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

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. 

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

In 2024, more people than ever in history will be going to the polls to vote in elections in more than 80 countries, including the US and the UK. As pillars of democratic societies, universities and colleges are integral to the exercise of choosing our public representatives. In today’s episode we speak to two political scientists about voting habits, including among Generation Z, and how universities can encourage their students to engage in the democratic process.
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.