Culture and Credibility: Negotiating Pacific Islander Heritage in Western Higher Education Administration

• In Event: Indigenous Language and Cultural Revitalization and the Power of Educational Research

Abstract

Pacific Islanders are underrepresented in U.S. higher education in terms of student participation and completion, faculty and staff representation, and especially senior administration. This autoethnographic reflection of a Native Hawaiian administrator informs and reimagines long held notions of academic and administrative credibility against a context of Pacific heritage. The reflections, which emerged from a larger study on the experiences of senior administrators of color, suggest that traditional views of western administrative credibility create a collective institutional deficiency in understanding the narrative and richness of pacific heritages and therefore, devalue pacific cultural approaches to administration. Grounded in Critical Race Theory, this study explicitly centers the voice of the only Pacific Islander senior administrator in his state’s public system of higher education.

Author

• Kyle Reyes, Utah Valley University