Philosophy of Research.

My transdisciplinary research explores and challenges higher education to reconsider educational equity across its approaches to cocurricular programs and student success which impacts the college experience. My own recent critiques of American higher education paint a rather dismal portrait of how little learning may actually be occurring on our campuses. Other scholars suggest that the need to connect meaningful and intentional social activities to engaged learning experiences (Arum & Roksa, 2011; Bok, 2007). To engage with such students requires a special person: one who has flexibility, commitment, and an uncanny ability to deal with ambiguity.  In some ways, these are the very kinds of capacities that William Perry (1970) outlines in his seminal study on the intellectual and ethical development of college students themselves.  The halls of academe demand that kind of maturation from us all.  This means that we, who serve in higher education, must also practice deep self-reflection if we are to be effective agents of student development.

The relationship between higher education and society is one that is rooted within the social contract, which has indeed eroded. Society expects higher education to serve as what Clark Kerr terms the “multiversity” and higher education expects that society will properly provide endless resources for its insatiable and voracious appetite in both “branding” and prestige. This relationship has altered the perception of higher education as a mature industry. Colleges and universities have transformed themselves from insular pockets of learning and knowledge transfer to vehicles of economic entrepreneurship. No longer do colleges and universities operate in a vacuum, but they are now subject to free-market laws of supply and demand. They are subject to these same laws of capitalism because they have begun to engage in market-like behaviors through entrepreneurial initiatives and competition among themselves.   My research and practice have sought to revivify American colleges and universities while re-examining their purposes and relationship with the larger society.  This relationship between society and campus foregrounds how different marginalized and historically underrepresented populations continue to develop identity and learn within these margins of policies and support systems.            

Throughout my research I attempt to amplify the voice of the student through qualitative research and to provide “snapshot data” to capture their behaviors through quantitative studies. This research provides evidence for my critical studies research that seeks to interrogate and challenge students, their instructors, and other college/university practitioners to be mindful of the crucial, yet sometimes overlooked, connection between cocurricular campus activities and the academy’s cardinal aim of learning. All of us in higher education should expect our pursuits to be, in John Dewey’s (1938) words, “educative rather than non-educative or mis-educative.“  To forget that out-of-classroom programs should sustain educational moments is to sabotage why colleges exist.  Both social interaction and individual critical reflection are vital to worthwhile collegiate experiences.          

My philosophy of research harkens a return to the professional vision of adopting the “student personnel point of view” (American Council on Education, 1936, 1949), i.e., the need to see the student “as a whole” in all her dimensions—physical, social, emotional, and spiritual” as well as strictly academic.  Learning can occur in many settings, though the university is perhaps the most perfected laboratory for its practice in a more or less organized form.  Indeed, college commencement, meant to be a “beginning,” should remind all of us who work in academe that our ultimate goal is to prepare students for life of the mind after college as well as during college. Through collaborating with some of the foremost and emerging scholars in higher education and across other disciplines, my research agenda that has evolved is a continuing which addresses three areas: (1) the college experience; (2) student success; and (3) educational equity across cocurricular spaces. Critical frameworks, descriptive phenomenology, and quantitative methods are utilized to interrogate these research themes. I seek to address a primary and fundamental existential question: What should postsecondary institutions do with and for its students?