A New Academic Year Begins

It’s the Monday before classes start, and the semester is already creeping in. The groundskeepers were out early, trimming and sweeping, making the place look like it’s ready to host thousands again. The campus is still quiet, but it’s the kind of quiet that doesn’t last. You can feel it in the air—the held breath before movement.

I’ve been through this cycle a lot. This fall will be my 26th straight semester teaching public policy and public administration. I started back in 2012, teaching as a grad student, and I’ve been at it every fall and spring since, with a scattering of summers and winters along the way. You’d think the rhythm would get old, but it doesn’t. It still feels new every August.

At home the reset is happening too. My girls start school tomorrow. Their energy is its own barometer—excitement tangled up with nerves, that end-of-summer reluctance mixed with the thrill of something new. New backpacks, new routines, the bittersweetness of leaving behind long summer days. Their start overlaps with mine, and I like that. It makes the whole season feel bigger, more layered.

But this year also feels heavy. Some of my students are nervous about being on campus at all. The ICE raids and the attacks on immigrant communities here in Southern California have left a rawness that doesn’t just vanish once you step into a classroom. It shows up in the way students carry themselves, in what they say, and in what they don’t.

The question, too, is legal. Not just policy preferences or partisanship, but how the law itself is being wielded—who it protects, who it punishes. It cuts to the heart of the two social compacts we’re living in. One vision of governance is about legitimacy, trust, and a shared sense of belonging. The other is transactional and exclusionary, a politics of power as possession. In that vision, administration itself can become a weapon, narrowing the circle of who counts, criminalizing protest and protesters as though they were rebels instead of community members.

We’re living in both realities at once, and my students know it. Many of them embody it. That tension walks into the classroom with them, whether it’s named on the syllabus or not. And part of my work—maybe the most important part at the start of the semester—is to hold enough space for it. To make the room feel like a place where they belong, even when the world outside tells them otherwise.

This morning, between meetings, I got an email from a coauthor. When we first started working together, they were a PhD student, then ABD, finding their footing. Today’s email came signed with a new line at the bottom: “Assistant Professor.” A small change in a signature, but a reminder that these starts build into something larger. Students become colleagues. Ideas become books. The cycle is actually a trajectory.

So yes, I still love this time of year. The winds start to shift, the big-box stores fill with students buying lamps and ramen, the campus hums back to life. But what really matters is this: every new semester is another chance to decide which vision of governance we’re preparing for. Which compact we’re willing to teach, live, and defend. That’s the test.