Episode 55: Kelly Miller on the Role of Libraries in Wellbeing, Mental Health, and Student Success
Listen On
What role does wellbeing play in student success? How can libraries improve student, faculty, and staff wellbeing in a time of polycrisis? How can you achieve not only institutional goals but broader societal ones too? We discuss these questions with Kelly Miller, Associate Dean for Learning and Research Services at University of Miami
In the landscape of higher education, we often talk about student success as a series of boxes to check: passing grades, timely graduation, and career placement. But what if we are missing the foundation that makes all of those outcomes possible? In a recent episode of the Connected College Podcast, I sat down with Kelly Miller, Associate Dean for Learning and Research Services at the University of Miami Libraries, to discuss a radical shift in how we view the role of the library and the definition of success itself.
Kelly’s perspective is a powerful reminder that for students to succeed, they first need to be well. By zooming out from traditional academic competencies to the broader context of human health and community, we can transform the campus experience into one that fosters resilience in an increasingly complex world.
How to Define Student Success in a Changing World
Traditionally, student success has been viewed through a competency-based lens. We look at a student’s ability to research, write, analyze, and present. While these skills remain vital, Kelly challenges us to consider a more holistic definition. She suggests that student success is deeply dependent on the health of the community in which students are learning.
This means moving beyond just "doing" and focusing on "being." If a student is overwhelmed by anxiety or disconnected from their community, their ability to perform academically is compromised. Therefore, success must include the cultivation of a healthy work and learning environment for everyone—faculty, staff, and students alike. When the people supporting the students are fulfilled and joyful, they are better equipped to help students thrive.
The Library as a Hub for Wellbeing and Connection
The modern library is undergoing a massive transformation. It is no longer just a warehouse for books; it is a center for community building and human connection. Kelly describes how the University of Miami reimagined the first floor of the Richter Library not just to co-locate academic services, but to create a "Learning Commons" that supports the whole person.
One of the most striking changes in their model was placing "Being"—defined as being a healthy, mindful person—at the center of their student support wheel. By partnering with counseling centers and introducing mindfulness-based stress reduction programs, the library has become a sanctuary where students can slow down, breathe, and co-regulate their nervous systems. In a time of "polycrisis"—where climate change, economic shifts, and political unrest create constant stressors—the library provides the stable ground students need to maintain a steady mind.
Leading Through Polycrisis and Global Goals
As we look toward the future, the role of the university library expands even further, connecting local actions to global initiatives. Kelly highlights the shift from the UN Sustainable Development Goals to the emerging "Inner Development Goals." This framework suggests that to solve external global challenges, we must first develop internal capacities like presence, orientation, and intentionality.
Libraries are uniquely positioned to lead this work. By offering spaces for multidisciplinary collaboration and hosting events that bring together the campus and the broader city, libraries act as the "remedy" to a hyper-competitive, siloed culture. This inclusive approach centers the voices of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities, recognizing that listening to those most impacted by systemic stress offers a path to healing for the entire institution.
Summary: A New Vision for the Connected College
The takeaway from my conversation with Kelly Miller is clear: we cannot have student success without community health. By shifting our focus from "winning" to "caring," and from "rushing" to "resting," we create an environment where everyone can thrive. The library of the future is a place of connection, collaboration, and wellbeing—a true heart of the connected college.
Episode 55 Transcript
-
Elliot Felix: Welcome to the Connected College Podcast. I'm your host, Elliot Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and how they're organized to enable student success. And if you're a leader in higher ed, and you think that the silos and separations get in the way of student success, then this podcast and my upcoming book, The Connected College, are for you. We're here to learn and work together to bust silos, question tradition, and forge partnerships so that students feel connected to their college, their community, their coursework and their careers. The film Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames is an amazing example of zooming in and zooming out to gain perspective. My conversation with Kelly Miller about the role that libraries play in student success is a lot like that. Kelly challenges us with zooming out from success to health, seeing that as part of and a precondition for it. Then we zoom out further to think not only about how libraries can advance institutions goals, but broader ones as well, like the UN sustainable development goals or the new and emerging inner development goals. I love when people answer better questions than what I asked. And this interview is a great example of that.
