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As a burgeoning scholar-practitioner in our field of institutional assimilation and veiled dominance, it is my “truth” that makes me critical of, indebted to, and excluded from an influential system inseparable from the advancement of humanity; I’ve come to learn that Western formations of formal education contemporarily erases, praises, tokenizes, and prizes specific identities in congruence with the colonial project from which it was birthed.

So how does one lead from a socially just framework from within such a model? For as cited by Welton, Owens, & Zamani-Gallaher (2018): systems of formal education are called institutions for a reason. Designed to not only outlast any given agent of social change, but also to perpetually foster the implicit curricula of social identity-based marginalization, comprehensive equity-based action as it intersects with educational leadership remains a myth to be seen.

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To illustrate: social justice leadership - when analyzed against Sergiovanni's (2000) exploration of the Servant Leadership style championed to be one of the better styles of leadership engagement - presents an unavoidable dilemma in contexts of higher education.

With one of the major tenets of Servant Leadership (as outlined by Sergiovanni) maintaining that an effective servant leader operates "with the values and ideas that help shape the school as a covenantal community" (pg. 274), utilization of equity-based administration are minimal at best.

A majority of institutions of higher education have a set of rights and responsibilities (i.e. Student Code, Honor System, Community Agreements, etc.) faculty, students, and staff are held to once they become members of a particular academic environ. Should someone violate the doctrines of the campus community, educational or terminal sanctioning tends to follow.

Yet - what happens when the sanctioning process fails or refuses to account for pre-existing disparities under the guise of egalitarian "fairness?" Will the student of color dismissed during their collegiate career for being found responsible for violating community standards recover from a formal separation from the university, along the same lines or at the same rate as their White peers? And what of Sergiovanni's exploration of empowerment as another core tenet of Servant Leadership: how well received will a leader of social justice be in empowering students to be affirmed along the lines of Queer identities in educational environments governed by ingrained sexual/gendered phobias and heteronormativity?

How can one be a socially just servant leader, if social justice contradicts the ideologies of the educational community, in question?

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Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Sergiovanni, T. J. (2000). Leadership as stewardship. In M. Fullan (Ed.), In The Jossey-Bass reader on educational leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Shields, C.M. (2010). Transformative leadership: Working for equity in diverse contexts. Educational Administration Quarterly, 46, 558-589.

Welton, A. D., Owens, D. R., & Zamani-Gallaher, E. M. (2018). Anti-racist change: A conceptual framework for educational institutions to take systemic action. Teachers College Record, 120(14).

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“that education is not the ultimate lever for social transformation, but without it transformation cannot occur” - Freire (1998)

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“that education is not the ultimate lever for social transformation, but without it transformation cannot occur” - Freire (1998)