Liz McCabe

Winter 2026 Interview

By Laura Ferdinand, Assistant Director of Content and Communications

In early January, the Office of the Provost announced Liz McCabe as the new Director of Academic Initiatives. As she begins to define the newly created role and identify priorities in collaboration with Associate Provost Karen Smilowitz and the undergraduate education team, McCabe is undertaking a listening tour to bring the perspectives, needs, and experiences of folks across the University into conversation. In doing so, she is enacting her core values as an educator, co-creating a space of community and curiosity in which to address some of the most pressing challenges and opportunities in higher education.

Last week, I sat down with McCabe at a mainstay of downtown Evanston dining to learn more about her new role. As we were settling in, she reminisced about sharing a meal with her parents at this same restaurant many years ago as a new graduate student, how they were comforted to know she could get a good meal far from her native New York. It is a fitting coincidence that we should meet here at the beginning of another exciting chapter of her Northwestern career.

Less than five weeks into her new position, which purposefully preserves her direct connection with students in the classroom, I was honored that she made time to meet with me. I was also surprised that she was as interested in learning about me as I was about her. Her spirit of generosity and connection infuses everything she does, from her role as an Associate Professor of Instruction, board member of several nonprofits, and former director of the Chicago Field Studies Program in Weinberg. McCabe deeply prizes a sense of co-created community, a space where every student feels invited and integral to its success.

In these first few weeks, McCabe is already forging the relationships that will support thoughtful work on emergent issues including academic integrity, teaching evaluations, and teaching and learning in the age of generative AI. We look forward to partnering with her as she helps shape Northwestern’s next chapter.

The following interview includes excerpts from our conversation, edited for clarity and continuity.

Congratulations on your new position as Director of Academic Initiatives in the Office of Undergraduate Education. Could you tell me about your background and what sparked your interest in stepping into this role?

In 2009, I started teaching in Chicago Field Studies (CFS) as a PhD student in the English Department. I loved the innovative spaces and weird challenges that experiential learning provided, getting to know students closely and advising them through internship experiences. When you're teaching those kinds of classes, you just have to be open to a range of things students are bringing. I loved that, so I just held on to CFS teaching—and it became a career.

Somewhere along the way, the director of CFS asked me to teach a civic engagement class, in part because I was also working with a couple local nonprofits and a regional leg of a national poetry contest for high school students called Poetry Out Loud, jobs that put me into contact with different civic structures and institutions. From there I began working with various colleagues, the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, and the Center for Civic Engagement at Northwestern on public humanities initiatives, bringing people together from various public arts and humanities institutions (so I’m thrilled that there is now a new Public Humanities Cluster in The Graduate School!). I was in the mix of trying to draw connections with community partners across the seeming boundary of the institution. Eventually, I stepped into the role of director for CFS a few years, and I learned that I didn’t mind—and even liked—the administrative and policy challenges that come along with the responsibilities of a director seat.

This year, I was returning to teaching in CFS and in the English Department to maintain connection to my trained field, to have classrooms to compare, and the position opened. What interested me about it initially was that it would be a chance to think about undergraduate education from an extremely different angle than I had been working from for a really long time. I was thinking about Northwestern in relation to boundaries and connections to the rest of the world—that’s the community engagement part of my experience. I was thinking about career preparation and how to maintain certain academic standards and possibilities within that very unique [experiential learning] program. Suddenly, I was imagining the possibility of looking at a wider range of challenges and possibilities of higher ed for undergraduates and for faculty right now. And that was compelling.

I loved the thought that I would get to learn so much, too. There's no way that I was going to not learn things in this job, if even just learning more about the points of commonality and points of difference across disciplines and schools in their approaches to some of our fundamental pedagogical questions.

I really love the design of this particular position, which follows the logic that if we’re going to have someone who’s thinking a lot about teaching and learning, they should keep teaching. Being able to have a foot in the classroom seems critical to me—tiring, sometimes—but crucial. It can be very easy to get distanced from the classroom when thinking about policy and lose sight of the kinds of questions that people are navigating on the ground, especially when things are changing as quickly as they are in the age of AI and beyond.

As you’ve begun this work, what are some of the questions or opportunities that feel most compelling for you right now?

I really want to trust my students. I want to enter the room with the assumption that we are going to get up to some exciting things together over the course of the quarter—that moments of intellectual exhilaration and surprise are open to all of us, and that they will all inevitably surprise me and themselves for the better at some point.

