Education Week - January 16, 2019 - 32

WHEN DID EDU-SCHOLARS EARN THEIR HIGHEST DEGREE?
■ TOP 10 RHSU

The 1970s was the top decade in which the 10 highest-ranked
Edu-Scholars completed graduate school. The 2000s was the
most common decade for the full 200 scholars.

■ OVERALL RHSU LIST

40
30
20

16
10%

HIGHEST
DEGREE
OBTAINED

10

7

1960s

1970s

30

28

1980s

10

1990s

2000s
SOURCE: Education Week Research Center analysis of
RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, 2019

The Making of a Public Scholar

O

By Roberto G. Gonzales
n Sept. 5, 2017, U.S.
Attorney General Jeff
Sessions announced
the termination of
the Deferred Action
for Childhood Arrivals program, a policy
providing temporary
protections to undocumented immigrants
who arrived in this country as children.
In the wake of the announcement, many
wondered how these young people would
navigate post-DACA lives. I had been studying DACA and its impacts on young adult
beneficiaries since the program's inception
and had generated a significant amount of
relevant data.
Over the next several months, I spent
much of my time responding to inquiries
about the program's termination and what
it would mean for the young beneficiaries
and their families. During that September alone, I spoke to 31 reporters. In the
months that followed, I provided expert
testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote declarations for legal actions, penned op-eds, and advised my
university's administration. I briefed
elected officials, foundation officers, university presidents, school leaders, teachers, counselors, and social workers. For
nearly a year, my academic productivity
slowed down significantly. But my studies
and my ideas were centrally shaping the
public debate.

I am now at the stage of my career where
I am comfortable being a public scholar. I
have been very fortunate to find diverse
outlets for my work, and my research
has provided me an evidence base that is
sought after by a varied group of national
and local actors-policymakers, community
and school leaders, and practitioners. But in
my early years in academia I struggled to
find my voice as a public scholar.
Prior to my academic career, I was a
youth organizer in an immigrant community in Chicago. In that role, I lived in the
neighborhood, and I was embedded in community life. That experience fundamentally
shaped my political orientation.
After more than a decade in Chicago, I
made a difficult decision to trade activism
for training as a social scientist. The early
years of graduate school were challenging,
as I reoriented myself to engage the world
around me from the perch of a scholar. As
I worked to find my voice in academia, my
field research placed me in communities,
schools, and social spaces of young people
who lacked citizenship-environments
not too different from my community in
Chicago. Meanwhile, the circumstances of
undocumented young people were increasingly made worse by policy, an observation
I had empirical evidence to support.
But I worried that I was not doing it
right. I was putting my training into practice and growing as a scholar. Yet I still felt
a strong inclination to advocate for my respondents and those like them.
I needed advice. I scheduled an appoint-

32 | EDUCATION WEEK | January 16, 2019 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary

ment with my adviser, Rubén Rumbaut,
an internationally renowned expert on immigration. He had been researching immigrant communities for several decades and
was a central figure in American sociology.
If anyone could set me right, it was he.
I confessed to him that I was having difficulty maintaining an objective distance,
that I was affected by what I felt was an
injustice, and I wanted to fix it. I expected
him to lecture me on the need to avoid
these kinds of traps. His reply was an emphatic: "Good!"
He explained to me that these trajectories need not be mutually exclusive. Doing
good scholarship and having a public voice
could go hand-in-hand. The key to this, he
told me, was to produce methodologically
rigorous, theoretically compelling, and empirically driven work that met the highest
standards of the discipline. If I could do
this, I would have a solid foundation from
which to establish myself as an expert and
leverage my expertise to inform the public
debate.
Rubén's advice and validation buoyed
my efforts through graduate school and
served as a guide for how I would conduct
myself as a scholar. It has also shaped
my career and influenced how I mentor
younger scholars. While I remain critical of
policies that negatively impact immigrant
students, I now have a body of work that
allows me to respond expertly. ■
ROBERTO G. GONZALES is a professor of education
at Harvard University.

"

In my early years in
academia I struggled
to find my voice as a
public scholar."
http://www.edweek.org/go/commentary
Education Week - January 16, 2019

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