Frank Shushok

What's Right with You: Helping Students Find and Use Their Personal Strengths.

Fixing whats wrong—with students, institutions, and cultures—is the most prevalent approach to change. Frank Shushok and Eileen Hulme offer the discovery and exploitation of whats right as a powerful alternative.

Learning at any time: Supporting student learning wherever it happens

A new residential college and a faculty-in-residence program demonstrate how student affairs educators and academic faculty at one institution have collaborated to create transformational learning experiences for their students.

Learning friendship: The indispensable basis of a good society

Aristotle believed that perfect friendship based in goodness is rare because few people seek to be good. Colleges and universities can prove him wrong by helping students understand the ways and whys of being a true friend.

William Deresiewicz Talks with Executive Editor, Frank Shushok, Jr. about His Book, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite & the Way to a Meaningful Life

11 ABOUT CAMPUS / NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2017 I MET JEROME WHEN HE WAS A SENIOR IN ONE of the psychology classes I taught. He stood out from the rest of the class not only in his academic performance but also in the ways he approached class—always prepared, asking good questions, going above and beyond in his assignments. He was the dream student—hard working, curious, passionate about his educational goal of earning a PhD in child psychology so he could make a difference in the lives of foster kids. A product of the foster care system himself, Jerome had been orphaned in first grade and had been shuttled in and out of foster homes yet had always worked hard in each new school, eventually earning a scholarship to college. When I met him, he talked of how he had always been fascinated by what made people tick—an excellent quality in a budding psychologist. He spent hours reading books and was an inveterate people watcher, so that by the time he entered college, he had acquired a level of emotional intelligence far beyond his years. It was crystal clear to me—Jerome had what psychologist Angela Duckworth calls grit , a passionate perseverance toward a long-term goal. Jerome was a hard worker who had overcome all the odds to succeed in college and go on to a top grad school. He had made something of himself. It’s a seductive story reflective of the American Dream: boy overcomes poverty and trauma through sheer effort to become a shining example of success for others. It reassures us that all is right in the universe. And yes, it can happen...sometimes. But there is an insidious danger in what Christine Yeh ( 2017 ), Chair of the Counseling Psychology Department at the University of San Francisco, calls our “national obsession” with these stories and with the concept of grit itself: It overlooks the role that systemic privilege plays in people’s lives.