The Insecurity of Higher Ed Research

Academics are often characterized (and caricatured) as pompous, confident that they are the smartest people in the room and eager to prove it. But arrogance and insecurity are sometimes flip sides of one coin, and the professoriate has seen a rash lately of scholars expressing dismay at their perceived marginalization -- sociologists awaiting calls from the Obama administration, for instance, and political scientists reiterating calls for more grounding for their discipline in "the real world."
When it comes to a field with an inferiority complex, few have it over scholars who study higher education. They, like many of their colleagues in the social sciences, yearn for more attention from and influence with policy makers, as was the subject of numerous discussions at last week's meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education here.
But higher ed researchers also feel as if they get short shrift from other scholars within the academy, several of them argued at a panel called "The Trouble With Higher Ed Research" at the ASHE meeting on Friday. Lisa Wolf-Wendel, a professor of higher education at the University of Kansas, said she was stunned when she went on the job market and an interviewer, impressed, asked her why she had sought a Ph.D. in higher education. "His implication was that I should have gotten a degree in a real discipline," she said.
Inside Higher Education