Interview with D-L Stewart, Ph.D. from the University of Denver on Racial Equity and Identity Development, Intersectionality, and the Experiences of and Unique Equity Issues Faced by Trans* Students

About D-L Stewart, Ph.D.: D-L Stewart (pronouns: he/they) is Professor and Chair of the Higher Education Department within the Morgridge College of Education at the University of Denver (DU). An acclaimed scholar of equity and social justice in education, Dr. Stewart’s work engages critically and historically with the experiences of Black and intersectionally minoritized students in higher education, with a focus on student development and identity formation. Their work examines the historical experiences of Black students at predominantly White universities in the post-World War II-era, the experiences of trans* students at predominantly cisgendered universities in the contemporary moment, and more, through a critical lens influenced by poststructuralism, critical theories of race, and intersectional thought.

Dr. Stewart is author of Black Collegians’ Experiences in U.S. Northern Private Colleges: A Narrative History, 1945-1965 and co-editor of several collected volumes and special journal issues, including Rethinking College Student Development Theory Using Critical Frameworks and Gender and Sexual Diversity in U.S. Higher Education: Contexts and Opportunities for LGBTQ College Students. Their publications have also appeared in leading education journals like the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Teachers College Record, and Equity and Excellence in Education.

Dr. Stewart has been recognized as a Senior Scholar by ACPA-College Student Educators International (ACPA), who have also honored him with a Contribution to Knowledge Award. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Denver, Dr. Stewart held roles as Professor in the School of Education at Colorado State University and in the College of Education and Human Development at Bowling Green State University. They earned their Ph.D. in Educational Administration and Higher Education from The Ohio State University, where they also received their M.A. in Higher Education and Student Affairs and taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor. Dr. Stewart received their B.A. in Sociology and Anthropology with a concentration in Economics from Kalamazoo College.

Editor’s Note: Following Dr. Stewart’s usage, this article places an asterisk next to the word trans* to denote a more expansive set of identities including, but not limited to, people who explicitly identify as transgender. As they write in their piece with Z Nicolazzo, “High Impact of [Whiteness] on Trans* Students in Postsecondary Education,” “Although there is contestation over how some people have misused the asterisk for exclusionary purposes, we use it throughout our article as a way to reflect the various ways in which trans* people may identify their genders, including in ways that do not rely on the prefix trans- or the word transgender.”

Interview Questions

[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] May we begin with an overview of your academic and professional background? How did you become invested in working to advance equity in higher education and come to focus your research on both the history of race in higher education and issues related to student development and identity formation among minoritized students, especially Black and trans* college students?

[Dr. D-L Stewart] I completed my Bachelor’s degree at Kalamazoo College, which is a small, private liberal arts institution in Michigan that was founded in 1833. That will become relevant in our discussion. As an undergraduate, I eventually decided to major in sociology and anthropology, and I did a concentration in economics. Kalamazoo College is a historically and predominantly White institution. The Black student population on campus was very small. At the time, Kalamazoo had around 1,200 students. My entering class had 10-or-so Black students, which doubled the number of Black students on campus. Other students of color were also not very well represented by any stretch of the imagination.

Because of that, my undergraduate experience was very much tainted by issues of race and racism that created a hostile campus climate. I started college in 1991. My first year in college featured the Rodney King Trial. The verdicts that came down, especially out of Simi Valley, ignited a lot of controversy and debate on campus. There was a letter, which was signed by a Ku Klux Klan chapter, that somehow, without a return address or stamp, was sent to the mailbox of the Black student who was president of our Black Student Organization at the time. Not the organization’s mailbox. It was sent to her personal mailbox.

That was the start of my college career. I was president of the Black Student Organization a couple of different times during my four years at Kalamazoo. I was president when we worked to finalize the establishment of the Umoja House, which was a living learning community for students interested in African and African American issues. That was a fight. There was lots of controversy around that, including claims of self-segregation.

Yet, in living in the Umoja House with other students, most of whom identified as Black, we had one White student in the house at one point, there was a noticeable shift in our experience of what it meant to be Black on campus because we had this space to come back to. That experience ignited my interest in the issues related to race in higher education and student development and identity formation in that context.

