Institutions, as well as students and established scholars, have much to gain when universities develop communities and support structures to ensure that skills such as planning, communication, judgement and cultural awareness are embedded across the university.

To find out more, we speak to Katerina Standish, an advocate for professional development around graduate supervision and author of The Graduate Supervisors Handbook: Practical Strategies for Graduate Pedagogy and Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026). Katerina is a professor of global and international studies, interim dean of the Faculty of Indigenous Studies, Social Sciences, and Humanities, and vice-provost academic at the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada. Having supervised 26 PhD candidates and many master’s students to completion, her postgraduate teaching and supervision background draws on knowledge of Western and Indigenous research frameworks, and she is a certified conflict coach.

This conversation is packed with practical advice about building foundational skills and where established scholars can look to advance their own practice.

And for more advice on research supervision that supports and inspires, check out our latest spotlight guide.

While efforts to improve access to higher education for disabled students have contributed to increased enrolment, people with disabilities are still less likely than their counterparts to enter college, to feel at home in higher education settings and to secure a degree. And research suggests that many do not to disclose their disabilities once enrolled within an institution, which limits the support available to them.

So this week, we speak to a US researcher who has dedicated the last decade to studying the experiences of disabled students in higher education and the barriers to full access and inclusion for all.

Katherine Aquino is a social scientist and educational researcher who currently serves as the executive director for research training and development in the School of Graduate Studies at Rutgers University. Her research examines the complexity of disability in the postsecondary setting and her most recent book, The New Accessibility in Higher Education: Disrupting the System for an Inclusive Future, co-authored with Adam Lalor was published by Oxford University Press last year.

Katherine explains why existing efforts to improve access and inclusion have so often fallen short of their ambitions, why a shift in mindset is needed for systemic change to take hold and how individuals have the power to drive big change

For more advice and insight on improving accessibility for all in university teaching, head to our spotlight guide: Make learning accessible to all in higher education.

Academics are specialists in their disciplines and research areas but very few have any expertise in running a business. So, while their discoveries may hold commercial potential, it is rarely a simple or easy process translating this knowledge into a saleable product or service.

To demystify the process of research commercialisation, on this episode we hear from a US-based biomedical researcher who has launched and grown five spin-out companies over the last 25 years.

Ashutosh Chilkoti is the Alan L. Kaganov Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University and the brains behind companies including PhaseBio Pharmaceuticals, Sentilus and Insolere Bio.

He runs the Chilkoti research group and has driven a number of initiatives at Duke designed to support entrepreneurship among students and staff.

As well as describing his own varied start-up experiences, he breaks down the process of developing a research finding into a business and offers insight on what investors look for and how institutions can best support their academics efforts in commercialisation.

For anyone interested in commercialisation and enterprise, this conversation offers practical takeaways and useful insights to guide your decision-making.

And for more advice on this process, check out our latest spotlight: A step-by-step guide to commercialising your research.

One issue is that professional services staff don’t always have clear pathways to promotion and progression, which can perpetuate perception of division.

So, this Campus Talks episode aims to answer questions such as: how deep is the divide between academic and professional services staff? Does the sector do enough to support career pathways for staff who don’t fit the neat progression of traditional academia? And how can universities do more to ensure that the breadth and depth of professional services expertise are not overlooked?

We talk to Eleanor Hodgson, a senior educator developer and director of the ASPIRE Professional Recognition Pathway at the University of Exeter. With a PhD in French, Hodgson has held both academic and professional services roles, at Next Steps South West and Exeter’s Business School, before taking on her current position in 2021.

She explains how her team collaborates with academics to enhance teaching and develop expertise such as AI literacy and inclusive pedagogy, and with other professional services teams across the university. She lays out why universities should draw in the depth of expertise across the university at all stages of strategy, policy and programme development. And she offers careers advice for graduates looking for alternatives to the traditional academic pathway.

For more insight on related topics, check out the latest Campus spotlight guide on connecting the dots between academic and professional services staff.

So, it should concern everyone that STEM fields are still overwhelmingly male dominated. And it’s not just women who are underrepresented, this also applies to minority ethnic groups. Women make up just 16.9 per cent of the 6.4 million people working in engineering and technology in the UK - compared to 56 per cent in other occupations. While minority ethnic groups make up just 14 per cent of the workforce, according to EngineeringUK’s 2025 workforce report.

On this week’s podcast, in homage to International Woman’s Day, we speak to an academic who has built a successful career as a woman in the male dominated field of chemical engineering, to find out how being an outlier shaped her approach to her career and what she thinks needs to change to diversify her discipline.

Raffaella Ocone became the first female professor of chemical engineering in Scotland – second in the UK – when she was appointed to the post at Heriot-Watt University in 1999. She is currently serving as president of the Institute of Chemical Engineering, marking the organisation’s first female president and CEO partnership.

She is also a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Institution of Chemical Engineers, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. In 2007 she was appointed Cavaliere of the Italian Republic and in 2019 in the Queen’s New Year Honours she was appointed Officer of the British Empire (OBE) for services to engineering.

But it all started for Raffaella in a small village, Morcone, in the hills of Campania in Southern Italy where, as she explains, few people backed her chances of becoming a professional engineer. Listen on to hear how she proved them wrong.

For more advice and insight on how universities and academics can support efforts to get more women and other underrepresented groups into STEM, check out our spotlight guide: Opening doors to greater diversity in STEM.

The next version of Horizon Europe, due to launch in 2028, is likely to show much greater alignment with EU economic and defence priorities, backed by the budget almost doubling to €175bn a year.

The initial proposal put forward by the European Commission opens Horizon up to dual purpose and defence focused research and places more weight on research designed to drive EU competitiveness in key industries such as green energy and digital technologies.

This week Miranda Prynne is joined by THE features editor Paul Jump to discuss how the planned changes could affect European research and the impact on Horizon’s flourishing global network of non-EU members such as the UK, Canada and Japan whose contributions currently make up around a third of Horizon’s total budget.

Listen to Paul’s take on whether the new Horizon Europe will provide a platform for a stronger international network of like-minded middle powers, giving them more clout on the world stage, or if a closer focus on Europe’s needs will create tensions with non-EU members.

Editing is an eminently learnable skill – one that can be broken down into manageable steps. That alone can be enough to ease the fear of looking closely and honestly at how your manuscript is constructed. And a systematic approach can guide writers to fix or improve their work in line with what peer reviewers, scholarly publishers and ultimately the target readership are looking for.

For this episode of the podcast, we talk to developmental editor, author and manuscript consultant Laura Portwood-Stacer. Her latest book, Make Your Manuscript Work (Princeton University Press, 2025) decodes the editing process into a set of steps. She explains the key area that anchors a manuscript, how authors can identify the strengths and problems in their work, the skills writers need to edit their own work, and the power of title and chapter headings in reaching as broad a readership as possible.

For more advice from experts around the world on how to take your academic writing to the next level, visit the latest Campus spotlight guide.

Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa) data obtained by Times Higher Education show that there were 6,085 non-UK-domiciled students enrolled on MRes courses in the 2024-25 academic year – up from 2,485 in 2023-24. 

This leaves the institutions behind such rises open to accusations of playing the system and using MRes courses as a way to circumvent the government’s visa rules.

On this episode of News Talks, Miranda Prynne speaks to Times Higher Education deputy news editor Helen Packer, who has been covering the story, to find out what lies behind the rising MRes numbers, what the institutions driving the growth have said and the reaction from politicians and other sector leaders.

