Author: Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig
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Every now and then, a moment arrives that shows you exactly why culture matters. Last night in Detroit, Western Michigan won the MAC Football Championship for the first time since 2016, and I could not be more proud. It was only the fourth time in a century. It felt like the culmination of something I…
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It is Saturday night, which means it is time for a movie story worth visiting. In 1979, when I was four years old, Monty Python released Life of Brian, a sharp, absurd, and wildly clever satire about the political and cultural tensions of ancient Judea. The film was not created to provoke outrage. It was designed…
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This reflection began yesterday with a phone conversation between myself and a colleague who once also served as both a provost and a dean. We compared notes gathered over years of leading teams, mentoring rising leaders, and managing the complicated personalities that appear in every institution. The similarities in our experiences were unmistakable. The behaviors,…
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Every so often, a project you believed in early, before the findings, before the charts, before the national attention, comes back into your life with a clarity that reminds you why the work mattered in the first place. That happened last week when I received a message from my colleague and friend Dr. Catherine Millett…
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I remember hearing “This Little Light of Mine” long before I truly understood it. I was a small child in a church in the early 1980s, surrounded by families who carried both joy and heaviness in their voices. The song moved through an upstairs room in a way that felt familiar even before I could…
Cloaking Inequity 