After I graduated from Kalamazoo, I went into a full-time professional role in student affairs at Kenyon College, which was another historically White, private liberal arts institution. I worked as a program coordinator in multicultural affairs. Working with students of color in that context helped me recognize the need for an intersectional perspective. We had Black students who were also queer, for instance, come to our office and tell us, “Y’all are not showing up and demonstrating support as an office for queer and trans* students on campus, or for Black queer and trans* students on campus. We are still also Black students.” I felt the need to respond to that in visible and tangible ways.

I only stayed at Kenyon for a year because I realized I was not going to advance as I wanted to without a graduate degree. I also started thinking about what it was I wanted to do and what kind of impact I wanted to have. I was drawn to research, scholarship, writing, and publication, and thought about bell hooks and Cornel West as role models of what my career could look like in academic spaces. I went to The Ohio State University to get my Master’s degree in Higher Education and Student Affairs, and then I continued on for my Ph.D. in Educational Administration and Higher Education, which has since been restructured to be Higher Education and Student Affairs.

I completed that final degree in 2001 and then went into faculty roles, the first one being at Ohio State. There, I was a visiting assistant professor before moving into a tenure-track role for three years at Ohio University. After that, I moved to Bowling Green State University for 12 years. That was where I went through the ranks and received tenure. I left Bowling Green in 2017 as a tenured full professor to move here, to Colorado. I was at Colorado State University initially for four years, and now this is my third year at the University of Denver. That has been my academic and career trajectory.

My focus on issues of race and racial identity development began with my dissertation, which was focused on the multiple socio-cultural identities of Black students in institutions like where I went to undergrad. My concern and interest in those issues is founded in my own undergraduate experience.

My dissertation is dedicated, in part, to what we called the Nappy Hair Club. We were a crew of Black women deeply engaged with issues around race and racism. We were trying to push back and address the hostile campus climate. We really made it possible, I think, for one another to finish Kalamazoo. The importance of peer relationships to supporting identity development and college persistence — I lived that. I wanted to examine to what extent that happens for other Black students while thinking about the intersectionality of race, gender, and spirituality, which was another emphasis of my scholarship.

[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] Would you introduce us to how you define equity in your work? Are there important ways your critical and intersectional approach, which you advance in a variety of publications including your co-edited book, Rethinking College Student Development Theory Using Critical Frameworks, changes how we think about educational equity, diversity, and inclusion?

[Dr. D-L Stewart] I have written about how I understand equity and justice as twins, in contrast to diversity and inclusion. I explore this, first, in an Inside Higher Education essay from 2017, titled “Language of Appeasement.” Later, I published articles digging into the policy implications of the framework I presented in that first essay, like an article called “Minding the Gap Between Diversity and Institutional Transformation: Eight Proposals for Enacting Institutional Change,” which I published in Teachers College Record.

I feel like diversity and inclusion have become something very different from what was intended by the cultural workers in colleges and universities who introduced these concepts in the 1970s and 1980s, often through the language of multiculturalism. Today, diversity refers primarily to compositional diversity: it is about how many diverse bodies an organization or institution can claim it has. Then, we have models of inclusion that say, “All voices should be included, regardless of what kind of harm they may do to other groups on campus.”

Juxtaposed against diversity and inclusion, equity and justice are not just questions of who you have around the table. They ask who cannot get into the room and who at the table is constantly under threat of being kicked out. It is critical that we recognize the instability of “inclusion” and that the very presence of minoritized individuals and communities in the very conversations meant to foster and advance institutional transformation is tentative and fragile.

I think about equity from a lens focused on structures and systems. Equity and justice attack the oppressive nature of institutional systems and structures, not the superficial cosmetics of a campus. They lead us to ask questions about what conditions we have created that maintain certain groups as the majority. Why are we still a hyper-White institution? That has to do with systems and structures, not simply recruitment and retention initiatives. Those efforts are all well and good, but they are undermined when the systems and structures that those initiatives are built on top of are actually not being transformed.

My work on equity also centers issues of safety and harm. I think about humanity and dignity as being essential to the conversation around equity and justice. Looking at equity and justice means addressing those who are most vulnerable with the status quo staying the way it is. That is not an “oppression Olympics approach,” which implies a person’s oppression is more important than someone else’s. Instead, it means recognizing that there are some people even within minoritized groups who are made more vulnerable to certain policies and practices. We cannot understand that unless we adopt an intersectional perspective.

