, I think there has been a pretty significant change in the context of campus, and when I talk to university leadership, they tell me they are very concerned about what they call ‘anticipatory obedience’ (Snyder, 2017). They are concerned that faculty or staff might change what we are doing just to avoid drawing critical attention to ourselves in any way, shape, or form. The leaders that I talk to are clear that they don’t want that to happen.

At the same time, I don’t think that they’ve been bold or clear in articulating that concern in public spaces. The University leadership has become more reticent about communicating, more reluctant to make public statements. That has meant there hasn’t been a clear assertion of our principles around belonging, a clear reassertion of their centrality.

That leaves faculty and staff to make their own sort of calculations about what to do or what not to do, what to change or not to change. I think at our Center’s level, we’ve talked explicitly about not wanting to signal any change in our programs, which we stand behind, but instead to lean even harder into our commitment to diversity and equity and inclusion. I think it’s really important to say those words explicitly. I think they’re a lot harder to oppose, when stated as the words they are, rather than as the acronym that too easily gets vilified.

That said, the inclusion programs that we do offer are seeing less faculty response. Our attendance at programs explicitly focused on inclusive teaching are diminishing, and so it’s a real challenge for us to think about how to maintain our commitment to principles as well as how we maintain our responsiveness to the community and what they’re looking for and what they need. And I don’t think we’ve hit on any perfect solution to that as of yet.

Patricia Guillen: So, I’ll jump in now. Maricopa Community Colleges is a 10-college district. Each college is individually accredited, which makes it fairly challenging to do anything from a centralized perspective. We don’t have the ability [to effect change on the individual colleges], without changing our systems from the bottom up, which we have in some instances.

But it is challenging because we are a disconnected, yet connected district. Each college is an HSI, a Hispanic-serving institution.

Our Associate Vice Chancellor came to us soon after the “Dear Colleague” letter came out last year. Our team was told we had to scrub our websites and courses of any DEI-related terms. Hours later I sat in her office and cried. I said, “You can ask a lot of people to do that. Why do you ask me to do that?” Because I have fought to be at the table that I’m at today: every day, I try to remember that I am pushing forward a legacy that my father started. He was not formally educated himself beyond high school, but he had [and gave me] a love for learning. And now you’re asking me to take out all those words that mean the most to me in a variety of different ways.

So that was the beginning of it for me. But I will say that the district, which is in a very politically charged state. (We are a very red state with tinges of blue that make us slightly purple, but then we go back to red.) From my perspective, we’ve abided by what the law has required of us while staying under the radar. We have changed the titles; we have changed the words. However, I don’t see that we’ve really changed the work that we do. The work has never really been about DEI; it’s about meeting our faculty and students where they are.

Some programming has been canceled or postponed, you know, until we can figure this out. We are a large district and we have a center for teaching and learning at most of our colleges. I’m in the [district]-level CTL, but I know that our college CTLs have been impacted even more because they offer individualized and intentional services to our faculty. But from my perspective, not a lot has changed except for the verbiage.

And, once I came to peace with that, I thought, “Okay, we’re still doing the same work.” I’m okay with that. I know it’s going to change; it’ll shift again, and then maybe again, but it is what it is right now. But it was very painful in the very beginning, and I’ve just managed to roll with it as we’ve all had to.

JDEED: Thank you for that. And so what I’m hearing from the three of you is that generally, the work has not changed, though there are variations around the language of DEI. For Patricia, the language has changed. For you, for Rob, you’re leaning more into the language. And what about you, Beth? You also said that you haven’t had to change the work, but have you had to change how you talk about the work?

Beth Luoma: I wouldn’t say we have changed how we talk about our work. We’ve actually added additional programming to name the current time for what it is. We call this new series “Teaching in Trying Times,” a regular gathering where faculty come together to discuss topics related to many variables of our current political and social landscape that impact teaching and student learning. It is a space where faculty are unpacking their individual curricular decisions. For instance, our faculty members read stories in the Chronicle of Higher Education and in Inside Higher Ed, where faculty have been recorded in the classroom and those recordings have been used against them. No one wants to be that story in the Chronicle. We’ve created spaces for faculty to unpack these national headlines and trends and consider what it means for their students and teaching.

JDEED: As you’ve been talking, I’ve been thinking about the ways in which higher ed institutions haven’t really stepped up and taken a firm stance against [anti-DEI directives or other measures that harm teaching and learning]. Many institutions are abdicating their role as leaders on DEI, either complying or in some cases fully supporting, the anti-DEI mandates of the current administration. Even some of the colleges and universities that are taking a public stance against the current administration are also quietly dismantling [DEI] programs [see for example Saul, 2025]. But, as Rob noted, [colleges and universities] have left faculty to fend for themselves. What is the role of the CTL here? Do you see CTLs as being institutional leaders in DEI, and if so, what does leadership look like?

