Spanning and Unsettling the Borders of Critical Scholarship in Higher Education

Abstract

In the 2021 Presidential Address, I argued that critical scholarship in higher education unsettled the demarcation between the street and the ivory tower and spans the gulf between theorizing and policy. I portrayed critical scholarship both as an insertion which disrupts bodies, stories, and refusals, as well as sitting uneasily on the fulcrum of praxis.

I am a critical poststructural scholar (Stewart, 2017a) which I have internalized as an inclination to subversively break things and reassemble them in ways that do not match their intended design. It is akin to la paperson's (2017) discussion of working within the machine, but I prefer the metaphor that Eileen Galvez introduced at the 2021 ACPA/ASHE Presidential Symposium (2021). She offered an alternative metaphor that avoids the ableism that can be attached to la paperson's usage of scyborgs and machines and instead. In this metaphor using computing software, Galvez argued that higher education professionals can (mal)function as malware within the systems of the academy. As malware, higher education professionals rewrite code, turn firmware against itself, and extract the resources necessary to accomplish our goals. With that in mind, I am breaking and reassembling how presidential addresses are supposed to function, like others before me have also done.

In a past life, I was trained as a Christian minister and one of the things that I have carried with me is that you should be able to say your whole sermon in one sentence. If you cannot say it in one sentence, it is not worth saying. So, here is my one sentence: Critical scholarship in higher education unsettles the demarcation between the street and the ivory tower and spans the gulf between theorizing and policy.

Critical Scholarship as a Disrupter

First, I would like to talk about critical scholarship in higher education unsettling the demarcation between the street and the ivory tower. I have the container of critical scholarship pictured in my mind like a word inserted into a sentence in copyediting mark-up, but instead of functioning as an insertion, it functions as a disrupter in the middle of a thought. Here, I want to talk about how critical scholarship disrupts three iterations of representation: bodies, stories, and refusals (Fig. 1).

Figure 1.

Critical Scholarship as an Insertion that Disrupts

Bodies

I stand before you this morning as the fourth in a line of Black presidents, with the fifth on deck this week. It is worth noting that there were 24 years between the first Black president—Michael Nettles—and the next—Shaun Harper. I am the fourth openly queer president. I am the first Trans* president of this association. I am also the first to inhabit all three of those social categories—Black, queer, Trans—as well as having multiple dis/abilities, despite not being regarded as such. Yet, what does it mean to be the first of a thing?

In other words, in what ways do bodies matter? Do bodies matter? Whose bodies matter? I must say that it matters that I have a masculine embodiment and that people see me as having done all the (supposedly) right things to be a (supposedly) proper Trans* person. A Trans* person who passes and by passing, I mean being a passageway—that others pass through me past the affective discomfort of others' supposedly improper gendering.

Bodies represent the ways we move about in the world—physically, temporally, affectively, as enacted desires, motivations, and impulses. We have given bodies personhood. Notice what I am saying. We have given bodies personhood—the status of being a person. But only certain types of bodies receive this status and whose bodies get humanized and personified shifts across time and space. Bodies on the street in all these categories I have called out a moment ago are the walking dead in the hands of a State that has continued to dedicate itself to the eradication of those bodies and the personhoods they would otherwise birth (Hartman, 1997; Hayward, 2017).

These bodies in the academy are portrayed as diversity tokens, measured and measurable progress, and achievement (Ahmed, 2012; Stewart, 2017b). Critical scholarship at work in higher education unsettles that demarcation between the street and the academy and recognizes that the surveillance power that renders Black, queer, trans, dis/abled bodies killable—here, I am drawing on Nicolazzo (2021)—in the public street also renders them killable in the academic streets.

Stories

Stories are representations. This is true for the stories we tell in our research, the stories in novels, poetry stories, bedtime stories. They re-present, or present differently, the teller's epistemic (beliefs about knowledge), ontological (beliefs about reality), and axiological (beliefs about value/s) commitments (i.e., paradigms). This is why critical scholars use positionality statements. When done right, positionality statements inform the reader of how the researcher came to tell the story in the way that they are. It is why positionality statements should not just be the terrain of qualitative scholarship. That would otherwise presume that other forms of scholarship of paradigmatically neutral. It has been argued repeatedly since Guba and Lincoln (1994) that such a notion is a falsehood.