But while there are many success stories of now well-established branch campuses all over the world, there have also been plenty of failures. There are currently 387 international branch campuses open across 85 countries. A further 73 have opened and then closed, according to research by C-BERT.

So, what causes some international branch campuses to flourish while others collapse?

To find out, I spoke to Christine Ennew, who served as provost and CEO of the University of Nottingham Malaysia from 2013 to 2016, having been part of the team who travelled to Kuala Lumpur in 2000 to establish this pioneering branch campus. Christine spent five years as pro vice-chancellor at the University of Nottingham and most recently was provost at the University of Warwick until she retired in 2023.

We discuss the thinking behind branch campus endeavours, what is needed for sustained success, common criticisms of branch campuses and what impact, if any, the UK government’s new international education strategy may have.

For more insight on related topics, check out our spotlight guide on how to deliver value for international students.

The case, being heard in the high court in London this week, brings to the fore questions over academic freedom, institutional autonomy, trans rights and EDI policies and the role of the OfS.

On this episode of News talks, Times Higher Education editor Chris Havergal talks to Miranda Prynne about the background to the case, the key points upon which Sussex is disputing the OfS findings and the broader implications for universities and the way they are regulated.

But most academics are relatively new to using AI and thus have a long way to go to understand its many potential applications. Something that comes more naturally to some than to others.

To find out how researchers can get the most out of AI tools while managing the associated risks, this week, we speak to a leading computer scientist who has been developing AI tools for research for more than 20 years.

Karin Verspoor is dean of the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Her research focuses on the use of AI to support biological discovery and clinical decision making by analysing biomedical text and clinical records.

She has held previous posts as director of health technologies and deputy head of the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne, as the scientific director of health and life sciences at NICTA Victoria Research Laboratory.

Listen to Karin’s take on the good, the bad and the best way forward for AI in academic research.

And if you want more practical advice and insight on how to best apply GenAI to augment your own research, check out our latest spotlight guide: GenAI as a research assistant.

This episode of Campus talks looks at how to foster safe, inclusive learning spaces, how to spot students who are struggling, advice for starting conversations around sensitive topics like mental health, and how educators can be open and authentic while protecting their own boundaries and work-life balance.

We talk to Marissa Edwards, who is a senior lecturer and researcher in the University of Queensland Business School. A mental health advocate with a background in psychology and organisational behaviour, she is also the co-editor of the Research Handbook of Academic Mental Health and co-founder and co-curator of Voices of Academia, a blog dedicated to academic mental health and well-being.

This interview makes reference to eating disorders, anxiety, depression and trauma.

You will find more advice from educators and experts from institutions around the world on supporting students in the university classroom in Campus’ latest spotlight guide.

You will hear from:

Michael Scott is pro vice-chancellor international and a professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick. Michael’s research explores the intersection of ancient history and archaeology within the Mediterranean and beyond. He has published numerous books on the ancient world for the popular market and written and presented TV series on the BBC, ITV, History Channel and National Geographic. 

Mark Power is vice-chancellor and chief executive of Liverpool John Moores University and a professor of higher education leadership as well as being practising artist. Mark has worked at Liverpool John Moores University for 44 years, having taken up a role as a senior technician in the fine art department at what was then Liverpool Polytechnic in 1981. He has maintained his internationally recognised work as an artist alongside his academic career throughout this time.

For more insight and advice on why and how to make the case for the arts and humanities in higher education, take a look at the spotlight guide on Campus.

By inviting students to work with their teachers to shape course materials, activities and even assessments, co-creation appears to offer a textbook solution.

However, giving students greater agency over their learning is not without its challenges and some educators may find the idea of ceding control over their teaching decisions troubling.

On this week’s podcast, we speak to a leading proponent of co-creation in higher education, who has researched and published extensively on this pedagogical approach, as well using it in her own teaching.

Catherine Bovill is a professor of student engagement and head of the programme design and teaching enhancement team in the Institute for Academic Development at the University of Edinburgh. She is also a visiting fellow at the University of Bergen in Norway and the author of dozens of research papers and a couple of books focused on co-creating in teaching and learning.

She explains why and how educators should bring elements of co-creation into their teaching offering examples of how it can work in different contexts and addressing oft-voiced concerns.

For more insight and advice on making co-creation work in your teaching, check out our latest spotlight guide: The practicalities of co-creation with students.

Skills – whether you call them soft, transferable, power, productivity, work-based or human skills – have come to dominate the conversation about employability. The rapid advance of artificial intelligence, coupled with a shrinking number of entry-level roles, means that graduates are looking for the capabilities that will give them an edge. Industry and governments, meanwhile, have their eye on the economic and innovation advantages that come with an agile, digitally literate and productive workforce.

Alongside academic skills, universities have long provided students with opportunities to develop communication, critical thinking and teamwork skills, but external demands mean they need to be more intentional about embedding transferable skills in curricula – and give graduates means to evidence this learning.

To find out how institutions in the UK and Australia are responding to the call for work-ready graduates with a skill set adapted to the modern economy, we talked to:

• Sir David Bell is vice-chancellor and chief executive of the University of Sunderland. He is also vice-chair of Skills England. Sir David has served as Her Majesty’s chief inspector of schools, and his public sector roles include permanent secretary at the UK Department for Education, director of education and libraries for Newcastle City Council and chief executive of Bedfordshire County Council.
• Dawn Bennett is a higher education consultant, with a focus on graduate outcomes and student success. She is also founder of the Developing Employ-ability Initiative, which gives students and educators a framework for managing career development and mapping employability skills, and a senior associate with consultancy Outside Opinion. She spent 14 years as the John Curtin distinguished professor of higher education and director of the Developing Employability and Creative Workforce Initiatives at Curtin University, Australia, and continues to engage in research. She is a former professional violist.
• Derek Harding is manager of the VET Educator Academy at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. In this role, he works on professional development for staff to promote academic quality. A former high school teacher, he has experience in foundation education and instructional design.

For more advice and insight on developing transferable skills from academics and experts from universities around the world, read our spotlight Soft skills for hard times.

Jenny is a senior lecturer and educationalist in the Health Professions Education Centre at RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences in Dublin. She also serves as programme director for the postgraduate diploma in health professions education, where she leads curriculum design and delivery to support educators in developing evidence-informed, learner-centred teaching practices.

To mark this year’s THE Awards, which are being presented in Edinburgh on 13 November, we talk to Jenny about how educators can put AI to use in a way that fosters efficiency without taking away rich cognitive work, how her uptake of technology has evolved, strategies for dealing with uncertainty and complexity in the classroom, why students should learn to be bored, and the skills university teachers can develop to future-proof their practice (hint: it involves finding the spark of enjoyment).

To learn more from acclaimed academics, teams and institutions from the UK and Ireland, check out our latest Spotlight guide, which pulls together advice from this year’s shortlist: THE Awards 2025: lessons from the stars of UK and Irish higher education.

But some claim that an over-zealous focus on inclusion and appeasing students has led to an erosion of academic freedom and allowed a ‘cancel culture’ to dominate higher education, leading to a worrying expected conformity of opinion on important contemporary issues. This is all playing out against the wider backdrop of growing polarisation and identity politics.

For this episode, we speak to two experts in this space to find out what practical steps universities can take to encourage more constructive disagreement and engagement with differing viewpoints among students as part of their learning. And how institutions can uphold the requirements of free speech and nurture plurality across campus, while protecting those most affected by contentious issues.

