SoTL in the States

Written by Jennifer Friberg-Fort

One day late last year, something happened that I didn’t expect. A scholar whose work had been published in a journal that I was affiliated with was writing to ask that their article be removed, not because of an error, not because the findings had held up poorly, but because their state had passed legislation restricting equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility (EDIA) work in higher education. Their published record, the one they had worked to build, now felt less like an asset and more like a vulnerability. They wanted it gone before their performance review.

This scholar wasn’t wrong to be worried. And that is what I keep coming back to. Over the past several years, a wave of state-level legislation has targeted EDIA-related work in public higher education. The specifics vary by state, but the broad strokes are consistent: restrictions on EDIA offices, limits on how diversity-related topics can be taught or researched, and in some cases, explicit language tying institutional funding or faculty evaluation to compliance. Numerous states have passed or advanced significant legislation along these lines, and more are in various stages of doing so.

For many faculty, the consequences have been immediate and practical. Programs have been restructured. Job titles have been changed. And scholars who have built research agendas around equity, inclusion, access, and related topics are now navigating a landscape where that work they believed in enough to publish may be used against them.

What This Means for SoTL

SoTL in the United States sits in an interesting position at the moment, and perhaps it’s not a comfortable one. A significant portion of SoTL scholarship is, at its core, about equity. Who gets to learn. Who is served well by our pedagogies and who isn’t. What it means to design courses and programs that actually work for the full range of students we teach. Much of this work doesn’t always wear the explicit label of “EDIA research.” Rather, it lives under terms like inclusive pedagogy, transparent teaching, access, and belonging. The constant is recognizable but in our politicized nation, so is the risk. 

The scholar who wrote to me wasn’t asking me to invalidate their research. The scholar was asking me to make it less findable. Less attributable to them. That request came from a very rational reading of their professional situation, and it raises a question that I don’t think our field has fully grappled with yet: what are we asking scholars to risk when we publish their work?

Most of the infrastructure of scholarly publishing (journals, repositories, indexing, citation) was built on the assumption that visibility is the reward. You do the work, you publish, the record stands, the field grows. Permanence was a feature, not a concern. For scholars operating under active legislative restriction, permanence looks different now.

What We Don’t Yet Know How to Do

Our field doesn’t have a good answer for how to respond in this moment, and I think we need to say that plainly. We don’t have established norms for what journal editors should do when a scholar requests retraction for reasons of professional safety rather than scholarly error. We don’t have clear guidance for how to support colleagues in restricted states who are trying to continue meaningful SoTL work without putting themselves at professional risk. We don’t have a shared language yet for what it means to sustain a community of inquiry when the conditions for inquiry are not equally available to everyone in the community. These are not rhetorical questions. They’re practical ones that people are navigating right now, largely alone.

I think about all the scholars we don’t hear from…the ones who quietly redirect their work, who don’t submit the study they planned, who frame their findings in language that doesn’t trigger scrutiny. We won’t know what didn’t get published. 

Context matters. Where you teach, the institution you’re embedded in and the region you call home shape the scholarship you’re able to do and the questions you’re able to ask. State-level legislation targeting EDIA work is context. It is reshaping who can do this work, how openly, and at what cost. And if this site is serious about studying difference across the landscape of American higher education, then this particular difference belongs in that conversation.