With respect to myself, we could have a conversation that began and ended with listing my identities as Black, queer, trans*, disabled, and being a member of a minoritized religious group. We could end the conversation right there. But that would overlook the way that the multiple sociocultural identities that I hold interact with multiple systems and structures of oppression and therefore impact me differently than someone who might hold some similar identities to my own but not others, or who may hold a mixture of dominant and non-dominant identities.

We also have to recognize, when we think about vulnerability, that I am not equally vulnerable to institutional systems and oppression in the academy, even around race and racism, because I am a tenured full professor and a department chair. I do not get to entirely escape the individual impacts of racism on me within the academy by any stretch of the imagination, but I am not the most vulnerable person when we think about these things. Someone who is in their early career, pre-tenure, or a faculty member who is not on the tenure track is much more vulnerable to the ways that institutional racism shows up against faculty of color than I am. That is what I mean when I talk about recognizing greater and lesser degrees of vulnerability across minoritized groups.

This is why equity and intersectionality must work together in order to have the necessary conversations about transforming institutions toward justice. We cannot have those conversations if we are not willing to deal with systems and structures, if we are not willing to deal with issues of harm and safety in a way that acknowledges how institutions create harm, and if we are not willing to have conversations about all of that through an intersectional lens.

[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] One focus of your research is on the history of race and higher education, and in particular the narrative of Black college students at historically White colleges in the U.S. from 1945-1965. Could you discuss what drew your attention to the racial politics of education during this period, and how your work on educational history informs the critiques you have made of academic equity initiatives in pieces like, “Twisted at the Roots: The Intransigence of Inequality in U.S. Higher Education,” and “An Inconvenient Truth about ‘Progress’: An Analysis of the Promises and Perils of Research on Campus Diversity Initiatives”?

[Dr. D-L Stewart] I have always had an interest in the history and philosophy of higher education writ large. I did not study history formally, but I think history matters. I very much ascribe to the Akan concept of Sankofa: that it is important and necessary to reach back in order to move forward. You have to know your history if you are going to understand the present and shape a different future.

Again, we come back to my college experience in the first half of the 1990s. As I was studying a consortium of private, historically White liberal arts colleges in the Great Lakes area called the Great Lakes Colleges Association, I realized that places like Kalamazoo and Kenyon, for instance, matriculated their first Black domestic or Black African students around the turn of the 20th century. This is in contrast to, for example, the University of Alabama, whose first Black student did not arrive until the 1960s. At the same time, it is important to also recognize that the racial politics of the Midwest were not great. These were not utopic places to be a Black person.

I was interested in the particular 20-year time span from the end of World War II to the height of the Civil Rights Movement because this was the era in higher education history where we began to see the massification of higher ed. We saw an extreme increase in the number of students going to college through the GI Bill and other government financial aid programs that began during this era. I found all of this very compelling, and I wanted to understand what was happening with these Black students then. How many Black students attended these particular institutions? What were their experiences like? How was it the same or different from Black students’ experiences since that period?

There was other historical research on Black students in this timeframe, but almost all of it was on public universities. There was also a large corpus of scholarship that exploded in the 1970s and the 1980s looking at conditions for Black students since 1965, which continues today. A gap existed in the research, both in terms of institutional type and in terms of time frame. I found that compelling as well.

An “Inconvenient Truth about ‘Progress’” and “Twisted at the Roots” were aimed at interrogating the idea that we have made real progress when it comes to racial equity on college campuses. We know at the very beginning of higher education that colleges and universities were built and designed for upper middle class, wealthy, White men who were Christian. We know it was not great, to put it lightly, to hold any non-dominant identity or combination of identities during colonial higher education.

We know that things were not great as we continued through African enslavement in this country, the Civil War era, and the Reconstruction period. We know about the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, whose first chapter was founded in the Midwest, in Skokie, Illinois: in the “North” where things were supposed to be better. There is a whole dialogue about the North versus the South dynamic with respect to racism that positions the North as some better place than the South. One of my participants who went to one of the colleges in Indiana talked about the ways that Indiana was referred to as “Up-South.” It may have been in the North, but it still had the same racial politics as the South, so it was just “Up-South.” There is really no difference there. As we trace all the way through, we get to this middle period in the 20th century when things are still not great.

