Julian Vasquez Heilig

Have you ever spent months looking forward to something? A vacation. A long-awaited trip. A graduation. A championship game. A reunion with people you love. You think about it constantly. You imagine how it will feel. You count down the days on the calendar. Then suddenly it arrives. Before you know it, the moment has passed and you are driving home, unpacking your suitcase, scrolling through…

There is an uncomfortable question that creeps into the mind at certain points in a career: Have I already peaked? The internal debate can arrive after a major award. It can arrive after a title change. It can arrive after leaving a high-profile role. Maybe you won a championship. It can arrive at a certain age. It can arrive when the applause gets quieter and the calendar no longer feels as…

The University of Texas tried to intimidate me as an untenured professor because my research challenged one of Texas’s most politically protected education policies. That is not an exaggeration. It is what happened. Long before today’s escalating political fights over DEI, curriculum bans, and ideological loyalty in higher education, I experienced firsthand how political pressure quietly enters…

Learn how to watch who is being punished, who is being protected, and what financial interests are quietly moving underneath a controversy, and the real story usually starts revealing itself. One of the hardest lessons people learn inside powerful institutions is that truth and loyalty are often treated very differently. Most organizations publicly celebrate honesty, transparency, courage, and…

Gillian Hayes recently wrote an essay titled “On Leading People Who Don’t Want to Be Led,” for Inside Higher Ed and much of it resonated deeply with my own experiences in leadership over the past 20 years. But I also think the issue she describes extends far beyond educational institutions. In many ways, higher education simply exposes more visibly a contradiction entrenched across much of…

Mother’s Day was yesterday, and I had some time to reflect. I found myself thinking first about appreciation. Big thanks to all mothers and mother figures who spend years giving love, protection, encouragement, patience, sacrifice, and emotional support in ways that often go unseen while they are happening. So much of what holds families together is built quietly over time, and many people only…

Not who celebrated you once success made belief easy and socially convenient. Who saw you before the evidence existed? Who recognized possibility in you while you were still uncertain, unfinished, struggling, awkward, overlooked, or invisible to everyone else? That kind of seeing is rare because real seeing is not simply noticing talent. Real seeing is the ability to recognize humanity,…

In the 1980s, rabbit’s feet were everywhere. They hung off keychains in gas stations, corner stores, and mall kiosks across my part of Michigan. They came dyed in bright colors, attached to cheap chains, sold as symbols of good luck. Even then, it never quite made sense. A severed foot on a keychain was supposed to bring something positive into your life, and yet it always felt like an odd way to…

There are moments in American history when a legal decision does not feel like a technical adjustment but like a rupture. This latest Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act lands in that space. It is not neutral. It is not incremental. It’s power being taken back. The elimination of representative numbers of Black Americans in Congress from Red States is the impending consequence. So for…

In American Fiction, there’s a moment every creator, every doer, should hear, and most aren’t ready for. An agent looks a writer dead in the eye and breaks the illusion: Creativity and commerce aren’t enemies. Then he reaches for a bottle. Not metaphorically, literally. “Johnnie Walker makes three kinds of scotch,” he says.Blue. Black. Red. Different audiences. Different purposes. Different…

Sometimes your phone rings, and your life can change in an hour. It does not announce itself as a turning point. It feels ordinary at first, just another moment in a long line of moments. But then something shifts, and you realize that what you are hearing is connected to something that has been building quietly in the background. Those moments remind you that the path you are on is not random,…

If you can keep your head when all about youAre losing theirs and blaming it on you,If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,But make allowance for their doubting too;If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: If you can dream—and not make dreams your…

Tenure is no longer a quiet, internal academic process. It has become a central political battleground for the Republican Party in recent years. Conservative lawmakers across multiple states have intensified efforts to weaken or eliminate tenure protections in both K–12 and higher education. What was once a cornerstone of academic freedom is now being reframed by politicians as a problem to be…

In college, my Uncle Terry came to pick me up in his old school van so I could move out of my dorm room at the University of Michigan. It was not fancy. It was not pretty. It was rusted. It rattled a little. Its paint color was from another era. We loaded everything in, shut the doors, and started heading down I-94. We were moving slow. Painfully slow. Cars were flying past us. I remember…

In 2026, a new podcast entered the conversation space with a powerful premise: our stories may feel personal, but they are rarely unique. My Story Is Not Unique creates space for reflection, honesty, and connection across lived experiences. I recently had the opportunity to join the podcast for a conversation on freedom, courage, and what it means to stand firm when the stakes are high. The…

Every year, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting feels like coming home. This year in Los Angeles marked my 23rd AERA, and I am reminded again why this gathering continues to matter so deeply in my life and work and the field of education. The AERA Annual Meeting is the largest national conference dedicated to education research, bringing together tens of thousands…