Kelly Miller: What's so interesting, Elliot, is that in recent years, so since we worked together on the Learning Commons project, so this is the project I think you're referencing. It's our planning for reimagining our first floor of Richter Library, which is our flagship interdisciplinary library at the University of Miami. And we reimagined the first floor, or at least a portion of it, to co locate and coordinate key academic services to better support students on their academic journeys. So we worked with campus partners from four different parts of the university. It's really complex project. And your team helped us so much as we tried to plan together using design thinking, and the focus there was very much on the student experience and student success. So how can we help students? I would say, so since we completed the renovation for that project, which was done in 2018, my attention has increasingly turned to how do we support people and people in general at the university?
Elliot Felix: So success is like a, it's a team sport, right? And like you could, if you're, if the faculty aren't supported, if the other staff aren't supported, how can the students succeed?
Kelly Miller: Yeah. So if there is so much focus at the university on student success without sufficient attention to, let's say, the wellbeing, so increasingly my work is focused on wellbeing, so if we are not sufficiently focused on the wellbeing, it's really hard to focus on student success. So for me, student success, um, in a way depends on the health of the community in which they're studying and learning. I've been focusing more on, you know, what is a healthy work and learning environment for everyone. And I realized that question might seem too large, but the more I worked on that, the more I feel like we are doing better for student success. Because if we're connected to what brings us happiness in our work or what brings us joy, brings us fulfillment, then we're better able to show up for the students.
-
Elliot Felix: That's such an interesting and fruitful kind of like reframe or zoom out because I do remember on the Learning Commons, it wasn't that it was myopic, but it was very focused. And the idea was, it was like a competency-based approach to student success. We thought about what we want students to be able to do. We want them to be able to work in a team, communicate, present, and research, write, analyze, create, and then we had services and spaces to support those different competencies. But what you're saying is you kind of have to zoom out and you have to look at not just the competencies, but the context and the community and those have to be healthy as preconditions for students to be able to do all that stuff and to feel supported and feel like they're part of something. I would love, like, what can libraries do to create a healthy environment for working and learning for everyone and to advance wellbeing and student success?
Kelly Miller: Oh, well, thank you. And I realize it's so huge, right? In a way, it's too huge. So I will, I'll kind of come back to that model you helped us create. Cause we developed this active learning model and it was very focused on actions. As you mentioned, learn, create, analyze, research, write, present, publish. Your team did a beautiful job of summarizing all these different activities. One of the things I realized was missing was being. Just be. Elliot's team created this wonderful visual of these action verbs that clarified for us as a Learning Commons community how we were helping students. And what activities we hoped that they would be able to do through their engagement with us. But as I listened to concerns from the campus community about overbooked counseling centers, a need for more attention to depression and anxiety amongst the student population, we realized that thinking about our stress relief programs that we were tending to do around finals time, but there was this growing awareness in me of, are we helping students just support them as human beings? And in what ways does that need to be integrated throughout the semester?
Elliot Felix: And I think we had conduct research at the center before, but I think it's more appropriate as one of the wedges of the wheel and be a healthy person at the center. I love it.
-
Kelly Miller: Yeah. And then simultaneously I had my own personal journey, which is I had this big change in my personal life and heartbreak and I signed myself up for an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction class called MBSR for short. And that started me on a meditation journey. I started to connect with researchers on campus who are mindfulness practitioners and researchers. I learned like, wow, there's all these strategies and techniques to better support people as they work with stress and can actually help their improved quality of relationships, reduce cortisol levels, and also can help performance. So now I'm finding these places of intersection. How we support student success for me now is how do we support wellbeing in our population using research-informed practices that are about connecting with our breath, connecting with our body, listening with presence. And now there's a next thing I'm kind of excited about is that we are also simultaneously working on climate work here at the university.
