University professor as cause zealot, mind manager, and syntax mauler.

The public presentations as part of their candidacies by two finalists for a professorship at the University of Vermont:

Keon McGuire, Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School of Education and African Studies at the University of Pennsylvania: “Problematizing the Presistent Problematizing of Black Students in Postsecondary Education.” “In this talk, I discuss methodological tools and theoretical frameworks that educational researchers could employ in order to move beyond studying Black students as problems and investigate new phenomena; namely the intersectionality of students’ racial, gendered and spiritual identities.”

Dr. Kelly Clark/Keefe, Associate Professor, Appalachian State University: “Becoming Outsider, Becoming Educated, Becoming Undone: Towards an Interdisciplinary Justice-Oriented Perspective on College Student Identity Development.” “Throughout the presentation, audience members will encounter my process of utilizing arts-based inquiry, inviting considerations that creative methods may help educational researchers to activate their commitment to social justice by carving out epistemic spaces for different ways of expressing unheard of or only partially effable truths.”

A third finalist for the professorship, Dr. Vijay Kanagala, Post-Doctoral Candidate, University of Texas, argues for the contribution he can make to a university setting in the Commission for Social Justice Educators Blog: “If not me, then who will counsel a recent immigrant about race and racism that was experienced at the supermarket or for that matter with an advisor or faculty member on campus? If not me, then who will work with a White student to encourage the process of self-exploration of her/his identity, privilege, oppression and racism and the ensuing guilt that employs a non-judgmental model for that White student’s ignorance and lack of exposure to diverse issues?”