Sumun Pendakur: We increasingly see ourselves as separate independent beings, disconnected from everyone and everything around us, unless we have the community and diligence to continue teaching and cultivating wisdom once held.” Sam continues to write, “By the time I was a tenured professor, I had forgotten much of this wisdom. I didn’t realize it overnight. It took many years of observing how people in academia, despite being the most informed people in society, continued to contribute to the world’s growing crises and ongoing violence. But it also required me to turn inward and face difficult truths that I reinforce systems causing massive suffering, too.” I, I, I’m, I’m so deeply hopeful that for all of our colleagues, faculty members, um, future student affairs practitioners, anybody else, uh, people just excited about student engagement, that they will thoroughly read the preface because I thought it was groundbreaking on so many levels.

Keith Edwards: Hello, and welcome to Student Affairs NOW. I’m your host, Keith Edwards. Today’s conversation is about the fourth edition of the Student Engagement in Higher Education: Theoretical Perspectives and Practical Approaches for Diverse Populations, out from Routledge. I’m joined by the volume’s editors, Doctors Stephen John Quaye and Sumun Pendakur.

Now, in its fourth edition, this foundational book brings together the work of 50 scholars and practitioners, with each chapter focused on engaging a different student population, from students of color and international students to disabled, low income, and parenting students. This edition adds three new problems of practice chapters and leans further into asset-based anti-deficit approaches at a moment when real political and legal pressure is on this work.

Let’s get into it. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and online learning community for thousands of us who work in, alongside, or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find details about this episode or browse our archives at studentaffairsnow.com.

This episode is sponsored by Evolve. Evolve offers four leadership coaching journeys designed to expand capacity and build capa- capabilities, empowering courageous leadership to transform institutions and reimagine the future of higher education. As I mentioned, I’m your host, Keith Edwards. My pronouns are he, him, his.

I’m a speaker, author, and coach empowering leaders in higher education to lead with and through the challenges toward better tomorrows for us all. Find out more about me at keithedwards.com. And I’m recording this from my home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at the intersections of the ancestral homelands of both the Dakota and the Ojibwe peoples.

Let’s get to the conversation, this great new book, and our fabulous guests today. Let’s get to some introductions to learn more about each of you. And Sumi, we’re gonna begin with you.

Sumun Pendakur: Woo-hoo. I’m so happy that we get a chance to have a conversation today. I’m excited to see my friend and collaborator Stephen here, and Keith, I’m really glad that you’ve invited us to join you here today.

So my name’s Dr. Sumun Pendakur. Everyone calls me Sumi. I’m the daughter of immigrants from India, grew up in Evanston, Illinois, right outside the city of Chicago. Evanston was the first suburb to integrate outside of the city of Chicago and even with that integration, was still largely divided arou- along racial and class-based lines.

And so I think that class-based binary and then the racial binary really shaped a lot of my early development. College opened up an entirely new landscape. I went to Northwestern University for undergrad and- Found myself immersed in a sea of fellow Asian Americans, East Asian Americans, South Asian Americans, et cetera, and got involved very quickly in the struggle for Asian American studies, ethnic studies specifically.

And so that work as a student activist, as an organizer as a community member as someone grappling with and sometimes against the administration, I think really shaped a lot of my own trajectory. Now, nearly 25 years into this career, Yeah, about 25 years, shaped this trajectory around what it means to sit inside and also in an oppositional framework to systems and structures that then shape experiences, whether those experiences are of students or faculty or staff.

And so that kind of mental map and framework and what it meant to grow up in that way, grow up intellectually and ideologically shaped everything that came after that. My journey into student affairs, to becoming a director of cultural centers, to eventually becoming a, a chief diversity officer and dean for diversity, and then eventually a chief learning officer, has really been informed by that sort of foundational experience.

And now of course I own my own consulting firm, so I get to do this kind of exciting work around who belongs how do we structure systems to ensure greater belonging, greater engagement? And that’s what sort of brings me, all the way back into this book which of course is the fourth edition, my second edition working on it with Steven, and that’s been an incredible joy.

It’s what makes me excited to do this work, to bring these questions, especially at this time, back into the hands of practitioners, because my whole life has been as a scholar practitioner. So there’s that intellectual treat for me, but then that act of service to be able to put into the hands of our colleagues.

So that’s the little bit of journey story that gets me excited about why this book and why now.

Keith Edwards: Yeah, that’s great. Thank you. Thank you for all of that. Steven, tell folks a little bit more about you.

Stephen John Quaye: Yeah, sure. So hi, everyone. Just excited to be here with Sumi and you, Keith. So working on this book was a joy, partly…

mostly because of I got to work with Sumi and just just a delightful person to collaborate with, so I’m just excited for, for folks to consume the book. So I’m Stephen John Nyamokwoe-Kwoe. I’ll tell you a bit about the, the name in just a moment as I talk about my, my story and what brings me here today.

So Sumi and I share a lot of similar paths, but then also we diverge in some ways. So I’m also the, the son of immigrants. So I was born in Ghana, West Africa. I was about two and a half years old when my family immigrated to the United States. So we, when we immigrated to the US, we lived in New York City and then we moved to Gulfport, Mississippi.

My dad’s a pediatrician, so it’s the only place he really could find a job being an immigrant from Ghana and experiencing racism, navigating a new climate. So we moved south at that point. And then I call Fairfax, Virginia home. It’s where I spent from ninth grade through college. And so I share that part, in part because as an immigrant from Ghana, much like many immigrants, part of the reason that my family immigrated to the US was to provide better educational opportunities for my siblings and I.