For these pieces, I talked to Black students who were alumni of these institutions. I also had the opportunity with Antioch College to read senior papers that were written at that moment in time and were stored in their archives. In these papers, the students wrote about their experiences, looking back as seniors across the whole of their time at Antioch. There were about 27 papers representing different Antioch alumni and others representing alumni from different institutions. All of them expressed, to a greater or lesser degree, difficulty in having to deal with racism and racial hostility from students, from faculty, from staff, and from the local community.

When we fast-forward to the Civil Rights Era at its nadir in the 1960s, we see protests and uprisings on campuses, demands for cultural centers to be instituted, demands for ethnic studies degrees to be made available, and demands for the recruitment of more faculty, staff, and students of color. We see solidarity between Black student movements, Indigenous student movements, Chicano student movements, Asian student movements, and more. All of this comes together in this period between the late 1960s and the 1980s, and we know things were terrible on campus for these folks during that time. Then we look at the scholarship from the 1980s forward, and things are still terrible. There has really not been progress in the way that the dominant narratives about higher education would want us to believe.

To return to the contrast between a diversity and inclusion and an equity and justice framework, when you look at things from just a diversity and inclusion framework, you can claim there has been all of this progress. There are so many more Black students in historically White institutions now than there were 60 years ago. That is quantitatively true. But they are actually not having significantly better experiences now than they did 60 years ago, than they did 80 years ago, than they did 125 years ago.

Now we have the existence of ethnic studies majors and minors and a relatively minor increase in faculty of color on these campuses. But we also see backlash and retrenchment in attacks, for example, in bans on curriculum and DEI policies and in the overturning of Affirmative Action. This equates to the reversal of access to higher education for students of color, particularly Black, Latinx, and American Indian, Native, and Indigenous students.

Given all of this, if we look at compositional diversity, we can have a conversation about progress. But if we look at institutional systems and structures, we cannot have a conversation about progress, because there has not been any.

[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] Your work has also focused on the experiences of, and unique inequities faced by, trans* students in higher education. Would you discuss how, as you argue in “High Impact of [Whiteness] on Trans* Students in Postsecondary Education,” higher education enacts trans* oppression, and perhaps address how trans* students are, or are not, represented in higher education equity initiatives?

[Dr. D-L Stewart] In that particular article, my co-author, Dr. Z Nicolazzo, and I were critiquing “high impact practices.” This phrase refers to a specific framework for promoting best practices with undergraduate students, particularly in terms of engagement, academic success, and retention. It is very much held up as a model of how institutions should function and the kinds of opportunities and resources that institutions should be providing for students. Our critique was not that these things should not be provided, but rather that neither the research nor how it is being implemented consider the ways that these practices have disparate impacts on access for certain groups of minoritized students.

Our article is focused on trans* students. We talk about a number of things, but one of the things that comes most immediately to mind is study abroad. Encouraging study abroad and having a rich set of study abroad programs is one high impact practice. However, when we think about trans* students and nonbinary students, being able to go abroad is not a simple thing, particularly if the name that you use does not match your legal documents in terms of passports. Trans* students cannot get a passport with their accurate names unless they go through all of these other legal and bureaucratic hoops that cost money and time.

Moreover, they may find themselves in a country that is not trans* affirming, or have limited options to only study abroad in countries that are trans* affirming and have public accommodations like all-gender bathrooms. When you are traveling as a trans* individual, having access to an all-gender bathroom is very important, considering educational experiences that are often required like day-long tours and taking classes in historic academic buildings. That is one example of how there is not an awareness or consciousness that, when you are pushing this “high impact” practice, you are not actually considering or engaging with how this practice impacts trans* students.

We talk about this in terms of “[Whiteness].” We put this term in brackets because we understand [Whiteness] to not just be about race. [Whiteness] is not about White people or even White racial identity, although race and racism is part of [Whiteness]. We also understand that [Whiteness] subsumes and is composed of other systems of normativity as well, including gender, sexuality, ableism or disability, and more. Classism is also significant, as is religious or faith-based exclusion. When we use the term [Whiteness], we are trying to use the brackets to indicate, as much as we can with the limited options on a keyboard, that [Whiteness] is a container for many things, and not just race.

