2025 Annual Meeting
Meeting Tracks and Session Formats
Meeting Tracks
This track will explore the public purposes of higher education and how colleges and
universities can advance them by focusing on the intersection of students’ career preparation; civic, community, and global engagement; and holistic well-being.With a focus on policy drivers of curricular and pedagogical innovation at the institutional, state, and system levels, this track will explore how evidence gathered through authentic assessment and evaluation can be leveraged to demonstrate the multiple values of the student educational experience—in the classroom and across the curriculum and cocurriculum.
This track will explore how the convergence of problem-solving approaches across the sciences, arts, and humanities can yield innovative solutions to complex and unpredictable societal problems, while also deepening student competency in, and capacity for, scientific learning and global engagement.
Amid growing threats to democracy in the US and globally, and in the aftermath of the 2024 elections, this track will focus on the integral relationship between higher education and democracy and on the role colleges and universities can play in helping create and enact a more aspirational, equitable, and inclusive vision of democracy.
With emphasis on artificial intelligence, this track will examine how new and emerging technologies can support student learning and success goals and advance institutional priorities.
Amid ongoing efforts to dismantle DEI, this track will focus on how to examine, build, and sustain institutional policies and practices that create and strengthen campus cultures of inclusion and belonging by prioritizing educational equity and student success.
Session Formats
Sessions will be 10*, 30, 60, or 75 minutes in length.
*HEDs Up sessions are the only format with 10-minute presentations.
Multiple 10-minute presentations, within a one-hour session, modeled on the format of TED Talks. Each presentation should focus on an innovative project or program, compelling research, or “lessons learned.” HEDs Up presentations should be provocative, challenging, entertaining, and interesting.
Explore current work, recent findings, or new perspectives and allow at least 20 minutes for discussion.
Follow a traditional format with a presentation(s) followed by discussion among the speakers and the audience.
Present findings, works in progress, or new methodologies about the meeting themes.
Provide opportunities for participants to share successful strategies and examples of effective academic and institutional leadership and/or change at all levels. For these informal discussions, participants are welcome to rotate among several discussion topics or to focus on one only.
Active-learning sessions—limited to 25 participants each—that focus on topics currently being discussed and debated within higher education. Seminar leaders pose provocative questions and introduce activities that engage participants in workshop-style activities.
Questions about #AACU2025?
If you have questions about the 2025 Annual Meeting or would like additional information, please email us at [email protected].