RHE Updates
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September 17, 2024
Dear ASHE community:
We hope this email finds you well. We are writing today with an update about ASHE presidential addresses and information about why you will see past presidential addresses appear in the current volume of The Review of Higher Education over the next year. As you may know, ASHE presidential addresses have generally been published in the pages of RHE. For some past ASHE presidents and editors, the publication process for addresses has been smooth, while it was unclear or unknown for others.
In his 2021 presidential address, Dr. Stewart pointed out the exclusion of some presidential addresses from RHE and the ASHE website, particularly those by Drs. Harper and Patton Davis, as examples of anti-Blackness and unjust exclusion of Black voices in academia, RHE, and ASHE. At our request, the ASHE Ethics Committee investigated these exclusions. In March 2022, they reported that nine presidential addresses had never been published and attributed these exclusions to an unclear publication process over the years, and simultaneously emphasized the validity of Dr. Stewart’s points about exclusion. The Ethics Committee recommended that the RHE editor contract be updated to spell out the publication process for presidential addresses, which has occurred, and measures be taken by ASHE leadership to publish past presidential addresses that could be found. The nine ASHE presidential addresses missing were from Drs. C. Robert Pace (1977), Burton Clark (1980), Howard R. Bowen (1981), Joan S. Stark (1985), Sheila Slaughter (1996), Lisa Wolf-Wendel (2013), Scott Thomas (2016), Shaun R. Harper (2017), and Lori Patton Davis (2018). ASHE contacted past presidents, archives, and/or personal estates in an attempt to recover the addresses. The five oldest addresses were determined to be unavailable.
Since the Ethics Committee filed its report, ASHE leaders have sought to publish the missing presidential addresses of Drs. Wolf-Wendel, Thomas, Harper, and Patton Davis. In 2022, presidential addresses were submitted to the ASHE office by Drs. Wolf-Wendel and Thomas. Earlier this year, Black women members of the ASHE community and allies started to resign from ASHE roles as a result of Dr. Patton Davis’s treatment by ASHE regarding her presidential address as well as other injustices and harms toward Black women (the ASHE Board of Directors sent a message about this to the ASHE community on March 20, 2024 and a follow up on August 19, 2024). Another outcome is that Dr. Patton Davis indicated to Dr. Hart (the current ASHE president) that she is no longer interested in publishing her address in RHE.
Since becoming the editors of RHE in 2019, we have worked with ASHE leaders and staff to regularize the process used to publish ASHE presidential addresses. Each presidential address occurs in November at the ASHE annual conference, the text is due to RHE in January/February, copy edited (only) and finalized by March/April, and the address is published in RHE’s summer issue. In April of this year, we were asked to take over the process of getting past addresses published and agreed to do so.
Since that time, we have been in touch with all ASHE past presidents as well as had additional communications with the four most recent past presidents with addresses not yet published in RHE. We are pleased to report that we have made the following progress.
- In collaboration with RHE’s publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press, we have posted errata language for each missing presidential address in Project MUSE in the RHE volume and issue in which it would have normally been placed that explains why it is not there and the effort that was taken over the last two years to get missing addresses posted. Importantly, Dr. Patton Davis was involved in reviewing and editing the errata language posted for her address.
- Once publication ready, we will post the addresses of Drs. Wolf-Wendel, Thomas, and Harper, along with errata language in Project MUSE in the RHE volume and issue in which it would have normally been placed. In addition, each of these addresses will appear in the print issue of this year’s volume (Volume 48), with Dr. Wolf-Wendel’s address in Issue 1, Dr. Thomas’s in Issue 2, and Dr. Harper’s in Issue 3. The current president, Dr. Hart, will have her address published in Issue 4 per the process we have been following since 2019.
We hope this makes the presidential addresses accessible to RHE readers as well as documents the errors of missing addresses. In the coming months, we will continue our work with ASHE Publications Committee co-chairs, Drs. Heather Rowan-Kenyon and Karen Kurotsuchi Inkelas, to update the ASHE Past Presidents webpage. The new format promises to be a considerable improvement.
Further, the RHE editorial team and board created four RHE Task Forces to take up:
- a review of RHE Policies and Procedures to root out anti-Blackness and imbedded racism and make recommendations for changes;
- consider an ongoing section of the journal that centers epistemic injustice;
- create a webinar series to tackle issues of anti-Blackness and gendered racism connected to RHE; and
- craft a related session for the ASHE community at the annual conference this November.
We thank the co-chairs and committees for their efforts. Please keep an eye out for programs and look to the RHE Annual Report coming out this November for updates on this ongoing work. We welcome and encourage your involvement.
Over the last couple of years, we have learned more about the anti-Blackness and racist harm that has been a part of ASHE’s and RHE’s history as well as the Association’s ongoing work to foster a healthier, thriving academic community where all higher education scholars may fully be and belong. It is our hope that our work with RHE and past presidential addresses, as well as the four task forces, help move us all forward.
Thank you for your patience as we worked to get to this point and hope you engage with us in the efforts yet to come.
Respectfully,
Penny A. Pasque, Editor
Thomas F. Nelson Laird, Editor
The Review of Higher Education
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