Even without the disruption, death, and heartbreak of 2020 it was clear that higher education was in need of transformation. Scholarship on resilience suggests that times of crisis are also opportunities to shift the course of society towards more just and sustainable futures. Indeed, transformation is occurring at an unprecedented pace with an epidemic forcing ten years worth of change in a period of months followed by the largest collective demonstration of civil unrest in a generation.

Thus far, the work of Beyond the Academy has focused on three themes; 1. Reforming incentive structures, 2. Promoting co-development as a best practice, and 3. Preparing future leaders. Each of these reforms remain critical. University science is driving our response to the pandemic, illuminating the importance of a robust research and development sector. The lines dividing inside and outside the academy are blurring as students, faculty, and staff cannot easily turn away from the health and safety of our shared communities. Students seek educational experiences that are responsive to the issues of the day and that provide them with the skills needed to address complex social and environmental challenges.

And now new challenges have arisen, and part of the motivation for writing this post is to seek input from our network members about whether BTA should expand our mandate beyond our original three goals. How can we provide a platform to explore alternative paths, address hard truths, and reimagine the public service mission of the University? 

As with any initiative that seeks to change institutions, there is a fundamental tension between the need for radical transformation and the pragmatism of investing in incremental reforms. Instead of retrenchment and a retreat to the safety of the status quo, I would like to see more academic leaders lean-in to difficult conversations about the future of the academy. I’ll be proposing a few ideas on a future BTA call. In the interim, please submit your ideas if you have thoughts about how our network can rise to the challenges of these times – envisioning a world in which universities not only make good on their social contracts, but actively push society towards more just and sustainable futures.

Name: Hawa Sydique  
Years of Experience: 20 
Current Position: Manager of the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute 

What was your dream job as a child?

I wanted to be a weather girl, and as I got older I thought, that’s rubbish, I want to be a newscaster.

Can you tell us about how your job advances sustainability?

The university has invested in these interdisciplinary areas and conservation is one of the lucky ones in that we have a physical presence at the university called the David Attenborough Building. So we are in something called CCI, Cambridge Conservation Initiative, 9 NGOs plus the university all sit in one place. And there is the university side of things, that’s what I manage.

What was your career path from graduate school to what you are doing now?

I did an MBA, and out of my MBA I got a job with Goldman Sachs. And I stayed there for a few years, and then I moved to an NGO who was being sponsored by Goldman Sachs. I just had to do it, I felt like my life wasn’t meaningful being in Goldman Sachs any longer. The NGO was in Cambridge so I moved from London to Cambridge for this job, and I spent about 5 years there. Then I joined the university working with an interdisciplinary program working with researchers in specific Africa programs and bringing them together with researchers in the UK, which was great for a while. Then I met my now boss. When I started out in sustainability I always had an interest in the environment but the main crux of all my jobs had been with people and so I didn’t think I was a fit for me and he really opened my vision to understand that people and the environment were different sides of the same coin and you need both to work together so solve some of these major crises.

What would you say are the top three skills you use in your job and how did you learn them?

I think project management. It’s a skill that once you’ve got it, you can adapt to use anywhere. And being able to problem solve and staying calm in those situations if you can, even if internally you feel like you’re not calm. I think being able to stay on top of technology is important as well for communications. And finally, networking. It’s first listening as you don’t have to be always heard, and then using what you’ve learned to network and not being afraid to send that email to someone and asking them to meet for coffee. I learned that by watching people and by getting a good mentor.

How do you transition into interdisciplinarity?

I think being open-minded and flexible about the opportunities that come your way, making sure that the people who are your sounding boards should come from a selection of backgrounds as well to help you think in a more diverse way. I think that’s essential. And taking risks. And if you fail, it’s okay.

What do you wish you had known when you entered the workforce?

At times you feel like you’re never going to make it. And you can. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Do the best you can and really believe in your capabilities. Life is also pretty short. Make sure that you do things that you remember. Live in the moment and experience the moment, because the moment goes quickly. Spend time with your family and friends, if you let it pass you by now it’s not something that you can get back.

On January 31, 2020, we convened in Los Angeles for the third Beyond the Academy workshop hosted by the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. This workshop was different than the past ones in that it focused on graduate students, and student attendees went through an application process to win an invitation. We ended up with a fantastic group of 24 students from 13 universities in the US, UK, and Canada. A small group of non-students (post-graduate researchers, faculty, and one administrator) were also in attendance to learn from the students and to continue conversations from the past two Beyond the Academy workshops.

Workshop activities included guided discussions, project development, sightseeing, improv training, and food. The students had opportunities to identify challenges they face as interdisciplinary scholars. The topics covered overlapped quite a bit with Beyond the Academy themes: incentives in academia, pressure to publish, challenges collaborating, translating across disciplines, and unclear career paths. When the focus turned to solutions, students broke into small groups and came up with excellent project ideas:

1. Tools to facilitate communication and network building among graduate students, including a website, Slack channel, and zine!
2. A series of interviews with interdisciplinary researchers to document their career paths and promote successful models of applied sustainability scholars. To be featured in the Beyond the Academy newsletter.
3. A handbook for facilitating conversations among graduate student researchers within and across departments that can scale the type of conversations that were initiated at the workshop.
4. A survey of graduate students designed to identify concrete examples of barriers to doing interdisciplinary work with the goal of publishing their findings in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
5. An op-ed/commentary on the strengths of interdisciplinary scholars that will better characterize the unique skills that interdisciplinary students have to offer the world – inside and outside the academy.

