Season 3, Episode 4: A Scholar and a [Insert Role Here]

In This Episode:

Drs. Commodore and Johnson engage with established scholars across diverse roles—ranging from academia to leadership in professional organizations—about how their scholarly identities have evolved alongside the increasing demands of their careers. The discussion will explore how they navigate professional responsibilities, such as leadership positions and recognition in their fields, while also balancing personal commitments like caregiving and pursuing opportunities beyond traditional academic paths. Access the full episode transcript (.pdf).

Panelists
Shelvia English, PhD she/her/hers Vice President, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion American Dental Education Association	Leonard Taylor, Jr., PhD he/him/his Associate Professor & Director Indiana University - Bloomington	OiYan Poon, PhD she/her/hers Senior Research Fellow, Education Equity NAACP Legal Defense Fund Thurgood Marshall Institute

About the 2024 Presidential Podcast Season "I Am A Scholar"

The intent of the 2024 conference theme, “I Am A Scholar,” is to not only consider our own identities as scholars, but to consider who we are as a scholarly community. As you reflect upon your own ideas about what makes you a scholar, I invite you to consider dismantling the hierarchies that have been constructed about who is worthy of the title “scholar.” I believe these often create barriers to better policy, practice, and scholarship.

This is a project to welcome and learn from a community of scholars from a variety of institution types, associations, policy settings, unique identities, geographies, methodologies, epistemologies, positions within and beyond academe, and myriad other locations. Collectively, we can stake our claim as scholars who continue to transform higher education through the work we do.

Moreover, if inclusion, equity, and organizational diversity are among our values, we must be willing to consider the ways in which assumptions about who can and should be a scholar limit what we can accomplish as a community. We must critically interrogate the exclusionary practices in which we engage regarding be(com)ing a scholar and how those practices compromise the integrity of our scholarship. We become better scholars by doing so—and in that way, we create better scholarship. Higher education, and the communities in which we work and live, are faced with vexing, complex, and wicked problems. We need all of our scholarly selves to find solutions and actively work toward our purpose and the purpose of higher education.

With this theme in mind, the 2024 podcast series will focus on what it means to be a scholar in this socio-political moment and consider our responsibilities as scholars within this context and moment.