[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] You are making the argument that if we take “high impact practices” designed for people with dominant identities — people more aligned with “[Whiteness]” — and superimpose those best practices onto people who hold minoritized identities, they may cause harm instead of producing equity. Could you expand on how this affects trans* students and students with non-dominant gender identities in particular?

[Dr. D-L Stewart] There is very little attention paid to actually providing equity for trans* students, faculty, or other employees on campus. We see more inclusive policies around bathrooms and locker rooms. Universities make sure there is a way for someone to add their pronouns to the human resources system. These things matter, but, returning to our discussion about diversity as compared to equity, they are largely cosmetic and compositional changes. They are not about the systems and structures that disparately impact trans* folks on campus.

For example, our institution conducted a pay equity audit, which many institutions are doing now, as they should. The two factors that came out of the audit were in the areas of race and gender. Now, they did not mean a trans*-inclusive gender. They meant sex on the binary (males and females) with the supposition that sex equates to gender (“men” and “women”). Trans* folks were, as they often are, left out of that conversation around pay equity, which meant that individuals of color who are trans* were left out of the conversation as well.

The excuse often is, “Well, we don’t have the data to know. We don’t know who trans* people are on campus.” That is increasingly becoming untrue as institutions add things into HR data systems that allow people to express that they self-identify as a gender beyond the binary. You actually can find this out. The other excuse is, “We can’t show the data for trans* and non-binary people because it would violate the anonymity of the survey.” This is an important concern, but the solution cannot be that we are just not going to talk about them at all. That is not an adequate answer if you say you are concerned, for example, with campus climate for minoritized folks on campus. That includes trans* and non-binary people.

[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] In addition to your role as Professor, you are Chair of the Higher Education Department within the Morgridge College of Education. Would you discuss your work as Chair and how it is informed by your research and your critical approach to higher education?

[Dr. D-L Stewart] When I consider my role as Department Chair, I think about what my sphere of influence is. I have a sphere of influence within my own department as a leader in that space. I also sit on our college leadership team. Within my spheres of influence, I am able to stoke conversations and direct or redirect conversations to be more grounded in equity concerns and justice concerns, rather than just diversity and inclusion matters. As I serve on campus committees, that is also a lens that I can bring into another sphere of influence.

My department is a small department; there are only five other faculty beside me. Nevertheless, our department happens to be composed, according to the traditional metrics of diversity and social identity, entirely of minoritized faculty. Our equity issues are not necessarily about race, gender, or sexuality, but could pop up in differences of faculty experience. We have tenure-line faculty and we have faculty that are not tenure line, and there are differences there. There are differences in terms of parenting status, including the age of their children, which have implications for department policy and practice, particularly around course scheduling. That is an issue that we are making sure that we address equitably right now.

In this department, then, my consciousness around equity becomes not just about the traditional metrics that people look at, but also thinking more broadly about the multiple kinds of ways folks can be disparately impacted by structures and policy, even within a group that, from the outside, looks great in terms of issues of diversity and inclusion. This does not inherently equate to equity and justice. You are not inoculated from acting in inequitable ways simply because you are a person with a minoritized identity.

[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] You are co-editor of the special issue of the Journal of College Student Development, entitled “Race, Indigeneity, and Relationship in Student Affairs and Higher Education.” Would you provide us with some background on this special issue and explore why Indigenous and critical colonial perspectives provide such a vital supplement to current DEI initiatives?

[Dr. D-L Stewart] There is no structure called post-secondary education in the United States without settler colonialism. The earliest institutions of higher education, which include Harvard, Yale, Princeton, what is now called Rutgers, and the University of Pennsylvania are sometimes called the “colonial nine” because they were all established before the official founding of the United States.

There are no institutions of higher education without the forced removal and genocide of Indigenous peoples on these lands. We are having only a partial conversation about equity and justice, and even diversity and inclusion, if we do not actually engage that fact. This is not just historical. It is ongoing. Higher education institutions are still occupying Indigenous land. We are still practicing settler colonialism through the systems and structures of higher education in what is now the United States. That is the most fundamental reason why Indigenous, decolonial, and anti-colonial perspectives matter.

