Times Higher Education

Campus: How to navigate higher education as a woman of colour

For international women's day, we spoke with two academics of colour about their experiences of being minority women in academia.

 

Henrika McCoy is the Ruby Lee Piester Centennial Fellow in Services to Children and Families and associate professor at the Steve Hicks School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin.

Henrika shares her experience of colleagues and students having erroneous expectations about her scholarship and background because she is a Black female academic. And she addresses the assumption that non-parent academics don’t have any caring responsibilities. 

More from Henrika:

Diversity statements: the good, the bad and the ugly

Questions you should ask yourself about your role in institutional racism

Yes, your university perpetuates racism against BAME academics: what can you do?

Didar Zowghi is a professor of software engineering and a senior principal research scientist at CSIRO's Data61. She leads a research team in "Diversity and Inclusion in AI" and "Requirements Engineering for Responsible AI". She is also the leader of the National AI Centre’s think tank on diversity and inclusion in AI in Australia, emeritus professor at University of Technology Sydney and conjoint professor at the University of New South Wales.

Didar speaks about about biases in AI systems, improving the gender imbalance among AI professionals and her journey from Iran to the upper echelons of the AI research community. 

 

THE Campus: Academia and activism

Academia and activism might seem like a natural pair. Both require grit, persistence and a passionate commitment to a cause. However doing social justice work is often at the sacrifice of other tasks that count towards career progression in higher education. 

 

In this episode, three academic activists discuss the structures within higher education that make this work difficult, how they balance it with parenthood and other commitments, and they offer advice to anyone else hoping to use their research and teaching as a bridge between universities and the community. 

 

Colette Cann is a professor and associate dean in the school of education at the University of San Francisco, and Eric DeMeulenaere is an associate professor of urban schooling in the department of education at Clark University. Their book The activist academic: engaged scholarship for resistance, hope and social change was published in 2020 by Myers Education Press. 

 

John McKendrick is a professor in social justice at Glasgow Caledonian University and is working to eradicate poverty. 

THE Campus: Career advice, LGBTQ+ in the academy and public speaking tips

A career in academia comes with a lot of components – some good and some not so good. In this episode we’re talking about topics that might seem like their on the periphery of the core elements of an academic career, but they’re crucial to your credibility among colleagues and your sense of well-being.

Ray Crossman, president of Adler University in Chicago, shares his experience of being an out president and encourages others to be their true self on the job, warts and all. He's also got advice on upskilling through mentors and explains how university mission statements give subtle cues to LGBTQ+ academics on how supported they would feel on campus.

Brian Bloch is a presentation and communication teacher associated with the University of Münster. Here he gives pointers on voice, body language, and English pronunciation. And he’ll give a conclusive answer to how to pronounce one of London’s most difficult-to-say tube stations.

Read more career advice from your peers on THE Campus: How to progress in your academic career

THE Campus: What makes a good higher education leader?

Universities have been around for a millennium, however their modern iteration - and the people who lead them - are somewhat different to their medieval European ancestors. Over the centuries, institutions have dealt with a multitude of difficulties but the current combination of a global pandemic, economic downturn, populist politics and a climate crisis seems particularly challenging. So what sort of leader does the moment call for? And how are senior figures in higher education responding to the issues of the day?

Leadership expert Jon McNaughton, an associate professor and associate department chair in Texas Tech University’s College of Education, joins the podcast to explain how the job of university president has changed over the decades, what type of leadership is required right now and how to know when to step away. Joy Johnson, president and vice-chancellor at Simon Fraser University, shares what it's like being a rare female leader and how she approaches housing shortages and the politics around recruiting international students.

 

Find out more about Jon's work here. 

 

THE Campus: An interview with Ruth Simmons, president of Prairie View A&M

Ruth Simmons was the first African American president of Brown University which she led for 11 years. Before that she was president at Smith College where she set up the first engineering programme at a women’s institution. She was recently called out of retirement to lead Prairie View A&M an historically black institution in southeast Texas. As she approaches the end of her tenure there, THE Campus editor Sara Custer interviewed her for THE Campus Live US.

Here she speaks about her pioneering work to research Brown’s historical links to slavery, the future of affirmative action, legacy admissions and how to get more people that look like her into university leadership. 

THE Campus: Breaking down barriers with research and student-led campaigns

How can faculty and staff address the real issues, however forbidden, that make students feel isolated and voiceless? When teams research difficult topics, how can they establish two-way, equitable participation with their community?

