Does Diversity Hiring Decrease Ideological Diversity?

Christopher C. Hull asks if diversity-driven hiring is the cause of declining viewpoint diversity in higher education.

Hybridism – Theoretical Learning Response to the Growing Diversity in Higher Education

The transition from a knowledge society to a network society leads to growing globalisation, networking and a sudden increase in networked knowledge. Higher education and further education, like vocational training, must react with hybrid forms of generalisation and specialisation, in which way complexity and diversity are rapidly increasing in the education systems. In addition, digitalisation and the consequences of the pandemic are pushing this development. Hybridisation can make a theoretical and practical contribution to finding an answer to the complexity of mastering these processes. The consistent further development of learning theory approaches in the context of modelling and applying hybrid systems and automata leads to hybridism and thus to the expansion of the spectrum of learning theories.

Epistemic Disobedience and Grief in Academia

Drawing on conversations with foreign women in academic positions at one major University in Norway, this article is inspired by Barad’s and Haraway’s theorizing on how matter and discourse are mutually constituted through a diffractive approach. Understanding diffraction as an embodied engagement, a becoming with the data through shared entanglements, this article argues that the researcher’s personal background cannot be separated from the data produced. Departing from the decolonial theorist Castro-Gómez concept ‘hubris of zero-point epistemology’, the existence of an abstract and transcendental western universalism, where ‘the observer observes without been observed’ (Domínguez 2020; Mignolo 2009), assemblages of foreign female academics are explored through posthuman feminism and decolonial perspectives (Jackson and Mazzei 2012; Taguchi 2012; Puwar 2004). Through immersion in assemblages of contradictions, strength, and resistance, this article contends that policymakers’ good intentions of diversity in higher education, and the existence of different bodies, are shaking the world of academia, albeit slowly. Academia is still immersed in zero-point epistemology, favoring western, upper-class, paternalist, and meritocratic thought, detached from academics’ embodied knowledge. This brings into existence ‘bodies out of place’, re/producing grief, resistance, and epistemic disobedience when some academics are not suitable of becoming real academics.

Counter-narratives in the First Person: Whiteness and the Limits of Diversity

This short article focuses on Sara’s experience as the first-ever student BAME department representative at a large post-secondary institution in the UK. Written as a first-person testimonial but grounded in a dialogic method of ethnographic recovery and remembrance, we argue that diversity initiatives that seek to create inclusion and representation, without a careful engagement with power, end up reproducing the university as a white public space that centres white fragility. The article highlights two key experiences during Sara’s tenure as BAME student representative in a department of anthropology that show how the limits of diversity in higher education are found in the refusal to engage with whiteness.

Students’ Perceptions of Diversity in Higher Education: A Case from Turkey

Today, as student mobility in higher education is increasing, university environments are hosting more students with different races, cultures and backgrounds. Because the structure of universities is mostly designed in accordance with the culture of white students, white students are generally not very interested in the issues of differences and their general perception of differences is low. However, African-origin black students, who have had an experience of differences in a period of their lives, are more interested in issues related to differences and their general perception of the differences they experience in the campus environment is higher. The aim of this study is to reveal the challenges and opportunities arising from being in an international educational environment and to try to understand students' perceptions of differences. For this purpose, at an international university in Turkey, which has increasingly been the scene of differences, 192 students' perceptions related to differences were measured via questionnaires and the results were analyzed.

Moving beyond the rhetoric on faculty diversity in higher education: an interview with diversity expert Dr Bailey Jackson

PurposeThe aim of this article is to provide Dr Bailey Jackson's perspective on institutional and systemic barriers to full inclusion of diverse faculty in higher education through the lens of the multicultural organizational development (MCOD) model. Dr Jackson is renowned for his work on social justice, diversity and multiculturalism.Design/methodology/approachThis is a personal interview with Dr Bailey Jackson. This interview provides insight on institutional level change efforts through the MCOD framework, a perspective on why institutions get stuck on the way to becoming a healthy multicultural institutions, and the effect on moving the needle on faculty diversity in institutions of higher education.FindingsThe institutional obstacles and barriers tend to be centered around misalignment with mission, vision and core values, how those are formulated to include diversity and inclusion. Faculty diversity is only one component in dealing with the health of any organization or the academy as a whole. If institutions focus on diversity faculty in an unhealthy system, they will encounter limitations on how much the institution will develop on the MCOD continuum. The health of the overall system is going to affect the approach to faculty diversity.Practical implicationsDr Jackson provides insight on his work with the MCOD framework and specifically the overall health of the institution as critical to faculty diversity initiatives. Questions to help institutions begin to assess themselves and identify changes required to move toward Multicultural within the context of faculty diversity are provided.Originality/valueThrough a series of questions, insight from Dr Jackson on why institutions get stuck in moving the needle on faculty diversity through the lens of the MCOD framework is gained.

Using differentiated teaching to address academic diversity in higher education

University educators increasingly face groups or classes of students with diverse academic levels, challenging a ‘one size fits all’ approach to teaching. In this article, we examine whether and how differentiated teaching, especially the concept of student readiness, can be applied to assess and respond to academic diversity, exemplified by two different cases; a methods lecture series and a peer-evaluation seminar. Each case presents specific tools, activities and techniques inspired by differentiated teaching that may be replicated or used for inspiration in similar contexts. The results include better fulfilment of intended learning outcomes, teaching that is perceived to be meaningful by students and educators, and a more inclusive learning environment. The two cases demonstrate the utility of differentiated teaching in higher education, challenging the prevalent assumption that differentiated teaching does not apply well to a university setting.

A Study on Workforce Diversity and its Impact on Employee Performance in the Indian Higher Education Sector

In spite of unassuming increments in the arrangement of women in top administration levels in the course of recent years, the extent despite everything stays low at 20% in 2012. Indeed, even with significant proof indicating a positive relationship between gender assorted variety and business execution, women still discriminated at senior administration, official administration and board levels. Through quantitative illustrative examination strategy, the exploration intended to distinguish with which of these elements are advancing and hindering the expanded gender diversity levels in Indian higher education sector. This examination study verified that higher education culture factors advancing expanded gender diversity in higher education division with higher gender diversity levels are distinctive to the factors hindering expanded gender diversity in higher education with low gender diversity levels.