Women missing from university leadership

While the number of women enrolled in higher education and hired as staff in universities is rising worldwide, the pace of this change and shift in attitude toward women leaders of universities is not happening quickly enough.

Five women who want to speed up equality gathered on Thursday at the Worldviews Conference on Media and Higher Education at the University of Toronto for a panel discussion entitled Majority in enrolment, minority in leadership: expanding the coverage on women.

Zukiswa Kekana, a doctoral student from New York University, told the audience that a greater number of women are enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs and are shifting from predominantly studying the social sciences to a more broad array of disciplines like health sciences.

Training for jobs we won’t get

Today, a year after graduating and with no intention of returning to academia, I found myself at . . . an academic conference! And no, it wasn’t the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, my old summer conference stomping grounds; instead, I was at Worldviews 2013: Global Trends in Media and Higher Education.

Tonight I’ve lots of ideas swirling around my brain, and am feeling thankful for having met a few of my Twitter contacts (and other interesting folk) IRL. As for the conference itself, one session in particular sticks with me: a panel discussion on journalism training programs. I was struck by similarities between the terrible job market for journalists qua journalists and the academic job market. We know that other fields also have pretty poor records when it comes to graduates getting good jobs.

University of Toronto hosts Worldviews conference

The relationship between the media and higher education in a complex and quickly shifting landscape will be the focus of the Worldviews conference at the University of Toronto June 19 to 21.

“Media and the academy have existed in parallel universes over recent years,” says Jeffrey Dvorkin, director, University of Toronto Journalism Program at the University of Toronto Scarborough. “This is an attempt to see how we can connect these two sectors in a really effective way.”

The conference will bring together academics, journalists, communications professionals and administrators from around the world to discuss themes such as the growth of global university campuses, the future of higher education and journalism, the roles of universities, and academic freedom in relation to civic needs. 

Journalism schools have to go where the puck will be

Journalism schools are caught in a dilemma: Should journalism curricula reflect the media’s needs as they are now or should J-schools be more experimental and in effect, become think tanks and laboratories for the new, new journalism and an audience that may – or may not – materialize?

Ideally, it can and should be both training for today and tomorrow.

Yet at a time when the definition of “what is a journalist” is up for grabs, journalism schools continue to insist on teaching ethics, values and responsible journalism alongside with broadcasting production and long-form magazine editing. This may be satisfying to the professoriat, but increasingly frustrating to journalism students who see these debates as stultifying and irrelevant in the age of Gawker scoops and action-packed Vice TV videos from Syria.