Rob Vanderlan: I can offer two thoughts on that, from my experience. First, Cornell has an informal academic diversity council. It’s a small group of people, convened by our deputy provost, that have a role to play in diversity and in inclusive teaching. We have representatives from the graduate school, undergraduate student programs, our teaching center, and our faculty development group. I think that our role [on that council] is to convey what we’re hearing from faculty and students, and the reticence that we’re sensing among faculty, especially among faculty from vulnerable populations. Our role is to let leadership know that they are right to worry about anticipatory obedience. There is a growing ethos of “keep your head down and keep out of the potential line of fire.” Faculty and staff believe they have reasons to fear and they have a lack of confidence the university will protect them. So, that’s the one role the CTL can play. The other role is that, while the inclusion related programs we offer may not have the attendance that they would have three years ago or five years ago, it’s really important that we continue to do them. We must continue to signal to the Cornell community that this is still a core value and that we don’t believe that effective college teaching can happen without attention to creating inclusive learning environments.

Patricia Guillen: In my experience, over the years our faculty development [centers] have slapped on the label of DEI [onto programming] because we know that the faculty we serve are diverse and come to the classroom sometimes with little teaching experience. We have good faculty who come with education degrees and experience in K-12, but so many more that don’t. And so, when I came to faculty development, I considered, what are the basics of what our faculty need? And it just so happened to be that it was understanding best practices in teaching, which also just happened to fall under that DEI umbrella. I never heard the term DEI when I first started teaching as an adjunct in business with no teaching experience whatsoever. All I knew was that I needed to engage my students, and all of my students were very different, so I had to figure out how to do that. [These are practices] we have lovingly labeled [DEI]. I can’t see our work changing. And so I think leadership for [centers] means that we lean into that and continue to meet the needs of our faculty who are meeting the needs of our students. My point is that we’ve been doing DEI before DEI became a common term, and we will continue to do it through scholarship and pedagogy. We just have to be a little more creative.

JDEED: So it sounds like centers can be leaders in this space and you’re defining leadership as consistency?

Beth Luoma: Thank you so much, Patricia and Rob. Structurally within an organization, CTLs can reside in very different places, but one thing that is often true about them, regardless of where they are in the organization, is that they exist in some sort of liminal space. When I think about my role as CTL director, I am, yes, technically, by HR standards, a staff member, and I am also part-time faculty because I teach across multiple departments. I like to have my students play “Guess My Undergraduate Major” with me sometimes, because I have taught Catholic Intellectual Tradition and our First Year Experience course here, and I have taught biology at other institutions.

I’m not just telling faculty, hey, I really think it is important to have developmental conversations with students when you suspect that they have used AI when it wasn’t allowed; I’m actually doing it. I’m spending that time in office hours, meeting one-on-one with my students. I know how much time it takes to have those conversations but also know firsthand how important they are.

And the same holds true, too, as we think about diversity, equity, and inclusion topics in the classroom. I’m currently teaching a sophomore seminar about the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. This is the week that we talk about race. We just finished reading and discussing Isabel Wilkerson’s “America’s Enduring Caste System” piece from the New York Times Magazine. And so I’m also having active conversations with my students about race, like many of my faculty colleagues.

CTL leaders [also] often have the ears of the decision makers, if they aren’t decision-makers themselves, and I don’t take this responsibility lightly. Now, you have to be at the table first, and that doesn’t always happen, but there’s a real strength in CTL work specifically to operate in this liminal space among faculty, staff, and students to advance meaningful work that improves the university for everyone.

Thinking about Mary Wright’s models [on the role of CTLs] (Wright, 2023), to look at the “hub” model of a CTL, we are connectors, and we can be the glue of the institution in times of chaos, yes, but also in times of strategic change looking forward.

Rob Vanderlan: Can I build on that? Thanks, Beth. Spot on to everything you just said there, and I want to extend the liminal metaphor just a little bit. CTL leaders often have a seat at those leadership tables, and we are part of the administration. I report to the provost’s office. But our center also, self-consciously and deliberately, positions ourselves as not part of the administration, because, fundamentally, we serve faculty. We are a developmental organization, offering confidential developmental teaching assistance. That can be an uncomfortable position at times. But it’s also a position of real power, because it allows us to stand a little bit apart from the administration when the administration is viewed with suspicion around campus, as it is around many of these issues. And I think it puts us in a position to hear more authentically from faculty, and then have the ability to represent those points of view in the halls of power, such as it is.

