Season 3, Episode 5: A Lifetime of Being a Scholar

In This Episode:

This episode explores the evolving role of scholars across different career stages, examining how their approaches to scholarship, teaching, and service have adapted to the changing academic landscape. Panelists will reflect on the lessons they've learned throughout their careers and offer insights into how to maintain passion for their work, navigate institutional challenges, and effectively mentor the next generation of academics.

This episode features conversations with senior scholars. We want to acknowledge and dedicate this episode to a senior scholar who we sadly lost this year. In addition to being a renowned scholar, Dr. Caroline Turner served as chair of ASHE’s Council for Ethnic Participation and as ASHE President. She was a mentor to many in the field and a friend to even more. While Dr. Turner is no longer with us, her legacy lives on through her students, friends, and colleagues. This episode is dedicated to her. Access the full episode transcript (.pdf).

Panelists
James Earl Davis, PhD he/him/his Bernard C. Watson Endowed Chair and Professor Temple University	Sharon Fries-Britt, PhD she/her/hers Distinguished University Professor University of Maryland

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.