I think it is important to acknowledge I am participating in this conversation as someone who is not Indigenous, but a second critical thing that I have come to understand from Indigenous friends and colleagues is that Indigeneity and race are not synonymous. Indigenous people are not a racial group, although they have been racialized. When we think about the 562 tribes and nations federally recognized by the United States, as well as those who are not recognized, these are sovereign peoples. They are sovereign nations that are occupied by a settler-colonial government.

The special issue is an expansive volume that explores the intersection of race and Indigeneity with multiple other social identities and its implications for issues of student affairs practice. For example, there is an article by LaWanda W. M. Ward [“A TribalCrit Sensibility Toward Critical Conscious Legal Literacy: Engaging ACPA’s Framework for Racial Justice and Decolonization”], which looks at legal literacy for student affairs professionals from an Indigenous, critical consciousness standpoint. I would argue we do not often think about legal literacy from the lens of Indigenous ways of knowing.

There is an article in this issue by Eileen Galvez and Susan M. Muñoz [“(Re)Imagining Anti-Colonial Notions of Ethics in Research and Practice”] that concerns thinking about research ethics from a lens that goes beyond the minimal requirements of an IRB review.

There is Juan Carlos Garibay, Christian West, and Christopher Mathis’ article, “‘It Affects Me in Ways That I Don’t Even Realize’: A Preliminary Study on Black Student Responses to a University’s Enslavement History,” which explores how Black students having knowledge about an institution’s involvement in enslavement impacts their sense of belonging on campus and their perception of the campus climate. T.J. Jourian and Laila McCloud contributed, “‘I Don’t Know Where I Stand”: Black Trans Masculine Students’ Re/De/Constructions of Black Masculinity.”

We were able to have some beautiful, expansive conversations about the issues and themes of race, Indigeneity, and relationships. Especially because of the work of my co-editor, Stephanie Waterman (Onondaga, Turtle Clan, Onondaga Nation), we were able to construct something I think is truly special and makes a much-needed contribution to our discussions around equity.

[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] Based on your research and leadership experience, do you have advice you would give to scholars, practitioners, or administrators seeking to advance educational equity in their own institutions?

[Dr. D-L Stewart] In la paperson’s work, A Third University is Possible, part of the argument is that it is possible to have institutions of higher education that are grounded in decolonial, anti-colonial, and anti-racist frameworks and foundations. Moreover, there are pockets of that already emerging within the university as a system, as well as within individual institutions. How can we tap into, expand, and multiply those pockets of resistance and activity? This is the first thing I would urge those invested in equity to consider.

Second, I would recommend that you think about your sphere of influence. Do not presume that you have no influence because you are not in senior leadership at an institution. You do not have to be. Where can you create change and move in different kinds of directions? Who is within that sphere of influence, and how do you work with them to create greater equity?

My third recommendation, which is perhaps dangerous, is that there is value and necessity in not relying on institutions to do all the work or to be the primary promoters or engines of equity work. Institutions are very good at recreating themselves. Relying on institutional agents and bodies is not a recipe for progress or transformation. They have a role to play, absolutely, but waiting for them to take the lead on these things is, I think, a critical error.

To go back to la paperson’s point about there already being pockets of the “third university” happening within current institutional structures, you do not need institutional leadership to create those spaces. In fact, it may have been better or easier to create those spaces without the involvement of institutional leadership. At the same time, I say this is dangerous because saying you are divesting from institutions as the primary engines of change can be extremely risky within the traditional, leadership-centered frameworks we have for pursuing equity. Certainly not everyone has the privilege to practice divestment in the same ways.

Thank you, Dr. Stewart, for discussing your impactful research on minoritized students’ experiences in higher education, the history of (in)equity in academia, and the importance of intersectional thought to your scholarship and leadership!

About the Author: Ben Clancy (they/them) is an academic and creative living in Chicago, IL. As an interviewer, Ben has had the honor of speaking with leading and emerging voices in the fields of communication, education, and beyond. They are a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication at UNC Chapel Hill, a former Research Fellow for the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life, and an alum of the Vermont Studio Center poetry residency. Ben holds an M.A. in Communication Studies from Texas State University, and a B.A. in English and Philosophy from Trinity University.