Quite some time ago, I wrote a blog post and later deleted it.  I deleted it after a professional grapevine indicated that the post—and perhaps this entire blog—was viewed by some as my self-aggrandizing and dismissing the knowledge and experience of senior colleagues.  Especially those with more time in the faculty chair than I had.  Basically, I deleted it because some folks didn’t like what I had to say.  Or so I heard.

But deleting something I had to say is not why I’m here.  Or it shouldn’t be.

I wrote in that post about the odd position I often find myself in as an academic, trained as a scholar and teacher, but so often required to operate in my work life in a whole host of ways and with a host of skills not really provided by my graduate study.  I wrote about “translating” between academics and non-academics in higher education.  And my words gathered the responses that they did—from others and, ultimately, from me.

I should have responded differently.  I should have responded by talking a bit about how I came to the skills I use every day in my work life.  In extreme brief, I was academic staff before I was faculty.  And I worked for years outside of higher education—to support my graduate studies, before ever beginning them, and between graduate degrees.  I took an unusual (to some) path that included newspaper work, extensive freelancing as a writer and graphic designer, desk-based work at non-profits and associations.  And that path helped prepare me—with my academic training—to manage an academic office.  I didn’t stay long in faculty-only employment by choice—because it wasn’t for me.  I’m one of those folks who turned down a tenure-stream job and has never held one.  I was lucky enough to move back into the work I really enjoy in higher education, which I love.  Faculty life isn’t for everyone who completes a doctorate, but higher education is not only for faculty.  Institutions run on the power of people with many kinds of educational backgrounds because they are necessary.  We all bring diverse perspectives that are needed, and I believe mine is one of them.  That is why I am here.  But my voice—and the voices of those in positions similar to mine—certainly should not be, cannot be, the only ones in the room, any room.

We have no universities without faculty, and my decade of work on higher education labor and contingency have taught me the unquestionable value of tenure.  We need faculty who are able to speak because they are not afraid for their jobs, and without that, we don’t have what a university should be, even if we have a university.  But we also have no universities without leadership and without operational staff of all kinds.  How could faculty fulfill their roles as faculty unless someone else was taking care of other business?

I guess what I am saying is that we are all in this together, and we need to do a better job of getting together because we can’t risk falling apart in our valuable enterprise—educating students for all of their tomorrows.

Last week, Kevin Kruger, president of NASPA, the professional organization for student affairs professionals, spoke on my home campus at The College of New Jersey, and made a claim about the future of higher education that struck me: The achievement gap is our next great civil rights challenge. He’s right, but I think responding effectively to this call to re-envision education and higher education will require that we change the cultural connotation of “civil rights.”

Here just after Black History Month, shortly after celebrations of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday and remembrances of his death and that of Malcolm X, and after media coverage of the anniversary of the Selma march and the movie, Selma, we would be tempted to continue to think of civil rights as a black/white binary. However, the skills gap is wider and more complex than America’s longest standing racial binary.

Kruger presented as part of his talk data that we should all be familiar with: tomorrow’s students are increasingly first-generation, increasingly Hispanic/Latino, and increasingly from lower income families. He also talked about how few African American students, particularly young men, are earning bachelor’s degrees. So, it is all of these categories of student who experience the achievement gap in differing degrees and are, therefore, part of this next civil rights challenge Kruger was heralding.

In urban centers, we know why this is happening: the long, slow suburbanization of middle class families, leaving poorer communities in America’s cities. Demographically, we know that this also means urban populations that are primarily ethnic minorities and new immigrants. But what about rural areas? What about first generation students in the American South and Midwest? Many of them are not ethnic minorities but do come from lower income families and face the same challenges as other first generation, low income students: a primary and secondary education that did not prepare them for the challenges of higher education, difficulty funding higher education, and—perhaps most importantly—no way to easily understand and navigate the complex system of a college or university in order to be successful.

It is all of these students who are the future (and even the present) of higher education. They are not the students that many schools are used to supporting and educating, but they must become so. If we widen our sense of the civil rights issue of the achievement gap, we see all of our students and their collective challenges. This will allow us to put into place the things they need on our campuses to succeed. Success is both retention and persistence, and we need to talk about them, about why they aren’t happening, and how they could.

Come back next week for a follow-up to this piece where I talk about that “how.”