Campus by Times Higher Education

With frozen tuition fees, falling international student enrolment and the very real possibility of a university going bankrupt, the UK’s new Labour government has inherited a sector in crisis. The need for fast action is apparent, but where should priorities lie? Two higher education leaders share their perspectives on what the sector needs in the short and long term.  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.

One way to future-proof students in our globalised world is to improve their cross-cultural communication skills. With students and academics more mobile than ever, the ability to reach across divides – be they language, culture, religion, economic or location – will be in demand whatever the workplace. These skills offer a path to belonging, innovating, being effective and thriving in higher education and industry. 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.

Will the UK general election offer a ray of hope for the beleaguered university sector? On this episode of the Times Higher Education podcast, two policy experts give their take on opportunities that 4 July may bring and how a new UK parliament might tackle hot topics such as international students and research funding. 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.

For this episode of the Times Higher Education podcast, we talk to award-winning author, cultural historian and literary critic Alexandra Harris about the research and writing practices behind her new book, The Rising Down: Lives in a Sussex Landscape (Faber, 2024). Alexandra is a professorial fellow in English at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Her books include Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists & the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, which won The Guardian First Book award and a Somerset Maugham award, and Weatherland, which was adapted into a 10-part radio series for the BBC. This conversation explores what a literary scholar can bring to the study of local history, the power of place, and how “trespassing” researchers can find new insights in familiar records of everyday and celebrated lives.

Katie Normington, vice-chancellor and CEO of De Montfort University, has proved to be adept at both leading by example and change management. Not only did she join the Leicester institution during Covid amid the longest lockdown in the UK, but in the three years she has led the institution she has overseen large-scale curriculum reform. De Montfort has moved most of its undergraduate and postgraduate courses from traditional curriculum structure to block plan, with significant boosts in student satisfaction. 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.

Imagine a learning environment where an AI professor fields infinite student questions, where business students practise difficult conversations with an avatar that models an array of personas and reactions, where automated feedback is not static but dynamic and individualised. Artificial intelligence and XR tools are changing education and preparing students to live and work in an unpredictable world.  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.

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

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

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

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