You will hear from:

• Caroline Mehl, the co-founder and executive director of the Constructive Dialogue Institute, a non-profit organisation that builds educational tools to equip US higher education institutions and other organisations with skills to communicate and collaborate across differences. She founded the CDI with psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt in 2017 having previously worked as an associate research scholar and visiting scholar at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
• Abhishek Saha, a professor of mathematics at Queen Mary University of London and co-founder of the London Universities Council for Academic Freedom. Abhishek was heavily engaged in lobbying the UK government over key details of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 which came into force this year.

You can find more insight and advice on how universities can encourage respectful disagreement, while handling sensitive topics with care and protecting academic freedom in our latest spotlight guide: Dealing with division: the polarised university.

But there are still opportunities available for PhD candidates who can successfully convince the relevant funding bodies of the worth of their proposed work.

We speak to a research leader and historian who has demonstrated notable success in her own career about changes to the funding landscape, how institutions can respond and how doctoral students can optimise their grant applications.

Hear from Alice Taylor, a professor of medieval history and vice-dean for research in the faculty of arts and humanities at King’s College London.

Her first book, The Shape of the State in Medieval Scotland, which was co-awarded the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize in 2017 – the same year she was awarded the prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize for History. 

More recently, she led the launch of a new doctoral school for arts and humanities at King’s, which opens next year.

For more advice and insight on related topics, read our guide to finding and securing research funding.

So, today we explore the many factors that influence motivation and ask how educators can use these to keep students engaged throughout their studies. You will hear tips for improving the quality of motivation, for beating procrastination and improving your time management, from:

• Ian Taylor, a reader in motivational science at Loughborough University and an associate fellow and chartered psychologist of the British Psychological Society and the author of a new book, published this year, Time Hacks: The Psychology of Time and How to Spend It.
• Helena Seli, a professor of clinical education and assistant dean of academic programme development at the USC Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. She is an expert in educational psychology and co-author, with Myron H. Dembo, of Motivation and Learning Strategies for College Success: A Focus on Self-Regulated Learning.

For more insight and practical advice on this topic, head to our spotlight guide which contains dozens of resources on motivating university students and staff.

We speak to two professors, who have both written on navigating this tricky career terrain, about how they have managed to find freedom and fulfilment in their work, even when faced with spiralling workloads and multiple pressures, and what fulfilment looks like.

You will hear from:

Jeffrey McDonnell is a university distinguished professor of hydrology in the School of Environment and Sustainability, and associate director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, as well as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2024, he was appointed as an officer to the Order of Canada and his many awards include the 2016 Dooge Medal from the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (with Unesco and the World Meteorological Organization), the 2022 Outstanding Achievement Award from the New Zealand Hydrological Society and the 2009 John Dalton Medal from the European Geosciences Union. He is the author of Navigating an Academic Career: A Brief Guide for PhD Students, Postdocs and New Faculty (American Geophysical Union, 2020).

Sarah Robinson is a professor of human resource management at IÉSEG School of Management in Paris. She moved into academia after working in international development and completed her PhD at the University of Lancaster before working her way up through a series of lectureships at the Open University, Leicester University and the University of Glasgow, where she was promoted to professor in 2019. After years studying the experiences of early career researchers, Sarah co-edited Doing Academic Careers Differently: Portraits of Academic Life (Routledge, 2023) with fellow researchers Alexander Bristow and Olivier Ratle, a book that seeks to highlight approaches to academia that diverge from the traditional career model.

For further career advice from academics all over the world, addressing some of the key challenges associated with working in higher education, head to our latest spotlight: An academic’s survival guide.

The answer, Thomas Jefferson University president Susan Aldridge says, lies in an interdisciplinary and applied approach to learning.

In this video podcast, she describes how the institution has achieved a 98% success rate for graduates in employment or further study, the benefits of bringing students from different disciplines together, upskilling everyone in the use of AI and why US university leaders need a joined-up strategy for communicating the value of higher education.

Thanks to Thomas Jefferson University for sponsoring this episode.

We speak to Rachel Gable, director of academic programme authorisation at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and the author of The Hidden Curriculum: First Generation Students at Legacy Universities (Princeton University Press, 2021) and the upcoming The College Handbook: How to Arrive, Survive, and Thrive on Campus (PUP, 2026). With a background in anthropology and a doctorate in education from Harvard, she has spent years researching student success, interviewing scores of students about how they navigate the unspoken norms and social rules of higher education. 

You can find more practical advice and insight on how best to set students up for success at your institution, from academics all over the world, in our latest Campus spotlight guide: A warm welcome for new students.

You will hear from:

Paulette Granberry Russell JD, the president and CEO of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. She took up the position in March 2020, after more than 20 years as chief diversity officer and senior adviser to the president for diversity at Michigan State University. She is a leading national voice on civil rights, justice in higher education and beyond, and the transformative power of higher education.

Frank Dobbin, the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, whose research investigates what initiatives are most effective in promoting diversity in corporations and in higher education. He has written and spoken widely on this subject, with his 2022 book, co-authored with Alexandra Kalev of Tel Aviv University, Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t sparking widespread coverage and commentary.

You can find more practical advice and insight on how best to support a diverse, equitable and inclusive higher education sector, from academics and EDI practitioners all over the world, in our latest spotlight guide: What next for EDI? Protecting equality of opportunity in HE.

But are universities equipping students with the capabilities and mindset needed to properly question information and assumptions, to self-reflect, overcome biases, analyse, empathise and reason? And if not, what could higher education do differently?

To find out, in this podcast episode we speak to two experts in education and strategic decision-making:

Olivier Sibony is an affiliate professor at the business school HEC Paris and a specialist in strategic decision making and the role that heuristics and biases play in this. Olivier spent 24 years as a management consultant with McKinsey and Company in New York, Paris and Brussels and has produced hit books including You're About to Make a Terrible Mistake in 2020 and Noise, A Flaw in Human Judgment in 2021, which he co-wrote with Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahnemen and Cass R Sunstein.

Tony Wagner is a senior research fellow at the Learning Policy Institute. Prior to this, Tony worked at Harvard University for more than twenty years, as expert in residence at the Harvard Innovation Lab and the founder and co-director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has also worked as a high school teacher, a K-8 principal, university professor and founding executive director of Educators for Social Responsibility. And he is the author of eight books with his next, Mastery: Why Deeper Learning is Essential in an Age of Distraction, published in September.

In these interviews, we break critical thinking down into its component parts, discuss its role in decision making, why it can be so challenging and why contemporary education systems need a rethink if they are to truly equip students to think independently amidst the flood of digital information with which they are bombarded daily.

For more practical insight and advice on teaching and practicing critical thinking in higher education, go to our latest spotlight guide: Critical thinking in teaching and research.

One aspect that is beyond question is social media’s ability to hook and maintain our attention. So, what can higher education take from social media’s compelling ways to improve teaching, critical thinking or outreach? How can teachers use its strategies to build engagement in class, for example? What can analysing influencers show learners about navigating AI-created content and deep fakes? What do online habits tell us about what students need from their teachers and each other?

