Student Affairs NOW

Guests discuss governance issues, including overreach, ethics, and effective board governance. We unpack recent events at Michigan State University as a case study to explore governance issues for higher education institutions across the United States. Drs. Brendan Cantwell, Felecia Commodore, Demetri Morgan, and Kris Renn discuss engagement vs. overreach, negative partisanship, board accountability, and the possibility of today's challenges being leveraged to create transformational change for reimagining boards for greater effectiveness for higher education as a public good.

This episode features a panel of scholars and practitioners as well as the executive director of the College Autism Network discussing how colleges and universities can better meet the needs of autistic and neurodivergent students on college campuses.

Student development theories and frameworks are foundational to the student affairs professions; however, there have often been concerns about their applicability to and effectiveness with marginalized college students. Square Pegs and Round Holes offers new perspectives to this important conversation by centering Critical Race Theory as a way to interrogate our understanding about the development of marginalized students.

Who are today’s college students, what do they need, and how can institutions rise to meet these needs? Today’s new episode brings together four panelists who contributed to a new book Multiple Perspectives on College Students: Needs, Challenges, and Opportunities. Combining thoughtful insights from higher education stakeholders -- including students, their parents, K-12 educators, faculty, and administrators -- with analyses by faculty/scholars, this book challenges us to update our understanding of today’ students from multiple vantage points.

This conversation features the two editors of the new book, Identity Interconnections. Lisa Delacruz Combs and Dr. Aeriel A. Ashlee discuss concepts and connections from their book, including compassionate cautions, liminality, threshold theory, healing and transformation, paradox and nuance, aspiring allyship, and even a Rihanna quote.

Today’s episode features three authors of chapters in a new book Becoming a Diversity Leader: Navigating Identity and Situational Pressures. While diversity leaders exist at all administrative ranks and levels across both academic and student affairs. Today’s episode focuses on the senior diversity officer role. Often a senior administrator or vice president or chancellor, senior diversity officer often wears a number of significant hats. They might be charged to lead university-level DEI strategic planning, to assess campus climate and implement equity initiatives within departments, and to respond to immediate DEI crises including bias incidents and hate crimes. Joining host Heather Shea are Raul Leon, Brighid Dwyer (Ajunwa), and Kelli Perkins.

The guests on this episode move beyond restorative justice in campus conduct processes to talk about the proactive and responsive ways higher education can utilize restorative philosophy, practices, principles, and justice processes. Special co-host Jessi Benveniste joins Keith Edwards in conversation with Drs. Léna Crain, Desirée Anderson, Patience Bryant, and Valerie Glassman. They discuss restorative approaches to community development, the critical roles of both accountability and grace, and the complexities of restorative justice's history and implementation.

As we launch the fall semester, student activists will once again—as they have for decades—resume their work to address climate on campus as related to racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and other forms of oppression. In this episode, co-authors of the book, Identity-Based Student Activism: Power and Oppression on College Campuses, discuss ways that campus administrators can reflect upon our work with student activists and consider new ways to improve relationships, resulting in more hospitable campus climates for all students across identities.

So many candidates and so many hiring authorities share that traditional approaches are no longer working, and the issues they always elicited are worse than ever. We need new approaches to hiring processes. Today's guests were all recommended as folks who are doing hiring radically differently. They discuss people-centered processes that honor the humanness of all involved, retaining current employees as the best hiring practice, taking a recruitment mindset rather than running candidates through an obstacle course or gauntlet, and making the processes reciprocal for the mutual benefit of candidates and organizations.