Have you ever taken one of those implicit bias tests that assess your hidden prejudices about characteristics such as age, gender, weight, or skin tone? As I reviewed the list of test options recently on Project Implicit, it occurred to me that the site was missing one that would be especially helpful to those of us in higher education: a quiz to assess our bias for charismatic leaders.
It would be interesting to test how much we value confidence over competence and how often we gravitate toward those who are charming, dynamic, and engaging — even when they lack the skills or intellect to effectively lead a college or university into the future.
Last year I was given a career choice that was not, in fact, a choice. The particulars of my situation aren’t important, but here’s the upshot: Last March, I was sitting in a meeting with my university’s new president, discussing my reappointment as dean, and it wasn’t going well.
Ultimately the president offered me a graceful exit: He suggested I stay in the job for an additional year while I searched for a new deanship elsewhere. That way, I could write my own career narrative as one of continual ascent. I hadn’t been ousted — I had decided to "seek a new challenge," "apply my skills to a different kind of institution," or (in the words of
LeBron James, when he left Cleveland the first time) "take my talents to South Beach."
So your strategic plan reached the end of its life span. The question is: Did anyone notice — aside from the folks who filed final reports about it for accreditors and trustees?
Too often, the answer is no. An institution or a department begins a strategic plan with great fanfare but the end is usually anticlimactic. Most of the people supposedly affected by the plan are unaware of its actual outcomes — and may not even remember the original goals.
That kind of lackluster finale represents a lost opportunity. The fact that most of us fail to conclude our strategic plans with as much energy as we start them undermines future planning. It also masks the reality that strategic planning is continuous and reciprocal: We are supposed to learn from the process, not just check some boxes and forget about it.
As an academic and a college president, I wish I could say I was first introduced to the idea of women doing their own thing, making their way in the big wide world, through some worthwhile book or artsy film.
But I can’t. In my parochial, supportive (in a tough-love kind of way) blue-collar community, it was cigarette ads that most helped me envision a world for women that was different from the one my beloved mother inhabited so adeptly, and mostly comfortably.
I was a young girl leafing through my mom’s pile of Better Homes and Gardens when I first saw the 1970s ads for Virginia Slims. I loved those ads. The women were beautiful and cool, and — as a preteen — I bought hook, line, and sinker into the notion that women of the day had "come a long way, baby." To me those ads said that, as a woman, you could be yourself and still thrive in your personal and professional lives.
For most faculty members, the hardest thing about entrepreneurship is the marketing — figuring out how to "monetize" your academic skills and services.
It’s a tedious and time-consuming process that depends largely on trial and error. It also involves a fair amount of self-promotion, something that is anathema in faculty culture. Words like marketing and monetize tend to make academics very uncomfortable. And yet, without marketing, you’re just a person sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.
Terry Wareham of Lancaster University once suggested that an article on ‘change’ in higher education be entitled ‘Quiet Flows the Don?’ While this may raise a wry smile, it is a little unfair. Try changing health or agriculture. Attempts to change higher education are likely to be protracted and uncertain, as these books illustrate.
Most developed countries are struggling with the structure of their higher education systems. England and Wales (but not Scotland), some countries of continental Europe, and Australia have yet to settle the relations between its sectors or tiers, or if they are to have a unified system, how to arrange it. Meanwhile, most of continental Europe and, until recently, England have been struggling to finance their greatly expanded systems. These enduring issues, associated with the transition from elite to mass higher education, have been made more urgent by the ‘intellectual arms race’, in which universities are competing for a place in the ‘knowledge economy’.
As an instructor for large classes, it is a challenge for me to get a range of students to speak up in class. When I invite comments (“Who would like to add or ask?”), there are always a handful of students that rescue me—I think of them as my Hermiones—but the other 100-200+ students remain silent. I contrast this with my small online classes, where I hear from everyone on a regular basis. One August night a couple of years ago, I was lying in bed, thinking about how to incentivize more students to contribute in class, and came up with Fired Up and Ready to Discuss.