To learn more about these student-led initiatives or to get involved, reach out to Christina at clocke@umn.edu. Check out the student-generated website SMOoThiE (Sustainability Mentorship and Organizing for Thinking on the Environment) to keep in touch with the student network – all are welcome to join this virtual community of interdisciplinary, applied scholars.

The Beyond the Academy steering committee is working on a suite of synthesis products based on the outcomes of the previous workshops. Stay tuned for a future blog post on the scope of these products and ways to contribute to next steps for the network.

It was inspiring to see the dedication and drive of the student participants. The academy will be a more diverse, inclusive, and impactful place because of their current and future leadership. Thanks to UCLA for hosting and for all attendees’ contributions and insights!

On September 19, 2019, we convened at Duke University for the second Beyond the Academy workshop. The workshop was hosted by the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, and the focus was on co-producing sustainability science. The 28 attendees represented 11 universities, one NGO, one agency, one charitable trust, and one private-sector group.

The first order of business was to define “co-production,” a term which, until the workshop, many of the attendees had not known or identified with. We learned that co-production involves “processes that iteratively bring together diverse groups and their ways of knowing and acting to create new knowledge and practices to transform societal outcomes” (Wyborn et al. 2019). That is a mouthful, but through concrete examples shared by attendees, it quickly became clear that co-produced work is all around us yet may be known by other names: community engagement, action research, boundary-spanning work, translational science, and participatory research, for example.

We learned about Kūlana Noi‘i, and problem-solving tools like the Drought Resilience Impact Platform (DRIP) and the Endangered Species Recovery Explorer to get some inspirational examples of co-production in action. Some workshop participants articulated a need to clearly distinguish co-production from broad terms like transdisciplinarity that can refer to collaborations solely among academic researchers. Co-production necessarily includes engagement and relationship building with partners outside of academic spheres.

A large focus of the workshop was identifying institutional barriers to doing co-produced science. Participants noted many challenges that come with co-production, including communicating among partners in different sectors, working under very different timelines, prioritizing research topics, staff turnover, political hurdles, and frustrations with administrative policies (like reimbursing community members for their time or travel costs).

Overarching all topics was the theme that co-produced research suffers from a lack of standing in academic circles, highlighting the importance of championing engaged work from the top-down (academic leadership) as well as from the bottom-up (support from individual researchers and departments). Because co-production is not typically incentivized by academia (for example, in tenure and promotion decisions), academics are taking professional risks when choosing to co-produce their research.

To address these challenges, we formed groups to develop action items around four main themes: Institutional reform, measuring institutional impact, research and evaluation (new data needed), and strategic planning for the Beyond the Academy network. Several groups even got a start on products during the breakout sessions, and these are the items that we will focus on first going forward:

• Institutional Impact Scorecard – You know how U.S. World and News Report ranks universities based on value and a bunch of other things? Why not create a score for public engagement?
• Essays about workshop topics – Drafts are in the works on several topics, including reforming tenure policies and addressing systemic bias.
• Co-production training curriculum – A training program for those who want to co-produce research, and those who want to train others how to co-produce research.
• Short-term plans for Beyond the Academy – Appearances at upcoming conferences and the January 2020 workshop focused on graduate students.

Stay tuned for updates!

Wyborn et al. 2019. Co-Producing Sustainability: Reordering the Governance of Science, Policy, and Practice. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 44.

On June 19, 2019, we convened at the David Attenborough Building in Cambridge, England at the end of May for the first in a series of Beyond the Academy workshops. The 28 attendees included administrators, faculty, staff and early career researchers from 12 universities in the U.S., Canada, and UK, as well as representation from non-governmental, industry, and self-employed sectors.

We approached this workshop with three goals in mind:

1. Establish a shared understanding of the state of the research and practice on measuring impact and rewarding scholarship. We defined impact as “engaged, actionable, solutions-oriented work that advances sustainability in a diverse and changing world.” Though we commonly measure a number of things in academia – number of publications, citations, grant income – these traditional metrics are insufficient for measuring real-world impact. On Day 1 of the workshop, we heard a summary of the literature calling for better indicators, and some ideas for new ways of assessing research impact that could be adapted to a number of academic contexts. (More on this in a future post).
2. Identify persistent barriers to measuring and rewarding impact. On Day 2, we turned the microscope on the Beyond the Academy network. We heard a summary of research investigating the policies of Beyond the Academy institutions and the perspectives of network members. We found that, although institutional mission statements prioritized public service and societal impact, tenure policies did not incentivize engaged scholarship. A survey of Beyond the Academy members indicated that time constraints and lack of recognition were major barriers to doing engaged work.
3. Co-develop a roadmap for addressing these barriers. On Day 1 of the workshop, we brainstormed ideas for future directions for the network and informally voted on which of these directions we thought were most important. On Day 2, we broke into small groups to focus on each of the top topics. We ended the workshop by taking turns noting aloud the specific actions each of us would be focusing on to make impact at our home institutions. Examples of proposed actions included: developing standardized templates for impact statements; developing a platform for sharing compelling stories of impactful research; challenging cultures of academic elitism; creating and supporting a community for early career researchers; and growing the Beyond the Academy network.

There was a palpable energy in the room at the close of the workshop, and it was clear that our members are committed to taking action and making change. As project coordinator for the Beyond the Academy network, I look forward to documenting actions taken by network members as we move forward towards our goals.

• interdisciplinary partnerships within and beyond academic settings
• adoption of new metrics to capture the impact of academic research in real-world settings
• problem-oriented projects co-developed with communities and end users
• graduate student success in interdisciplinary endeavors