Imagining Prestige: Problematizing and Reimagining Different Possibilities for Higher Education

• In Event: Imagining Excellence: Examining, Predicting, and Projecting the Future of Prestige in Higher Education

Abstract

The contributions of this analysis will be broken out into two parts during the symposium, but articulated within one narrative for the paper. The focus here is to first problematize prestige through an explicit justice-centered lens. In sum, prestige and the way it is conceptualized and pursued in higher education has always been problematic for communities of color and the institutions that serve them. With the veneration of elite, ivy league, research-centered or liberal arts institutions within pastoral settings (Riesman, 1956; Thelin, 1990), these institutions’ exclusionary histories produced a vision of prestige emulated across generations that has been embedded into policies, practices, belief systems, and sensemaking in higher education with harmful implications on access for students of color and those from low-income communities, and community-centered missions and research, resulting in diminished access, irresponsible spending, and negative campus environments for people of color (e.g., Doran, 2015; Gonzales, 2014; McClure & Titus, 2019; Orphan, 2018; Zerquera, 2019). Alongside the untenability of standard prestige approaches–which rely on measures currently being reshaped amidst recent higher education upheavals (e.g., Elliot et al., 2024; Esaki-Smith, 2024; McNair, 2024)--there is a critical need for not just a shifting in how prestige is measured and considered, but a radical transformation in how we conceptualize and engage with prestige altogether.

Centering institutions and contexts often excluded from conceptualizations of prestige provides an opportunity to reimagine prestige in higher education differently. I draw from the concept of imagination as a guiding conceptual and analytical framework for analyzing the perspectives from the other panel sessions. In her book, Benjamin (2024) shows how imagination is constrained via oppression and must be liberated for a more just future. She argues that our ability to address injustice is constrained by the dominant imaginaries that shape society: “We are in many ways trapped inside the locksided imagination of those who monopolize power and resources to benefit the few at the expense of the many.” Based in her text I capture the proposed framework through a series of reflections that seek to push our collective imaginations:


1. What are the imaginaries and whose imaginations have we been entrapped by? What have been the implications of this entrapment? How has injustice been perpetuated? What ways have these imaginaries been maintained through cultural stories, norms, and institutionalized processes?
2. Who are you beyond the old stories within the dominant imaginary? What will you need to leave behind to reimagine yourself?
3. How have we internalized the imaginaries perpetuated by dominant, oppressive frames? Who has paid the cost of this misstep? How have social hierarchies within and across institutions been naturalized, and what has been our role in this process?
4. Where have our experiments to break out been crushed? What did we learn? What and how have we abandoned efforts? What must be held onto?

The final paper and session content will draw out a collective reenvisioning of prestige for the study and application to higher education based on the conceptual and empirical contributions of the other panelists.

Author

• Desiree Zerquera, University of San Francisco