University of Venus

Announcing #femlead

In Announcements on 2012/02/22 at 00:29

We are pleased to announce the inauguration of #femlead: a biweekly (every other week) Twitter chat focusing on women in higher education leadership. (If you are unfamiliar with Twitter chats, they are online conversations that take place on Twitter. You can read more here).

With this conversation, our goal is to create an open and inclusive forum for:

networking,
sharing experiences and resources, and
addressing the challenges and opportunities facing women in higher education who seek to lead with vision.

The numbers of women filling leadership positions on campuses around the world are growing; they are staff, faculty, and administrators. The growing numbers are cause for celebration as more women take on exciting and transformative roles. But we feel this also creates a need for a supportive space for women–and men–to talk about what these new roles mean and how best to fill them in order to pursue personal, professional, and institutional goals with integrity.

You might be interested in work-life balance, and wishing for a leadership role that made a better match with your personal commitments. You might be thinking about taking the next step in your career…but not completely sure what that looks like. You might be seeking a network of mentors–or mentees–from other disciplines or sectors of academic life. We’re hoping #femlead will prove a resource for all the possibilities and questions we have on a day-to-day basis as female leaders in higher ed.

While we seek to provide a female-centered perspective, we don’t necessarily define our work or our positions as feminist. #femlead will be a welcoming space for multiple points of view from women and men all around the globe.

We hope you will join us for our first chat: Tuesday, February 28 from 2:00-2:30 EST.

Janine Utell will lead our first chat and we will focus on service v. leadership: what’s the difference? Is service work invisible? How can we facilitate women thinking of themselves as leaders as they confront their various service obligations?

Chats will be held biweekly, Tuesdays at 2 EST, and will be archived (details to be announced).

We look forward to chatting with you on Tuesday and would love to have you host forthcoming chats or suggest hosts you would like to bring into the conversation.

Future topics will include:

the division between the Global North and the Global South
the relationship between female leadership in higher education and female leadership in other sectors (politics and business)
common goals for the GenX female leaders for the midterm and long-term perspectives: what (and where) do we want to change?

#femlead mission statement
We believe in the value of connecting, networking, and sharing resources and experiences. Our mission at #femlead is to promote these values and to create an inclusive forum for open discussion of the issues confronting leaders in higher education. #femlead is for those who lead, those with vision, those who seek to support one another in the challenges and opportunities facing us in all areas of academic life (faculty, staff, administrators). #femlead is female-centered but you don’t have to be a woman to participate in this conversation – all civil and constructive voices are welcome!

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Higher Education

TedX: The Speaking Equivalent of Blogging

In Afshan's Posts on 2012/06/02 at 03:32

Afshan Jafar, writing from New London, Connecticut in the US.

When three of my students approached me a couple of months ago to participate in a TEDx event, I balked. The students sent me a very well-organized folder with information about TED, some of the speakers already lined up, links to their favorite TED talks and then they set up a meeting with me. The event was in the middle of April. As many academics know, April is not a good month for us. The semester, at least for me, picks up like a roller coaster and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down for the end.

I had so much to do in April. I had taken on an extra course in April (part of a gateway course for another program), so I was teaching four courses. That means I was grading for four courses. I had over 65 proposals to review for my new volume, and I needed to put together a proposal for the (possible) editor. All of this would be happening the week of the event itself. There’s no way I can or should take this TEDx event on, I thought. I decided I’d meet with the students, but that my response would probably be a “thanks for thinking of me, but I really am very busy and I just can’t fit this in to my schedule”.

But then I had the meeting with the three students. They were so excited and working so hard to pull off an event of this magnitude all on their own! They had put their hearts and souls into trying to organize this event and now they wanted to line-up speakers. I was torn. I told them I’d think about it over the weekend and let them know. “Of course I know I should say no”, I kept saying to myself. “But if I were to do this, I would probably go with this topic” would be the next thought. And so back and forth I went.

When I finally sat down to talk to my husband about why I was so torn, I realized that part of it had to do with my schedule. The other part had to do with the fact that this was completely new territory for me. This was no academic talk at a conference. Far from it: I would actually need to be concise (what academic knows how to get their point across in under 18 minutes?), entertaining, and intellectually stimulating at the same time! I had never spoken in front of such a large audience before, and then the thought of being video-taped… to be honest, that was intimidating. This will be around forever! What if I screw up? I feared the exposure: my thoughts will be out there in the form of a video, I won’t have control over this “product” once I put it out there.

Not so different from blogging after all is it?