For this episode of the Campus podcast, we talk to two very different guests, a psychologist in the UK and a professor of public relations in the US:

• Peter Lovatt is an expert on the psychology of movement and dance, a former professional dancer, and founder of Doctor Dance. During his 20 years working in university research labs, he led the Dance Psychology Lab at the University of Hertfordshire and was a dance psychology lecturer at the Royal Ballet School. His books include The Dance Cure: The Surprising Secret to Being Smarter, Stronger, Happier (Short Books, 2020) and Dance Psychology: The Science of Dance and Dancers (2018).
• Cayce Myers is a professor of public relations and director of graduate studies in the School of Communication at Virginia Tech. His work focuses on laws, regulations and ethics that affect public relations practice, and his books include Public Relations History: Theory, Practice, and Profession (Routledge, 2020) and Money in Politics: Campaign Fundraising in the 2020 Presidential Election (Lexington Books, 2023).

For more resources from our Campus contributors on this topic, visit our latest spotlight guide: What can higher education learn from social media?

Hear about the efforts of US librarians to protect valuable public data and government records from the sudden erasure by the Trump administration. Plus, a UK vice-chancellor describes a pioneering project which saw his university partner with the local council to create a joint library that is open to anyone.

Lynda Kellam is the Snyder-Granader director of research data and digital scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania. She has held previous data librarian roles at Cornell University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She serves as secretary of the International Association for Social Science Information Service and Technology (IASSIST) and is a past president of the Government Documents Round Table (GODORT). Independently of her role at Penn, she is a leading figure in the Data Rescue Project, which is coordinating efforts to protect US public data at risk of deletion or mismanagement.

David Green is the vice-chancellor of the University of Worcester. A Cambridge-educated economist with a career-long commitment to education and social equality, he was instrumental in establishing The Hive, which is the only fully integrated university-public library in Europe, in partnership with the Worcestershire County Council. Before joining Worcester in 2003, he held senior academic posts at London South Bank University, Leeds Metropolitan University and the University of West London, and worked as a researcher and consultant in the private sector and for UK homeless campaign SHELTER. In 2019, he was awarded a CBE for his services to higher education. 

You'll find more advice and insight on how university libraries can optimise their services for students, academics and the public in our latest spotlight guide.

Most academics want their work to have an impact and one route to achieving this is by commercialising their findings. By partnering with an existing company to bring a product to market or by establishing a new spin-out enterprise, scholars can develop technologies, products and solutions that can revolutionise whole sectors, whether in healthcare, construction, farming and more. But this is a far from easy or simple process requiring tenacity, adaptability, collaboration and high level problem solving.

For this week’s podcast, we speak to two people with extensive experience in what it takes to commercialise research and become an academic entrepreneur.

Mairi Gibbs is CEO of Oxford University Innovation – the university’s technology transfer unit - where she has worked since 2002. With extensive practical experience in partnership management, formation of spinout companies, licensing and patent portfolio management, she explains the initial steps to commercialisation, what investors look for and what can be done at an institutional level to support more spin out activity.

Andrew Hammond is co-founder and head of R&D at Biocentis – an Imperial College London spin out founded in 2022. With a background in molecular biology, Andrew’s 10-year academic career at both Imperial and Johns Hopkins University involved advancing gene editing technology for use in insects. The resulted in the development of gene drive technology designed for use on malaria mosquitos and the later development of Biocentis.

For more advice and insight on this topic, read our spotlight guide on how to work well with industry. 

For many, the easier changes have been made so, looking ahead, institutions need to get smarter about how they transform their practices and policies to halt future global warming.

In this episode, we speak to two women focused upon driving positive change and reducing emissions in two very different but equally important arenas of university work.

Ellen Quigley is principal research associate at the University of Cambridge. She is also co-director of finance for environmental and social systemic change and special adviser in responsible investment to the university’s chief financial officer. Her own award-winning research focuses on the mitigation of climate change and inequality through the investment policies and practices of institutional investors. Drawing on the example of Jesus College, Cambridge, she explains how universities can use their power as investors to influence and press for environmental change across multiple sectors – and work against funding for fossil fuel extraction.

Jenna Lowe is the laboratory sustainability officer at the University of Liverpool. She manages the university’s Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF) and is a member of the sustainability team. She was shortlisted in the Outstanding Technician of the Year category in the 2024 THE Awards. She discusses how seemingly small adaptations in lab practices can have a huge impact in reducing emissions and waste.

You can find more advice and insight on how universities can work towards achieving net zero in our latest spotlight guide here: Higher education’s bumpy road to net zero | THE Campus Learn, Share, Connect

For this episode of the Campus podcast, we speak to Karen Gravett, who is an associate professor in higher education and associate head of research in the Surrey Institute of Education at the University of Surrey. Her research covers belonging, digital education, student engagement, relational pedagogies and literacy practices. As part of the Belonging to and beyond the Digital university project, Karen (working with Rola Ajjawi of Deakin University and Sarah O’Shea from Charles Sturt University) asked students what belonging means to them, and in this conversation she shares insights into post-Covid student life and why elements such as curation, safety, non-belonging and connection to an academic discipline are powerful drivers of belonging.

You'll find more advice and insight on how to build belonging at your higher education institution in our latest spotlight guide.

We speak to:

Michael Sanders is a professor of public policy at Kings College London and director of the School for Government. In addition to his academic career, he has worked in government as chief scientist on the Behavioural Insights Team and was the founding chief executive of What Works for Children’s Social Care.

David Garcia is a professor with Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. Prior to joining ASU, he helped found the Arizona Center for Public Policy - ThinkAZ, and he was worked as an associate superintendent and a director of research and policy with Arizona Department of Education. He is also a former legislative staffer with the Arizona State Senate and was the 2018 Democratic candidate for governor of Arizona.

For more advice and insight on how best to engage policymakers with your research, take a look at our latest spotlight: An academics' guide to policy impact.

We speak to two academic experts to learn about effective institutional strategies to support internationalisation but also what key barriers prevent a more global academy.

Lily Kong is president of Singapore Management University. She is the first women to lead an institute of higher education in Singapore. She took the helm in 2019 after three years as provost, and prior to this she held senior management roles at the National University of Singapore.

Manuel Barcia is the University of Bath’s pro vice-chancellor (global) after moving from the University of Leeds in May 2025, where he was dean for global engagement and chair of global history in the School of History.

For more advice and insight on this topic, browse our spotlight guide to teaching and researching across borders.

Thank you to all who contributed their personal wisdom:

• Lucas Lixinski is a law professor and associate dean at UNSW Sydney, which he joined after completing a postgraduate fellowship at the University of Texas School of Law.
• Maha Bali is a professor of practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at The American University in Cairo (AUC). 
• Doune Macdonald is an emerita professor at the University of Queensland and a visiting professor at the University of Sydney.
• Debbie Riby is a professor of developmental psychology and associate pro-vice chancellor for postgraduate research students at Durham University
• Bhawana Shrestha is a research fellow at the Learning Institute for Future Excellence at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University.
• Chris Wright is a senior lecturer and co-ordinator of the Drawing Centre at De Montfort University.
• Chin Moi Chow is an associate professor of sleep and well-being in the Faculty of Medicine and Health at the University of Sydney.
• Pippa Caterall is a professor of history and policy at the University of Westminster.
• Patrice Sewou is an associate professor of learning and teaching and the director of the Centre for the Advancement of Racial Equality at the University of Northampton.
• Aster Cosmos is a learning designer at Monash University.

For more insight and advice on protecting the well-being of those working and studying in universities, take a look at our latest spotlight guide on making mental health a priority in higher education.

