Contested Issues in Troubled Times provides student affairs educators with frameworks to constructively think about and navigate the contentious climate they are increasingly encountering on campus. The 54 contributors to this volume, through a format of opening positional essays paired with a response, role model productive dialogue across differences to address the book’s overarching question: How do we create an equitable climate conducive to learning in a dynamic environment fraught with complexity and a socio-political context characterized by escalating intolerance, incivility, and overt discrimination?
In addressing 24 contemporary and contentious questions (such as, how do student affairs educators navigate the tension between the First Amendment right to free speech and the expression of ideas that create a hostile campus climate?), the contributors present diverse ideological and political conceptualizations of each issue.
Rather than attempting to offer readers absolute truths and definitive solutions to these persistent and messy issues, this book illustrates the possibilities and promise of acknowledging multiple approaches to addressing contentious issues, articulating a persuasive argument anchored in professional judgment, listening attentively to others for points of connection as well as divergence, and drawing upon new ways of thinking to foster safe and inclusive campuses.
Among the issues this volume addresses are such topics as sexual violence; historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups; transgender and undocumented students; the professional skills, knowledge and/or dispositions needed to thrive and facilitate systemic change in contemporary higher education organizations; the implications of maintaining personal and professional identities via social media; and self-care.
In this companion volume to Contested Issues in Student Affairs (whose issues remain as relevant today as they were upon publication in 2011), a new set of contributors explore new questions which foreground issues of equity, safety, and civility - themes which dominate today’s higher education headlines and campus conversations.
The book concludes with calls to action, encouraging student affairs educators to exhibit the moral courage needed to critically examine routine practices that (un)knowingly perpetuate inequity and enact the foundational values and principles upon which the student affairs profession was founded.