Every ASHE president has had their presidential address printed in the pages of the Review of Higher Education as the lead article except two: Shaun Harper and Lori Patton Davis, the first Black woman president.¹ There has been no recognition and documentation of the messages they sent to the field and specifically this association beyond the redacted videos available on the ASHE website. Unavailable in print are Harper's (2017) address about white power and supremacy in the study of higher education and the need and opportunity to serve the people not ourselves. Unavailable in print is also the address given by Patton Davis (2018), a master of the metonymic, about the "zombie research" that threatens the viability and relevance of the field and the dangers of service to the myths of what counts as rigor and quality in higher education research.

The reasoning is unknown and perhaps race and Blackness have nothing to do with it, but if style and delivery do, then that is about Blackness, and if it is about Blackness, then it is about the entrenched anti-Blackness within this association. If those of you here today only remember and talk about Kanye West and the incisive smackdown of a hater, then we are part of perpetuating that anti-Blackness. This exists despite having had four, and soon five, Black presidents—four within five years—because representation and compositional diversity will not save us (Stewart, 2017b). Looking across the field of higher education research, I find it very curious what is considered publishable related to Blackness, Black commentary versus blackened commentary.

It is this melding of the street and the ivory tower that critical scholars traffic in with their scholarship. Critical scholarship in higher education, and in the fields where it began, is conveyed through both oral and written tradition that speaks truth to power. We do not need to put on Vaseline or to remove our jewelry, rather critical scholars take the highbrow ideas of the academy and turn them into the lingua franca of the street, conversating, as the late bell hooks commented (Chua, 1994).

He [Snoop Doggy Dog] said, "I don't rap. I just talk. I want to be able to relax and conversate with my people." Are we, cultural workers situated in the academy, developing a jargon about cultural production that does not allow us to "conversate and cross" these very borders that we're talking about how cool it would be to cross? If we don't find a way to "conversate," all we're ever talking about is that those of us who have certain forms of class privilege can enter the low-down and dirty spaces and take what we want to get out of those spaces, and take our asses right back home. That is really crucial for the future of cultural criticism in the United States … How much are we conversating?

(para. 6)

Critical scholarship takes up the stories of those whose paradigmatic representations have been denigrated, dismissed, and discarded—even when itself is the subject of denigration, dismissal, and discarding.

Refusals

Despite the number of firsts, and seconds, and thirds (and teensth) in some social group categories, ASHE is still experiencing firsts related to race, nationality, citizenship, Indigeneity and tribal citizenry, dis/abilities, and institutional status. As noted earlier, ASHE has crossed off another first this year—its first Trans* president. Nevertheless, all these firsts—and this first, in particular in this moment—must be framed through a criticalpoststructural lens that I introduced (Stewart, 2017a). Criticalpoststructuralism understands five things, you might loosely think of these as tenets: 1) the endemic nature of power; 2) that power is held by and within dominant social categories; 3) that power is fluid; 4) as is identity is fluid; and, 5) that the constancy of surveillance carried out through social institutions—over and above individuals and groups—maintains power structures that produce varying degrees of vulnerability.

Through that framework, we can recognize the necessity of understanding that in a society where visibility is sacrosanct, representation and visibility remain traps, as Tourmaline (writing as Reina Gossett at the time), Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton (2017) and the authors they gathered have asserted in the book Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility. Moreover, in her article "The ruse of consent and the anatomy of 'refusal,'" Indigenous scholar Audra Simpson (2017) has written about the ways that Indigenous communities in North America and Australia refused recognition politics in a settler colonial society. Rather than acceptance being a goal and something to strive for, acceptance was refused as it was still based on settler colonial logics reliant on justifications of violence against Indigenous peoples. To refuse acceptance and recognition is to remain comfortably on the margins, withholding the right from dominant systems to use you as markers of achievement, as among the state's pantheon of progress.

Disrupting Representations

Visibility and representation trap you into thinking progress has been achieved, that structures and systems have shifted, that climate has improved. It is the neoliberal diversity and inclusion goals that I have written about as ineffectual and which serve to maintain structures of power for dominant groups (Stewart, 2017b). To have a Trans* president who is still misgendered both publicly and privately; "all gender" bathroom signs that further harm Trans* people because we lack an intersectional justice ethic; and, like many institutions, offering the opportunity to add a "preferred" name to your membership profile while investing in state technologies of naming perceived to be "real," reflects that we still have leagues to go as an association regarding how we acknowledge, engage, and enact the inner and outer workings of gender beyond embodied representations.