This podcast episode explores what good research looks like, how it can be supported at an institutional level, and what feeds into a healthy research ecosystem that enables robust studies of all types, at all stages to be carried out and knowledge advanced.

We also delve into research security to find out how such scholarly work can be protected from misuse or being weaponised amid ever-changing geopolitical power struggles.

You will hear from:

• Marcus Munafò, who is currently associate pro vice-chancellor for research culture and professor of biological psychology at the University of Bristol, but will, in May, take up the post of deputy vice-chancellor and provost at the University of Bath. He is co-founder of the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) and leads a major project funded by Research England to accelerate the uptake of open research practices across UK higher education sector.
• Jacqueline Littlewood, director of research security at the University of Alberta in Canada. She took up this role leading the university’s safeguarding research office in 2023 after a 20-year career in government as a policy analyst and adviser, including working with Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

For more advice on this topic, check out our resources offering insight on delivering top quality research, including a spotlight collection on how to demonstrate research excellence.

In seeking to answer these questions, we put assessment under examination. In this podcast episode, the nature of institutionalised education, how assessment can better serve learning, the impact of grading, and compliance all come under scrutiny.

We speak to:

Susan D. Blum is a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. An award-winning author and educator, she has written and edited 10 books including a trilogy critiquing the way university teaching is delivered with the latest, Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning, coming out in 2024.

Catherine Wehlburg is president of Athens State University and president of the Association for the Assessment of Learning in Higher Education (AALHE).

Josh Eyler is director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and clinical assistant professor of teacher education at the University of Mississippi. He has written highly regarded books on the science of learning with his latest, Failing our Future: How Grades Harm Students and What We Can Do about It, published in 2024.

More insight on assessment in higher education can be found in these Campus spotlight guides: 

• The evolution of authentic assessment
• AI and assessment in higher education
• The great assessment rethink

So, there is a growing movement towards more cross-disciplinary working in higher education, but it faces challenges. Interdisciplinarity requires a shift of mindset in an academy built upon clear disciplinary distinctions and must compete for space in already overcrowded curricula.

For this episode, we speak to Gabriele Bammer and Kate Crawford to find out why interdisciplinary research and teaching are so important and how these leading scholars are encouraging more academics and students to break out of traditional academic silos.

Gabriele Bammer is a professor of integration and implementation sciences (i2S) at the Australian National University. She is author of several books including ‘Disciplining Interdisciplinarity’ and is inaugural president of the Global Alliance for Inter- and Transdisciplinarity. To support progress in interdisciplinarity around the world, she runs the Integration and Implementation Insights blog and repository of theory, methods and tools underpinning i2S. Gabriele has held visiting appointments at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center at the University of Maryland and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany.

Kate Crawford is an international scholar of the social implications of artificial intelligence who has advised policymakers in the United Nations, the White House, and the European Parliament on AI, and currently leads the Knowing Machines Project, an international research collaboration that investigates the foundations of machine learning. She is a research professor at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles, a senior principal researcher at MSR in New York, an honorary professor at the University of Sydney, and the inaugural visiting chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Her award-winning book, Atlas of AI, reveals the extractive nature of this technology while her creative collaborations such as Anatomy of an AI System with Vladan Joler and Excavating AI with Trevor Paglen explore the complex processes behind each human-AI interaction, showing the material and human costs. Her latest exhibition, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power 1500-2025, opened in Milan, November 2023 and won the Grand Prize of the European Commission for art and technology.

More advice and insight can be found in our latest Campus spotlight guide: A focus on interdisciplinarity in teaching.

These interviews – with a researcher, a teaching expert and a pro vice-chancellor for AI – share practical advice, break down key considerations, and offer reasons for vigilance and optimism. 

We talk to:

• Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and a cooperating faculty member in the computer science and engineering department at the University of California, Riverside, whose article “Making AI less ‘thirsty’: uncovering and addressing the secret water footprint of AI models”, co-written with Pengfei Li and Jianyi Yang, also from UC Riverside, and Mohammad A. Islam of UT Arlington, has drawn attention to water consumption of AI data centres
• José Bowen, an author and academic who co-wrote Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024) 
• Shushma Patel, pro vice-chancellor for artificial intelligence at De Montfort University in the UK. 

For more Campus resources on this topic, see our spotlight guide Bringing GenAI into university teaching.

We speak to two academics about the challenges associated with the dominant commercial academic publishing model and how they are seeking more effective ways to enable researchers to disseminate knowledge.

Paul Ayris is pro-vice provost for library services at University College London and chief executive of UCL Press which he founded 10 years ago as the UK’s first fully open access university press. The press produces a range of open access monographs and edited collections, student textbooks and academics journals and is now home to UCL Open Environment, the only multidisciplinary open science journal focused on all environment related topics.

Philipp Koellinger is a professor in social science genetics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and co-founder and CEO of a tech start-up DeSci Labs which hosts DeSci Publish, a pre-print network where scientific research is published, validated, and curated without paywalls or publication charges.

On the broader question of public impact, hear how universities could provide a framework that supports academics to carry out more community-engaged research, designed to serve the public good.

On this episode, we talk to:

Chris Lintott, professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford, presenter on the BBC’s The Sky at Night program, author and co-founder of citizen science platform Zooniverse. He explains how his interest in citizen science was sparked and why he believes it is such an effective model.

Neeli Bendapudi, president of Penn State – Pennsylvania State University – discusses a new coalition of university leaders from across the US and Canada who are working with funders, government agencies and others to develop a roadmap for the future community-engaged, public-impact research.

For more insight into the global higher education sector, visit Campus. 

Storey is a professor of fashion and science at the London College of Fashion in the Centre for Sustainable Fashion at the University of the Arts London (UAL). In May, she donated her 30-year Helen Storey Foundation Archive of about 2,000 digital and physical pieces to UAL. In this interview, she details her journey – how she transitioned from award-winning commercial fashion designer to working with scientists on projects that, among other explorations, translate the first 1,000 hours of human life into textiles – and how she hopes the archive will benefit students.

Storey, who was awarded an MBE for Services to Arts in 2009, also shares insights from her humanitarian work, from creating Dress 4 our Time to becoming the UNHCR’s first designer-in-residence, and how these experiences are now intertwined with her work at UAL.

The conversation covers what the arts and science bring to each other, the value of the tactile, and how art can be a conduit for people to connect with overwhelming issues such as climate change, plastic pollution and global displacement.

For more insight into the global higher education sector, visit Campus. 

In this episode, Indigenous university leaders – in Canada and New Zealand – explain how their institutions support First Nations’ participation in higher education. First, we talk to Angie Bruce, a Red River Métis woman who is vice-president (Indigenous) at the University of Manitoba. Prior to taking up her post, Angie had extensive experience working with First Nations, Inuit and Métis people in public sector organisations. She discusses the historical and systemic barriers to Indigenous involvement in Canadian higher education and what institutions can do to break these down.

We also meet Te Kawehau Hoskins, who is pro vice-chancellor (Māori) at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. A professor in Māori and Indigenous education and philosophy, her research interests are Indigenous Māori political philosophy and practice, Indigenous–settler relations and Treaty practice. She tells us about her journey into higher education and how spaces on campus allow First Nations and non-Indigenous students and faculty to come together in a meaningful way. 

For more advice on how to amplify Indigenous voices in higher education, visit Campus. 