Members of the teams that won the Times Higher Education 2021 Awards for Outstanding Contribution to the Local Community and Outstanding Contribution to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion join us in this episode to discuss working with taboo and difficult topics. Anna Walas, faculty research impact officer and honorary research fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the  University of Nottingham, talks about her team’s research into gender-based violence. And Lindsay Morgan, a placement officer for the School of Arts & Creative Industries at Edinburgh Napier University and co-producer of Bleeding Soar, tells us about the campaign to increase awareness of period poverty around the world.

 

Related links:

Website for the Bleedin' Soar campaign

Website for the The Language of Hate Crime project

"Talking about taboos: how to create an open atmosphere for discussing difficult subjects" by Lindsay Morgan

"In this together: developing meaningful community engagement" by Anna Wales

Resources from 2022 Times Higher Education Awards nominees 

 

THE Campus: Is AI in higher education worth the hype?

Artificial intelligence has a lot of potential for higher education. It can automate onerous repetitive tasks for teachers, help researchers leapfrog mountains of data crunching and make higher education more accessible and personalised for students. But AI also presents risks, including biases that can become embedded into algorithms and a lack of transparency around data use.

Though we may be a long way from understanding exactly how higher education can harness AI and machine learning’s great potential in a safe way, this episode's guests say that continuing to test and explore it is the only way to make progress.

Join THE Campus editor Sara Custer and senior content curator Miranda Prynne as they speak with Ashok Goel, a professor of computer science and human-centered computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the developer of the first automated teaching assistant, as well as John Wu an assistant astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and an associate research scientist at Johns Hopkins University.

 

Find resources from your peers exploring the benefits and costs of AI in higher education on THE Campus.  

THE Campus: Teaching 101 advice from your peers

Even the most experienced faculty member could benefit from teaching advice from their peers. In this episode of the THE Campus podcast, we feature short tips from university educators around the world to create a mini teaching community in podcast form. And we speak with David Dodick, a sessional lecturer at University of California, Berkeley and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, about the the arts and humanities employability myth and common mistakes he's seen university lecturers make.  

So sharpen your pencils and make sure your laptop is charged – prepare to get schooled on how to teach.

Find more teaching resources in our THE Campus spotlight "Teaching 101: advice for university educators"

 

This episode is sponsored by Routledge. THE Campus listeners can use code THE20 before 22 October 2022 to get *20 per cent off* all orders. 

 

THE Campus: How can universities help tackle misinformation?

Education is often offered as a solution to tackling misinformation, particularly training in critical thinking and analytical skills. But what does that actually look like in the day to day running of a university? Or for the average higher education instructor not specialised in fields like media, politics or social sciences? And is there more that institutions could be doing to inform public policy and technology companies to help get ahead of the disinformation wave? 

Phil Napoli the senior associate dean for faculty and research at the Sanford School of Public Policy and the director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy at Duke University shares his ideas about how universities can support local journalism and researchers can work with third parties to impact public policy. 

And Simge Andi, a lecturer in quantitative Political Science at the University of Exeter, talks about her research into why people are vulnerable to misinformation and what she's learned from studying elections in Turkey. 

This episode is sponsored by The Wall Street Journal. Visit wsj.com/timeshighereducation to learn more about integrating WSJ into your classes.

And for more advice from your peers on what universities can do to fight fake news, check out our THE Campus spotlight: The role of higher education in separating fact from fiction.

 

THE Campus: What makes research and teaching interesting?

Whether teaching or writing up research, there is a strong incentive for academics to try and make their work as interesting as possible. If people are intrigued by what they’re doing, it is likely to have a greater impact. But since everyone has their own unique take on what is or is not interesting, this can seem an impossible task.

So, we spoke to three academics to find out if there are any universal characteristics that academics could try to develop in their work that will successfully pique people’s interest.

Kurt Gray, associate professor in psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and director of the Deepest Beliefs Lab and Center for the Science of Moral Understanding, shares a beginners guide to what makes something interesting.

Manuel Goyanes, assistant professor in the Department of Media and Communication at Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M), discusses the qualities likely to generate greater interest in research.

Emily Corwin-Renner, research scientist at the University of Tübingen’s Hector Research Institute of Education Sciences and Psychology, shares insight and strategies to help teachers hold the attention of their students.

Further reading:

Find dozens of helpful resources on how to make your teaching more interesting on THE Campus.

Manuel Goyanes’s 2018 study “Against dullness: on what it means to be interesting in communication research: Information” published in Information, Communication & Society