by Samuel D. Museus, Associate Professor of Higher Education at the University of Denver and Fellow of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Research Coalition (ARC)
During his speech at the Council on Ethnic Participation
business meeting at the 2013 Association for the Study of Higher Education
conference in St. Louis, Missouri, Dr. Shaun Harper told the story about one of
his mentees who decided to put off enrolling in graduate programs because he
wanted to spend the next few years of his life making a real difference. He went on to talk about how many people who have
chosen to pursue a doctorate in higher education have done so in order to have
a positive impact on their communities, and many of us would argue that we
entered the field to have a positive impact on higher education and society in
general as well. However, Dr. Harper also noted that the field has not effectively
engaged those passions to promote significant impact and we, as a community,
have not engaged in the kind of activity that effectively addresses some of the
most critical issues facing higher education. For me, his speech prompted a (re)envisioning
of the nature of scholarship in higher education. In this essay, I build on Harper’s
discussion, my own research agenda, and previous blog posts by Drs. Kezar and
Gildersleeve, to offer some thoughts about how our scholarly community can (re)envision
a higher education scholarly enterprise to more effectively serve our students,
our institutions, our communities, and society at large.
Systemic Problems
Require Systemic Solutions
In her November essay, Kezar astutely noted that we are
lacking a broader systems perspective in higher education scholarship, and this
is readily apparent. In their previous pieces, both Kezar and Gildersleeve asserted
that there is a plethora of higher education scholarship that examines students
at the individual level being presented at national conferences. Yet, it is
difficult to deny that the populations we study are heavily influenced by major
systemic trends that surround and place immense pressures on postsecondary
institutions and their leaders to adapt. Indeed, the rapid racial and ethnic diversification,
widespread globalization, and pervasive digitization placing pressures on the
higher education sector have no reservations in forcing college campuses to change
the way they do business and deliver education in the 21st century.
Unfortunately, institutions of higher education often take a reactionary –
rather than an informed, complex, and visionary – approach to responding to
these forces. For example, this reactionary institutional behavior has
manifested in many institutions bringing increasingly diverse students to their
campuses without transforming their organizational environments to reflect that
diversity, or heavily recruiting international students without systemically
and systematically integrating those students into the fabric of institutional
life, or making fiscally responsible decisions that generate revenue without making
morally responsible and strategic decisions about how they can bring in
revenue while preserving academic freedom and supporting liberal arts
disciplines that matter so much to the well being of society but are not
aligned with the increasing market mentality of college campuses. These are
systemic issues that require more intentional and meaningful systemic
solutions. If these forces continue to place pressures on higher education
leaders and we fail to generate meaningful, strategic, and large-scale methods
of responding to them, our students and society will suffer as a result.
So, what does all this mean for the higher education scholarly community? And, how does our community of scholars respond to this
conundrum? Kezar presented useful recommendations for advisors, discussants,
and individuals in other positions in higher education to begin shifting their
work to reflect more systems-level thinking. And, Gildersleeve offered very useful
practical recommendations for individual scholars who are (re)constructing
their scholarly agendas in a more systemic way in his January essay. Here, I
compliment those suggestions with recommendations for the scholarly community
to engage in a collective and systemic paradigmatic shift in order to make our research
more relevant and responsive to the demands placed upon us by external forces.
(Re)Envisioning a
Community Focused on Transformative Scholarship
I begin my (re)envisioning with a personal story. When I was
in my doctoral program at Penn State, I was deeply concerned about the
individual challenges faced by students of color as they navigated
postsecondary environments and I did an extensive review of the higher
education literature on diversity, campus environments, and college student
success. From this review, I drew an overarching conclusion that our field had
failed to generate an empirically based and complex understanding of the ways
in which postsecondary institutions can and do construct campus environments to
help diverse student populations thrive in college. Put another way, at the
expense of sounding utopian of naively optimistic, I felt that we needed to
illuminate what cultural and programmatic characteristics could be infused
throughout a college or university environment to help diverse students thrive.
