The journal
Essays on education, leadership, and the cultural context of knowledge.
Signed essays from a thirty-year scholarly career. Long-form notes on research, on leading higher education, and on the questions the field keeps returning to.
Looking for the episode companions to The Cultural Context of Knowledge podcast? Read them on the podcast site →
2026
8 essaysStill Searching for a Match.
A note on my new article in Urban Education's 60th-anniversary issue, which returns to a question I first raised in 2009 and asks what ethnic matching looks like when we take equity, history, and place seriously.
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Lifting as We Lead: A Preview.
A preview of a forthcoming chapter on Black male deans mentoring Black male faculty — the benefits, the structural costs, and what the institution's reliance on a small number of people reveals about how leadership development is organized in higher education.
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Why Most Leadership Models Fail in Chaos (And What Actually Works).
Most leadership models assume stability, time, and clarity. Real leadership does not happen in stability — it happens in chaos. An essay on why traditional frameworks fail under pressure, and the six structures that let an organization function inside chaos rather than try to control it.
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Leadership Without Stability.
Thirty years of watching institutions has taught me that what the conventional account calls stability is better understood as the temporary absence of disruption. An essay on leading higher education when the ground does not sit still.
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Purpose That Actually Works.
A purpose statement that can be recited is not the same as one that can resolve a trade-off. An essay on what operational purpose has to do to function under pressure, and why most mission statements do not.
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Ethnic Matching Beyond the Classroom.
The matching research has begun to extend from K-12 classrooms into college transitions, faculty-student mentoring, and academic leadership. An essay on what three recent extensions are telling us about the construct, and why the policy response will have to extend with them.
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How do you actually measure belonging in a classroom? A note on methods.
The word shows up in every grant proposal and half the conference titles. Here is what the instruments actually measure, what they can't, and the one I keep going back to.
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The Cost of Being Indispensable.
The leader who keeps everything together through personal effort is running a unit whose capability lives in one person. An essay on the difference between being essential and producing the appearance of being essential.
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