Meet the New CGS Board Chair: Michael Cunningham on Using Communication for Student Success

CGS is proud to welcome new board chair Michael Cunningham, associate provost for graduate and postdoctoral studies and a Suzanne and Stephen Weiss Presidential Fellow and professor in the Department of Psychology at Tulane University.

“I’m quite honored to chair the board for CGS. I think CGS and their staff are wonderful. Suzanne Ortega is a thought leader and to be a thought partner with her is a privilege. I look forward to learning more from her,” Cunningham said.

High-Impact Interventions

Cunningham has long been interested in interventions that help people have better outcomes. His research is based on African American adolescents and what support systems they had or utilized to have better than expected outcomes, despite any challenges they faced.

Michael Cunningham at the 2023 Annual Meeting.

He’s used his leadership roles, as associate provost and as the graduate student representative in the president’s cabinet, to put positive interventions into practice by implementing policies that will help keep graduate students on track.

Cunningham said that when he first began running the office for graduate and postdoctoral studies, an obvious policy that would help students was one for parental leave.

“A lot of graduate students are at the age where they want to start families, but they were highly uncomfortable telling mentors and advisors if they got pregnant because they were scared of losing their funding,” Cunningham said. “One of the first things we did is talk to the provost about putting together a policy for family leave for graduate students.

“Now Tulane graduate students who are on tuition waivers have six months of family leave if they are pregnant, adopt or foster a child. A student can talk to a case worker who then works with the department head or program director on behalf of the student to work out the time off needed or if an exam needs to be moved. The student is guaranteed the same amount of funding they had before they took the leave,” Cunningham said.

Effective Communication

Cunningham thinks a lot about how effective communication is important for diverse student populations and how that can help students succeed and be used as a positive intervention. An example of this is when Tulane implemented providing annual feedback to graduate students on how they are doing in their programs.

“We provide feedback at least once a year so that students don’t find themselves in their third year and all of sudden not doing so well,” Cunningham said. “If students don’t get any feedback, then they don’t get any opportunity to improve.”

Cunningham said that this also provides program leaders with the ability to see which students are doing well and help promote them to prestigious positions or awards.

When it comes to communications, he talks about the importance of inclusive language in university communications. He gives the example of recent communications to students giving instructions during a hurricane. A problem emerged with a single set of evacuation instructions, mostly geared towards undergraduate students, leaving out graduate students who were already in their homes and international students who had no other place they could go.

“We must be mindful of who our students are and what kind of resources they need. The graduate student experience is different than the undergraduate experience and both are different than the international student experience,” Cunningham said. “When we talk about university policies and the planning process, we have to make sure that people are thinking about policies that are inclusive of all the different student populations.”

He applies this type of inclusive communications for implementing holistic admissions practices. When it comes to recruiting underrepresented students, Cunningham said it’s not enough for administrators to do things like removing standardized tests; he wants to know what they are doing to make underrepresented students feel welcome. He thinks programs must do a self-assessment to understand and communicate what a successful student looks like for their program.

Cunningham says this is important because some underrepresented and first-generation students don’t know the nuances of academia. He finds that many first-generation students don’t know that most PhD programs give student tuition waivers. He also gives an example of how some programs post the average GRE score of the students in their program, making potential students see that as a cutoff score and therefore not applying. Cunningham said this lack of communication or miscommunication can create barriers to entry.

“Instead, highlight the values of your department on your webpage. Say that you are looking for students who want to contribute to the research mission in this particular area,” Cunningham said. “Make it really clear in terms of who your faculty are, the kind of research that’s going on and how the students who are interested in those areas should think about those areas too.”

Supporting Diverse Communities

Reflecting on the upcoming year, Cunningham is concerned about the national attacks on diversity at universities. To address these attacks, he wants to create pipelines for students to enter graduate programs but to also make sure that those programs are ready to handle the needs of these diverse populations.

He said one way that graduate programs can ensure that graduate students succeed is to implement individual development plans from the start. He says this helps all students because it gets them thinking about their dissertation ideas during their course work and helps them develop their expertise in the area they want to study.

Cunningham also talks about how to be a helpful mentor to students who may not have the same background as you. He describes looking for opportunities to expose his graduate students to other faculty or colleagues who can help fill those experience gaps.

“Most of my graduate students are female and while I’m a very empathetic person, I’m not a woman. I’m also not married and I don’t have kids. When I bring my graduate students to conferences, I introduce them to my colleagues who don’t have kids by choice, to people who had kids as graduate students or who had kids after they graduated. I want them to know there is no perfect way of doing any of this,” Cunningham said.

Having a diverse student population also means needing to embrace career diversity. Cunningham thinks graduate education leaders need to be better prepared for the range of careers that graduate students want to pursue.

“The majority of PhD students are not going into academia and many of the students who are in master’s programs are not going into doctoral programs,” Cunningham said. “They’re getting a master’s degree to go into a career. Do we have careers services available for students to explore their career options?”

Despite the attacks on DEI, Cunningham remains optimistic for the future because he knows the science of having diverse and inclusive graduate cohorts supports pro-DEI policies.

“I always think science first, science second and science third. We know that the most successful graduate programs are ones that have diversity of thought, which is supported by science,” Cunningham said. “When you only have people who are just like you, you don’t get that creativity. You don’t get new ideas.”