Abstract
Several individual differences have been shown to predict academic and psychological outcomes among university students,
however, it is not always clear which are most impactful, in part because many of the constructs overlap. Thus, the purpose
of the present study was to examine the unique contributions of self-esteem, self-compassion, self-efficacy, and mindsets
when predicting outcomes among university students. Undergraduate students (N = 214) completed an online survey
including measures of the predictors as well as the outcomes of self-control, mental health, and both course and term grades.
Correlations confirmed the overlap among the predictors highlighting the importance of examining the unique contributions
of each. Results of multiple regression analyses showed that self-esteem and self-compassion explained unique variance
in depression and anxiety over and above self-efficacy and growth mindsets. In contrast, self-efficacy and growth mindsets
each significantly predicted self-control when controlling for self-esteem and self-compassion. Only self-efficacy predicted
course grades. Given our results, we suggest that self-compassion and one’s beliefs about their abilities are complementary
strengths for students attending university and should be considered when designing interventions to improve outcomes.
Keywords: self-esteem, self-compassion, self-efficacy, mindsets, self-control, mental health, grades
Abstract
Many post-secondary institutions are developing policies and programs aimed at improving responses to sexual assault
experienced by students. In some areas, such as Ontario, Canada, the government has mandated post-secondary institutions
to do so. However significant these initiatives, they are predicated on the assumption that students trust, and want to
engage with, the university following sexual violence. This study explores students’ perceptions of sexual assault policies and
services on one mid-size university campus focusing specifically on how trust factors into reporting sexual victimization and
using services. Findings show that students believe that sexual assault policies and programs exist, but this does not mean
students are willing to use such resources or that they even trust that their university has students’ needs and interests at the
fore. This paper discusses policy and programmatic considerations for building student trust in their post-secondary institutions
to encourage student use of campus support.
Keywords: sexual assault policies, student trust, institutional betrayal, sexual violence, university policy, violence prevention
Whenever I am approached by academics who want to make the transition from scholarly to public writing, they always ask me the same question: "What should I write about?" But, really, that is a two-part question.
One part is about genre. Newcomers to public writing typically don’t know the genres — that is, the differences between an op-ed, an essay, a profile, a reported article, or a well researched think piece. You have to learn your journalism genres before you can decide which kind of piece to write (more about those genres in a future essay). The other part of the question has to do with figuring out what you have to contribute to public discourse. That’s what this month’s column is about.
People are often told to find their passion as though passions and interests are pre-formed and must simply be discovered. This idea, however, has hidden motivational implications. Five studies examined implicit theories of interest—the idea that personal interests are relatively fixed
(fixed theory) or developed (growth theory). Whether assessed or experimentally induced, a fixed theory was more likely to dampen interest in areas outside people’s existing interests (Studies 1–3). Those endorsing a fixed theory were also more likely to anticipate boundless
motivation when passions were found, not anticipating possible difficulties (Study 4). Moreover, when engaging in a new interest became difficult, interest flagged significantly more for people induced to hold a fixed than a growth theory of interest (Study 5). Urging people to find their
passion may lead them to put all their eggs in one basket but then to drop that basket when it becomes difficult to carry.
Canada has a highly educated population, and our overall rates of participation in post-secondary education are among the highest in the world. The problem of accessibility in Canadian higher education lies not in the overall rate of participation, but in the disparities and inequities in participation among elements of the Canadian population. Canadians from lower economic groups are less likely to obtain a postsecondary
education than individuals from wealthier backgrounds. Canada’s Aboriginal populations have extremely low levels of participation compared with
the population as a whole. Once admitted, there may also be important differences in whether students from different groups succeed in completing a postsecondary credential, or whether they are able to continue into professional or graduate programs.
After I received word of my promotion to full professor this past June — a day after my 39th birthday — I decided to text my friends rather than post the news on Twitter. One of them asked how I was celebrating. I told her that I wasn’t yet. Instead I was making a list of all the people who had tried to destroy my career.
"Wow, that’s heavy," she said. It was.
But it was also cathartic. Writing the list helped me realize something. From the outside, being a mother probably seemed like the greatest challenge on my path to full professor (the most common reply to my text was some version of "I can’t believe you did that with two kids!"). In fact, the biggest obstacle was actually race.
