CFP: Critical Institutional Research: Analysis, Methods, Theories

Proposed Call for Proposals
Critical Institutional Research: Analysis, Methods, Theories

Association for Institutional Research Pre-conference Workshop
May 25/26, 2015, Denver, Colorado, USA

In spite of a long tradition of critical approaches to both the study and practice of education, institutional research is dominated by very much traditional approaches to inquiry. Positivism, behavioralism, managerialism, and rationalism remain key—and usually unexamined—substantive and methodological commitments in IR, and opportunities to pursue alternatives are limited by both the immediate demands of the decision-makers to whom IR professionals are accountable and the conflation of these values with scholarly rigor. Critical approaches to IR offer the opportunity to better understand and perhaps improve existing practice, to open new directions for inquiry, to broaden the groups represented in IR analyses, and when necessary to challenge problematic practices in IR and in higher education more broadly.


To address these issues, I propose that interested institutional researchers organize a mini-conference on critical approaches to institutional research as a pre-conference workshop at the Association for Institutional Research conference.

Opening Access to AIR's Research Publications

Many of you will have heard, by now, of the death of Aaron Swartz. He was, by all accounts, a technically brilliant man passionate about not just the technical but also the social aspects of the Internet. A firm believer in openness on the Internet, his prosecution was for an act of civil disobedience toward the American intellectual property regime: mass downloading of academic research from JSTOR. Swartz' death is thus leading many to demand that the journals through which we communicate abandon paywalls and adopt open-access policies.

Count me among them: Research in Higher Education, the research journal of the Association for Institutional Research, should adopt an open access model.

Why the AIR Nominees Should Join Twitter

I voted today in the officer elections for the Association for Institutional Research. AIR is the main professional organization in North America for the people who do reporting, business intelligence, and assessment for higher education—my professional colleagues. Like most such organizations it relies on its members to serve as officers, board members, and committee members to function. The slate of candidates seems quite capable. I don't know any of them personally, though I've connected with one virtually (more on that below). Certainly, I am grateful that they've volunteered their time to make a great organization work.

I have been a member of AIR for about a year, so I hardly know the players in institutional research. But as someone who is active in the AIR LinkedIn group and who follows a fair number of institutional researchers on Twitter, I expected to recognize at least some of the candidates. With the exception of Ellen Peters, who is also involved in the LinkedIn group, social media users are absent. So far as I can tell, none use Twitter. Not one of the candidate's statements mentioned AIR's social media use. And that's a problem.