We are thrilled to welcome our newest host joining the Student Affairs NOW team, Dr. Mamta Accapadi! On today’s episode, Drs. Heather Shea and Keith Edwards chat with Mamta about her excitement for joining the team and the conversation and guests she is looking forward to hosting. The conversation touches on groundedness, consciousness blooms, healing, and timelessness.

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This is Mamta Accapadi's first episode as a new host of the Student Affairs NOW team. Featuring five prominent South Asian/Desi women senior leaders, this episode is meant to be both a prayer and a beacon. It is an episode that honors the wisdoms, celebrates the triumphs, owns the privileges, and acknowledges the traumas of our lives and lineage journeys as pioneering South Asian/Desi women. We hope you enjoy our sacred stories.

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Experienced residence life leaders Dana Olivo, Erin Simpson, and Dr. David Hibbler, Jr explore different ways of doing residence life work in our current and future contexts. They explore structural possibilities and methods of reimagining our day-to-day work. They discuss innovative ways to integrate the proactive work of student learning, community building, and belonging along with the reactive work of crisis response.

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Higher education and student affairs has long needed to address attrition, retention, and leadership to create sustainable careers and better workplace cultures. ACPA President Dr. Andrea Domingue called for a Task Force on 21st Century Employment in Higher Education, which Dr. Roshaunda Breeden chaired. In this conversation, these two share the report from the task force, which describes the challenges, explores the roots in supremacist cultures, and offers recommended antidotes for action.

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Editors and authors discuss practices, principles, and processes for being in our self work, relational work, and community work for transformation. Guests discuss the why, what, and how of the theory of Being in the contexts of practice, teaching, research, conflict, and even family. They share tools to help folks be more productive and effective in working toward transformation of individuals, communities, and systems.

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Today’s episode directly challenges the media-created assumption that parents are “problems” to be managed by the institution and instead posits a model of parent and family engagement and connection. Particularly relevant as institutions seek to connect with parents and families of first generation college students during points of transition and orientation, seeking engagement and partnerships with parents is one core strategy for fostering student success. Today’s episode features a panel of administrators and scholars with deep appreciation for the contributions of first-generation students and their parents and families. The episode also includes several recommendations for campuses with established (or new) parent and family programs.

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Despite their overwhelming success in higher education, Black women continue to be devalued, discriminated against, and harmed by the colleges and universities where they work or attend school. Their unique standpoints, epistemologies, and praxis have always challenged the standard white hegemony of higher education and yet never before in higher education have we had a text that highlights, explains, and uplifts the unique intersectional perspectives of Black women as scholars, activists, teachers, and leaders.

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Guests discuss governance issues, including overreach, ethics, and effective board governance. We unpack recent events at Michigan State University as a case study to explore governance issues for higher education institutions across the United States. Drs. Brendan Cantwell, Felecia Commodore, Demetri Morgan, and Kris Renn discuss engagement vs. overreach, negative partisanship, board accountability, and the possibility of today's challenges being leveraged to create transformational change for reimagining boards for greater effectiveness for higher education as a public good.

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Student development theories and frameworks are foundational to the student affairs professions; however, there have often been concerns about their applicability to and effectiveness with marginalized college students.

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Who are today’s college students, what do they need, and how can institutions rise to meet these needs? Today’s new episode brings together four panelists who contributed to a new book Multiple Perspectives on College Students: Needs, Challenges, and Opportunities.

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