This essay reports on engaging academic and community partners whose positionalities spanned diverse lived experiences and power structures. Using groundwork from several literatures, we reflect on developing, nurturing, repairing, and expanding a container as a critically reflective space for experimenting with new ways of being and doing. A…

In 2023, the 118th Congress will reauthorize the federal Farm Bill, the primary legislation through which Congress supports the nation's system of land-grant colleges and universities for teaching, research, and cooperative extension, which supports local agriculture and the agricultural sciences. This report examines the contributions of and…

Peer observation of teaching (PoT) is a recognized evaluation tool. However, faculty concerns persist regarding bias, beneficial feedback, and lack of peer observer training. While faculty desire to provide quality and equitable reviews, many higher education faculty peers have little expertise in conducting observations and evaluations. This…

An important pre-condition to diversifying the workforce of land-grant extension services is access to qualified ethnic minority individuals with an awareness and interest in pursuing extension careers. This paper highlights an example of collaboration between the K-State Research and Extension office and an educational research program at Kansas…

This final brief of a three-part series explores Tennessee and its legislative attempts to curb underfunding. The first brief explored the national landscape of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) funding, including the historical disinvestment of land grant HBCUs. The second brief explored the systemic underfunding of HBCUs in…

The debate over the federal government's role in education has taken center stage in recent months, with many arguing that it is time to "hand education back to the states." While state control may sound appealing to some, this perspective overlooks the crucial role the federal government has played in establishing and protecting a…

Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs) are colleges and universities across the United States and U.S. Territories enrolling significant percentages of racially minoritized undergraduate students or created with the explicit purpose of serving specific populations of racially minoritized students under various programs created by U.S. Congress (U.S.…

In this chapter, a team of academic librarians offers strategies to address four common challenges instructors face when incorporating digital literacy into their courses.

How can digital art--based research counter Indigenous eradication and settler replacement enacted by land-grant universities (LGUs)? How can non-Indigenous settlers ethically engage in decolonizing work? With these questions, our art-based research project emerged from a spring 2021 Pennsylvania State University (PSU) graduate seminar, Land…

While employment rates and wages for college graduates are extraordinarily higher than for those without a college degree (NCES, 2023), underemployment remains a significant challenge for graduates unable to find positions that align with their skills and education levels. However, innovative career services strategies are helping institutions…

To handle wide-ranging reports and increasingly collaborative projects, our college research office developed and implemented a relational database. Department level tracking requests for research administration activities exceeded the capabilities of existing tools. Our desired solution aligned between multiple spreadsheets and cloud-based…

Land-grants, so called because the U.S. government donated federal land to each state to establish a university, were a brand new idea in 1862: higher education for everyday people focused on the practical subjects of agriculture and the mechanical arts, whose purpose was to improve the economic and cultural wellbeing of the people in their state.…

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are vital to higher education. Yet, many land-grant HBCUs have received lower levels of funding since their inception. While many state legislatures have targeted funding toward HBCUs in recent years, many institutions feel that the historic inequity must be remedied. This issue brief examines…

The purpose of this design case was to document rigorously the process and decisions made during the development of a five-day, pre-semester virtual orientation for International Graduation Teaching Assistants (IGTAs) and their domestic counterparts, teaching in an English as a Second Language Composition (ESLC) Program of a large land-grant…

In this 2023 NEA Special Salary issue, a post-pandemic look at faculty salaries in 2022. What was found, looking at federal data, is that U.S. faculty's purchasing power--that is the value of your salary, considering inflation--is at historical lows. All the gains that were made incrementally since the Great Recession of 2008 have evaporated in…