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: what makes a good higher education leader?

Advice, insights and solutions for the challenges facing higher education from academics, faculty and staff at institutions around the world. Hear teaching tips, writing pointers, discussions on the  big issues, forecasts and first-hand experiences from university leaders.

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For this episode of the Times Higher Education podcast, we talk with an academic, practitioner and policy commentator who uses phrases such as “burning platform” to describe the state of universities’ digital landscape.
Mark Thompson is a professor of digital economy in the research group Initiative for the Digital Economy (Index) at the University of Exeter, and his work focuses on the complexity and velocity of the digital economy. A former UK government policy adviser, he is recognised as one of the architects of digital service redesign of the UK public sector.
In this interview, conducted at Digital Universities UK at Exeter, Thompson shares his concern that the sector is drifting away from its true north of research, teaching and impact (he uses Jeff Bezos idea of “day one”), citing statistics that less than 40 per cent of university staff are academics. He suggests reasons for this and talks about the need for leadership at institutional and government level as well as the prisoner’s dilemma of whole-sector transformation.

Campus interview: Mark Thompson, professor of digital economy at the University of Exeter

What difference does human connection make to student success? Does it matter if students come to in-person lectures? And what if students turn to AI for help with academic tasks rather than asking libraries or someone in student support?
This episode of the podcast takes on these questions, ones that have driven headlines on Times Higher Education, to examine the topics of student attendance in lectures and whether students’ use of AI might be making them lonelier. We talk to two Australian academics who both touch on questions of human connection in their work.
Jan Slapeta is a professor of veterinary and molecular parasitology and associate head of research in the Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney. He first talked to THE in 2022 when his tweet of a photo of an empty lecture hall touched a nerve in the Twitter-verse. Here, he explains why he is feeling optimistic about in-person teaching in 2024. His insightsare insightful and heartening as are his tips for new teachers.
Joseph Crawford is a senior lecturer in management in the Tasmanian School of Business at the University of Tasmania. His paper, co-authored with Kelly-Ann Allen and Bianca Pani, both from Monash University, and Michael Cowling, from Central Queensland University, “When artificial intelligence substitutes humans in higher education: the cost of loneliness, student success, and retention”, was published last month in Studies in Higher Education. Our conversation ranged from what belonging and loneliness actually are to what happens when students turn to AI over real-life relationships.

Campus: human connection and the student experience

In this episode of the Times Higher Education podcast, we talk to two experts – one in the US and one in the UK – about open access, the global movement that aims to make research outputs available online immediately and without charge or restrictions.
Heather Joseph has been an advocate for knowledge sharing and the open access movement since its earliest days. Based in Washington DC, she has been executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) since 2005, and is known for her policy work, leadership and international consultancy for organisations such as Unesco, the World Health Organisation and the World Bank. In 2021, she won the Miles Conrad Award, the National Information Standards Organization’s recognition of lifetime achievement in the information community, and her lecture as the recipient is a detailed history of the movement, its goals and strategies.
Steven Vidovic is the head of open research and publication practice at the University of Southampton in the UK. A palaeontologist with a passion for scholarly communication and knowledge exchange for public benefit, he is also chair of the Directory of Open Access Journals advisory board and Southampton’s institutional lead for the UK Reproducibility Network, and he is a member of Jisc’s transitional agreement oversight group.

Campus: what is open access?

In this episode we discuss a rare creature: the female higher education leader. 
Indeed, according to the American Council on Education’s most recent American College President Study, women remain outnumbered by men in the college presidency by a ratio of 2:1, with about 33 per cent of presidencies held by women.
Women in higher education were also more likely to work a part-time or reduced schedule or postpone a job search or promotion to care for minor dependents
We’d be hard pressed to find a better person to speak with about female leadership in higher education than Sian Block, an award-winning cognitive scientist and an expert on performing under pressure. She is also the 19th president of Dartmouth, and the first woman elected to the position in the institution’s 250-year history.
Sian speaks about navigating failure and dealing with anxiety on the job. She also gives some very helpful advice on how to turn imposter syndrome into something positive and shares her personal experience of female leadership, a journey that began with working in the provost office at the University of Chicago before serving as president of Barnard College at Columbia University and then moving to Dartmouth in 2023.

International Women's Day Campus interview: Sian Beilock, president, Dartmouth

In this bonus episode of the THE podcast, we continue the theme of universities’ role in fostering civic engagement with an interview with renowned human rights scholar and award-winning author Kathryn Sikkink.
Sikkink is the Ryan Family professor of human rights policy at Harvard Kennedy School, as well as faculty co-chair of the Harvard Votes Challenge, a non-partisan initiative that promotes student voter registration and turnout. Her books include The Hidden Face of Rights: Toward a Politics of Responsibilities (Yale University Press, 2020) and The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), which won the Robert F. Kennedy Center Book Award.
In this discussion, we talk about the origins of Sikkink’s interest in human rights, what support students need to navigate the mechanisms of voting, and why showing up on election day is not just a right, it’s a responsibility.

THE Campus: what makes a good higher education leader?

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