I have three siblings, and the spaces in which we grew up were always predominantly white areas. And so it was not until my junior year of college at James Madison University where I had a teacher or a professor for the first time who was not white. I have vivid memories of my developmental psychology professor Dr.

Ashira Naseem, walking into the classroom space and I just felt This sense of freedom and joy, and this palpable energy, just seeing somebody who looked like me in front of the classroom for the very first time it’s largely the reason that I became a, a professor. And I’ve actually shared this with Dr.

Naseem more recently. And so just knowing that what his influence played in my own development was really powerful and palpable. And so for me, growing up in predominantly white environments, I never really had the opportunity to think about my Black racial identity. It’s something that I re- I thought about and I knew that I often felt excluded or isolated or that I didn’t belong, but I really didn’t have the language to name what I was feeling until I got into my master’s program at Miami University, where it’s the first pla- space that professors invited us to talk openly about our race and our different social identities.

And so that really gave me the language to name what I was experiencing. At the time of moving into the, the, the US, like, when my f- my siblings and I went through the process of becoming gaining citizenship in the United States, I remember my parents asked us, we could choose a different name if we wanted.

And so that’s when I chose the middle name of John, because I got really tired of my teachers and peers butchering my Ghanaian name. And it’s something that really didn’t sit well with me as I became, as I started to reflect more on my identity. And so this book is the first time that I’m actually embracing and using my full name, all of the names.

John is still important to me. It’s a name that I chose. It- I shared the initials SJQ with Sebastian, my 15-year-old, and so it’s something that I wanted to keep, but I still, I wanted to reclaim my, my Ghanaian heritage as well through, through my name. And and so I think just working on this book, working with Sumi, having conversations with her, it really helped me see the ways in which I think the, the student engagement is a way for people to understand how do we actually engage students, and that happened to me at Miami University.

It happened to me in the sense of b- being able to reclaim that identity of who I am. So I wanted to use this book as an opportunity to reclaim that identity and to demonstrate the ways in which I as a student was being engaged, and how that facilitated this process of my name today. And so that’s a little bit about me.

And again, I’m happy to join here today.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. That’s awesome. I think a, a mark of a good book is when people, it when the ideas in it live on. And I still quote the very first edition of this book that came out that Stephen and Shawn Harper wrote in the introduction. Because it was an aha moment for me.

And an aha moment is not, I learned is not new learning. It’s when someone gives you language for a learning you’ve always had but couldn’t quite- … articulate and put into words. And so in that first edition, you and Shawn Harper described the thing that I had always known but couldn’t say, which was this myth of magical thinking.

And when I still talk about curricular approaches, I talk about that. This notion that if you share a 14 by 14 room for nine months with another human being, you’re gonna learn conflict resolution. And then we cross our fingers and hope that goes well.

Stephen John Quaye: That’s right.

Keith Edwards: And if you live on a residence hall floor community with people from all over the country, all over the world, you’re gonna learn about how to communicate across differences.

And then we cross our ho- fingers and we hope that happens. And we know through a lot of data that doesn’t lead to the learning that we want. But engagement around that does. And I think that was something that I always known and and the hope and the claims that we made fussed with me, and then reading that really unlocked that for me.

So Stephen, I’d love for you to talk about how we got from that first edition to this fourth edition, and how this came to be and the evolution. And then we’ll hear from Sumi about where we are now.

Stephen John Quaye: Yeah, sure. So it’s, it’s wild when I think about the fact that this is the fourth edition of this book.

I didn’t honestly think we would go four editions when we conceptualized this book. And so yeah, I’m happy to talk a little bit about the origin of the book, how we got to where we are today. And then I’ll invite Sumi to share some pieces that I think really stand out with this fourth edition.

So I started my PhD work at the University of Southern California in 2004. And I was 24 years old when I started my, my, my PhD. And I, as a PhD student, this was I think maybe in my f- my first year actually. I took a class with Sean Harper, who has been on the previ- the first three editions of this book.

And I forget the name of the class, but it was a class that was ultimately focused on college environments or student engagement in some capacity. And these were… This was a class for the, where it was comprised of both doctoral students in the PhD program, but then we also had students in the executive doctoral EdD program that Sean was directing at the time.

And much like the creative scholar that he is, Sean invited us as students on one of the f- assignments to actually write about the notion of student engagement in this, And this is how the book became to be. It actually came from a classroom assignment where he invited us to collaborate with other students in the class and tackle one of the populations that are not being engaged on college campuses.

And then after we turned in our final papers, he invited those who wanted to to submit this to, to include our final paper and turn it into what ultimately became the first edition of this book. And so I think that was just really powerful in terms of, like, how an assignment that was, we initially wrote it as for the purposes of completing this assignment in our learning, actually then became the, the seeds of what then became The Student Engagement in Higher Education book.

And so over time, I think where the book has morphed is that- We’ve invited… That first edition was students in the class. The book did better than we were expecting, and so we got invited to do a second edition. And at that time we said, “Okay, we had success in this first edition with students in this class.

What if we actually then invited a broader population?” We made a, an open invitation and actually identified folks who were a- actively doing this work for the different populations in the book, folks who are working with students with disabilities, folks who are working with students of color international students, et cetera.

And so that became then the second and third editions, was to actually invite scholars who are working more on this, on, on this book. I think what really distinguishes the fourth edition, and Sumi will talk more about this in a moment is we really wanted to invite those who are actually working with students on college campuses of these various populations.