This is not about the workings or unworkings of a particular person or group, nor is it to say that those representations and firsts are not valuable. But it is to say that they are insufficient and ASHE is not yet done with gender, just like it is not done with Blackness or Indigeneity or Dis/ability. It cannot be done through individual efforts or the idiosyncratic motions passed by the Board of Directors. No, it must be concretized in the bedrock of the association's identity, policies, practices, norms, and socializations. This is work that has begun over the last two years and will continue. It is critical scholarship that helps us to refuse the enticement of believing the ivory tower will do anything but bind us to the altar of diversity.

Critical Scholarship Spanning the Gulf Between Theorizing and Policy

This second half of my one-sentence thesis re-presents Figure 1 offered above. In this interpretation, I have envisioned critical scholarship sitting uneasily on a fulcrum. That fulcrum represents praxis in higher education, the melding of theory and practice that is essential to producing higher education scholarship that matters. Critical scholarship sits uneasily on praxis because it has been perceived to have an unclear relationship to the practice element of theory (Fig. 2).

Nevertheless, I argue that critical scholarship in higher education spans the gulf between theorizing and policy. It reflects the heart and mobilizations of the theme for this year. Really, I have already begun talking about this because criticality is about the transformation and liberation of systems and structures, it is about concretizing, or embedding, transformation and liberation in the DNA of organizations, so that the charisma of a particular leader, or succession of leaders, does not direct or fail to direct how the values of the association are enacted. I argue here that mobilizing critical theorizing leads to critical policy enactments.

Figure 2.

Critical Scholarship on the Fulcrum of Praxis

Spanning and unsettling the borders in this conference theme is the mobilization of a set of intellectual, cultural, and relational practices meant to disrupt and transform how we apply our work (scholarship, teaching, and service) in higher education through the conference forum and space. That word, practices, is key. We did not just theorize the challenges and dispute the envisionings of conference forums, rather we moved that theorizing into praxis. This conference then is a conceptual place, carrying forward Davina Cooper's (2013) discussion of "everyday utopias" as promising places which have conceptual life that mobilizes their practices. Similarly, we envisioned an Otherwise, as Ashon Crawley (2015) introduced and later elaborated on with Sofia Samatar as a "concept of irreducible possibility…signifying our capacity to create change, to be something else, to explore, to imagine, to live freely, fully, vibrantly" (Samatar, 2015). We moved in this way within an association that still has work to do, a promising space, not a finished one. We put critical scholarship to work but that is not easy to do in the field of higher education. Several external factors come together to create the conditions in which it is not easy to put critical scholarship to work in this field. Among them are scholarly mission drift and, in tandem with that, discovery scholarship.

Mission Drift

Our critical praxis in this moment notwithstanding, something has gone awry in the field generally—or more likely, it is functioning exactly as it should. We talk about "mission drift" for institutions, those who are striving to an elevated institutional status, not because they are seeking to further enhance and broaden their service to their communities, as is the case for regional public institutions as discussed by Cecilia Orphan (2018). Contrarily, this type of what I call mission expansion by these institutions is often filling a gap that is not being met by other institutional types in the region. Rather, I am speaking of colleges and universities who strive to get acceptance onto the AAU elite list, who want to be within the top 50/25/10 in the US News and World Report rankings. Rankings which, as scholars like Leslie Gonzales and Anne-Marie Núñez (2014) found, function as a regime that directs the production of knowledge, "promoting individualism, standardization, com-modification, and homogenization," (p. 1). Similarly, I assert that academic fields can experience a type of mission drift that has them striving for a homogenizing, commodifiable excellence that is determined by how close to scientism the field's scholarship is judged to be.

This devotion to scientism is communicated through many avenues. For example, in my experience with several different academic journals as an editor, board member, or reviewer, journals in the field pride themselves on rejection rates and strive for bigger impact factors and higher numbers of downloads for their articles. As a frequent external reviewer, I have seen how institutions assess scholarly quality and rigor in annual and, what is sometimes known as, consequential reviews by these same metrics of productivity. These institutions also judge the usefulness of scholarship by whether other scholars at peer institutions, or even aspirational peers, embrace the ideas, methods, and recommendations offered by those under review. I have seen editors and reviewers judge manuscripts by the researcher's attestations of generalizability, their numbers of participants, and the interrater reliability of their coding, whether or not those are relevant or appropriate for the paradigm and methodology the author is using.

