Caucusing, as a social justice activity, is traditionally implemented to provide an insider space for marginalized persons to share experiences and build a space for belonging and safety by excluding those who hold privileged identities. Within a particular event that combines privileged and oppressed, experiences are uneven, with insiders…

Offering examples from her own experiences, the author advises community-engaged scholars (and those mentors and institutions that support them) to always question assumptions with respect to the communities in which they are engaged. She notes that as they work to unfold research programs, they should be sure to listen carefully to the…

In this article, the author shares his fear that students will become accustomed to an educational experience that lacks joy and fun as a result of the changes made to education due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He and his teaching colleagues have noticed that when students are learning virtually, they act much more as receivers of knowledge than…

St. Philip's College is the only community college in the nation that is both a Historically Black College (HBCU) and a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). The college has a long history of evolving to serve the local population in San Antonio, Texas. Currently, more than 50 percent of St. Philip's students are Latinx, 29 percent are White, and 12…

In this testimony by Alexander Mayer, Deputy Director, Postsecondary Education, Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC), Before the New Jersey State Assembly Higher Education Committee, the following three points are emphasized: (1) Developmental education is a major challenge facing low-income college students in New Jersey and across…

Students, staff, and faculty ought to engender a culture of civic action and ethical accountability enhanced by rigorous coursework, but this goal necessitates resources: administrators must invest in service-learning to reap its full benefits. Issues arise, however, when one considers this investment in light of the academy's corporatization. As…

In the winter of 2010, as the professor of an introductory Gender Studies course in a Canadian university, author Ilya Parkins was involved in a community service learning project centered on the memorialization of women murdered in her university's local community. In this article, Parkins considers what limited this project, which was so…

Across the U.S., an estimated 60% of incoming community college students require developmental courses to be ready for college-level work, according to estimates by experts. As these courses act as a gateway to further studies, those who fail are most often lost to higher education: Less than a quarter will earn a degree or certificate within…

This paper is a commentary to a paper by Anne Solli, Frank Bach and Björn Åkerman on how students at a technical university learn to argue as biotechnologists. Solli and her colleagues report from an ethnographic study performed during the first semester of a 5-year program in biotechnology at a technical university in Sweden. Their study…

I spent the first two years of college at a two-year community in southern California. I had very sheltered high school experience, so attending college was exciting for me. In high school, I wasn't involved in extracurricular activities or organizations other than choir, and I didn't share my sexual orientation with others. College, I hoped, was…

The quest to create engaged public research universities requires academe to confront a stark reality: inflexible administrative structures, historically embedded practices, status-quo thinking, and inertia. Until these obstacles are overcome, the retreat from public life will not be arrested. In this article, the author provides a sample of the…

Frequently overlooked in the discussion of whether there is or is not a higher education bubble are community colleges--despite the fact that this sector within public higher education represents 43 percent of first-time freshman and 44 percent of all undergraduates. For the most part, the "bubble" discussion has focused on whether the…

Purpose: The purpose of this Editorial is to introduce key themes in the area of student-community engagement (SCE) and the papers included in this special issue. Design/methodology/approach: The paper discusses dominant trends in the current context. Findings: The selection of papers in this issue represent the range of programmes that have been…

Some of the students in this author's developmental writing class are, to their own surprise, brilliant storytellers. They simply trust the tale, not the teller. If they tell a ghost story, they do not pretend, for instance, to believe in ghosts or zombies or duppies; they actually do. And so when they write faithfully, the reader sees what they…

Christine McPhail formerly served as president at Cypress College in California and is founder and professor emeritus of the Community College Leadership Doctoral Program at Morgan State University in Maryland. She is the Managing Partner for The McPhail Group LLC and currently serves as a Leadership Coach for more than a dozen community colleges…