And now I don’t wanna create this, this distinction or, that I often struggle with this tension between scholar and then practitioner, right? And so for me I prefer the term scholar practitioners because I think it’s the combination of both doing the practice, but then also the practice is grounded in research and scholarship that I think makes one an effective educator.

However because the previous editions mostly center the experiences of faculty we thought what was missing was we wanted to gain more experience from those who are actively working directly with these populations outside of a classroom context. And so that’s where I think the fourth edition really stands out is bringing in voices from those who are actively engaged in this work on college campuses.

And I’ll stop there and turn it over to Sumi, who I think will dig more into those pieces about what distinguishes this edition from the previous three.

Sumun Pendakur: Thanks, Steven. And I’m so grateful. I think we all know, unfortunately, plenty of folks in our field who are very quick to delineate a sort of again, a binary between scholar and practitioner.

And so that’s one thing I’m just so grateful to you for, is that is so fluid for you and real for you. It’s not a, a false construct you’re resting on. Yeah. See it every day in the way that you interact- Appreciate that … so it’s really special. So okay, if I can build on what Steven offered.

I was invited in by Sean to work on the third edition with Sean and Steven back when I was the chief learning officer at the USC Ra- Race and Equity Center, and had a great experience working on that book. And then, this, on this fourth edition, it’s just me and Steven, and there was an opportunity to actually sit down and say, “Okay, if you and I are going to co-edit this book let’s just, let’s definitely not sit only on what has come.”

“But let’s how we can build, what we need to shed, what we can redesign altogether.” Yeah. So I think there’s a particular level of intentionality with the fourth edition. It certainly builds on two and three, for example. But goes in some interesting directions. Okay, so I’ll give just a couple of quick examples about that type of intentionality.

I wanna actually start by maybe just sharing one paragraph from the preface, which I think is very unique compared to the three prior editions. They were brilliantly written in the three prior editions as well, but this takes it in a, a direction that I think ties to the sort of intentionality we attempted with this edition.

And this is by many of us, our dear friend and colleague, Dr. Sam Musas Sam, as he was going by in this book. And he writes in the forward, I’ll just read it to you because I thought it was beautiful, “But our systems of domination and destruction socializes quite effectively, and we constantly internalize messages that we should crave to feed our egos and dominate to be successful.

We increasingly see ourselves as separate independent beings, disconnected from everyone and everything around us, unless we have the community and diligence to continue teaching and cultivating wisdom once held.” Sam continues to write, “By the time I was a tenured professor, I had forgotten much of this wisdom.

I didn’t realize it overnight. It took many years of observing how people in academia, despite being the most informed people in society, continued to contribute to the world’s growing crises and ongoing violence. But it also required me to turn inward and face difficult truths that I reinforce systems causing massive suffering, too.”

I’m so deeply hopeful that for all of our colleagues, faculty members future student affairs practitioners, anybody else people just excited about student engagement, that they will thoroughly read the preface because I thought it was groundbreaking on so many levels. And for me, as someone, in this field now 25 years, it forced me to pause and reflect on my own practice- Yeah

and how it’s so easy to fall into reproductive traps- … on so many levels. So I thought that was just a beautiful way to enter this new book. I’m really happy the way our first chapter, the chapter Stephen and I co-wrote, turned out because in this particular edition we also, and I think this ties really well to Sam’s preface, we embedded a set of in- self interrogation questions for the reader, whether it’s a faculty member, student, grad student, whoever it might be.

And I think those questions, if the reader reflects on those questions and plays with them with each chapter, the level of depth and play and stickiness and grappling you can get with this book. And I think going back to what you said, Keith that something that stuck with you in that very first edition changed your pra- not just your thinking, but your practice.

That’s our fundamental goal with this edition, right? That thinking and practice dovetail beautifully. And then I guess I’ll just mention one other thing in addition to this deeper interrogation of self and practice and to make meaning of each chapter is we’ve built in this newest edition three problems of practice chapters.

So when Stephen and I were talking and rapping about like what do we really wanna see, the one thing that I think adds to what’s come before is that while we had these brilliant chapters prior, they necessarily followed a structure that, laid out the context, laid out a specific student population, laid out obstacles, assets, strengths, laid out theoretical interventions and recommendations, really grounded recommendations.

But we thought if we’re going to go in this direction of grappling, then we wanna provide something for our new readers or future readers to actually play with. And so these three problems of practice chapters are designed and I’ll talk about them a little bit more in depth later, to get the reader Vested in a thorny campus problem that does not have any easy answers in which they’re gonna have to apply what they know from their own knowledge, own experiences, and what they’re gaining from the book to try to navigate this as current or future higher education practitioners and administrators.

And so I felt very excited about, being able to add that for us to be able to add that to this edition of the book. No easy answers, and isn’t that our work, right?

Keith Edwards: Yeah, I was gonna say, I think thorny campus problems with a no easy answer sounds like every morning in higher education right now.

Let’s talk a little bit more about today’s context and everything going around from federal policies and court cases and AI and disruption and enrollment cliffs and financial models and all of this. Again, thorny problems without easy answers. I’d love for your, for both of you, and we’ll start with you, Sumi, to what does this offer practitioners, educators, and leaders?

And again, we don’t wanna break those apart into three separate categories, but th- they are three categories, and many of us inhabit m- multiple of those. What does this offer practitioners, particularly in this now context that we’re in?