We speak to:

• Roderick Watkins, vice-chancellor of Anglia Ruskin University, which was named 2023 THE University of the Year
• Mark Brown, a professor in evolutionary ecology and conservation at Royal Holloway, University of London, who won Outstanding Research Supervisor of the Year
• Joanne Pledger, a senior lecturer in astrophysics, and Ruth Spencer, a senior lecturer in dance, both at the University of Central Lancashire who, with colleagues, worked on the Into Our Skies: Space in Schools project, which took home the award for widening participation or outreach initiative.

As centres of teaching, research and innovation, universities are uniquely positioned to educate on environmentally aware leaders and help find ways out of this crisis.

We spoke to two academic experts in this space to find out how they and their institutions are driving action on climate change.

Tripp Shealy is associate professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech. His research looks at how climate and environmental issues are handled in land development and construction.

Liz Price is deputy pro-vice chancellor for sustainability at Manchester Metropolitan University and a professor of environmental education. She is responsible for driving sustainability across education, research and partnerships and developing Education for Sustainable Development, Carbon Literacy and Net Zero skills at the university.

For more inspiration and advice on how to advance efforts on climate change within your own inspiration, take a look at our latest spotlight guide: A greener future for higher education.

How can institutions balance social responsibilities against the need to maintain sound finances? How can they improve the quality of teaching and research while driving efficiency and streamlining spending? And how can they remain competitive in an ever-changing global higher education sector?

We spoke to two vice-chancellors about how they navigate these challenges.

Alex Zelinsky has been vice-chancellor of the University of Newcastle, Australia since 2018. He is a computer scientist and systems engineer by background who has previously worked in government as Australia’s chief defence scientist.

Anton Muscatelli has been principal and vice-chancellor of the University of Glasgow since 2009. He will be retiring next year after leading the university through a period of impressive growth. An economist, Anton was chair of the First Minister’s Standing Council on Europe and a member of the Scottish Government’s Council of Economic Advisers until 2021. He has been a special adviser to the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee on fiscal and monetary policy, and has advised the European Commission and the World Bank.

On this week’s Campus podcast, we discuss the full spectrum of student safeguarding and support.

Rachel Fenton, a professor in law at the University of Exeter and one of the UK’s leading academic experts in sexual violence and bystander intervention outlines the scale of the problem in UK universities and explains what can be done to tackle sexual misconduct in all its forms.

Catherine Moran, deputy vice-chancellor, academic, at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, discusses how her institution approaches student support, harnessing data and tech tools alongside human connection to ensure all students get the reassurance or help they need to succeed in their studies.

For more advice and insight specific to university safeguarding, head to our latest spotlight collection, made up of resources contributed by higher education professionals from all over the world: Duty of care: making university safe for all

Chas Bountra is pro-vice chancellor for innovation of the University of Oxford – we spoke just a week before the University of Oxford was named as the world’s leading university in Times Higher Education World University Rankings, for the ninth year in a row. The university claimed the top spot once more, based on its increased income from industry, the number of patents citing its research and its teaching scores.

Chas is also a professor of translational medicine and head of impact and innovation in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine. He is a director at Oxford University Innovations and has previously worked in industry as vice president and head of biology at GlaxoSmithKline and was the director of the Structural Genomics Consortium Oxford from 2008 to 2020.

Sara de Freitas is an an author, educator and researcher with extensive expertise in data science and digital technologies. She is honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London and a visiting professor at the Open University and the University of South Wales.

An environmental scientist by training, she also discusses how post-Covid changes to work patterns led to a rethinking of university spaces to boost sustainability and cost efficiency.

It is this latter question which makes defining good teaching so difficult. So, for this week’s podcast we spoke to two academics who have taught and researched teaching in widely varied settings to dig into the nuances of this most admirable of skills.

Leon Tikly is a professor and global chair in education at the University of Bristol, UNESCO chair in inclusive, good quality education and co-director of the Centre for International and Comparative Education in the School of Education.

Jason Lodge is associate professor of educational psychology and director of the learning, instruction and technology lab in the University of Queensland’s School of Education. He is an expert advisor to the OECD and Australian National Task Force on AI in Education.

In this episode of the Campus podcast, we talk to two experts from leading US institutions – who were both speakers at Times Higher Education’s Digital Universities US 2024 event – about how technology is redefining the university experience.

Steve Harmon is executive director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Tech as well as associate dean of research in professional education and a professor in the School of Industrial Design. He explains how his university has created “co-learning” spaces where students can gather and interact while benefitting from the flexibility of hybrid learning, and how technology from VR to YouTube supports the “learning to learn” skills that underpin higher education.

Lev Gonick is the enterprise chief information officer at Arizona State University and chair of the Sun Corridor Network, Arizona’s research and education network. He talks about the digital infrastructure required to support inclusive digital education at scale, looking to Hollywood-style immersive storytelling to teach STEM, and why it’s vital to align digital goals with the institution’s overall mission.

Julia Chen is director of the Educational Development Centre at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and leads a multi-university project focused on best practice in relation to generative AI. She talks about how her institution is rethinking teaching and assessment in the light of AI advances and supporting faculty in making the necessary changes to their course design and delivery.

Helen Cocks is head of digital strategy and engagement at the University of Exeter, responsible for setting the direction and driving engagement for the institution’s digital transformation. She explains how her team has partnered with students and staff to roll out a university-wide digital strategy focused on improving student experiences and upskilling staff.

These conversations were recorded live, in-person, at Digital Universities Asia in Bali in July 2024.

Our interview is with Shân Wareing, the new vice-chancellor of Middlesex University in northwest London, arranged after she posted on LinkedIn about the five things she focused on in her first day in the role. In that post, she listed sense-checking the mandate she had first pitched, identifying the key people to meet, understanding the underlying issues, how to make decisions “stick”, and seeing the life of the university.

As she explains, the clarity of that road map comes from over 20 years’ leadership experience in roles such as deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Northampton and pro vice-chancellor of education and student experience at London South Bank University. But her acuity comes from other sources, too. She offers fascinating insights into how to put a career together, the skill that is more important than confidence, and finding joy in what you do.  

Our conversation took place in May, when she’d been in post for just over a month.

For this episode of the Campus podcast, we talk first to Vivienne Stern, chief executive of Universities UK, about universities’ valuable opportunity to make a first impression, where Labour might turn for advice on higher education and how the sector may “tilt” in a quest for balance and stability.   

Our second guest, Chris Day is chair of the Russell Group of research-intensive universities and vice-chancellor of Newcastle University. He details what is at stake for a sector amid a funding crisis, job cuts and department closures – and where new revenue streams might come from – as well as hope that the 4 July election has brought a chance to reset the sector’s relationship with Westminster.

For this episode, we talk to two very different experts in cross-cultural education; one works in medical and healthcare communication in Hungary and the other teaches creative writing and other media in the mountains of Central Asia. They share their advice for creating a classroom that supports language learning and understanding, how teaching can adapt to maximise the benefits of an international student cohort, connecting practical clinical skills with functional language, and how language learning itself creates more empathetic communication.

Lucy Palmer is a senior lecturer of communications and media based at the Naryn campus of the University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan. She is also a former foreign correspondent and a successful memoir writer.

Katalin Fogarasi is an associate professor and director of the Institute of Languages for Specific Purposes at Semmelweis University in Budapest, Hungary.

Our questions include what is on higher education’s wish list for the new parliament, and how might university leaders demonstrate the value of their institutions to policymakers?

Over two interviews, we also tackle “blue sky” research funding, the future of skills training, how immigration policy might shape international student flows, and whether higher education will be a priority regardless of who wins the race to Whitehall.

