by Nancy Chick
In early 2023, I wrote about living and working in Florida in the wake of HB 7, commonly known as the Stop WOKE Act. Three years later, I live and work in Texas, and I brought the context with me. What felt like a regional crisis in 2023 has since spread—legislatively and culturally—in ways that make the argument I wrote then feel less like a warning and more like a chronicle.
That article, “Rereading SoTL: Toward New Beginnings” began as a simple act: I reread Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered. What I found there surprised me, not because it was new, but because it had been hiding in plain sight for over thirty years. Boyer’s central argument wasn’t simply that teaching constitutes scholarly work. It was that SoTL was necessary to meet what he called “today’s urgent academic and social mandates,” specifically the challenge of serving an increasingly diverse student body (Boyer 1990, 13). These weren’t footnotes. They were central to his thesis. And somehow, none of that made it into the story we tell.
I borrowed a lens from Toni Morrison to think about this gap. In her 1989 essay “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” she wrote that “invisible things are not necessarily ‘not-there’” (Morrison 1989, 11). The omission of Boyer’s equity argument from SoTL’s origin story wasn’t accidental. It was the result of choices—about what questions counted, whose urgencies mattered, what the field was “really” about.
Why It Matters More Now
The context I was writing about in 2023 has intensified in 2026 in ways I anticipated but still find staggering. Colleagues are quietly redirecting research agendas, changing language in abstracts, wondering what’s safe to put on a CV. Jen Friberg’s recent post about a scholar asking to have their published article removed—not for scholarly error, but for professional survival—is a document of exactly what I was afraid of when I wrote “Rereading SoTL.”
My argument in the article wasn’t that we need to add diversity as a new priority to SoTL. It was that we need to recognize it as SoTL’s founding priority, one we’ve been underreading all along. Let’s start telling a more complete version of the story we’ve always had. The gap between what Boyer called for in 1990 and what our current context allows has never been more visible—or more impossible to ignore I hope this rereading offers some grounding for our work ahead.
References
Boyer, Ernest. L. 1990. Scholarship Reconsidered: The Priorities of the Professoriate. Carnegie Academy for the Advancement of Teaching.
Chick, Nancy. L. 2023. “Rereading SoTL: Toward New Beginnings.” Innovative Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-023-09679-0
Morrison, Toni. 1989. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (1): 1–34.
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