Discovery Scholarship

What I have described could be called a devotion to the scholarship of discovery, one of Ernest Boyer's (1990) typologies of scholarship. Yet, even to discuss a scholarship of discovery is reflective of settler colonialism and the actual Columbusing of other people's lives, knowledges, and labor. Nevertheless, much of our research in higher education is executed as a scholarship of discovery. This scholarship of discovery is the root really of the individualism, standardization, commodification, and homogenization that Gonzales and Núñez (2014) discussed. In adhering to a higher education adaptation of the Scientific Method, we have made a critical error. There are variations on how many steps there are to the Scientific Method, but it begins with a researcher making an observation, forming a hypothesis to explain the observation, conducting a study to test their hypothesis, and then ends with the researcher reporting findings before they begin anew with making new observations. This discovery approach relies on the presumption that it is the researcher who has the primary power of astute observation, that the researcher is the seat of explanation, and that the researcher knows how and is best positioned to determine, to understand, and to discuss what is happening. This is increasingly what is happening in higher education scholarship, even in qualitative research. We have drifted from understanding to data saturation to proving, with no search for disconfirming data. It begs the question of reporting to whom and for what purpose. Perhaps some of us are here merely to report to each other, to engage in what my college drama teacher, Ms. Theresa Davis (personal communication, 1991–1995), called intellectual masturbation, so that we can win the grand prize of tenure, promotion, and awards that prioritize the length of one's curriculum vita over the quality of the scholarship contained therein.

A Scholarship of Ideation

This is not to say that publishing research that leads to new understandings is not necessary. Instead of a settler colonial scholarship of discovery, I believe that we should be engaging with a scholarship of ideation, the formation of ideas and concepts, which is curiously generally absent from the field. Scholars engaged in ideation are told their work is "too theoretical," except in a few corners where scholars have to seek publication outside higher education specific journals, even until recently in the Review of Higher Education. As opposed to being a problem, critical scholarship can help us properly diagnose and then address the issue in a way that actually attends to its root. This would be a move away from Dr. Patton Davis's indictment of "zombie research" in her yet unpublished presidential address. Instead, our scholarship of discovery is expert in diagnosis but mediocre in treatment and further, is harmful to the participants and communities they settle within and extract knowledge from—"damage-centered research" as Eve Tuck (2009) wrote in "Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities."

Discussing Implications

This lack of attention to the roots shows up in how we discuss our findings. I would love to do a critical discourse analysis of the implications sections of published research articles. In my reading over 20 years, implications sections are typically long on research implications but short on practice and shorter still on policy, if it is even included. Even those implications for research fall prey to settler colonial pursuits of knowledge as researchers document their desires for greater generalizability and surveillance of participants. Too often they recount what the researcher should have done—repeat this with a more diverse sample being most common among what I have seen. Diversity in research participants is treated as a salve for their fragility and as armor to demonstrate that they care about social justice. It operates as a performance of goodness that fails to lead to transformational knowledge or transformational revision of systems and structures (Stewart, 2021).

Scholarship of Application

I am attesting that this pursuit of a science of discovery and its application of the Scientific Method has so polluted the field that it seems we have collectively forgotten that higher education is an applied field, multidisciplinary in its origins and best iterated through interdisciplinary frameworks. Within Boyer's four domains of scholarship, I argue that we emerged out of what he would call the scholarship of application. Through this domain, quoting Boyer (1990), "theory and practice vitally interact, and one renews the other." Lee Knefelkamp and her colleagues (1985) introduced the P-T-P Model, Practice to Theory to Practice. Practice to Theory to Practice is about research as learning, but also about research as the practice of humility, the valuing of practitioners as holders and developers of knowledge, and the necessary partnership between those who study and those who do. The people who use our research, as well as those with whom our research is conducted, are the determinants of its goodness and utility. Critical scholarship takes this one step further and grounds theory in the practical, lived experiences of the people directly impacted by white supremacist and settler colonial policies and practices.

The Call to Get to Work

There has been no shortage of ASHE presidents who have used their presidential address to speak to the need for higher education scholars to put their work to use in the interest of institutional practice and public policy. The first to do so being Michael Nettles, who used his 1993 presidential address to speak to the emerging opportunity for higher education scholars to insert themselves in national public policy conversations about educational assessment (Nettles, 1995). At least six presidents since then, three in the last five years, have repeated the call to ASHE and to the higher education field writ large to do research that benefits people, not impact factors, to look beyond journal paywalls to make direct contributions to the daily work of higher education through policy and practice.

Indeed, progress has been and is being made from multiple directions. There is more involvement of policy workers within scholarly associations, like ASHE, particularly as scholars move from the faculty ranks into these roles. There has been greater visibility of higher education scholarship and higher education scholars in the public sphere through outlets like Diverse Issues in Higher Education, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed as well as through scholars' own social media engagement.