Sumun Pendakur: That’s right. That’s, such a great question. Thank you.

Because we certainly don’t wanna leave people only with thorny problems without easy answers, right? Yeah. If I wanted that, I can go open up YouTube or my Instagram right now- Yeah … cry a little bit, shut it, and take a nap, and then- Yeah … we’d be done. We’d

Keith Edwards: be done. I love the, the line from Jose Luis Rivas, the vice president in Delaware.

He said “Remem- I don’t remember the last time I opened up the Chronicle and there was good news.”

Sumun Pendakur: Ooh.

Stephen John Quaye: Yeah …

Sumun Pendakur: yes. Yes, 100%. So I think for today’s student affairs practitioners, educators, leaders, no matter what, habitus they are in, a couple things come to me.

One thing we asked for all of our authors to do, these 50 incredible scholars, is to ensure that they embedded really practical guidance and recommendations for multiple institutional contexts, and particularly in the time, in this time of institutional belt-tightening. And we’re surrounded both by necessary forms of institutional belt-tightening, false austerity measures- and institutions collapsing resources in order to either pre-comply, overly comply, or gleefully comply- … with this administration’s tactics, and the practitioners left navigating what comes from that, right? So I think that practical guidance about, okay, we’re not… We told our authors, “Don’t tell people…

You cannot tell practitioners, ‘Oh, you’re gonna na- need to suddenly invest $2 million in this particular intervention strategy.'”

And I think they took that really seriously, so I think that’s really valuable. One thing that Stephen and I agreed on, just from day one, is that we wanted the book, of course, to be grounded in an explicit consideration of diverse student needs, but also their core strengths and assets.

Not as something that can be capitalized on in a sort of extractive sense- … but something that can be recognized and known by practitioners as further opportunities that even in this time of sort of what I would call willful and deliberate destruction- That we as practitioners number one, don’t have time to be disempowered, but also when we look at the light, strength, and asset of our students, that there’s so much that we can do to advance studur- student-centered thinking, that we can advance our own compassion in a time designed to dry up empathy that there’s always good work to shift your own lenses based on who you are, how you were rai- raised, what you thought you knew, and how you confront what you know now.

So that’s all, I think, really well embedded in the book too, that there’s so much to be done internally in addition to externally, and those pieces I think dovetail well. What about you, Steven? Yeah, I- Oh, sorry.

Keith Edwards: Let me get in there real quick. I love that because I think in relationships the thing that most bug us about other people are usually things we can’t tolerate in ourselves.

Stephen John Quaye: True.

Keith Edwards: And so I love that this notion and Sam was pointing it out, and you’re drawing more attention to us, these critiques we have of systems, and structures, and institutions, and administrators and everything have lots of validity a- and can be true, and where do they point within us in the work that we need to do?

‘Cause probably if it really bugs us that our VP is doing something, it probably is something within us that also is there. So I love this both/and of the external, the systems, the structures, the, the policies, the procedures, and our own inner work along the way. Go ahead, Steven. Thank you.

Stephen John Quaye: Yeah. So just to build off of what, where Sumi left us.

So I think one of the, one of the most, I think, pernicious effects of systems of oppression that educators on our campus are navigating, that we’re navigating as well, is that it has this effect of making us feel alone and isolated.

Keith Edwards: Yes.

Stephen John Quaye: And so I just remember something that… I mentioned my, my story of being an immigrant, and the thing that I think has consistently perplexed me throughout my career and even as a young person, or a younger person I should say is that it often felt like either I was the only one experiencing X, Y, and Z or I was the only one who wanted something to happen or it just this sense of a- am I- are other people noticing this, are other people grappling with this?

Like, why does it sometimes feel like folks are just moving through the world business as usual when I’m feeling like I can’t even move on a daily basis? And I think that’s one of the, I think, most disastrous effects and pernicious effects of systemic oppression, is it forces us to really feel like this sense of isolation.

And so I think what this book offers in this current climate is this sense of like coalition building and this sense of like we’re not isolated, that there a- there are actually folks engaged in this work. This is a, a quick aside, but I think it’s related. Before we started recording Keith you live in Minneapolis, and we were talking about the ways in which ICE has infiltrated, just the city of Minneapolis.

And I think one of the, one of the powerful things just as somebody who’s not in Minneapolis but just to observe what ha- what’s happening, was this resistance to the isolation. Exactly. Was this resistance to feeling like we, we were helpless and we can’t address this, right? And so I don’t mean this in like this hunky-dory like this cute sort of ev- we’re all together and not in that sense and that there’s no problems but this sense of like that we, we are in this together and even through our differences that’s what makes us actually stronger.

And so I think that is one of the things that this book is also trying to offer is by folks reading these chapters and seeing the various ways in which the authors are gla- grappling with these issues, I think hopefully it helps them not feel so isolated in their work, and that there are other folks who are offering ideas and who are also wrestling with this, and here are ways to think about addressing some of these issues.

So that’s one, one piece that I wanted to share. The other piece is I think the other thing that I really appreciate about this what this volume offers is I mentioned this notion of systems of oppression. I think what’s really hard is it’s hard to know how to tackle these larger systems, and because they often change or i- it, or manifest differently. So for example, one of our authors Santiago Castillo-Gutierrez w- wrote the chapter on engaging international students. Many of our campuses right now are dealing with this duration of status that the federal government has put this four-year time limit on international students for being here on their visa to complete their degree, right?

