Campus Talks by Times Higher Education

A behaviour change expert explains what is required to shift a whole campus community towards more environmentally sustainable habits.

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To reach net zero, institutions need to shift the behaviour of their whole campus community towards reducing their carbon footprint and making greener daily choices. This means changing long established habits among thousands of diverse students and staff. How can universities do this without becoming too dictatorial?

We asked behaviour change expert Esther Papies, a professor at Radboud University in the Netherlands, to explain what drives successful behaviour change and therefore what strategies universities need to employ to reduce their overall emissions and create greener campuses.

Esther’s research examines the social and psychological processes in the transition to healthier, more sustainable and more equitable choices, particularly relating to diet. She has published extensively on the motivations and barriers for reducing meat and dairy intake, the motivation for climate action among privileged individuals and emotional experiences relating to climate change.

She provides a clear break down of what is needed to support long term behaviour change in favour of more sustainable lifestyles and shares advice on how to overcome inevitable resistance to altering long held behavioural norms such as meat eating and driving cars.

How can universities develop sophisticated systems for data sharing and analysis that can guide communications and student services? Alain Pompilus was tasked with putting such a system in place and shares lessons from the experience

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Universities hold a huge amount of data, with information collected at each stage of a student’s journey. The challenge lies in how to make best use of this data to support insights that can shape university services and communications.

Alain Pompilus, associate vice-president for constituent knowledge and insights at the University of Florida, was bought in to address this challenge and create more effective market research efforts in order to better understand and engage key groups such as prospective students and parents, current students and alumni.

His work focuses on using research, data, and strategic analysis to deepen the university’s understanding of its target audiences and strengthen how it responds to the needs and expectations of these different communities.

Here, he discusses this work, what has been learnt so far and how he has started to build a more joined-up approach to developing and sharing insights across a huge and decentralised organisation like the University of Florida.

Thanks to the University of Florida for sponsoring this episode.

The challenges of being an LGBTQ+ researcher in the US have multiplied since Donald Trump returned to the presidency. Funding cuts, closures of LGBTQ+ resource centres on campus, attacks on trans rights and backtracks on Pride Month celebrations have all harmed not only scholars’ crucial work, but also their ability to support the next generation of queer academics. A New York Times data analysis estimated that $800 million (£596 million) worth of research into the health of LGBTQ people had been pulled as a result of the administration’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion programmes.

One of the LGBTQ+ scientists affected was Lisa Diamond, a renowned researcher of women’s sexuality who lost her own NIH grant in the wake of the sweeping funding cuts. Diamond is distinguished professor in psychology and ethnic, gender and disability studies at the University of Utah. She has a PhD in human development from Cornell and is the author of the groundbreaking, award-winning book Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire.

In this interview, she talks about the heartbreak, trauma and chaos that the wave of grant terminations brought about. She explains how her experience under the current administration has led her to rethink her role as an LGBTQ+ scientist, how data collection is its own form of resistance, and how she now finds herself giving her students that same kind of cautious career advice she received back in the late 1990s. For her, 2025 was a turning point for LGBTQ+ health research. And in November, she and co-principal investigator Scout, a trans researcher from the LGBTQIA+ Cancer Network, began a survey of the LGBTQ+ community that has grown into an oral history project.

For more advice and insight into supporting the LGBTQ+ community in higher education, read our Pride Month spotlight guide on Campus.

We find out how one US institution has led the way in embedding AI across all its majors and what has been learnt in the process

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Many universities are now racing to embed AI literacy across their curricula and equip students with knowledge that may prove critical to future careers. But the University of Florida had embarked on this mission years before large language models exploded into everyone’s consciousness with the arrival of ChatGPT.

In this episode of Campus Talks, we speak to Hans van Oostrom, director of the University of Florida’s AI2 Center, which supports the university’s AI initiatives across teaching and research, including the university-wide Undergraduate Certificate in AI Fundamentals and Applications.

We discuss what ‘AI across the curriculum’ means in practice, how the University of Florida has built AI expertise across all its academic departments, what drives AI resistance and how to balance AI use against the other foundational skills that students need to develop.

For more advice and insight on building AI literacy from higher education experts all over the world, head to our latest spotlight guide: Boosting AI literacy across your institution.

What purpose does, or should, assessment serve? How can educators shift the focus of assessment towards feedback? Who is really driving higher education’s unhelpful obsession with grades? And how does GenAI affect all this?

In this episode of Campus Talks, we explore all these questions and more with David Boud, Deakin distinguished professor at Deakin University and a leading scholar on assessment and feedback. David is the foundation director of Deakin’s Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Technology Sydney.

He has been a pioneer in learning-centred approaches to assessment and is one of the most highly cited academics in the world on teaching, learning and assessment in higher and professional education with dozens of books bearing his name, including The Impact of Feedback in Higher Education (2019) and Assessment for Inclusion in Higher Education (2022).

We discuss what constitutes good feedback, strategies for engaging students in the feedback process, how to design assessments that centre feedback and learning and where universities have been going wrong on assessment and grading.