Disagreeing Well in Higher Education

Mary McHarg is the current Union Affairs Officer and serves as the Chair of the Board of Trustees at Students’ Union UCL. This follows a successful year as the Activities & Engagement Officer, where she co-wrote the Student Life Strategy and represented UCL’s wide range of sports clubs, societies, arts groups, and volunteering opportunities in various capacities.

Tomiwa Owolade is a journalist and author. He has written for the Times, the Sunday Times, the New Statesman, the Observer and the Evening Standard. He is the author of the book This is Not America.

Sasha began her term as the Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Sussex in August 2022. She is Sussex’s ninth Vice Chancellor and our first female VC.

Previously, Sasha was UCL’s first Pro-Provost for Equity and Inclusion and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences. Before that, Professor Roseneil was Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Essex, and held leadership positions at Birkbeck, University of London and the University of Leeds.

Hetan is chief executive of the British Academy, the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. He is Chair of Our World in Data, a website providing long run data and evidence on global challenges. Hetan is a member of a number of advisory boards including at the Resolution Foundation, the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge and UCL’s policy lab. He is a Fellow of Birkbeck College, University of London.

Dr Michael Spence AC joined UCL as President & Provost in January 2021, joining the university from the University of Sydney where he was Vice-Chancellor from 2008 to 2020.

Since arriving, he has led a year-long university-wide consultation to develop the UCL Strategic Plan 2022-27, which sets out UCL’s priorities and ambitions for the next five years in order to strengthen the excellence of UCL’s education, research and innovation, underpinned by a robust financial strategy and improvement of the processes and services that underpin academic excellence. Work to implement the plan is now underway.