And so even in the f- four or five months since Santiago wrote this chapter, that is something that is different. So that’s changing. So that’s a… So as we think of this as a systemic issue, this is a law that our government has provided. Yes, our, many campus leaders are likely going to push back, and this will be challenged in the legal system.

But yet it’s hard to know as we’re working, for example, with international students on a day-to-day basis, h- how can we push back as individuals on this larger systemic issue that is impacting the work? And so I think that’s another challenging thing with these larger systems of oppression. And so what I appreciate about the authors of this book is many of them have this both end approach.

They offer individual actions that educators can do on an individual level, but then also how can we do this on a more systemic level to address these larger issues? ‘Cause that’s, I think the more challenging part that can again make folks feel isolated or helpless, is that what are my individual actions going to do to fundamentally address, for example, ableism or fundamentally address patriarchy, right?

And so I think that’s what the au- authors are offer- also offering in this volume, is showing how you can be part of the w- the solution in addressing these issues, even if imperfectly, right? And so I think that’s another piece that I love about this fourth edition.

Keith Edwards: I wanna get to the problems of practice here in a moment, but I wanna sneak in a question.

And then- Yeah …

as soon as, of course, as soon as I decide to do that, I think Steven, you may have answered it. But we’ll have you do two. I wanna ask you as, as editors, you talked about coming together, working on the previous edition, working on this one, thinking, “What do we want out of this, this whole body,” right?

And then inviting people in, and this making sure we have folks who are doing the work with students. You’re both very smart, very accomplished prolific scholars in many ways. I’m c- really curious for each of you, what’s a chapter you can’t stop thinking about? What’s one that you keep coming back to and going, “Man, that’s so true,” or, “I never thought about it like that,” or what’s one you can’t get out of your head?

And Steven, you may have just given one away we’ll give you a chance to give a second one. But Sumi, what’s one that you keep coming back to?

Sumun Pendakur: Okay. Okay th- now this is you’re asking the mother to pick a favorite among

Stephen John Quaye: her-

Sumun Pendakur: This is terrible.

Keith Edwards: Thankfully, there’s a lot of chapters.

So you can offend a lot of people with this one. Yeah. But what’s one that just may not be your favorite, but one’s, one you keep thinking

Sumun Pendakur: about? Okay. All right. Give me one second to think about this. It would be… Okay, l- let me pick something from, that’s not from one of the problems of practice chapters.

Yeah,

Keith Edwards: Please. No ‘Cause we’re gonna talk about those next.

Sumun Pendakur: We’re gonna talk about those next anyway. So let me- I was about to

Stephen John Quaye: say, you about to cop out to me?

Sumun Pendakur: No I’m not. But no

Stephen John Quaye: you’re getting at it.

Sumun Pendakur: I promise I’m not. I promise I’m not.

Keith Edwards: Just so folks that have the con- There’s 20 chapters plus three chapters on the problem of practice,

Sumun Pendakur: exactly.

Keith Edwards: And you and Steven wrote the first one, so we got plenty of work to work, work from.

Sumun Pendakur: I’m gonna say that I think… Okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna pick two that I thought pushed the boundaries of both academic and practitioner thinking in some really exciting ways, and that was the Engaging Cisgender Women chapter by J.A.

Silvas and Moira Osius, and the Engaging Disabled Students chapter by Kirsten Brown, Ellen Broido, and Autumn Wilke. And I don’t want to give too much away, right? You can’t have the trailer give too much away. No spoilers. No spoilers, no spoilers, exactly. But I think what the authors of those chapters did incredibly well is to take something that I think that many of us scholar practitioners think, “Okay I understand this framework.”

And w- what they did is they exploded the frameworks in really meaningful ways. Not explosion for the sake of explosion, but explosion for the sake of seeing how we as practitioners can actually be doing so much more by situating ourselves differently vis-a-vis the quote-unquote issue or problem, number one.

And number two, using using frameworks that actually sort of position top and bottom in really different ways so that when you’re designing engagement, right? Fundamentally all the chapters are all about how do you design engagement in such a way that it’s not an accident to go back to your magical thinking- opening Keith? That it cannot be accidental and it cannot be just dependent on students finding engagement opportunities because then the same thing happens over and over in that the most well-connected or the most well-to-do or the most able-bodied or the most, most whatever students will find opportunities and others will continue to trickle to the margins, which then impacts belonging, retention, variables of success, et cetera.

So I love what they did is that they took these frameworks, flipped them, exploded them and created really dynamic ways of engaging with minoritized and marginalized student populations. Th- that then in the best ways of universal design and thinking actually would be beneficial to dozens and dozens of other types of students.

So I think that’s what I loved about both of those two chapters, that it wasn’t– And n- not that any of them did it in such a narrow thing, but those two really stood out for, ah, okay, I’m seeing how this in fact transforms the engagement work across a huge swath of student communities, not just this one that’s in question for this chapter.

So yeah, I’ll leave it there.

Keith Edwards: Thanks. How about you, Steven? One that, is there one you can’t get, stop thinking about?

Stephen John Quaye: Yeah. So the chapter I can’t stop thinking about is from Royel Johnson and Terrell Taylor. They wrote this, the chapter on engaging students with criminal legal records. And the reason that one pops up in my mind is because for a couple reasons.

One of the things is so Royel wrote this, this chapter I, I forget the name. I think, I don’t think it was with Terrell in the previous edition, but it was focused on the language that they used in that was justice-oriented or justice-impacted students. And so one of the things that we wrestled with them was we asked them “Tell me more about this, this switch from using justice impacted to criminal legal records.”

