For the purpose of the Social Justice and Inclusion competency area, social justice is defined as both a process and a goal that includes the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to create learning environments that foster equitable participation of all groups and seeks to address issues of oppression, privilege, and power. This competency involves student affairs educators who have a sense of their own agency and social responsibility that includes others, their community, and the larger global context.

My social justice training began in earnest in my first graduate experience at the Boston University School of Theology (BU STH). There, I learned foundational concepts in critical race theory, post-colonialism, and intersectional feminism. As BU STH is the school that conferred Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s doctoral degree, I was required to read and write about Dr. King’s speeches and writings, and about the speeches and writings of his mentors, Howard Thurman and Mahatma Gandhi. The STH was the laboratory in which I began to recognize and actively root out racism from my heart. In class, students respectfully challenged each other’s thinking and encouraged one another to better integrate the moral and ethical concepts we were learning into other course material. On the student activities side, STH’s student group CAUSE Justice was the place where I learned about worker justice and immigrant justice. This included learning about the restorative justice process. In my final year at the STH, I served as the President of CAUSE Justice. My greatest accomplishment in this role occurred when my best friend and I presented free trainings on Intimate Partner Violence for future pastors, a population which represented the majority of the student body at the time. While I was at BU, I attended a church that was created specifically as a place for LGBTQ people to recover from injury caused by the Church. The friendships I formed with Queer friends there, and their stories of discrimination and assault, solidified my commitment to LGBT inclusion.

            After graduation, as I continued my involvement in local activism, I attended trainings to learn about social justice issues, including trainings and seminars on deconstructing white supremacy. As a white person, especially a person with white supremacy in my extended family, I especially recognize the urgency for me to identify the tools needed to dismantle systemic racism. While in my corporate job, I reflected on the best ways I could do this. I realized that part of my privilege as a white, straight, cisgender, educated person was having a job that taught me about the inner workings of medical school admissions. This knowledge gives me the ability to help others access power, status, and wealth. What would be the best way for me to use my knowledge to help others? My answer coalesced into a goal of working as an academic advisor. As I observed a number of students with poor admissions outcomes, the patterns I saw helped me realize that students with marginalized identities shoulder so many responsibilities and competing priorities. I saw how low expectations in their K-12 school systems resulted in difficulty with college-level coursework. While I can’t fix K-12 education in the U.S., I do have a skill set for helping students make the most of their college academic experience.

            It is striking to me that the ACPA-NASPA competency rubric for SJI focuses primarily on using institutional power to break down structural barriers. While I can certainly evaluate an institution’s systems for the perpetuation of systemic oppression, and I make it a regular practice to self-evaluate my own privilege and bias, I may not progress beyond the Foundational and few Intermediate aspects of this competency I have already mastered. I am not interested in advancing beyond positions that involve direct service in a student-facing role within academic advising. My definition of success is not wealth, prestige, or influence; it is encouraging as many students as possible and giving them the tools they need to succeed. This may mean I will not be planning departmental trainings or allocating institutional resources. As an advisor, my work to continue to grow in the SJI competency will be to engage in continuous growth in cultural competency and continuing to reflect upon my own privilege. I intend to continue participating in trainings, workshops, and direct actions (e.g., protests/pickets, phone banking) that increase my awareness of cultures that are not mine and cause to me to stop and think about my privilege. I also hope to use the knowledge I have gained and will continue to learn to “design programs and events that are inclusive, promote social consciousness and challenge current institutional, country, global, and sociopolitical systems of oppression,” an Intermediate-level skill. Being able to design inclusive and socially conscious is important to me.

            Advancement toward the other Intermediate and all Advanced mastery items would require advancement beyond the type of work I want to do, as they involve leading processes and responding to events on campus in an official capacity. I would be remiss if I did not challenge the structure of this ACPA-NASPA competency rubric, which appears to value holding power and using it wisely. That value in itself is an expression of privilege. Does it really require a more complex understanding of social justice concepts to apply them to the work of a student affairs executive, or just different from doing so at the entry level? What would it look like for the SJI competency rubric to address growth in dimensions of SJI for low-status employees? Perhaps the Advanced column would have items like “Participates in direct actions while balancing public role as a university employee” or “Advocates for culturally competent curricula within reporting lines.” Restructuring this CAS competency may be necessary to make it applicable to all levels of Higher Ed employees.