Podcast: The Way Forward: Higher Education In a Time of Crisis

Posted by Bringing Theory to Practice on March 23, 2021

We’re delighted to announce the launch of a project that has been many months in the making: a BT2P podcast we’re calling The Way Forward: Higher Education In a Time of Crisis. The podcast is available on the Apple Store, Spotify, Stitcher, and Audible. There you will find a brief introduction to the series and our first episode of our season, a conversation with President Freeman Hrabowski of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. We hope that you will listen, like, and subscribe.

The podcast is part of BT2P’s larger Way Forward project, and it complements our grant program of the same name. Both initiatives aim to catalyze positive educational responses to the current crisis facing American society and American higher education. 2020 confronted higher ed with a pandemic, economic catastrophe, and threats to institutional survival. It shone a light on long-festering harms of racism and inequality—as well as on the resilience of our institutions and our larger communities. The crisis made it clear that higher ed is in turmoil. But it has also opened possibilities of creative change that weren’t so thinkable in the before times. The Way Forward is BT2P’s effort to illuminate and support those positive pathways.

This first season of our podcast features some of the most visionary and thoughtful voices in higher education. Along with Freeman Hrabowski, coming episodes include innovative leaders like Chancellor Nancy Cantor of Rutgers University-Newark, creative institution-builders like Adam Bush of College Unbound, and radical public scholars like Michelle Fine of the Graduate Center, CUNY. Our conversations take on the immediate crisis, the long-term problems it has amplified, the possible, positive futures it has opened up, and current work that can point the way forward. If you’re interested in discussions about the future of higher ed that go beyond chatbots and Zoom, please listen and let us know what you think.