Nick Hillman is director of the Higher Education Policy Institute and worked as chief of staff for David Willetts when he was minister for universities and science from 2007 to 2013. Diana Beech is CEO of London Higher. Her policy experience includes being a policy adviser to three ministers of state for universities, science, research and innovation.

The way that Normington talks about leadership demonstrates the very qualities she champions: clear strategic direction, communication and empowering others to lean into their strengths. She is a past winner of a Times Higher Education leadership and development award. This conversation covers her journey from aspiring ballet dancer to university head, early leadership challenges, and why higher education needs bold leaders, courage, creativity and agility as it faces global challenges.

In this episode of the Times Higher Education podcast, we talk to an expert in immersive technology, whose experience includes big tech companies such as Amazon and Meta, where she was head of immersive learning, as well as her current role in higher education.

Monica Arés is executive director of the Innovation, Digital Education and Analytics Lab at Imperial College London. In this conversation, she tells us about the evolution of edtech from the early days of virtual reality, immersive technology’s potential for unlocking curiosity (and the costs that come with it), and what she thinks teaching technology will look like in 2034. Hint: it’s a personalised, creative world with fewer screens.

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.  

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 insights are 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.

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.

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. 

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.

Elizabeth Matto is director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics, a research professor and teacher-scholar-practitioner of democratic education and director of the Center for Youth Political Participation at Rutgers University. She talks to us about what civic engagement is, how campuses can support their students to vote and engage as citizens, and universities’ mission to prepare young people to be part of a democratic society. She also gives tips for facilitating political discussion in the classroom and creating an environment that allows students to be brave, respectful and open with their views. Her new book, To Keep the Republic: Thinking, Talking, and Acting Like a Democratic Citizen (Rutgers University Press, 2024) is published in April.

Michael Bruter is a professor of political science and European politics in the department of government at the London School of Economics and Political Science and director of the Electoral Psychology Observatory. Michael has published seven books, including his latest book with Sarah Harrison, Inside the Mind of a Voter (Princeton University Press, 2020), and multiple articles in the fields of elections, political behaviour, political psychology, identities, public opinion, extreme right politics and social science research methods. He told us what their research has shown about first-time voters, including debunking misconceptions such as that young people don’t care about elections, and why voting is like bungee jumping.

This wide-ranging Campus interview draws on Purnell’s wealth of knowledge of public policy, the digital landscape and the creative industries. The conversation covers universities’ social purpose, the potential of online to widen access to a creative education, what AI could mean for the arts, and how government policy could be shaped to better support students. He also talks about how urban development can foster creativity, and how his experience as a film producer shaped his view of the arts’ potential to make a difference in the world.

In this episode we hear from an institution who has managed to get alternative credentialing right in a big way. The University of Edinburgh has been building Moocs (massive open online courses) and microcredentials for over 10 years. It currently offers 80 online master’s courses and 100 Moocs and microcredentials, reaching 4.7 million learners around the world. Melissa Highton, assistant principal of online and open learning at the university, is here to tell us about their strategy behind developing Moocs, how they remain relevant to millions of learners and the secret behind their commercial success. 

Michael D. Smith, a professor of information technology and public policy at Heinz College and Tepper School Of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, speaks with us about his recent book The Abundant University. Having observed disruption in the television and music industries, he urges universities to leverage technology to reach more students and secure their futures. 

Read more from Melissa Highton on Campus "A look back over 10 years of Moocs"

Microbiologist Mike Ibba joins us to discuss Chapman University's decision to move its philosophy department into the Schmid College of Science and Technology and why he wants training the next generation of scientists to be his lasting legacy. Ibba has been the dean of the college since 2020 after spending nearly 20 years at The Ohio State university. He also shares his experience of making the transition from a large, publicly-funded R1 institution to a small, private R2 institution. 

Thanks to Chapman University for sponsoring this episode.

Can spending time in natural environments support students’ well-being? The is the question that an interdisciplinary team of researchers and educators at Trinity University in San Antonio Texas wanted to answer.  Despite research showing that spending time outside does support students’ mental health, the team struggled to get students to actually spend time outdoors. So they developed an innovative course combing theory, research and practice to help students improve their mental wellness and better understand how it’s connected with the natural environment.

On today’s episode of the podcast, Laura Allen, co-developer of the course and a professor in the department of education at Trinity University joins us to talk about what inspired her and colleagues to develop this programme, how it combines forest bathing and undergraduate research, and, most importantly, if it’s helped their students. 

Thanks to one of our newest Campus+ members Trinity University for sponsoring this episode. 

Watch the video recording of this episode on Campus. 

Civil discourse is part of Dr. Diermeier’s solution to tribalism on campus and he gives examples of how that has been coached and encouraged at Vanderbilt. He also shares what is was like in the first few months of his chancellorship when researchers at Vanderbilt’s University Medical Center were on the cutting edge of Covid-19 vaccine development.

Find more resources from colleagues and peers on how to protect academic freedom on Campus 

This episode's contributors are:

Eve Riskin, dean of undergraduate education, Stevens Institute of Technology 

Monika Foster, head of department marketing, operations and systems, Faculty of Business and Law, Northumbria University 

Jon McNaughtan, associate professor, educational psychology, leadership, and counseling, Texas Tech University 

Sioux McKenna, director, Center for Postgraduate Studies, Rhodes University 

Preman Rajalingam, director, Centre for Teaching, Learning and Pedagogy, Institute of Pedagogical Innovation, Research and Excellence, Nanyang Technological University

Bryan Hanson, graduate student ombudsperson, Virginia Tech

Tara Brabazon, dean of graduate studies and professor of cultural studies, Charles Darwin University 

Barbara Kensington-Miller, associate professor curriculum and pedagogy, University of Auckland

Elena Riva, associate professor and director of education, Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning, University of Warwick

Gabriel Paquette, associate provost for academic affairs and faculty development, University of Maine

Lucas Lixinski, professor law and justice, UNSW Sydney

Dr. Brown intends to make higher education a place for indigenous students, starting with James Cook, one of her alma maters – a goal which she balances with an acknowledgment of the legacy of the university’s namesake. In this interview, she talks about what she’d like to see changed in Australian higher education, how researchers should engage better with First Nations communities and how a welcome to country statement can make a big difference when it’s done the right way. 

She's also an award-winning mentor, having received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring in 2020, and encourages her colleagues to not confuse confidence with talent. "If you give someone an opportunity they may take it and run," she counsels. 

This episode is sponsored by Stevens Institute of Technology

Hear the previous conversation with had with Ashok on Spotify, Apple podcasts or Google podcasts.  

However, our guests both offer elements of hope despite the bleak outlook. Bryan Alexander is a senior scholar at Georgetown University and a futurist. His latest book, Universities on Fire, implores universities to wake up and realise that they can make a profound change in the climate crisis. And he is cautiously optimistic about their ability to do that.

Our second guest is Sebastian Pfautsch, an associate professor in urban planning and management in the School of Social Sciences at Western Sydney University, with a background in tree physiology and, of all things, interior design. His multidisciplinary research is built around the complex issue of urban heat. He talks about some of the actions WSU, which has topped the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings for the past two years, has taken to meet the SDGS and what Australia’s experience of extreme heat can teach the rest of the world about cooling their cities.

