Recentering Respect: Transatlantic Insights on Practices for Dignity and Inclusion

As debates over discrimination, immigration, indoctrination, and everything in between continue in the US with reverberations across the UK, respect for human dignity, inclusion, and institutional autonomy seems to continue to be pushed aside, this is combined with the fact that over the past decade, we have witnessed universities being painted as sites of “indoctrination,” while equity and inclusion initiatives are framed as discriminatory. In addition to ongoing funding cuts, reshuffling, and even the shuttering of offices for equity, diversity, and inclusion, attempts at rewriting historical narratives and restricting what faculty and students can say, it can be argued that higher education has become one of the principal battlegrounds for many heated political debates.

It is evident these attacks aren’t only about budgets or policy shifts, but are directed at silencing critical thought, reshaping public understanding, and undoing the gains for inclusion and belonging made in the past 30 to 40 years.

So, in the upcoming Translocating Inclusion conversation, Dr. Tiffenia Archie (Temple University) and Dr. Wayne Mitchell (Imperial College London) will share their insights on how universities can work toward reclaiming autonomy and their role as spaces for knowledge production, innovation, inclusion, and human progress. We will explore how and why, in the face of manufactured divisive tactics, it is critical to recenter respect as a guiding value, foster inclusive leadership, and preserve higher education and our wider communities as places where difference deepens dialogue rather than division. They will offer strategies for navigating external pressures without capitulating to them, mobilizing broader public support, and building communities of belonging centered around higher education’s true mission of expanding human dignity, deepening critical thinking, and equipping the next generation to imagine a more just future.