Editor's Note

As the 11th Editor of The Journal of College Student Development, I feel the responsibility of taking the lead of a major academic journal. I expect it to be challenging while also incredibly rewarding. I affirm the principles this Journal has maintained for many years. First and foremost, the peer review process should be helpful and informative to authors. Second, the review of scholarship should be conducted by an Editorial Board that is diverse and representative of multiple ways of knowing. And finally, as an editorial team, we have the responsibility of sustaining the Journal for future generations. These principles also give us tremendous room for personal judgment, and that is why we also want to share our values.

This editorial leadership team comes to our positions with depth and breadth of experiences as scholars and includes individuals who hold marginalized identities, both of which provide us with insight on how to push our field forward to make it stronger. We want to encourage scholarship that acknowledges the systemic inequity academic processes sustain and break down barriers around definitions of what constitutes good scholarship. We recognize that our goals present some inherent tensions; that is, we want to maintain the status the Journal garners within the greater higher education field and the student affairs community. At the same time, we understand that this prestige could be interpreted as being at odds with our values of furthering the inclusion of marginalized voices and encouraging new and critical scholars in the field. Instead, we see these two goals as being symbiotic and necessary to promote research and move the field forward.

As we embark on this next era of the Journal, one of the changes we are making is the inclusion of Translational Education Research (TER). In this issue, we provide the first TER column focused on doing anti-racist work within a higher education organization. These pieces expand the public scholarship that addresses how research can be applied to practice. We hope this piece and future TER articles will promote conversation to help us apply what is known and question what needs to be understood. This section is one example of how we hope to evolve as an academic journal. We aim to provide research-based professional development scholarship that addresses the pressing issues facing our campus communities.

Prior to taking the reins of editing the Journal, our team had conversations about how we enact our values as editors. We all recognize the responsibility we hold as gatekeepers for publication, adjudicators of knowledge, and decision makers about what constitutes good scholarship. We accept these responsibilities with care and hold each other accountable to assure we are maintaining our values as inclusive, critical scholars in the field. We also hope you, the readers, will help us maintain these values.