For decades, higher education scholars – like Vince Tinto, Alexander Astin, and
George Kuh – had stimulated vital research and discourse around student
integration, involvement, and engagement. Similarly, for some time, postsecondary
education researchers – such as Walter Allen, Sylvia Hurtado, Amaury Nora,
Laura Rendon, and Daniel Solorzano – had produced ground breaking and valuable
research that shed light on the problematic nature of racialized environments.
But, a cohesive and coherent picture of what institutions can do to construct
curricula, programs, and practices that maximize those students’ success in
college was elusive.
The initial result was my dissertation, which built on the
work of the aforementioned scholars and examined institutions that exhibited
high and equitable persistence and graduation rates to understand how they had
constructed campus cultures that facilitated success among diverse populations.
Then, after conducting several other studies of campus environments and diverse
populations as an early career faculty member, I generated the Culturally Engaging
Campus Environments (CECE) Model and Survey (Museus, 2014), which incorporate
knowledge from over 30 years of scholarship and several qualitative studies to
convey how institutions can cultivate environments to help students thrive and
provide tools that can constitute the foundation for the transformation of
academic departments, residence halls, student affairs offices, classrooms, and
other spaces across college campuses. I am now working with other scholars, my research
team, and national leaders in student affairs to bring this knowledge onto
college campuses for purposes of institutional assessment and transformation.
My point in sharing an overview of this one strand of my
scholarly agenda is threefold: (1) to highlight that there was always a
long-term vision of systemic transformation
driving my agenda, (2) to demonstrate the reality that we have an ability to
link the individual (e.g., diverse students’ success) to the systemic (e.g., organizational
culture) and center this intersection
in our empirical endeavors to advance such transformation goals, and (3) to
illuminate the potential in reframing the way we think about progressive
scholarly agendas in our field. Echoing and extending some of the valuable
insights previously offered by Gildersleeve, I underscore that we do not have
to stop studying individual students, but we can (re)center some of our agendas
on the intersection between student experiences and institutional culture, or
student lives and cultural communities, or student identities and classroom curricula,
or student outcomes and federal or state policy. And, in doing so, we can help
generate knowledge that is conducive to positive systemic transformation. Yet,
individual researchers making conscious choices to engage in such an agenda is
not sufficient, for the traditional structures that individual higher education
scholars must navigate do not necessarily value or reward such agenda
(re)envisioning. Thus, as a community of scholars, we also need to think about
how we can (re)structure our own systems – our scholarly arenas and discourses
– to promote such complex and transformative scholarship. I offer a few
thoughts to begin this thinking and discussion.
Creating Space for
Critical Conceptual Analysis of Systems: First, empirical research
dominates our field. Even frameworks originally constructed to deconstruct pervasive
systems more often than not drive empirical studies that examines individual
experiences. Take, for example, the case of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Today,
higher education scholars using CRT frequently apply this framework as a lens
to examine individual racialized experiences and this work is undoubtedly important.
Some of us have applied the framework to examine more systemic processes in our
work. But, the utilization of CRT to illuminate the ways in which race and
racism permeate broader federal and state policies or colorblind institutional cultures,
policies, and structures are also important in underscoring systemic problems
and are much more difficult to find. Undoubtedly, empirical qualitative and
quantitative analyses are critical contributions to the higher education
knowledgebase, but the potential of critical conceptual analyses of higher
education systems is seldom realized.
In addition, young scholars need to produce, produce, and produce
to get promoted and tenured. While many of us periodically emphasize
scholarship quality over quantity in public forums, the reality is that many
institutional cultures and promotion and tenure processes are at least
partially driven by quantity and most pre-tenured faculty members know that one
or two transformative articles or books might not get them tenure. The combined
disproportionate emphasis on empirical inquiries and the generation of quick
results and publications makes doing traditional student-focused research
appealing (at least) or career-saving (at most). As a community, we need to do
better at creating mechanisms for scholars to engage in deep critical analysis
of social forces and deconstructing of systemic structures in higher education
scholarly, policy, and practice arenas to shed light on pervasive problems and
construct solutions to them.
