Oh academia... I had such innocent understandings of you in my younger years.
When I was 18 years old, I was fortunate enough to be awarded the Gates Millennium Scholarship. This funded my bachelors, master's, and doctoral degrees. Don't get it twisted though, I still walked out with a sizable amount of debt (USC is not cheap by any means).
Now, Mr. Gates designed the scholarship program to support low-income students that were well on their way to succeed in college, based on academic merit throughout their high school career. My dad had a GED and my mother had a high school diploma. They met, like many Native families, at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, KS. They fell in love and soon my mother was pregnant with my eldest sister Karla.
I enrolled in a tribally run boarding school for high school so I could take my self out of a toxic home environment and focus only on school. I knew my only way of pulling myself out of poverty was to get a degree.
Fast forward to 2015, when I was beginning to look for doctoral programs. I was looking at both Ph.D. and Ed.D. programs.
The more I researched the more I came to realize that there was a stark difference in the nature of the Ph.D. path and the Ed.D. The main questions I had to ask my self were:
Do I want to teach?
Do I want to do research?
Do I want to serve? (advisor, committees, etc.)
Funnily enough, my answer to all three of these questions was "Yes!" However... the more I learned about what the Ed.D. involved and what I could do with it, the more it appealed to me. See, you can do all three of the items I mentioned with either a Ph.D. or an Ed.D., but the Ph.D. puts an emphasis in their coursework in preparing the student for a research-based career. Not much else. At the time, I wasn't sure that was all I wanted to do, but the Ed.D. was designed for those that were practitioners in a specific field (most commonly within education) to hone in on their discipline and become more effective and efficient in their field. For me, this made the most sense. The idea of being a practitioner that has the option (not the obligation) to teach and research took a huge load off of my mind. I finally felt free! To be clear, I did have to write a dissertation. It may not have been over 300 pages, but it was a labor of love that cleared three Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), one of which was a tribal IRB at the university I was researching, and was approved by all three of my doctoral committee members.
My issue with the traditional route of going for the Ph.D. and searching for some amazing post-doc program, followed by an assistant professor-ship, then hoping and praying that it's tenured track was so daunting to me that I couldn't imagine myself doing it for the next decade of my life. I wanted to write, research, and serve on doctoral committees at my own leisure and not because I was being forced to by a tenure-track requirement.
In defense of my Ed.D. I have but one quote I want to pull out by Gordon Kirk, University of Edinburgh, "The Ph.D. is to understand the world, the Ed.D. is to change the world."
Now, some of you may be thinking (and yes I've heard this man times) that you want to pursue a Ph.D. program because you want to be taken serious and that the Ed.D. just isn't. Well after coming to my personal decision to take the Ed.D. route my thoughts on this is: the Ed.D. is only going to be seen as the 'sub-standard doctorate degree,' if we continue to perpetuate it as such. Many of us go into higher education and obtain graduate-level degrees in order to 'shake the system,' or to 'keep our white-allies in check' but we can't do that if we are all adhering to this idea of degree hierarchy and superiority.
If I can get on my soapbox once again, my hope is to write in a manner that I would like to write, on topics that I care about. I imagine I will publish peer-reviewed articles and write a book chapter in the future, but what alarms me most about the world of academia is that only the elite, or to be more specific the "most woke of the elite" are going to be the ones that find any article I write hidden somewhere in a JSTOR database or something similar. The platforms I plan to use going forward, (outside of my actual job) will be to talk about my story, my educational journey, and to highlight research done by those before me so that it's no longer tucked away in the depths of the ivory tower. It's really of no use to the average person there. And with the amount of people that come to Native American communities for research and dissertation projects, I, personally, would like to know what they were up to and how I can share this information with those that it actually effects.
And in that way, academia, my love, you have failed me once again, with your ridiculous limitations for professors, and your deeply embedded dimensions of hierarchy. And I am sure you will continue to do so. But I have no regrets and happily see higher education as my calling in life. Thank you reader for sticking it out with me, I appreciate each and everyone of you.
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