Centralizing student voice in hiring the new Dean of the UC Davis School of Education.

To Whom It May Concern:

This letter is in response to the hiring of a new dean for the School of Education (SOE). In order to achieve a holistic and transformational change in the ways in which the SOE fulfills its mission, we believe strongly that this search must be made in community with SOE stakeholders, and in particular, SOE graduate students.

We appreciate the work Dean Levine has done in helping to found our SOE and contribute to our growing prestige. However, with new leadership also comes new opportunities to realign our collective efforts with institutional purpose, which is clearly stated in the first sentence of our mission—“to confront and eliminate inequities…through the promise of education.” In brief, we would like to see transformational leadership as it relates to educational equity and justice in the following areas:
**The next dean should have a demonstrated track record of centralizing issues of educational equity and justice in their careers.
**The next dean should have a demonstrated track record of hiring and retaining faculty with educational equity and critical social justice research agendas.
**The next dean should be able to embrace and expand the historical legacy of engaged student participation around issues of educational equity and justice.
**The hiring process for the next dean should centralize student voices with de facto voting power.

With this letter we want to make it known that students of the School of Education, along with the Social Justice Education Coalition (SJEC), are organizing and advocating for the aforementioned, and that we will continue to advocate for an SOE that can live up to its current mission statement. We hope this letter is met with visionary and equitable leadership.

Since 2011, after a racialized incident occurred, graduate students from the SOE organized and brought attention to institutional issues directly related to equity and diversity. From our perspective as students, it seemed that the SOE administration responded with a lack of urgency on matters that were important to us and the school’s socio-cultural climate. As a direct result, the Social Justice Education Coalition (SJEC) was formed with the mission of institutionalizing critical social justice frameworks as it relates to advocacy, research, curriculum, courses, faculty and recruitment of students, which cultivate critical consciousness in the communities we represent. We define “critical” as going beyond critical thinking to include a political and/or institutional critique of education, that not only advances analyses of oppression as it relates to race, class and gender, for example, but that pushes for institutional transformation by highlighting contradictions between institutional values and actions (Leonardo, 2009). We feel that this scholarship is essential if we hope to meet the demands of our mission and exact any change toward equity in education. How can anyone make an impact without a strong foundational understanding of the structural and institutional challenges students face in their daily lives?"

SJEC’s most prominent accomplishment is the Critical Consciousness Speaker Series (CCSS). The CCSS is student-led and developed as a way to take agency over the knowledge to which we have access at the SOE. The favorable response and subsequent demand for the speaker series is demonstrative of the need for critical social justice frameworks in the SOE, Davis campus and surrounding community. Over the last five years, students have organized 10 CCSS events, which have been attended by over 1,000 community members and amassed 8,370 YouTube visits! The CCSS brings scholars who, in an intensive visit, help supplement our education and provide valuable and lasting mentorship--scholars such as Gloria Ladson-Billings, Daniel G. Solorzano and Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade. Moreover, in order to remain sustainable, SJEC recently created an advisory board comprised of officers and faculty from the SOE, Graduate Studies, the Office of Campus Community Relations and SAYS, a division of Student Affairs, because we understand that true transformation cannot happen in isolation nor without campus partnerships dedicated to equity and diversity. This model embodies a commitment to the principles of community our university values and that we expect to see in our new dean.

As an SOE graduate student body, we witnessed a focus from previous leadership on rankings and funding. We also noticed several shortcomings that kept the SOE from meeting its true potential. A particularly detrimental aspect was the inability to recruit and, most importantly, retain professors/researchers with research agendas that were critical and social-justice oriented. The ongoing loss of diversity impacts students the most. Many of us are still yearning to be consistently mentored or apprenticed by faculty with a critical social justice research agenda. We also witnessed a lack of urgency in developing mor...