This article puts into complicated conversation three intellectual discourses: academic disciplinarity, postcolonial theorizing, and curriculum theorizing. The author harnesses Pinar's (2007) conceptualizing the important role of "studying" academic disciplines; Singh's (2018) critique and challenge to postcolonial theorists, most aptly captured in their discussion of "mastery logics"; and the turn toward decolonization, competencies and curricular framing of higher education and college student affairs work. Building on previous work (Eaton, 2016; Eaton & Smithers, 2019) examining the role of student affairs work on college campuses in rigidifying human subjectivity and (co)(re)creating the neoliberal subject, the author seeks to advance the intellectual questions and dialogue (Pinar, 2007) of higher education and student affairs researchers, theorists, and practitioners through three framing questions. First, how are mastery logics foundational to the field's ongoing commitments to competencies and Tylerian (Tyler, 1949) curricular logics? Second, how do these commitments to mastery logics delegitimize the fields ongoing articulation of dedication to a range of values (i.e., decolonization, social justice, and focus on the whole student)? Third, how can we "survive" (Singh, 2018) mastery logics in the field by imagining something different and living beyond mastery?