In the years since the post-pandemic return to classrooms, faculty and students across campus have navigated evolving challenges, including the rise of generative AI, student-athlete travel schedules, and increasing digital distractions.

The Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE) is now launching Promoting Academic Communities and Engagement – or PACE – a new initiative to support faculty and increase intellectual engagement among Stanford students.

Co-led by VPUE senior associate vice provosts Lianne Kurina and Shari Palmer, the initiative has been building since 2023 and has involved meetings with stakeholder groups across campus. “PACE will be tapping into the desire of both faculty and students for a reset that leads to more engagement in Stanford classrooms,” said Jay Hamilton, the Freeman-Thornton Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education.

Below, Hamilton describes PACE’s goals, how the initiative has taken shape, and its plans to engage and support instructors and undergraduate students.

What are the overarching goals of PACE?

Students come to Stanford to learn from stellar faculty. Challenging coursework leads our students to excel in critical thinking. The self-transformation of learning involves a chain of effort: doing the reading, coming to class, asking questions, and producing your own work. Many forces now undermine expectations around effort and ethics. PACE is an initiative to identify and remove roadblocks to rigorous engagement in the classroom.

Faculty and students alike have been challenged by numerous changes over the past 10 years – the pandemic, the ubiquitous (and distracting) use of devices in the classroom, AI, heightened focus on getting As, rising rates of accommodations, and increased absences from student-athletes due to the ACC transition. The result has been real confusion around expectations for classroom engagement. PACE will convene conversations, develop resources, and share best practices to help ensure that our undergraduate courses challenge and engage students in ways that promote curiosity, openness, and resilience.

How did the initiative come about?

In fall 2023, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education Sarah Church made a presentation to the Faculty Senate about the need to reset classroom expectations coming out of the pandemic. In 2024, VPUE’s Assessment and Program Evaluation team did interviews with 25 instructors across 21 departments to produce a report on topics such as student approaches to academics, coursework, grading, and exceptions to course policies. In spring 2025, we added questions to the annual Frosh Survey about attending class, turning in assignments on time, completing required reading, and exploring optional reading or problem exercises, so we could start examining student patterns over time.

Last September, I appointed Lianne Kurina and Shari Palmer to plan and co-lead PACE. Over the last two quarters, they’ve held more than 30 meetings with stakeholder groups across campus. We’re formally launching now to expand the campus conversation.

What kinds of topics and pressing issues will be explored through PACE?

Some challenges will be addressed through information sharing. In the fall, PACE will unveil an easy-to-use website with clear, succinct guidance on multiple classroom topics that faculty can adapt. It will offer frameworks for, among other topics: creating a device policy (such as motivating and maintaining device-free classrooms); creating in-class assessment approaches to ensure student ownership of course material; and building flexibility directly into course structure (including assignments) so that it is up to students to manage how coursework interfaces with their commitments and life events, rather than appealing to instructors for specific exceptions. The goal is not to impose uniform rules but to lower the costs to faculty of creating a rigorous and engaging learning environment by gathering and sharing best practices.

Fortunately, through our conversations across campus, we’ve found that some departments have already given careful thought to one or more of these issues and developed clear, consistent policies within their units.

Other topics, such as accommodations, academic integrity, and grading, don’t lend themselves to quick answers and will require sustained faculty conversation and potentially policy changes. PACE’s role will be to bring people together to discuss and brainstorm how to make progress. We’re also planning to host an academic conference on the rationale for, history, and future of undergraduate education.

What’s the most ambitious aspect of this initiative?

This is not a quick fix. It involves creating new norms about a bundle of individually gnarly problems. Thankfully, many university groups and offices are already tackling elements of these challenges, including the Faculty Senate, the Academic Integrity Working Group, the Office of Accessible Education, the Office of Community Standards, AI meets Education at Stanford (AIMES), Learning Technologies and Spaces, and the Center for Teaching and Learning.

How will you measure the success of PACE over time?

One measure will be the time students devote to their coursework. I’m optimistic about this because I’ve seen course redesign lead to more engagement. Last fall, during COLLEGE 101: Why College? Your Education and the Good Life, many sections banned laptops, some introduced short reading quizzes, and the course ended with a blue book final. This was designed to reduce classroom distractions and promote reading, which in turn generates more informed conversations. Weekly time devoted to the course increased by about an hour per week relative to two years ago, and student comments noted additional insights gained from reviewing for the exam.

We also anticipate gathering qualitative data through focus groups, surveys, and interviews to better understand what’s going on in campus classrooms. What policies and practices are instructors implementing? And how are students understanding and aligning to them?

As you’ve begun exploring PACE’s aspirations with instructors and students, what has been surprising?

I’ve been struck by student demand for revising expectations. Last month, ASSU (Associated Students of Stanford University) leaders asked that faculty include a section in every syllabus outlining course AI policies. COLLEGE 102: Citizenship in the 21st Century this spring featured an essay contest with the prompt, “How should the Stanford community promote learning, reduce cheating, and conduct accurate assessments of student learning in the age of artificial intelligence?”

The winning student memo called for professors to institute “understanding checks” such as “oral check-ins or supervised problem-solving sessions” to evaluate whether students had really done the work and understood the material (rather than farming the work out to AI). They also concluded, “To further emphasize the learning process, departments should incorporate components such as attendance, section participation, and in-class engagement in final grading.”

If instructors or students have ideas about norms or expectations within classes that you would like to see altered, or stories of successful changes, I welcome them to email me at jayth@stanford.edu.