Constructing New
Theories that Catalyze New Scholarly Conversations: Theories that explain
processes and experiences within the context of the larger contemporary social
forces discussed above are difficult to find. My agenda discussed above evolved
to address what was an absence of comprehensive, coherent, quantifiable, and
culturally relevant and responsive theories that explain the impact of campus
environments on diverse student success. But, where are the frameworks that
explain the complex impact of globalization and academic capitalism on faculty
life and outcomes? Where are models that help provide a framework for understanding
how organizational change evolves in the context of current neoliberal
ideologies and trends? Where are the evolving bodies of scholarship that test,
retest, critique, and refine these models? Such models are critical for
communicating critical evidence-based information to policymaker and
practitioner audiences because they can convey a significant amount of
information in condensed form and bridge the gap between spheres of influence.
Surely, some scholars have produced such scholarship in
their work, but the generation of such frameworks has not been the norm in our
field, has not been the focus of doctoral training in higher education programs,
and has not kept pace with the increasing influence of contextual social forces
influencing higher education. It behooves our community to think about ways
that it can promote the generation of new contemporary frameworks that examine
the impact of policies and organizations on today’s administrators, faculty
members, and students, and the collective testing and analysis of these
frameworks.
Engaging in Coalition
Building and Collective Action: In Harper’s speech, discussed at the beginning
of this essay, he referenced the low success rates of Black males in higher
education and asked the question, why have we not built a national coalition to
facilitate real systemic transformative change to address this issue? This is a
great question, and reflecting on it can lead us to think about the possibilities
of coalition building. Coalitions can offer vehicles for collaboration,
enhanced visibility of scholarship, support networks for young scholars, and a
broader reach and impact of scholarly works. These are just some of the reasons
that my colleagues and I started the Asian American and Pacific Islander
Research Coalition (ARC), which has already resulted in strengthened
friendships within our network, emerging relationships with organizations in
the practice arena working with Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI)
students, and a renewed or enhanced sense of hope among some of us that we can
have a transformative impact on policy and practice in a way that will help
more AAPI students and communities thrive in higher education. However, such
coalition building is an immense amount of work and again our field is not
currently structured in a way that supports such activities. The question is, how
can we, as a scholarly community, create structures that reward the sweat and
tears that go into forging such collaborations?
Breaking Down
Barriers to Scholarly Isolation: We produce research and literature (and
therefore ideas, models, and solutions) that are primarily consumed by other
higher education scholars, and often does not reach policymakers and
practitioners. Yet, our scholarship cannot be transformative if it is not consumed
and integrated into policy and practice. As Chair of the ASHE evaluation committee
for two years, it was readily apparent that policymakers and practitioners are
few and far between in our scholarly arenas. Similarly, a handful of us attend
conferences like the American College Personnel Association (ACPA) or the
National Association of Personnel Administrators (NASPA), but we are not well
represented in those arenas. As a result, practice is often more grounded in
hunches than a comprehensive understanding of theory and evidence. Similarly, a
few scholars have relationships with philanthropic foundations and
policymakers, but such relationships are not yet prevalent within our community
and few young scholars have the means to cultivate them. As a result, those in
the philanthropic and policy world who want to support or utilize groundbreaking
and transformative work will never be exposed to the vast majority of cutting
edge ideas that emerge throughout our field, which limits the impact of our
collective work.
I do not intend to argue that AERA and ASHE or ACPA and
NASPA should transform primarily into a venue for discussing the application of
research to practice or research to policy. But, I am arguing that our
community – especially the leaders of it – should think of new ways to create
space for more higher education researchers to cultivate relationships and engage
in work with policymakers, practitioners, and foundations
to collectively develop research that leads to real solutions for pervasive
policy and practice problems. I must commend current ASHE President, Caroline
Turner for moving the field in the right direction with the focus on catalyzing
dialogue between researchers and policymakers at ASHE 2014, but such efforts are
not yet commonplace.
In sum, I am arguing that we must (re)envision a scholarly
community that is aimed at generating knowledge that can help institutions
transform to thoughtfully and effectively respond to the immense social forces
surrounding them in the present day while advancing core values of higher
education, such as equity, public service, vibrant exchange of ideas, and the
cultivation of socially responsible lifelong learners….
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