I think there might be a sea change under way in the policy research arena. In her 2021 Distinguished Lecture for AERA, Dr. Sylvia Hurtado, a past ASHE president, spoke of the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) espoused desire for research findings that would result in anti-racist policies and practices (Hurtado, 2021). You cannot get to anti-racism without critical theories, despite the ongoing nonperformative language of anti-racism used by colleges and universities. To address today's issues, we need critically oriented policy work in higher education. I argue that it is up to the task.

Critical Scholarship = Critical Policy

In Estela Bensimon and Robin Bishop's 2012 special issue in RHE, "Why Critical? The Need for New Ways of Knowing" on the need for scholars to focus on race and equity through critical frameworks, Greg Anderson (2012) critiqued critical race scholarship. He noted, "critical race theory in the field of higher education has not yet provided a bridge capable of addressing the gap between institutional practice and pedagogy, research and scholarship, and policy formation and analysis," (p. 141). He argued that critical race scholarship had not gained traction in the policy work at the time because the questions that motivated critical theory were not well-suited to the questions that mobilized policy and it was too reactive to be usable.

As I noted earlier, theory is not only useful but necessary for getting at the root of an issue. Theory is an explanation for why things are as they are. Once you have a clear grasp on the why through theory, then your solutions will be effective. I have spoken to multiple groups across the country about the need to have a clear grasp on what the problem is to reach a solution that will actually correct it. As the saying goes, "if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."

Disputations notwithstanding, critical scholarship like Critical Race Theory (CRT) was guided by Black legal scholars' theorizing about race, racism, and its embeddedness in U.S. society. It is a theory of race—of race not as a static thing to be defined, but race as an action. As noted by Hurtado (2021), the NIH is seeking findings that will result in anti-racist policies and practices. This must be due to a recognition that existing policies and practices are a result of racism. Without a CRT analysis, the theory of the problem will fail to recognize that and look for more ways to fix the people who are the subjects of racism in hopes of eliminating racism. If we are to be honest, although there are certainly pioneers in this work such as Estela Mara Bensimon and Ana Martínez Alemán among others, much of this recently has been spearheaded by early and mid-career scholars, many of whom are scholars of color such as Dominique Baker, Krystal Williams, Chris Nelson, Eric Felix, Vanessa Sansone, Cheryl Ching, DeShawn Patterson, Mike Hoa Nguyen, Jason Taylor, and others. A lot has changed in the last 10 years. The 2021 ASHE Graduate Student Policy Seminar is a reflection of that shift.

I said earlier that the questions that critical scholarship asks are compatible with the answers that policy seeks. What are those questions and how do they connect to the policy cycle? Although perhaps flawed, the policy cycle is still a useful heuristic (Hillman, Tandberg, & Sponsler, 2015) (Fig. 3).

Figure 3.

Connecting Critical Scholarship to Policy.

1. 1. Critical scholarship asks, "How did we get here, what is at the root of the situation we are facing?" This is a policy question in that policymakers want to know why this situation exists and why they should intervene. Agenda setting.

2. 2. Critical scholarship asks, "What systems or structures are in the way of addressing this situation?" This is a policy question in that previous policies may be creating the situation to be addressed. Policy formulation.

3. 3. Critical scholarship asks, "What would actually make a difference in the material conditions of the people being made vulnerable?" This is a policy question in that policy makers need to know how to intervene. Policy formulation.

4. 4. Critical scholarship asks, "Who do we need to get on board to make this change?" This is a policy question in that policy is inherently a political game and interest convergence is still real. Policy adoption.

5. 5. Critical scholarship asks, "How does the intransigence of systemic oppression mangle the ability for change to occur?" This is a policy question in that how policies roll out often has a great deal to do with whether they do what they were intended to do. Policy implementation.

6. 6. Critical scholarship asks, "Have we made a material difference in the situation that improves the lives of the people who were most impacted?" This is a policy question because policymakers need to know if their interventions are failing or succeeding. Policy evaluation.

At each stage of the policy cycle, critical scholarship can be brought into play and this is evident in the real-time work of many of the scholars I have cited above. It is also present in the monograph edited by Michelle Young and Sarah Diem (2017), related to primary and secondary education.

Conclusion

I would prefer not to give a conclusion as I think we have work to do. I myself have work to do that I have begun and intend to continue doing to bring a policy-consciousness to my work. This is a policy consciousness that all of us who claim to be critical scholars I hope will keep top of mind as we do our work. Thank you.