The Authority File Podcast Recap: Celebrating Five Years of Toward Inclusive Excellence

Posted on March 24, 2026 in Interviews, Podcasts

Authors:

Fatima Mohie-EldinBill Mickey
Illustration of a group of diverse people standing with their arms around each other and facing away from the viewer as they look back on TIE's five-year anniversary. The words "Celebrating Five Years of TIE!" are printed in yellow alongside the illustration.

Toward Inclusive Excellence (TIE) launched on March 24, 2021, with a simple, but powerful mission: to provide solutions, opinions, and constructive discourse grounded in current research on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) within academic libraries and the higher education community at large, and to highlight programmatic initiatives already underway that deserve more coverage. Under the leadership of former editor in chief Dr. Alexia Hudson-Ward (ACRL’s current president), we sought to pursue this mission by creating a pool of informational resources, comprising blog posts, podcasts, resource lists, webinars, and research reports, that readers could draw on to better understand discrimination and prejudice in its various forms (e.g., racism, sexism, ableism) in order to better promote diversity within their institutions.

Today marks TIE‘s five-year anniversary. While we remain as passionately committed to our mission today as when we started, TIE has undoubtedly evolved since our inception. To commemorate the history of this intrepid endeavor, editor Fatima Mohie-Eldin sat down with Bill Mickey, host of The Authority File podcast and editorial director of Choice, to discuss TIE‘s evolution, scope, and DEIA trends we have noticed in higher education. The first episode speaks more specifically to TIE‘s history and recent editorial shift, while the second episode addresses how TIE strives to respond to DEIA news in real time.

Long-time readers of TIE will appreciate learning more about our plans for the future, while newer readers will be able to gain an overview of our past work. You can listen to both episodes of the podcast below.

Part 1:

Part 2:

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Interested in contributing to TIE? 

Email Fatima (fmohie-eldin@ala.org) at Choice with your topic idea.

Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.

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