Advancing racial equity in leadership education: Centering marginalized institutional contexts.

The idea for this issue came to Jasmine late one night as she was reading through past issues of the New Directions for Student Leadership (NDSL) series. NDSL topics are always timely, comprehensive, and thought-provoking. She noticed, however, that many discussions of how we, as leadership educators, work to improve approaches to leadership capacity development largely take for granted the institutional contexts in which such development occurs. Jasmine has been a graduate student in the Illinois Leadership Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), a peer facilitator for the Leadershape Institute (which is also head-quartered in Champaign), and is a UIUC faculty member teaching leadership courses and conducting research on student leadership development. She recognizes that her positioning within a resource-rich, predominantly White, research-intensive institution has shaped her opportunities for engagement within the field of leadership education and undoubtedly informs her conceptualizations of leadership research and practice, even as a woman of Color. Rich has been working in leadership development and education for about 20 years. He is interested in leader identity and the decisions we make to be leaders. When he first learned about the social change model of leadership development (HERI, 1996), it was a pivotal point in his own identity as a leader. His work in identity started by looking at how we progress into and through leadership and identity models using Nigresence (Cross & Fhagen-Smith, 1996) and ethnic identity theories (Phinney, 1998) as a basis to examine our personal decisions. Understanding the whole person, their attitudes, values, and beliefs in addition to their formation through lived experience and their culture is vital to how we see leadership. A definitive part of this formation is our college experiences. The combination of institutional context and our personal assimilation are important to our whole identity. His interest in the benefits and importance of this issue emanates that our identity and formation are vital as leaders and educators. Concurrently, NDSL issues editors, Susan Komives and Kathy Guthrie, identified the need for an issue exploring institutional type as the context for leadership development in their strategic plans for the NDSL series. They identified Rich and Jasmine as editors who had experiences at diverse institutions in a variety of youth leadership programs and ask them to develop this issue. It was a perfect convergence of interests. As issue editors, Rich and Jazz evolved the concept further in their NDSL proposal to cultivate a focus on the critically needed exploration of how institutions that focus on serving marginalized student populations approach student leadership learning and development presented in this issue. “without addressing context, our theories of leadership remain incomplete, making it more difficult to offer practical guidelines to address the leadership demands of changing organizations in contemporary society” (p. 876). This issue, as the title suggests, is not about critical quantitative inquiry, or even about critical research methods. It is, however, about examining the unique contributions of oft-overlooked institutional contexts to broader understandings of leadership education and development, and the ways considerations of these institutional contexts might continue to move the field of leadership education toward more racially equitable and socially just outcomes. In taking a cue from critical quantitative inquiry, the first questions that we co-editors interrogated as we began this project were, what is presumed to be “average” or “normal” in postsecondary leadership education research and practice? Where do these ideas come from and who do they privilege? These questions became all the more timely and salient as incidents of Anti-Asian violence coupled with the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and others served as heart-breaking reminders of just how far we have yet to go to achieve racial equity and justice in the United States. There is a story most often told in leadership education (Dugan, 2017). From a theoretical perspective, this story begins with the Great Man theory and follows a familiar path around trait, relational, and behavioral theories through to ethical, transformational, servant, postindustrial and adaptive conceptualizations (Chunoo et al., 2020; Dugan, 2017). From a leadership education perspective, the story begins with the establishment of the American College Personnel Association (ACPA) Commission IV task force and traces an evolution through milestones such as the development of the National Clearinghouse for Leadership Programs (NCLP), the creation of the Inter-association Task Force, the founding of the National Association of Campus Activities (NACA) and the establishment of the first set of guiding principles for student leadership programs from the Council for the Advancement of Standards in higher education (CAS) (CAS, 2020; Komives, 2011). As Chunoo et al. (2020) point out, the story of the evolution of leadership theory centers “white, cisgender, hetero-sexual, upper-class, and male conceptualizations of leadership” which serves to “oppresses people from marginalized groups while privileging dominant ways of being and teaching about leadership” (p. 46). While perhaps less blatantly oppressive, the story of the evolution of postsecondary leadership education as a field is colorblind, at best. The dominant narrative centers the role of Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) and the scholars within them while ignoring sociohistorical factors that likely tempered full participation for racially and other-wise marginalized scholars, professionals, and institutions. As we re-tell these prevailing narratives, we reify the theories, norms, practices and contexts that are seen as normal, typical, and standard. These norms then become the basis for our taken-for-granted assumptions about what leadership is, where it occurs, how it can be developed, and who gets to set the standard for when it has sufficiently been achieved. Frameworks that are generically inclusive of multiple inequities and overuse concepts like diversity and multiculturalism and even equity and social justice might lead educational leaders to “depoliticize,” “soften,” and in essence water down the critical work needed to promote long-lasting change for racial equity… Acknowledging and naming racism is an integral step when attempting to dismantle something so pervasive to education (p. 3). Thus, racial equity in education is a racial justice project. It calls not only for the absence of discrimination and inequities on the basis of racial categorization, but also the presence of deliberate systems and supports to achieve and sustain racial equity through proactive and preventative measures (Potapchuck, 2020; Racial Equity Tools, 2020). Circling back to Chunoo et al. (2020), “efforts to revolutionize leadership education research” must begin by “examining embedded and unacknowledged Whiteness, patriarchy, and other imbalanced social processes which devalue leadership styles and talents possessed by marginalized communities, pacify cries for true equity, establish inadequate diversity initiatives, and perpetuate racism” (p. 47). The present publication