When I write CIHR grant applications, it’s easy for me to argue that my project is important: it’s because of the impact my work will have on the health of Canadians. But when I write SSHRC grant applications, I can’t make that same argument, because the reviewers would think I’ve applied to the wrong funding agency. How do I argue to SSHRC review committees that my work is worth funding?
Dr. Editor’s response:
The Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada – while specifying different criteria for different competitions – is generally looking to fund projects that are significant, important, and valuable.
In SSHRC’s Insight Grant competition, for instance, their evaluation criteria are “challenge,” “feasibility,” and “capability”. As part of the “challenge” criterion, they’re considering the “originality, significance, and expected contribution to knowledge” of the project; under the “capability” criterion, they’re considering the “quality, quantity and significance of past experience and published and/or creative outputs” (see SSHRC Insight Grants). Other SSHRC competitions want to know about your top five “most significant career research contributions” (see SSHRC Partnership Grants).
Now that we are into the realities of teaching in a COVID-world, I keep hearing similar sentiments from my colleagues, something to the effect of, “It’s going fine, but I don’t feel like a good teacher anymore.” What I hear in these statements is not a bad teacher but one who has lost confidence in their teaching. Whether teaching fully online, a hybrid model, or in-person with social distancing requirements, everyone has had to make changes to the way they teach. The pedagogical style and practices that we previously relied on are either no longer an option or are not as effective given the current constraints. So, we have
adapted, learned the technology, and made necessary adjustments. We’re doing it, but we don’t feel like we’re doing it well. We’ve lost our confidence, and thus feel like we’re not good teachers anymore. The good news is that we don’t have to wait for teaching to return to “normal” to feel like good teachers again. We can start to feel confident again by building self-efficacy in our own online or hybrid teaching.
Presentation courses are becoming more prevalent at Japanese universities. This paper focuses on one small cohort of students (n=5) that took an elective presentation skills course at Nanzan University. The paper initially looks at some of the salient themes related to teaching presentation skills and then outlines the design of the course. The main focus of the paper is on the students’ reflective comments on the course and how it affected their presentation skills. Finally, some example guidelines are offered for teachers who are teaching similar courses
Because of pandemic-induced distance learning, planning lessons and remaining connected with students involves an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the benefits and potential problems with edtech resources. As a veteran teacher and instructional coach with years of experience in edtech, I’ve seen it over and over again: Teachers’ inboxes and social media news feeds are inundated with advertised tech products, and it’s hard to know what will enhance the learning experience for our students, whether they use the tool in class or remotely.
There are a host of factors that educators need to consider when choosing edtech tools and resources that will support their students and instruction.
I’ll get right to the point because I know you don’t have much time. A new semester is looming, and you are overwhelmed. It could be because you’re early in your teaching career and still feeling your way. Or it could be related to the impossible amount of work you are facing, as teaching loads grow ever heavier. But some of it arises from a common problem that you can help to alleviate yourself: You are overpreparing for class.
“Make sure you know which train or bus to catch, at what time(s), and the stop closest to your destination. Check the timetable! Even in large cities, bus services can be few and far between in the evenings. Avoid waiting alone at a bus stop at night, particularly in poorly lit or deserted
areas.”
You might assume that this advice was written by a fearful parent for a nervous teenager embarking on their first solo trip to a distant town. In fact, it is taken from a training leaflet titled “How can I be safe while interviewing people?”, written for its postgraduate students by the Centre for Urban History at the University of Leicester.
This is just one example of the extent to which the modern culture of fear has infiltrated university campuses. The leaflet evokes a vision of urban Britain in which the perils of a bus journey and the dangers posed by visiting people in their homes demand “that someone knows where you are going”.
We know that the pandemic has led to an increase in depression and anxiety. But which groups are most at risk and why? What are the policy and service delivery adaptations that can reduce the burdens of social isolation, financial stress and fear of the unknown? What are the coping measures that are helping families and communities to be resilient? Across Canada, university researchers are working to understand the particular psychosocial effects of the pandemic, discovering concerning ripple effects – and also reasons for hope.