Elliot Felix: There's changes in economic climate too. I mean, there's a lot of increased stressors happening.
Kelly Miller: Exactly. Economic, political, a matter of fact, the term that's being used in the community that I'm increasingly in conversation with is the term is polycrisis. So how do we support students success in a time of polycrisis? When you have all of these intersecting challenges in the world and they're feeling it in their bodies. Actually co-regulating our nervous systems, not to the threat, but to wellbeing, can help us. So I think this is community work and it's also individual and collective work. We have an initiative here at the university called the Climate Resilience Academy that's trying to bring researchers from across the university together to imagine different solutions for the climate crisis, and they're also creating new curricula that's multidisciplinary. That work is tracking to the Sustainable Development Goals for the UN. But we know we're not going to reach those in time. So now a new initiative is emerging called the Inner Development Goals. In Inner Development Goals, they have a nice framework, but part of it is a category of being.
-
Elliot Felix: It's really interesting. You know, one of the things I was hoping to get at is like how the work that libraries do is changing and I think you've already answered that because it's focusing on wellbeing and the health of communities. It's like adapting, surviving and thriving in a time of polycrisis. It's also like working together across disciplines and cultures to solve problems. I feel like every question we're zooming out a little bit further, like we went from the skills to the person, to the community, to now the country and the world. Who's doing this well?
Kelly Miller: Yeah, so I think this is work quite at the edge, actually. Since right now the conversation in libraries is dominated by conversations about artificial intelligence and technology. But increasingly I see what our university library is doing is focusing on community building, whether or not we say that, because we're offering more and more events and programs that bring in not only students and faculty, but the larger community. We are offering more and more exhibits. We're partnering more with our art museum. Our numbers are rising again in terms of how many students are coming to the library. They want this gathering space. We don't have enough group study rooms. We don't have enough places for students to physically connect. So, I just see that that's where the energy is. Why not connect them with what research is telling us supports their health? The challenge is it goes counter to a lot of our cultural conditioning. A lot of what the research is telling us is we need to slow down, and pause, and we need to rest more, and we need to take care of ourselves more. We need to spend more time in presence in community with others in order to be well.
-
Kelly Miller: I just had a meeting this past week with colleagues from different libraries in Europe. I'm part of a special interest group focused on library space that is international. One of the dominating questions in that conversation was, what is the identity of a library without books? Because a lot of libraries are moving their books out and then you're left with, oh, what are we? I just think there's such an opportunity to maybe even redefine success as being well in this moment, because there are so many uncertainties in the world. Having a stable, steady mind that knows what it wants to do in this moment, that it has an intentional task, is like the best we can do right now. In order for us to imagine better futures, we need stable minds working together, not stressed minds.
Elliot Felix: Right. I remember when I was a kid, in youth soccer, one of the most important things we learned is toward the end of the game, the less time you have, the slower you go. Because every play means more. At the very moment when you're tempted to rush things, that's actually when you have to slow down.
Kelly Miller: Oh, I love that story. That's so beautiful. Right now in our culture, in our education, like what is the goal? It's about caring for each other, figuring out how we can actually survive in a world that's under threat. Increasingly this work on wellbeing, it can't be disconnected from our racial justice work, our inclusivity work. We're working closely with the BIPOC and LGBTQ communities because these communities are most under threat. Listening to them actually heals us all. That competitiveness that comes out of capitalist culture and white supremacy culture is the challenge. Focusing more on collaboration and connection, which is what libraries do, is the remedy. Wouldn't it be wonderful if all of us as human beings and the natural world that we're a part of around us could all thrive together?
Elliot Felix: Well, that's awesome. And I think that's an inspiring vision for the future. I think that is the perfect place to end our conversation about libraries and student success, which is so much more than success, it's health and wellbeing and thriving together.