And I forget the exact r- rationale that they provided, but but to me, what’s i- what’s important here is that the language that we use matters, right? And when we name… Like, how do we help people understand the issue we’re talking about? And we have to use language that is accessible to to, to people.

So I think that’s one, one piece that stands out to me from that chapter. The o- the other piece too, though, is I’ve been talking about larger systems of oppression, and I think the system of carcerality in our society is one that I think is really difficult to know how to wrap one’s hands around.

Right? If you provide in popular discourse surveys about policing there’s not a clear answer. There’s lots of s- there’s lots of groups that want to end policing, and then there’s just an, this, a similar number of people who say, “Oh, no. We don’t… It’s we need police.”

And it’s partly is because we don’t know how to… We’ve been so impacted and infiltrated by policing in our society on so many levels that it’s hard to us, for us to even dream of what that might look like differently, right? And so what I appreciate about this chapter is that the authors ask readers to dream about what a world without policing might look like and how would that impact the engagement of those who have been impacted by the criminal justice system or crim- criminal legal system, right?

And so I think that is another piece that I really love about that chapter, is that notion. They really, I think, wrap- grapple with this, the systemic oppression in powerful ways and provide possibilities for thinking beyond carcerality, which I think is really hard to do when we’re in a system where that is so prominent.

And so I just, I appreciate that the authors, I think, offer readers possibilities there and ideas for how to best engage these students should they enter our college campuses

Sumun Pendakur: Can I jump on that for a second too- Yeah, of

Stephen John Quaye: course …

Sumun Pendakur: Keith Keith, which is y- you’ve talked about systems of oppression, and I th- whether it’s in the US or whether we’re talking about Hungary or whether it wherever in the world, one of the things that’s deeply embedded system of, systems oppressions do i- and writers have written about this for decades and decades, is to delimit the imagination.

Delimit the scope and opportunity for possibility. Yeah. And so I think anything that helps us to imagine something different, better, that gets us out of the it’s either this or that,” when- … this or that may not, and again, not nec- speaking about carcerality, but the this or that are what has been given to us.

What else is the possibility, and where can our imagination take us? But imagination is one of the first things to be crushed under various forms of authoritarianism and authoritarian thinking. So I love- Exactly … what you just said about that chapter, Steven.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. Good stuff. I’m glad we got into some of the details of those, and even though we’ve only talked about just a few chapters, it gives folks some texture of what is here in some of these- these other chapters. Let’s, we’ve alluded to it a couple times. Let’s get to it. The, there’s three chapters that kinda conclude the book around the problems of practice. And what is it that you hope student affairs educators can take from these chapters? Sumi, we’ll begin with you.

Sumun Pendakur: Sure. So these three problems of practice chapters focus on very different very different topics.

One is about student athlete acade- academic engagement. One is about the engagement of student activists through the lens of pro-Palestine, anti-genocide activism and campus response. And then a third chapter is about addressing dating violence among members of a student organization where the student who experienced harm doesn’t wanna report their partner.

So each one of these, you remember how when we took our methods classes and we’re all excited about thick, rich data, thick, rich data? These are thick and rich, and I think that’s what I love about them. And what the chapters do, of course, is they really skillfully all of our authors for the Problems of Practice chapters really skillfully lay out a complex, as I said earlier, thorny case study of a specific student or student organization, the players in this context, how multilayered it is.

Where is power located? And I think so often in our own conversations in terms of s- broadly writ, solving campus problems the most basic part of analyzing where is power, how is power being leveraged whose needs are being lifted, whose needs are being subordinated. Without that analysis of power, we end up with really Pollyanna-ish equal, quote unquote, equal responses, when in fact that equality embeds tremendous inequality, right?

So this, these chapters, they ask questions about where do the various actors in these scenarios land? How do campus making… h- campus decision-makers respond? What underlying power structures are act- actually at play? So making that really visible and material for the reader, for the person who’s interacting with the book.

And then how do you, the student affairs practitioner, educator, scholar navigate these three very dynamic situations with compassion, complexity, and rigor, I would say is And there’s tons. What I love about these is if higher ed faculty members, program leaders use these chapters in the book, we ask those authors to embed questions so that it is ready to go for team-based discussion or group problem solving or individual reflection or whatever it might be.

But these are really the… The work is not theoretical. It is grounded in theory as a way to advance problem solving and intervention, but this work, as you’ll see in these three particular chapters, is not theoretical. It’s what’s happening every single day, and we as practitioners are called on to answer incredibly different questions, sometimes with limited information, sometimes with enormous pressures that are not just the situation, but donors, boards, state policies, governmental policies, right?

So I think those, these three new chapters afford some really beautiful opportunity for people to take what they’ve learned through the other chapters and then to play, wrestle, grapple, internally reflect, and then externally think, navigate, et cetera.

Stephen John Quaye: Yeah, that’s a beautiful summary. I don’t I don’t think I have much more to add beyond just a, a couple of pieces to what Sumi shared.

But I, I j- I do wanna shout out and just thank Sumi in particular for these Problems as Practice chapters, because I think when we were initially conceptualizing the book she’s the one who brought this idea to the forefront. And as, as a way, I think, to do all of the things that she said, particularly help those who are working on college campuses think about the questions and the cases and how do it- how do we actually do this work better from a student engagement lens.