represents one small step toward such a revolution by centering the theories, approaches, experiences, and challenges that inform leadership education within institutional contexts that exist outside of the large, predominantly white, research-intensive norm. This issue is divided into three sections. The two articles in the first section lay the foundation for the rest of the issue. In the introductory article, we define racial and educational equity and make the case for how paying greater attention to student leadership development across institutional contexts can advance racial equity within and through the field of leadership education. In the second article, Smist provides a historical overview of how different types of institutions came to be and who these institutions were designed (or have evolved) to serve. Present-day challenges for each of these institutions are also briefly considered. In the first article in this section, Jun and Aronson explore the historical and theoretical foundations of leadership education at faith-based institutions. Faith-Based institutions are included in this issue due to a relative dearth of student leadership development research in these contexts. As Jun and Aronson note, however, “many faith-based educational institutions are still dominated by a White culture and mode of operation, even as some campuses may have become compositionally diverse in terms of ethnicity among student population.” It is likely that advancing racial equity in leadership education may not result purely by studying leadership education at these institutions, but rather by considering ways to improve educational practices for racial equity within these institutions themselves. In the next article, Camacho Jr. et al. affirm how community colleges provide leadership development in the form of leadership credentialing, career placement, and pathways to 4-year institutions. Given their open-access missions and relative affordability, community colleges represent an important avenue for advancing educational equity in leadership education, particularly as it pertains to low-income students, adult learners, veterans, racially minoritized students, English language learners, and other systemically marginalized student populations. Next, Lewis reviews how women's colleges use transformational and feminist leadership theories to develop women student leaders. Here, intersectionality is used as a framework to consider the degree to which women's colleges have achieved racial parity with respect to enrollment, and to examine the extent to which these institutions attend to the needs of their non-White women students. The following four articles: HBCU, TCU, HSI, and AANAPISI, each focus on minority-serving institutional contexts (MSIs). HBCUs were designed, out of necessity, to serve Black students who were barred, whether by law or by practice, from attendance at the (white) institutions that already existed at that time. As Hotchkins demonstrates, HBCUs boast a proud legacy of facilitating leadership engagement and capacity development for students, despite chronic underfunding and historical disparities in institutional resources. Youngbull offers an overview of leadership education in Tribal Colleges and Universities. Tribal colleges face many institutional constraints such as lack of funding and essential infrastructure, low enrollments, and cultural narratives that position them as inferior. Despite these challenges, Youngbull points to the uniqueness and power of TCUs, explaining, “TCUs stand apart from other MSIs in their establishment through the chartering process, as each tribal institution was founded and chartered by their own respective tribal governments.” Providing support to these institutions can advance racial equity efforts in leadership education. Next, Venegas points out “Hispanic-Serving Institutions represent about 17% of universities in some of the largest state systems in the country, including the state systems of Florida, Texas, and California and educate about 74% of Latinx students” (HACU, n.d.). Her article highlights the connections between research, theory and practice for Latinx student development while noting gaps pertaining to HSI-specific knowledge and applications. In the next article, Gogue et al. discern the ways Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institutions incorporate “a culturally responsive approach to leadership that recognizes AAPI identities and cultural assets” while describing the challenges of supporting the development of such a diverse range of ethnic groups under one umbrella term. HSIs and AANAPISIs differ from HBCUs and TCUs in that their institutional designations are not necessarily tied to mission, but rather to enrollment and federal Pell grant eligibility. Both articles explore these tensions and their implications for racial equity. In the final article in this section, Hoffman-Simen and Meyer focus on graduate education in the fields of Healthcare, Engineering, and Law. Leadership education is a crucial component of professional preparation within these and other fields, yet student leadership development research tends to focus almost exclusively on undergraduate experiences and outcomes. For this reason, we wanted to dedicate an article to leadership education in graduate/professional schools. This article aims to highlight the leadership skills needed for professionals in each respective field noted above while also discussing diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in response to social unrest. Readers of NDSL will be interested to know the Spring 2022 issue will be devoted to leadership development in schools of engineering. Further, the Winter 2022 issue explores leadership development for graduate and professional school students. The concluding article in this issue likens the process of leadership development to a musical composition. Leadership education and development use common elements, theories, and modalities in their delivery. The arrangement of these elements helps to create the music needed to develop leaders within the context of each type and culture. The contributions of our authors and their articles will be to bring voice to the less visible programs doing the important work of expanding the leadership narrative and trouble the standard narrative to inform racial equity in postsecondary leadership education. Rich Whitney is an associate professor and chair of the organizational leadership doctoral program in the LaFetra College of Education at the University of La Verne. He has been training, facilitating, and speaking to groups on leadership for over 25 years. The classroom is a conversation with the students that respects the combined knowledge in the room to build from the topic and experience. Leadership development requires an understanding of equity and inclusion of the whole person and their Rich teaches classes in personal leadership, leadership theory, team dynamics, and program development. Jasmine D. Collins is an assistant professor in the Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communications Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work focuses on shifting the field of leadership education toward critical conversations of power, justice, and equity in an effort to help educators and educational leaders cultivate and sustain inclusive learning environments to support marginalized students in their development.