Teaching in the age of AI is very, very hard right now. I know a lot of people are talking about a sense of distrust and suspicion infusing a teaching experience that didn’t feel like that even a year ago. I see it. I feel it. I’ve had those moments, too. But I’m inspired by my many colleagues who are finding ways to enter and build classrooms and learning experiences that start from the assumption that students are game. They’re curious, they’re eager, and they want to be excited intellectually, even amid all the things that they are stressed about, and all the temptations to lean into those stressors. We still have students who want to learn how to think. They need help understanding what we mean by that, and the academic endeavor as a whole. What is it that we do here? Why do we cite sources? How is knowledge made? What skills do you need for the critical act of discernment?

Right now, my priority is to be on a listening tour as much as possible. I am trying to get to know people and the various committees and councils that I am directly serving, particularly the Academic Integrity Council and the Generative AI Advisory Committee for now.

I think my job is to serve, to help a team of people serve the schools, faculty, student body, and broader Northwestern community—to aim in the best possible directions toward student learning and innovative research for all of us: the community and everybody who benefits from the work of higher education.

You are also an Associate Professor of Instruction in Northwestern’s Chicago Field Studies and a key team member for the Engage Chicago summer program. What have you learned from these experiences, and how do they inform your approach to academic initiatives at the institutional level?

Teaching in experiential-learning programs has taught me the pleasure of entering a classroom where students can’t leave the rest of their lives at the door. Especially in an internship-connected classroom, you need students to talk about their internships! I need to create an environment in which they’re going to tell me and each other how they’re doing, really, because for the class to work, we need to know: what happened in your workplace today? In Engage Chicago, students are living together in the middle of the city for the summer, while doing their internships, doing program trips, taking the L, reading the local news... the whole thing requires them to talk about it all together! So, in these kinds of classes, we’re always asking: what can we learn by bringing your experiences into the room and putting them into conversation with our various texts and materials? It’s challenging, but quite fun.

CFS became this place where I got to get really close to groups of students every quarter, and I had to experiment all the time. You have to be extremely agile in this kind of teaching. You can have a lesson plan, you need them to discuss the article or the short story you assigned or what have you, but the students can walk in the door and say, you know, this crazy thing happened at work or on the train and suddenly you're going, what do I do with this? How do I get from where they are to where I need them to go, without discounting where they are starting from?

More and more, I think agility has been a hallmark of my professional life. There's certainly no way to do community-engaged teaching and learning well without it, because challenges and opportunities emerge that you just can’t plan from the start. And I don’t see how to do effective problem-solving and guidance for a complex endeavor like this institution or higher education in general without a certain flexibility.

Across your teaching, what do you most hope students carry with them long after they leave your classroom?

I very deeply prize a sense of community in every classroom I’m in. I have to make sure that students know each other’s names—whether a small CFS seminar or the summer we had 64 students in Engage Chicago. It’s almost a joke within my classes within the first couple weeks that I am going to continually ask them to use each other’s names in discussions. They start to cheer for it sometimes. It might sound silly, but whatever else happens in the quarter, they need to have realized that they had to think with other people—that their learning was a collaborative, iterative process. In the classrooms that I co-create with students, I need them to feel like they are invited into a space of community and curiosity, where they are necessary to its success.

How have you engaged with the Searle Center and our educational developers?

I have connected with the Searle Center in a few different ways. I’ve been doing the University Practicum. I think I’ve done it almost every year since it started! I go to workshops occasionally, and I have also mentored graduate students through their CFS teaching who are in or have recently been through a Searle program. Essentially co-mentoring a graduate student while they were working with Searle has been great. It is a deeply supportive experience for graduate students.

One of strategic priorities at Searle is to cultivate a relationship‑rich environment where instructors can connect across shared interests and sustain their vitality as educators. How do you see opportunities for partnership in building that kind of relational ecosystem?

The University Practicum has been a great example of this, so I’m excited to be doing it right now. In general, though, a lot of faculty are thinking about how to navigate this era of generative AI while maintaining their fundamental learning goals and core methods of their disciplines—and the changes are happening quickly. People are trying to adjust or try new things without much lead time, and that can be very hard. What do you do in the middle of the quarter if you realize that your entire class is using ChatGPT for a discussion board? Or a new version of an AI tool goes live that scrambles an assignment you’d built around a previous version? People are figuring it out on the fly. That can create an immense sense of pressure and frustration, and an array of possible issues when accounting for accessibility, academic integrity, and more.

We need some wide-open acknowledgment of how hard this is, particularly for faculty who do not have a lot of space for thinking about this because they’re always thinking about the next quarter of teaching while wrapping up the one they’re in. Anything that we can do to create more resources, and support for faculty right now would be an outstanding way to keep connecting Searle even more deeply with what’s happening in classrooms, so I look forward to supporting Searle’s ongoing efforts to do that work with the schools and faculty. There are a lot of wonderful things happening in our classrooms right now, too! And I’m excited to help people share those lessons.

Published February 18, 2026