By the end of the weekend I decided I couldn’t let this opportunity pass. TEDxConnecticutCollege took place on April 14, 2012. The theme was “Rethinking Progress” and I spoke on “Women’s Bodies”. So, what do I have to share with my fellow academics and bloggers about the experience? You know the thrill that you get when your blog post is about to go live? Now multiply that by about a hundred and you’ll get a good idea of what this kind of public speaking is like. It was an exhilarating experience. It gave me the same sense of freedom that blogging does. You can be funny, even if you’re discussing something serious; you don’t have to worry about quoting important scholars endlessly to prove to everybody that you know what you’re talking about; and you can (and should) leave the audience thinking instead of providing them with neat little conclusions that they must accept because you bombarded them with data and evidence.

Perhaps most importantly, it taught me that just as we, as academics, feminists, thinkers, have turned to blogging because “we have something to say”, we should also consider using public speaking opportunities to say what we want to or need to say. It’ll help us reach a wider audience than any academic conference we’ve attended, especially, as in the case of TED/TEDx when those talks are made available to anyone with a computer connection.

What are you waiting for? The world is waiting to hear what you have to say . . .

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Academia, Social Class

In Loco Parentis – Luxus?

In Elizabeth's Posts on 2012/06/01 at 00:59

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe, writing from Evanston, Illinois in the US

When skyrocketing college tuition becomes the target of public critique, I tend to think about the recent study of spoiled American middle class children as opposed to academic salaries.

I’ve known a few faculty to flaunt their wealth with ostentatious automobiles and sumptuous square-footage. Most, however, hold true to a lifestyle that shares more with Jane Austen’s genteel poverty than Donald Trump’s outlandish ostentation.

Undergraduates are an entirely different matter. The one percent have not only monopolized the admissions process but also set the material expectations for the student body at large. Even their classmates on work study and substantial financial aid flash pricey gadgets as they fill out paperwork for need-based scholarships. I suppose they have imbibed the advice to ‘dress for the job you want not the job you have.’ They carry the cell phones for the jobs they want upon graduation. Despite public discourse about cutting back in the wake of the ‘great recession,’ students remain committed to their stuff.

Institutions comply with this materialism as a means to recruit. Our definition of how to improve higher education too frequently hinges on dorm room connectivity and coffee shops per capita. Somewhere along the line, the furniture of the mind got shoved against the wall as an impediment to social mobility. Socialization to the professional class via swanky dorms and sports clubs (whoops I mean centers) outstripped reading Socratic dialogues in dingy basements while digesting stale cereal.

As we discuss how to bring the next generation of high school kids to college and launch them into careers, the focus remains on mimicking the lifestyles of the lucky few as opposed to building an intellectual framework upon which to hang the rest of their lives. Building projects garner money from wealthy alumni who want to see their names carved in stone lintels and to imagine future generations passing beneath them. Money for tutorials on Montesquieu for mechanical engineers or particle physics for playwrights proves harder to raise.

I understand the need to train students in decorum. Come to my home on a January weekend and you will likely find students eating off my wedding china while they explain grand schemes to illustrious strangers. Grammar of all sorts has fallen by the wayside in our schools. Our kids arrive in college – even the most elite – unsure as to the appropriate use of ‘I’ versus ‘me’ and unaware that you ought not proffer a handshake if the palm is covered in snot. Neither of these skill sets requires a smartphone to learn. Indeed, the gadgetry distracts from lessons at desks and in dining rooms.

I grew up reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s accounts of her days in a one room schoolhouse and hearing my grandmother’s tales of the same. Sentence diagrams and washed hands featured in both. Neither Wilder nor my grandmother could dream nor would wish to deny their progeny the incredible laboratories and libraries this generation takes as a birthright: common resources held for the common good. I wonder, however, what they would make of ubiquitous SUVs and iPhones.

Even the spoiled Oxonian scion Sebastian Flyte of Brideshead Revisited treasured his worn teddy bear above his more glamorous goods. When universities began to educate aristocrats as well as clerics, it seemed a sound idea. Let the rich but dim Sebastians subsidize the broke but bright like Charles Ryder. The stuff of tragicomedy ensued. Read or watch Porterhouse Blue; listen to Kenny Chesney’s “Keg in the Closet.”

In the centuries since the collegiate clergy welcomed the wealthy into their midst, the relationship changed. Middle class parents now mortgage themselves to the hilt in order to gilt their offspring’s protective cages in a close facsimile of one-percent opulence and expect their colleges to follow suit. If the child manages to escape and can’t control his or her underdeveloped wings, the shocked elders sue. The college has failed to maintain its promise to serve In Loco Parentis Luxus.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

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