Abstract
Institutions of higher education have unsuccessfully sought to implement equity-based practices that aid in closing opportunity gaps for underserved student populations. Utilizing the perspective of the student affairs profession, the authors provide data-driven and anecdotal evidence of strategies educators can successfully utilize to interrogate university structure, norms, policies, and practices that are misaligned with institutional mission, vision, values, and strategic goals. This chapter explores the changing paradigm of higher education and discusses how university personnel can work collaboratively to address equity issues by practicing empathy and care to influence institutional culture.
TopIntroduction
We shy away from conversations involving identities, such as race, sex, gender, religion, class, sexuality, ability, age, primary language, nationality, ethnicity – I promise you this list goes on, trust me. But, understanding these intersections is a small piece of this fixture, and no one person has all of the pieces to construct the big picture. That’s why collective knowledge is so important, because just like it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community to educate a people. Though, one challenge I’d like to challenge in this educational painting is that we’re often educators who pick and choose which topics we’re comfortable facilitating…which perpetuates our reality: the miseducation of the people.
Excerpt from a spoken work poem, Beleaf, by Demetri R. Kelley
Achieving equity in higher education has been an ever-elusive outcome for many institutions across the globe (Gorski, 2019; McNair et al., 2020). Considering the term equity has been utilized within various contexts, each contributing a different meaning and how to address its implications, this puzzle is no surprise. For example, definitions of equity have often described equality. Equality is a state of being where everyone has the same rights and privileges. However, equity is a means of corrective justice to remove the barriers resulting from the systemic oppression with which higher education was designed (McNair et al., 2020). Equity then serves as a guide to reconstructing institutional structures, policies, and practices to create equal opportunity and outcomes. (Gorski, 2019; McNair et al., 2020).
Recent literature has sought to demystify the concept of equity within higher education by providing three core principles that “illuminate the human and structural obstacles that block [its] path…and the responses that equity-minded practitioners can make to overcome them” (McNair et al., 2020, p. 21-22). Therefore, to effectively operate as an equity-minded practitioner, one must: 1) understand the systemic impairment caused by the historical exclusion of minoritized populations from higher education; 2) identify the remnants of oppression within institutional norms; and 3) implement anti-racist efforts to influence change in institutional structures, policies, and practices. Therefore, one cannot achieve equity without acknowledging its direct connection to anti-racism, which is the examination, confrontation, and deconstruction of racism and its systemic implications (Kendi, 2019). Although these equity-minded principles are simple in theory, they prove difficult to implement within the constant evolution of campus populations. Racism is still prevalent, though it is only one form of systemic oppression that causes inequity. To truly achieve equity, institutions must address all forms of oppression within the institutional history and culture. These changes often take significant time and energy and impact institutional resources, which may be scarce due to the economic shifts presented in the face of a global pandemic. Furthermore, the impact of COVID-19 has created a new paradigm throughout the world, and business cannot and should not continue as usual if equity is the goal. Instead, institutions must integrate practices rooted in genuine care and concern for students’ holistic well-being and success, which requires intentional interrogation of current practices and an examination of the culture, climate, and interactions that may create encounters that feel uncaring and callous.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Oppression: Unjust or cruel treatment; excessive power that impedes one’s vitality.
Equity: A means of corrective justice that seeks to identify the remnants of oppression within institutional norms and implement transformative efforts to reconstruct institutional structures, policies, and practices.
Culture: The pattern of thought, belief, behavior, practices, and norms of a group of people or organization.
Empathy: The ability to connect with the experience of another with compassion.
Higher Education Institutions: Colleges, universities, polytechnics, vocational and post-secondary schools, and profession-oriented institutions that provide formal, tertiary education services that can lead to the award of academic degrees or professional certifications.
Minoritize: The act of subordinating a person or group.
Equity-Minded: The active interrogation of institutional circumstances that may perpetuate barriers of opportunity and access.
Anti-Racist: Active effort to dismantle systemically racist systems.
Systemic: Relating to the design of a system.
Marginalized: A person or group within a particular identity category that are treated as insignificant or peripheral to what matters.