From “Race” to Race Transcendence: “Race,” Writing, and Difference Twenty Years Later

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1528-1533 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie Smith
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Faculty Member ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
Academic Life ◽  
Historically White ◽  
English Departments ◽  
Academic Specialization

When I began my career in higher education in the early 1980s, English departments at elite, historically white colleges and universities typically only had, at most, one faculty member of color. With a few notable exceptions, that person was usually the only one in the department to teach or conduct research on topics that engaged questions of race. Now, almost thirty years later, the study of race has assumed a more prominent role in academic life. Not only is it increasingly common to find clusters of scholars working on race in English departments, but scholars of all races and ethnicities are engaged in the study of race. Moreover, scholars of color are no longer assumed to focus on works of literature and culture produced by people of their own racial or ethnic backgrounds. Generally speaking, we have moved beyond the expectation that academic specialization follows phenotype.

Historically White Universities and Plantation Politics: Anti-Blackness and Higher Education in the Black Lives Matter Era

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Elon Dancy ◽  
Kirsten T. Edwards ◽  
James Earl Davis
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Black People ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
Institutional Policy ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Historically White ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Black Bodies

In this article, the authors argue that U.S. colleges and universities must grapple with persistent engagements of Black bodies as property. Engaging the research and scholarship on Black faculty, staff, and students, we explain how theorizations of settler colonialism and anti-Blackness (re)interpret the arrangement between historically White universities and Black people. The authors contend that a particular political agenda that engages the Black body as property, not merely concerns for disproportionality and inequality, is deeply embedded in institutional policy and practice. The article concludes with a vision for what awareness of anti-Black settler colonialism means for U.S. higher education.

Winning the Argument and Moving the Fight: The Legacy of a Grassroots Humanitarian

Public Voices ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
Mary Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
United States ◽  
Winning Strategy ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
The United States ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Trade Offs

The author of this article argues that the two-decades-long litigation struggle was necessary to push the political actors in Mississippi into a more virtuous than vicious legal/political negotiation. The second and related argument, however, is that neither the 1992 United States Supreme Court decision in Fordice nor the negotiation provided an adequate riposte to plaintiffs’ claims. The author shows that their chief counsel for the first phase of the litigation wanted equality of opportunity for historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), as did the plaintiffs. In the course of explicating the role of a legal grass-roots humanitarian, Coleman suggests lessons learned and trade-offs from that case/negotiation, describing the tradeoffs as part of the political vestiges of legal racism in black public higher education and the need to move HBCUs to a higher level of opportunity at a critical juncture in the life of tuition-dependent colleges and universities in the United States. Throughout the essay the following questions pose themselves: In thinking about the Road to Fordice and to political settlement, would the Justice Department lawyers and the plaintiffs’ lawyers connect at the point of their shared strength? Would the timing of the settlement benefit the plaintiffs and/or the State? Could plaintiffs’ lawyers hold together for the length of the case and move each piece of the case forward in a winning strategy? Who were plaintiffs’ opponents and what was their strategy? With these questions in mind, the author offers an analysis of how the campaign— political/legal arguments and political/legal remedies to remove the vestiges of de jure segregation in higher education—unfolded in Mississippi, with special emphasis on the initiating lawyer in Ayers v. Waller and Fordice, Isaiah Madison

Of Promise and Peril: Doctoral Study in Public Administration in the 21st Century

Public Voices ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 73
Author(s):  
John R Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Faculty Member ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Doctoral Students ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Extensive Experience ◽  
Doctoral Study ◽  
Recent Graduate

The author, a recent graduate of the Doctor in Public Administration program, shares his thoughts about what it means to study public administration in the twenty-first century. He hopes his insights, born out of more than a forty year-long career in the field—decades of work in colleges and universities as a faculty member, dean, provost, vicepresident, and acting president, as well as his extensive experience in teaching public administration at the graduate and undergraduate levels—will help doctoral students in their academic pursuits. More specifically, he hopes that his remarks will make Ph.D. students think more deeply about the promise of their endeavors and, on the other hand, give them advance warning about perils of the process and ways to avoid them.

