Editor’s Note

For more than 83 years, The Journal of Higher Education has published the highest quality empirical, theoretically grounded work addressing the main functions of higher education. This volume marks an important expansion of the Editorial Review Board at the Journal. The expansion of the Editorial Review Board represents another step in a larger push to streamline the review and production processes at the Journal in an effort to ensure a timely turnaround of the most thorough and constructive peer reviews in the field and to shorten the time to print.

I am grateful for the continued commitment by so many of our field’s most distinguished scholars. In addition to the new members of the Editorial Review Board, I also welcome to our smaller Editorial Advisory Board Jim Hearn, Bill Trent, Fran Stage, and Adrianna Kezar. The members of both boards join a larger editorial team comprised of Associate Editors Cecilia Rios Aguilar, Terrell Strayhorn, and Paul Umbach; Consulting Editor Laura Perna; Book Review Editor Jenny Lee; and Editorial Assistants Hugo Garcia and Rocio Mendoza.

Substantively, the editorial team has invited a series of short essays that will be appearing later this year and into 2015. These pieces are designed specifically to call attention to the most important and durable issues in the field today. Distinguished higher education scholars who have enjoyed a long view of the field over their careers have written several of these pieces while others have been written by younger scholars who have successfully carved out new forms of academic career paths in the field. Scholars from several allied disciplines have also made important contributions through these pieces.

The larger effort is designed to call systematic attention to the issues defining the core of our field as it undergoes what is arguably the most profound change since the end of World War II. Through these pieces and the regular stream of high quality research articles that characterize the Journal we hope to enable a call to action through academic inquiry that will ensure that the field remains intellectually vibrant, methodologically sound, and fundamentally relevant to those who endeavor to understand the nature of the field at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Thank you for your continued support of and interest in The Journal of Higher Education. I encourage you to continue to use the Journal as the authoritative source for the field’s most important ideas and to consider its pages as a visible outlet for your best scholarship.

March 2014