And so I think that these are important addition to the book. The two pieces that I would just add to what Sumi already beautifully shared is is one of the things that I think is really important is that the cases that these three Problems of Practice chapters are focused on they’re not just these sort of I think, trite fictitional cases that come up in a class, and folks are like, “Okay what would you do if X, Y, and Z happened?”

They’re actually grounded in real world examples of things that these authors have been grappling with and as a way to help readers also make sense of it. So I think they’re very relatable and are issues that are, folks are navigating regularly on their own college campus. The other piece that I think was really intentional in these chapters is I think the, the authors themselves.

And so for example Noor Kalele, who wrote the chapter on on student activists is a recent she recently graduated with her PhD at University of Texas Austin. And actually wrote a beautiful dissertation on this very topic and struggled with, like, how to navigate like this, this experience with- Our folks are at risk by sharing their stories around, like, how they’re pushing their institutions to do better as activists, right?

And so I think that, that voice is really important. It’s a voice that I think helps those who are engaged in activism hear and s- and feel seen in the risk-taking that I think is involved for students who are simply trying to just be students but feel like they have to become activists because us, as educational leaders, are not doing what we’re paid to do, which is to support them on their college campuses.

So that’s really important. And then Nadika and Carla, who wrote the chapter on engaging campus sexual violence, again, are folks who are actively engaged in this work on their own college campus and are coming at it, again, from a lens of power that Sumi mentioned. And then Jasmine Albacar, who wrote the chapter on the student athlete academic engagement, is somebody who’s a professor but then also has ties in terms of her own activism as well, and I think wove those stories into her chapter.

So I think that those … So we intentionally invited, I think, these four authors in particular because, again, of their own stories and the ways in which they are doing the work on their college campuses that’s related to the topic that they’re writing about. So it’s, again, to reiterate our point from earlier we really wanted in this edition for the folks who are actively doing the work on college campuses to be part of this book so that they could actually share from their own experiences

Keith Edwards: Awesome.

We’ve given folks plenty to think about, to be intrigued by and to reach out a- and get the book. And you’ve talked about numbers of ways we can read it for our own learning, ask ourselves the questions, engage within it with our teams, which is super helpful. And we are running out of time, and the podcast is called Student Affairs NOW, and we always like to end by asking folks what are you thinking, troubling, or pondering now?

And if folks do want to connect with you, what’s the best way for them to do that? So Steven, what are you troubling now?

Stephen John Quaye: Yeah, so

Sumun Pendakur: I’ll- He’s troubling me.

Keith Edwards: He’s troubling you. Other than SuMi, what are you troubling?

Stephen John Quaye: Other than SuMi, so there’s three things that I’ll leave folks with that I think I’m really yeah, that’s that I’m thinking about or pondering or that is troubling me at this moment is, So coincidentally, today is the first day of the fall semester at Ohio State University, where I’m a an associate dean and professor. And many students are returning to campus today. Some are starting their college journeys for the first time.

Some are midway through. Some are graduating. Some are reentering. Some are leaving out. So there’s lots of transition happening as we enter a- another fall where we are still in a very toxic sociopolitical climate where it makes- Doing things like engaging in activism, even saying the words diversity, equity, and inclusion, words that are at the core of the work that Sumi and I have been doing are curse words in our current climate, right?

And so that puts educators, students at risk. And so I say that because I’m thinking about how do we s- how do we support the students who are really vulnerable on our campuses? I’m thinking about transgender students of color, international students, disabled students without naming what they’re experiencing, right?

And without naming these words diversity, equity, and inclusion it becomes hard to do work if we don’t name what we’re talking about. So that’s one piece that I’m, that’s really staying with me as we enter another academic year. What does it mean to do this work in this larger social political climate that views the very work that we’re doing as problematic or as not real or not needed?

So that’s one, one piece. Related to that, secondly I’m also thinking about care. We have, I think about the salaries of Ohio State employees, particularly those who are doing a lot of this labor who are often underpaid, under-resourced. We at Ohio State, our Office of Diversity and Inclusion has now been sunset for over a year because of the s- of the state context in which we live, where we have laws about not being able to fund diversity, equity, and inclusion centers based on state dollars.

And so that makes the work of those- educators even more vulnerable. So I’m thinking about care and rest for them. What does rest look like when you are literally not able to rest because you have students who are dependent on you, you have caretaking responsibilities, you have older parents who are dependent on you, right?

You’re navigating lots of things at home and at work, and yet you’re still under-resourced in both capacities. And when is it time for them to rest, right? And so this is my plea to the vo- those of us who are in positions of power, who hold more dominant identities, to shoulder that work so that your colleagues with minoritized identities can rest and recuperate.

So that’s my, the second piece that I’m really pondering and that is troubling me. And then I’ll just end with with reciprocity, something that I’m also thinking a lot about. So I think a lot about, how do I keep giving back to the communities who made me who I am? This connects way back to when I introduced myself, right?

So I think a lot about other Ghanaian students out on Ohio State’s campus. What does it look like for me to give back to them? What does it look like to give back to my communities? What does meaningful work in my community also look like? And then what does it look like to give back to these authors who contributed their talents, their time to writing a book, I think, again, in a context where it may not have been safe for them to do so, as it was even in the previous edition.

I think about the, their work right? Some of our colleagues did not want to be recognized on social media for their chapter because they are undocumented or because, again of our society, right? And so I just think a lot about the risk-taking that is involved with doing this work.

