Blog 24/ Why Naming the Moment Is a Scholarly Responsibility
We must honor the moment and be historians, in addition, to Educators and Scholars.
As educator-scholars, we are not only teachers of content or producers of research. We are also, at critical junctures, historians of the present. During periods of institutional stability, that role may recede quietly into the background. But during unforeseen and transitional moments, it becomes essential.
Higher education is currently navigating such a moment.
Across campuses, shifts are occurring that are not always formally announced, evenly explained, or consistently documented. Language changes. Structures soften. Commitments are reframed. Yet because these changes often unfold gradually rather than abruptly, they can evade immediate scrutiny. What feels diffuse or difficult to name in real time is often clarified only in hindsight—once consequences have already taken hold.
This is where scholarly responsibility enters.
In my own work, including the development of the Post-DEI Hollowing Phenomenon™, I have approached naming not as reaction, but as documentation—an effort to trace patterns students are already navigating in real time.
Naming a moment is not an act of activism. It is an act of documentation.
To name patterns as they emerge is not to assign blame or prescribe solutions. It is to recognize that lived experience, institutional behavior, and structural change are already interacting—whether or not they have been formally acknowledged. Scholars do not create these dynamics by observing them. We simply make visible what is already underway.
In times of transition, silence is often mistaken for neutrality. But silence, too, is a choice—one that allows dominant narratives to proceed unchecked while student experiences remain fragmented, individualized, or dismissed as anecdotal. When moments go unnamed, they are easily reframed later as isolated incidents rather than patterned shifts.
Educator-scholars have a particular ethical obligation here: not to rush interpretation, but to refuse erasure.
To document is to slow the moment down long enough to be examined. It is to preserve language for experiences that might otherwise be absorbed into institutional forgetting. It is to ensure that what students are living through is not rendered invisible simply because it is uncomfortable, politically fraught, or inconvenient to address.
This work requires restraint. Naming does not require spectacle. It does not demand immediacy. And it does not hinge on resolution. Its value lies in clarity—clarity that allows future analysis, accountability, and understanding to occur.
I write from this posture.
Not to react to change as it unfolds, but to record it carefully. Not to predict outcomes, but to trace contours. Not to speak over students, but to ensure their experiences are not lost to silence or delay.
In moments like these, scholarship does not rush ahead of history.
It stays with it.
And sometimes, that is the most responsible work we can do.
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Dr. Courtney Nicole Johnson
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