Findings from a recent Gallup survey of Americans found that only 36 per cent have a "great deal" or "quite a lot of" confidence in higher education. That’s about 20 percentage points lower than the same survey in 2015. For Jonathan Koppell, president at Montclair State University, it’s time for universities to own their part in that loss of trust in American higher education. The big question universities need to ask themselves is: What are we doing to change the modus operandi to make it easier for people to get the dream universities are selling them, i.e.: get a degree, have a better life? 

In this interview Dr Koppell  discusses accessibility to higher education for minoritised groups as well as the merger with Bloomfield College and how the affirmative action ruling will change the higher education landscape.

This episode is sponsored by Montclair State, the newest member of the Campus+ network. Find out more about Campus+. 

Three intrepid pioneers are our guides as we learn how tools such as ChatGPT can enhance student feedback and academic research. Jennifer Rose, a senior lecturer in accounting and finance at the University of Manchester, and David Nicol, a research professor in the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow, explain how they are using the AI generator in their teaching – while being sensitive to its limitations and risks. They use it to help students use inner feedback to improve their writing (through comparison with ChatGPT output), to save time, to make thinking visual, and to foster critical thinking and academic skills.

Our third guest is Brooke Szücs, a research assistant and advocate for diversity in education at the University of Queensland. Brooke, who has autism, uses ChatGPT as “a conversation partner” to enhance her academic writing through feedback, polishing and drawing out key ideas, and even asking it to suggest journals where she could submit her work.

Read more from Jennifer Rose on Campus.

Read more from David Nicol on Campus.

Read more from Brooke Szücs on Campus.

David Latchman, vice-chancellor at Birkbeck, University of London, is optimistic that universities and the public have woken up to the importance of lifelong learning. In this interview we talk about why he thinks England's Lifelong Loan Entitlement programme is the right one to unlock the benefits of lifelong learning, the sticking points of the policy and how employers should get on board. 

Our second guest is Liz Giuffre, a senior lecturer in communication, teaching into music and sound design, in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney. Liz is also a music commentator, founding journal editor, archivist, podcaster, blogger and author – her latest book is Kylie Minogue’s Kylie, co-written with Adrian Renzo. We talked about how the ubiquity of popular culture (“it’s both ordinary and extraordinary”) drew her to study it, and why it’s the job of academics to understand mainstream culture – whether that’s the music of Kylie or Shakespeare’s plays.

Read more from Michael Dennin on Campus.

Masud Khokhar is a third-generation librarian and computer scientist and is currently the Librarian & Keeper of the Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds where he is also the director of learning spaces. Masud is also the current chair of Research Libraries UK. In this episode he does some myth busting around academic libraries, explains how they can be agents of change and tells us what he sees are the steps to shaping a more diverse generation of upcoming librarians.

Toni Carter is the director of the Kares Library at Athens State University and an advocate for improving students' information literacy. She gives advice on how faculty can collaborate with librarians to help students think critically about which sources of information they trust.

In this interview he explains why interdisciplinarity might be harder to achieve than some might think, how to communicate the public good of science to various audiences, and if science should be leveraged in geopolitics. 

But for some scholars, decolonisation is merely a by-product of the work that they do, including our guest Farish Noor, a professor in the department of history in the Faculty of the Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Malaya in Malaysia and a professor in the Standards of Decision Making Across Cultures programme at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Despite its complexity, Noor says, decolonisation is essential to a comprehensive view of humanity.

Many in academia doubt decolonisation's relevance for STEM subjects, but in this episode we’ll also hear from Brigitte Stenhouse, a lecturer in the history of mathematics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at The Open University. She has overseen the creation of a database of original sources to give students a global and historical view of the discipline.

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. 

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. 

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

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. 

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. 

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 

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.  

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. 

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.

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

In this interview, Freeman talks about how to have the difficult conversations that identify where students needs are not being met. How UMBC uses granular data to identify students who might be falling behind, and how inclusivity work is the tide that raises all boats so everyone benefits.

Find more resources about how to champion inclusion on your campus on THE Campus

Freeman's first book:

The Empowered University by Freeman Hrabowski III with Philip J. Rous And Peter H. Henderson

Research quoted in the intro:

“A critical exploration of inclusion policies of elite UK universities”  by George Koutsouris, Lauren Stentiford, Brahm Norwich, in British Educational Research Journal

They cover everything from tips to establish a consistent writing practice like Jack London and how to find the hook in your work, to why your article might be rejected and how to bring in voices beyond just those writing in standard North American or British English. 

Hear pointers from: 

John Weldon, an associate professor and head of curriculum in Victoria University’s First Year College

Dorsa Amir, a postdoc in the department of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley

Tara Brabazon, a professor of cultural studies at Flinders University

Daniel Martin, a publisher at Elsevier, a fiction author and creative writing teacher at Delft University

Joe Moran, a professor of English and cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University

Marnie Jo Petray, an associate professor and graduate coordinator of TESOL at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania

Stone Meredith, a teacher of college-level composition, literature and philosophy courses at Colorado State University Global

Anne Wilson, a consultant fellow at the Royal Literary Fund 

Avi Staiman, CEO at Academic Language Experts

Gaillynn Clements, a visiting assistant professor in linguistics at Duke University

Read We must end linguistic discrimination in academic publishing by Avi, Marnie Jo and Gaillynn

And find more tips for success in academic publishing on THE Campus

They talk about using their strengths of teaching and research to engage with the community and what that means for increasingly digital campuses. 

This episode features:

Deborah Bull, vice-president, communities and national engagement at King’s College London  

Derek Douglas, vice-president for civic engagement and external affairs at The University of Chicago

Julie Wells, vice-president, strategy & culture at University of Melbourne

YouTube scientist Simon Clark shares how he got started doing science and PhD vlogs and Christina Zdenek, a post-doc and lab manager of the Venom Evolution Lab at The University of Queensland, gives her top three tips for communicating your research. 

Read more form Christina:

Get your research out there: 7 strategies for high-impact science communication

Peter Mathieson, the principal and vice-chancellor at The University of Edinburgh, and Anant Agarawal, CEO and co-founder of edX, the COEO at 2U and a professor at MIT, both offer their own unique perspectives on a tumultuous period for global higher education.

Listen to Higher Ed Heroes here.

Find resources and advice on how to create a happy campus in our latest THE Campus spotlight. 

For this episode we spoke with the book’s editors, Jess Crilly, an independent author who was formerly the associate director for content and discovery, library services at the University of the Arts London and Regina Everitt, the assistant chief operating officer and director of library, archives and learning services at the University of East London. 

We cover what it means to decolonise a library, how a project like this stretches far beyond the archives and learning services of a campus and what practical advice they’d give to someone interested in doing this work. Not surprisingly, it starts with a conversation. 

Learn more about their book Narrative Expansions: Interpreting Decolonisation in Academic Libraries

And find more advice pieces about decolonisation on THE Campus including How to support academic staff starting the journey of decolonising the curriculum  and Decolonising the curriculum – how do I get started? 

Joining us is Pardis Mahdavi, dean of social sciences in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University and Scott N. Brooks, an associate professor with the T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at ASU. 

They co-authored one of THE Campus' most popular resources, "Diversity statements: what to avoid and what to include". 

And Elena Riva, an associate professor and director of studies at the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning at the University of Warwick, is here to speak about the research that informed her piece "Well-being pedagogies: activities and practices to improve the student experience online".

See more of this year's top resources, collections and spotlights that have helped academics and university staff around the world do the best teaching and research imaginable.