So those are, like, three things that I’m really thinking about. And because these are things that I think a lot about folks can find me via email Q-U-A-Y-E.13@osu.edu, or also on social media. I’m grinning as I’m saying this because I often tell Sumi I’m in, I’m on social media.

Do I actually engage actively on social media? Not as much as I used to. But I am on LinkedIn. I am on Instagram. So you probably should not find me there if you really wanna connect with me. But yes, but I am there as well too, so I look forward to folks engaging, and I’m just delighted to, to talk about this book and just to celebrate it.

And so just thank you to everyone who contributed, and thank you to Keith for having us, and also to Sumi for collaborating with me on this book. So it’s been a, it’s been a journey, and it’s been a joy.

Keith Edwards: Wonderful. Sumi, you’re a troubler. What are you troubling now?

Sumun Pendakur: That was really beautiful, Stephen.

You earlier had just talked about our opportunity to work together, and so I just wanna say this at the top. This has just been… we all work on so many different projects.

But through a project when you can intellectually stimulate one another develop a more meaningful relationship, develop a real friendship, like that feels like such a generative reward.

So I just wanna extend so much love and care to you, Steven, as my co-collaborator, co-conspirator. That was an unexpected and beautiful part of this whole process, yeah. So in addition to that, what am I troubling? What am I thinking about? I s- I said a little bit about it before.

I’ve been s- writing and talking about on many public stages since 2021 about the attack on LGBTQ+ populations, what was originally attacked with critical race theory, then equity and inclusion and diversity, et cetera. That’s five straight years. There’s moments where it feels like Cassandra, if we go back to the Greek myths.

And so I think There’s a grief that I feel that we are in this place right now and that the project of the authoritarian right, which rests on the illiberal treatment of those on the margins, found ready victims in trans folks, queer folks, Palestinian folks, undocumented folks, disabled folks.

And because of the way our society is structured, that the vast majority of people will say those are edge cases. It’s not gonna happen to me.”

The… And this is how it works everywhere. I’m talking about our country, right? And so watching that happen in real time and feeling a little bit like screaming into the void has created, I think, a, a a sharp strand of grief within me.

And… But I’ll pair that grief with that I’m continually looking for the good, looking for forms of fight, whether it’s local against ICE, against automatic license plate readers like Flock systems, whether it is against the, the illiberalism of the destruction of free speech by resting it on anti-Palestinian sentiment whether, right?

Even through, the movement against MAHA and its fundamentally eugenic proposition. So there’s all that happening, and I’m watching it, and I am pulling from it, and I’m involved in it. And that, I think, is what soothes the sharper edges of that grief on some levels and keeps me going.

Because this time is really deliberately designed to make us feel degraded and to make us quiescent. And so wherever I see people asserting their dignity and humanity, not just of themselves, but of others around them, whether it’s on a campus or on the streets, in the courtroom, then that is pouring back in, if that makes sense.

I guess two other small things I’m thinking about are I feel tender about higher education right now, given everything we’re witnessing, right? This is a pretty savage attack on all the things, and this is not to say everything in higher education is perfect. I think the three of us would be the first to be able to critique.

And yet, as I think about my 13-year-old and my 7-year-old and- What, what lies in front for them in terms of their own collegiate exposure? What will be standing? What will be crumbled? I have those tendrils of, feeling around me. So I’m thinking about that. And I’m thinking about all the different ways that they can learn inside and outside of our institutions as well, always, right?

Always. And then the final thing is it shows up in my work all the time, right? So I Now at this point, nearly six years into having my own consulting firm, I do organizational development, executive coaching of leaders, speaking, training, facilitating, keynoting all over the country. And so I am constantly immersed in, what you would call other people’s problems.

And in some ways I love that because I love being a problem solver or somebody to support people grappling with difficult circumstances to be able to do their best work, to be able for their teams to keep on thriving, for people to actually be cared for, like Steven talked about whether it’s individuals or team leaders or structures and systems.

And so yeah, I keep on thinking about, okay, how do I keep on doing good work and putting good work into the universe as my little drop in the ocean, against- Yeah … the broader tidal wave. So yeah, I’ll leave it there, Keith. And p- it’s easy to find me, Sumunpendakur.com is my website. Sumun Pendakur on LinkedIn or dr_sumi on Instagram.

Yeah. That’s all the things.

Keith Edwards: Awesome. Thank you both for the book for joining us today, for your good work and your wonderful insights here. This has been terrific. Thanks for everything. And for folks who wanna get the book directly from Routledge, you can use their code SANOW20 for a 20% discount if you’re purchasing directly from Routledge.

So go ahead and do that. I also wanna thank our sponsor of today’s episode, Evolve. Given the current context of higher education, we need to invest in leaders with the capacity and capabilities to transform their institutions and the future of higher education. The Evolve Institute for Higher Education Leadership offers four leadership coaching journeys tailored to four different leadership levels.

Each is a three-month journey that includes individual and group coaching, plus a curated curriculum of short asynchronous video modules. We also offer Evolve for leadership teams. If you’re ready to evolve your leadership voice, visit evolve-institute.com to learn more. And as always, a huge shout-out to our producer, Natalie Ambrosey, who does all the behind-the-scenes work to make us look and sound good.

And we love your support for these conversations. You can help us reach even more folks by subscribing to our newsletter, on YouTube, to the podcast. We would love to connect with you. And if you wanna leave us a five-star review, it does really help these great conversations like today reach even more folks.

I’m Keith Edwards. Thanks to our wonderful guests today, and to everyone who’s watching and listening. Make it a great week. Thank you both.

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