Beth Luoma: The other piece I was thinking about at the CTL level is leading by integrating inclusion work throughout all we do. For me, when I think about inclusion, and I think, Rob, you were speaking to this before, it’s the very fabric of teaching, whether it’s about gathering feedback from our students, or engaging in active learning and accessible practices, or being transparent about learning goals, or prioritizing community-building and student belonging. Inclusion drives many of our evidence-based practices.

Beth Luoma: And so we continue to consider the ways that we ensure that the curriculum of our centers is never siloing the work of inclusion, but is rather integrating it throughout.

Rob Vanderlan: Thank you for saying it.

Patricia Guillen: And inclusiveness has nothing to do with the color of my skin, or the amount of money that I make. It’s about the quality of the education you receive, and the fact that this has been twisted and used against us, it just drives me crazy.

JDEED: Then, should CTLs aim to reshape and reclaim the conversation around DEI away from race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., and reframe it around education, broadly. We don’t want to diminish or erase the identities of our students, but as you’re saying, diversity, equity, and inclusion are core to good teaching, they’re core to learning. And so, are these the conversations that CTLs should be shaping and have the power to shape? I have to admit that as I ask this, I’m not even sure I believe in it.

Rob Vanderlan: Right? I think a lot about this, and I don’t think… it may be that I have nothing coherent to say about it, so I apologize.

JDEED: I don’t know if I had anything coherent to ask about it!

Rob Vanderlan: But I do worry a lot about losing sight of the particular markers of social identity. We know a lot about how social identities shape who we are, how they manifest in learning environments, how powerful it is to acknowledge and see and celebrate those identities, and how that contributes to actually a sense of belonging and better learning. I really hope that in five years’ time, we haven’t washed away all that context and are just left with empty platitudes. And so what we’re struggling with is exactly how to articulate that in ways that are persuasive.

I’ll say that my initial impulse when the attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion came, is to use the words and make people defend the opposite. If you’re against diversity, you’re for homogeneity. If you’re against inclusivity, you’re for exclusivity. [I did this] partially because I come from an intellectual fighter discipline, and I want to have that argument. But a colleague at another teaching center challenged me on that, and I think quite effectively.

Can you reclaim a language that perhaps has already alienated some of our colleagues, some of our faculty colleagues, some of our students, certainly many people in the larger population? And so, rather than try to fight on those terms, can we come up with better language to describe what we’re about?

And I… I hear that criticism, I’ve thought a lot about it. I’m not sure we can come up with better language, and that’s where I’m sort of stuck, but I recognize the need to protect the work that we’ve done that is really important, valuable, and essential to a university. We also need to find effective language to make the case for why we do what we do to the broader public, and I’m not sure what that language is yet.

JDEED: I’ve engaged with centers that have switched from, language like, “UDL helps students with disabilities succeed” to “UDL helps all students, including those with disabilities.” To me, that’s putting marginalized students back on the margins. It’s felt akin to an All Lives Matter (Ungvarsky, 2024) approach to educational development.

Beth Luoma: I do find it helpful in CTL work to be spelling out the way that the practices that we’re recommending are effective and based in research from the educational literature. And that’s where we as CTL leaders can really lean into the diverse expertise of our faculty. I think of our psychology faculty, for instance, who can speak deeply to the research of student belonging and motivation and their impacts on learning, and how if we establish practices in our classroom that promote inclusion and belonging, the learning is going to be better.

JDEED: I’ve appreciated the ways in which you’ve all highlighted the dilemmas, but also the possibility in the work that you’re doing, that centers are doing. So my last question, the question I like to end with, is, what gives you hope at this moment? What gives you hope for the work that you’re doing, for the work that CTLs can do?

Rob Vanderlan: I’m a historian, and history gives me hope, because there have been much, much, much darker times than this. I know that doesn’t sound very hopeful. But those times don’t last.

And human beings are resilient, especially when we come together in community, and that’s part of what we do in teaching centers, is we bring people together in community, and we find support, inspiration, and power in those spaces.

Patricia Guillen: I’m hopeful because I know that education changes lives. And no matter what, and I’m going to go with history here, no matter how far back we go, we know that we are enlightened through knowledge, and as long as I can help contribute to that in a positive way, then I am hopeful. So I know we’ll get through this.

Beth Luoma: I find hope in the people around me. These are challenging times in higher education, but I am drawn to think about the colleagues with whom I work and how devoted they are to the success of our students, how they are showing up to work for the right reasons. I like to imagine how the work we do with our students is going to make the world a better place down the road. And it’s in the little encounters, too. There’s so much going on in the broader landscape, but to have those small moments of care that happen, whether it’s in the classroom, between me and a student, among students, with faculty, with colleagues in the hallway. The humanity is still there, the joy is still there. We need to resurface that humanity and bring it to the top.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.