Making Space for Queer Students at an HBCU This final episode of Collegeland takes us to North Carolina Central University, a Historically Black College and University, where we talk with three people who have been critical to developing the LGBTA Resource Center. Co-hosted by Lisa Levenstein and Tiffany Holland, the episode highlights the importan…

COVID has brought new attention to what many are calling the “mental health crisis" on college campuses. A 2020 study found that nearly 40% of college students experienced depression and 13% have had suicidal ideations. The week Lisa Levenstein talks with Gary Glass, licensed psychologist, and director of counseling and career services at Oxford Co…

Students know who their favorite professors are on campus but they rarely know that up to 70% of college faculty are contract workers, often paid by the course, with very low pay and no job security. To put a personal face on the issues facing contingent faculty, we talk to Jennifer Hyland Wang, a long-time non-tenure-track faculty member at the Un…

Teachers of indigenous languages encounter a difficult problem: how to use the classroom, so long a site of white supremacist , violence and language loss for native people, to step outside of a Western viewpoint and rebuild native ways of being? This week we hear from leaders in Dakota Language revitalization connected to the University of Minneso…

According to federal and most state laws, undocumented students can enroll in higher education in the United States, but do they feel like they belong there? Our guest, Shirley Leyro, critical criminologist and Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Borough of Manhattan--CUNY asked that question in a study she conducted on the challenges facing…

As campuses across the country have returned to in-person education this fall, requests by faculty for accommodations have been routinely ignored or denied. So for our first episode for Season 2, we reached out to three members of the Accessible Campus Action Alliance (ACAA), an organization of disability studies scholars and activists that has cal…

For this special bonus episode, Nan and Lisa sit down with Season 1 producer Richelle Wilson to talk about her experience as a first-gen college student, the challenges of student loan debt and getting a PhD in a collapsing academic job market, and why she loves higher ed even though it doesn’t always love her back. Stay tuned for Season 2, coming …

Libraries are the information infrastructure of universities. And as with most infrastructure, the critical work they do is often invisible—that is, until something breaks. There’s a lot more to the library than meets the eye, so we asked Maura Seale, history librarian at the University of Michigan, to break it down for us. In true librarian fashio…

You’ve probably heard the horror stories about college dorms: late nights, loud parties, and lots of questionable bathroom antics. These campus living areas depend on the vital labor of housekeepers like Tracy Harter, who works at UNC Chapel Hill. She’s here to set the record straight about the students living in the dorms. Sure, they sometimes giv…

Land-grant universities are the legacy of the Morrill Act of 1862, which gave states throughout the Midwest and West upwards of eleven million acres to establish colleges that would focus on agriculture and the “mechanic arts.” This opened up higher education to people all over the country. At least, that’s the narrative you’ll see in most U.S. his…

Few things say “college” more than a stack of books, and yet university presses remain one of the best-kept secrets on campus. To get a behind-the-scenes look into the world of academic publishing, we talk to John Sherer, director of the University of North Carolina Press. UNC Press has long been a pioneer in publishing books on African American hi…

According to a 2017 study, nearly half of all college students in the U.S. face food insecurity. That’s a huge problem. And it’s not just about food, either—many of these same students also experience housing insecurity or have other basic needs not being met as they struggle to pay skyrocketing tuition bills and expensive educational fees. These a…

During the COVID vaccine rollout in the U.S., major pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Moderna have become household names. But did they really create these vaccines by themselves? Not by a long shot, says Dr. Deborah Fuller, a vaccinologist and professor of microbiology who runs her own lab at the University of Washington. She and her team h…

Rebecca Barrett-Fox tells us why she advised professors to “do a bad job of putting your courses online” in a blog post that went viral as colleges quickly pivoted to remote learning last March. *** Among other things, 2020 was the year of the Great Virtual Shift, when college campuses across the country pivoted to emergency remote instruction in r…

Welcome to Collegeland! We started a podcast about higher education in the middle of a pandemic, so it’s only fitting that we kick off this first episode with our favorite campus scientist, Dr. Malia Jones. Malia is one of the creators of Dear Pandemic, a social media campaign and one-stop shop for practical, science-based information and advice ab…

We speak with Dr. Diya Abdo from the Center for New North Carolinians about her work resettling refugees on college campuses. *** College campuses are like cities unto themselves, and they have an abundance of resources to share with the surrounding community. That’s the expansive vision of Dr. Diya Abdo, who founded Every Campus a Refuge, a refuge…

Joe Biden won the U.S. presidential election, and we have students like Morehouse College’s Rick Hart to thank. *** All eyes were on Georgia after they flipped blue for Biden/Harris in November and again as they voted in two Democratic senators, Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, in a historic runoff election earlier this month. But none of t…