The Innovating Together Podcast

Bridget Burns, Executive Director of the University Innovation Alliance, and Derrick Tillman-Kelly, Director of UIA's Fellows Program and Network Engagement, speak with Dr. Don Pope-Davis, Dean of the College of Education and Human Ecology at Ohio State University. A leader who is passionate about using higher education to address issues of equity, economic growth, and the psychological well-being of educators and students, Dr. Pope-Davis discusses OSU's Dean’s Diversity Postdoctoral Fellows Program, the thinking and groundwork that led to its development, and preparing a campus culture for any large-scale diversity initiative. Topics include:

• How diversity hiring doesn't always guarantee diversity retention
• Building in the diversity before starting the Diversity Postdoc Program
• Starting the conversation for cultural change within an institution
• How smaller colleges can launch successful diversity hiring programs
• Institutional behavior and institutional accountability

Bridget Burns, Executive Director of the University Innovation Alliance, and Derrick Tillman-Kelly, Director of UIA's Fellows Program and Network Engagement, speak with Dr. Bryan Brayboy, President’s Professor in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. As senior advisor to the president, director of the Center for Indian Education, and co-editor of the Journal of American Indian Education, Dr. Brayboy discusses the challenges that indigenous students face in higher education, the efforts and missteps of institutions in addressing Native populations' needs, and the deep history of rights and responsibilities in U.S. democracy. Topics include:

• The burden of history and the misunderstandings that indigenous students are dealing with
• Land grant institutions and 21st-century land acknowledgment proclamations
• Good intentions and how they can miss the mark
• What it means to be in right relation
• How the Haudenosaunee (a.k.a. the Iroquois Confederacy) contributed to the basic structure of U.S. government

Bridget Burns, Executive Director of the University Innovation Alliance, and Derrick Tillman-Kelly, Director of UIA's Fellows Program and Network Engagement, speak with Dr. TJ Stewart, Assistant Professor of Student Affairs & Higher Education at Iowa State University. As a researcher who explores college students with stigmatized identities, identity-based student activism, and critical qualitative methodologies, Dr. Stewart discusses unrecognized student populations in need of equitable treatment, the myths and realities of critical race theory, and faculty and staff activism in the interest of social justice. Topics include:

• How and why some groups of students are overlooked in conversations about equity
• Sizeism and fatphobia on campus
• Accepting the reality of sex work as a student labor choice
• Perceptions of pathology and stigma as roadblocks to social justice
• Critical race theory as a tool for understanding institutionalized inequity
• Individual choices as a pathway to changes in policy