Global Goals and Contributing Disciplines in Higher Education, With a Focus on Sustainable Engineering

2016 ◽  
Vol 138 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaufui Vincent Wong
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
Quality Engineering ◽  
Sustainable Engineering ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
The Many ◽  
Engineering Schools

This work has been done to recognize the various contributing disciplines in colleges and universities to achieving the global goals. One aim is to point out the many college disciplines internationally that would contribute to these goals. Only four out of the global goals seem not to be directly contributed to by sustainable engineering. A presentation of relevant publications has been made of the role of sustainable engineering in accomplishing the 17 global goals of the United Nations. The pervasiveness and long reach of the many branches of sustainable engineering are evident. The implied importance of good quality engineering schools and colleges worldwide cannot be refuted.

Leaving Academia: The Shifting Terrain of Higher Education

2020 ◽  
Vol 102 (102) ◽  
pp. 92-107
Author(s):  
Lynne Segal
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Higher Education ◽  
Academic Life ◽  
Student Debt ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Teaching Research ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences ◽  
Fault Lines

Leaving academia, this essay joins a steady chorus of reflection now thinking backwards over the last half century of extraordinary transformations in higher education. The industry is booming, more students than ever are entering universities, yet the academy is seen as increasingly in crisis. Staff workloads keep mounting, student debt soaring, and staff and student anxieties alike are multiplying, even as government underfunding, imposed managerialism and commercialisation threaten to reduce the underlying logic of higher education to market principles. In this context it is more urgent than ever to record the half century of struggle that opened up and enriched academic life, gradually ensuring the entry of hitherto excluded voices and topics into research and scholarship, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Drawing on my own involvement, I recall some of these always-incomplete attempts to challenge the fault-lines of intellectual life in the academy, knowing that we need always to cherish the value of teaching, research and learning, simply for its own sake.

Walking in the Ivory Tower: Differential Belonging and the Architexture of Home

2021 ◽  
pp. 107780042110483
Author(s):  
Gust A. Yep
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Faculty Member ◽  
Ivory Tower ◽  
Relational Patterns ◽  
The U.S

Deploying Carrillo Rowe’s concept of differential belonging and extending McCune’s notion of architexture to encompass transnational sensory registers, affective valences and intensities, relational patterns, and ideological and political textures, I describe and examine the complexities of home as a racial, gender, and sexual non-normative transnational subject in the U.S. academy. More specifically, I narrate two scenes of my autoethnography to make sense of my transnational experiences of academic home in U.S. spaces of higher education. In the article, I first discuss the concept of differential belonging and the architexture of home before I embark on my autoethnographic scenes and conclude with an exploration of how people “back home” imagine my life as a faculty member of a major U.S. university.

Organizational Culture and Effectiveness in Higher Education: A Test of the “Culture Type” and “Strong Culture” Hypotheses

1996 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 219-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. Smart ◽  
Edward P. St. John
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Organizational Culture ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
Independent Effect ◽  
Institutional Performance ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
Differential Effectiveness ◽  
Culture Strength ◽  
Four Year Colleges ◽  
Strong Culture

Two of the more promising lines of inquiry in efforts to understand the hypothesized linkage between organizational culture and effectiveness have focused on the differential effectiveness of organizations depending on their dominant culture type and their culture strength. The primary purpose of this study was to determine whether these two lines of inquiry operate in an independent or conditional manner in explaining the hypothesized linkage between organizational culture and the performance of a sample of four-year colleges and universities. The findings provide support for both lines of inquiry, albeit not entirely in a manner suggested by their respective proponents. For example, while culture type has a decidedly stronger independent effect on institutional performance than culture strength, the differences are clearly more pronounced on campuses with “strong” rather than “weak” cultures. The implications of these findings for research on and efforts to improve the performance of colleges and universities are discussed.

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