Higher Education Was Built For Moments Like This

As many of us in higher education plod through our spring semester, the mood on our campuses is unmistakable: exhaustion, unease, the quiet fear that the work we do in higher education no longer feels possible—or welcome. 

Across the country, public trust in colleges and universities has fallen to shocking lows. Faculty are being told to avoid “controversial” topics. Students are told they’re too fragile or too radical. 

The students sitting in our classrooms right now are watching all of this closely. They see the political vitriol rising, elected officials mocking expertise, and higher education itself being cast as partisan. Many are disillusioned. But beneath that fatigue, we see something else—a hunger for authenticity, purpose, and pathways to tangible impact. Students still want to believe that their voices matter. They just need to see their college and universities believe it too.Robert Glover is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Honors at the University of Maine.

This is not a time for despair, or retreat. In fact, it’s precisely the moment higher education was built for, so long as we lean into our mission to teach the next generation of leaders rather than shy from it.

For the past decade, we’ve worked with colleagues across the country through ENACT: The Abraham Feinberg Educational Network for Active Civic Transformation, a nonpartisan initiative based at Brandeis University that offers a promising model. ENACT links faculty and students at nearly fifty campuses across the country to engage directly with state policy. The emphasis is not on winning a policy fight, but on practicing democratic engagement in real time.

Through structured, faculty-guided learning, students begin by researching an active bill in their state legislature—learning the policy background, institutional context, and range of perspectives surrounding it. They translate that research into concrete forms of civic communication: written testimony, meetings with lawmakers, or brief advocacy memos developed under faculty guidance. Reflection is built in. Faculty push students to assess not just what they argued for, but how power operates, where constraints and obstacles arise, and what effective participation requires. 

In our ENACT courses, these lessons play out in concrete ways. As one student with little prior exposure to politics wrote, “It reframed politics for me. Not as an abstract or divisive arena, but as a tangible, collective mechanism for advocacy and leadership.” Analyzing bills, meeting with legislators, and organizing constituents led directly to a paid campaign externship and eventually to her current role in Hennepin County government, where she now helps oversee health and human services policy.