KAN Conversations: Professor Akira O’Connor
Professor Akira O’Connor of the School of Psychology and Neuroscience was appointed Assistant Vice-Principal (Diversity) in March 2026, joining the University’s Senior Management Team and helping to shape its strategic direction. Here, he discusses his priorities in this role, moments that remind him of the value of EDI work, and the importance of celebrating diverse alumni stories.
What does diversity mean to you in a university context today?
For me, it boils down to fairness. Diversity is about ensuring that everyone who has the potential to do well at St Andrews does well at St Andrews. That’s the people who are here and the people who could be here but aren’t for various reasons. It’s about making sure we remove those barriers to students coming to the University and ensuring they thrive once they are here.
The ‘today’ bit of that question is important as well. We’re in a social and political context where, depending on where you are in the world, EDI has become a bit of a dirty word. People are losing jobs and research programmes are being discontinued. I think a lot of that is to do with a misconception around what diversity work is.
We in the sector, and in society more generally, need to make a better case for EDI as a means of ensuring that resources are more fairly allocated. When you put it like that, you go some way to dealing with the objections. It’s moving away from the mindset of ‘that doesn’t apply to me, so I oppose it’. Once you make a case for fairness as a principle that applies to everyone, it makes much more sense that this is something that we should be working on, and something we’re all working towards.
You were recently appointed as Assistant Vice-Principal (Diversity). What are your key priorities for this role?
Firstly, there are some routine, yet important, administrative priorities, such as ensuring we deliver our various action plans in ways that genuinely benefit both individuals and the University.
A big priority for me is building community. We’ve got a lot of work to do to better support certain groups – for example, through the Race Equality Charter (REC), which focuses on racially and ethnically minoritised people, as well as gender equality work. At the same time, it’s important that this work doesn’t unintentionally atomise groups, separating people or losing sight of the fact that it should benefit the whole University community.
Often, tensions can build across boundaries that artificially create a sense of separation. Part of what I need to do in this role is to bring people together across these boundaries, building a coherent feeling about who we are as a multifaceted University community.
In my role, I need to make sure that when we apply the lessons learned from EDI work across the University, we don’t let other groups that have been traditionally marginalised fall off the agenda. Whether it be LGBTQ+ groups, people with disabilities or those living with mental health issues, I want to make sure that we are building an environment that works for everyone.
What experiences in your career have reinforced the importance of this work?
One moment that stands out, and is closely connected to the work I still do at St Andrews, was building the team to apply for the REC. It was a process of finding leaders from across the University and connecting them. It was like forming a super group – every person had their own story. Some had been pushing against the door for a while and were getting tired. Others were coming to it with a fresh face and a lot of energy.
It was all about harnessing that energy and being supported by University leadership to act on our proposals. It was a moment where it felt like the University was realising the kind of energy and drive that existed within the organisation and essentially saying, ‘all right, go for it, let’s see what you can produce’. That resulted in a comprehensive, ambitious action plan that we’ve been working from for the past few years.
Another moment that sticks out to me is from early on in my career. I’m a psychologist and do work on memory. My work is focused on what people know, and don’t know, about their own memories. As part of my Masters project at the University of Leeds, I attended a day centre for people with learning difficulties and spent a lot of time with attendees, carrying out memory test games.
I often reflect on that experience. It was incredibly rewarding to spend time with people with learning disabilities and to involve them in university research. While we do a lot of work at St Andrews – and across higher education institutions more broadly – that focuses on different aspects of diversity, we don’t tend to see very many people with learning disabilities in these environments. I want to do the sort of EDI work where we create an environment that is open and where it wouldn’t be unusual to see people with learning disabilities working at the University, contributing to the life of departments, schools and units.
How do you balance long-term cultural change with the need for visible and immediate impact?
I think the key is in the question; it’s all about balance. It’s tempting to want to start with the visible, immediately impactful things. In that action, you’ve signalled something about the organisation that you want people to understand – you are ambitious in your diversity goals. But it needs to be paired with some of the more difficult, harder to shift changes around how an organisation works. Changes around what is rewarded and around the kind of culture that exists in each unit and department.
It’s important to do the harder, background work alongside the immediately impactful projects – both are important. If you don’t do the visible work, people won’t understand why you’re doing the more time-consuming, culture change work. The biggest hurdle we run into in EDI work is awareness. It’s all about telling the story, communicating the work and why it matters.
Why is it important to celebrate diverse alumni stories?
There’s a phrase: ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’. We want students to see a wide range of what success looks like and the varied journeys it can take to achieve it. The process is different for everyone. The more students understand that there are different routes to success, the more hope they can have about life after graduation.
There is also an important point about visibility in diversity to be made here. I cannot tell you how excited I get when I see an actor or a pop star who’s half Japanese, like me. I’m like, ‘What? That’s so cool. I love them’, even if I know nothing about them. We’re all different and sometimes that leads to feelings of isolation and loneliness. If celebrating more people with different backgrounds and experiences means that some of those negatives get turned into unexpected moments of connection, community and joy, then I’m all for it!
How can institutions do this authentically?
By allowing people to tell their own stories without trying to make them fit into a mould. It’s important to let alumni highlight their successes and personal challenges. Those challenges will differ for everyone, but there may be commonalities based on factors such as gender, sexuality or cultural background. Just allowing people to talk about their experience without feeling like they need to conform to a particular sort of storytelling – I think that’s key.
This article first appeared in our Kaleidoscope Alumni Network (KAN) newsletter.