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The COVID-19 pandemic raised barriers for college students and challenged institutions to rethink approaches to student retention. Academic advising is critical to achieving student retention. During COVID-19, advisors faced increased work demands and adopted coping behaviors to keep workloads manageable. Coping behaviors are conceptualized as moving toward students and moving away from students. This exploratory study used multiple regression analyses to examine the relationship between advisor work conditions and the extent to which advisors used coping behaviors. Survey data from a 4-year public university indicated that the level of resources and supervisor support available to advisors were significant predictors of the extent to which advisors coped by moving away from students.

Flexible behavior requires gating mechanisms that encode only task-relevant information in working memory. Extant literature supports a theoretical division of labor whereby lateral frontoparietal interactions underlie information maintenance and the striatum enacts the gate. Here, we reveal neocortical gating mechanisms in intracranial EEG patients by identifying rapid, within-trial changes in regional and inter-regional activities that predict subsequent behavioral outputs. Results first demonstrate information accumulation mechanisms that extend prior fMRI (i.e., regional high-frequency activity) and EEG evidence (inter-regional theta synchrony) of distributed neocortical networks in working memory. Second, results demonstrate that rapid changes in theta synchrony, reflected in changing patterns of default mode network connectivity, support filtering. Graph theoretical analyses further linked filtering in task-relevant information and filtering out irrelevant information to dorsal and ventral attention networks, respectively. Results establish a rapid neocortical theta network mechanism for flexible information encoding, a role previously attributed to the striatum.

Scholars of library and information sciences have addressed the critical roles of libraries in energizing the public sphere, or the social spaces in which ideas and opinions are exchanged. But seldom is the discussion of race, racism, and marginalization examined in public libraries. The concept of the public sphere represents a critical foundation for examining the roles libraries play in illuminating voices in the civic culture of a society. Who is the public, and why are their voices important? How can libraries respond to the reconfiguration of contemporary publics? How should libraries engage in the production, organization, and distribution of information access? Drawing from public sphere perspectives, this paper explores not just how libraries can be more responsive to the changing political, economic, social and educational climates of the 21st century, but also how expanded conceptualization of public roles might contribute to democratic revitalization.