Our Commitment

Academic Programs

The University of Denver’s Higher Education Department (DUHigherEd) engages in collective learning about the foundations of postsecondary institutions, structures, and systems across diverse educational pathways. Our scholarship is grounded in theory, praxis, and community engagement to address persistent and emergent postsecondary phenomena at the institutional, local, regional, tribal, state, and national levels.  

The DUHigherEd community is committed to: 

  • Teaching and mentoring educators and professionals who seek careers related to postsecondary contexts, such as administration, policy, teaching, and research, as well public and private agencies of higher education.  
  • Uplifting and celebrating the diverse knowledge bases held by communities historically and contemporarily excluded from higher education. 
  • Centering and generating consequential research, scholarship, and creative activities that addresses interlocking systems of oppression that perpetuate inequities and injustices influencing the ecology of higher education by informing policy, practice, and theory. 
  • Fostering a sense of accountability to build liberatory practices needed to disrupt and dismantle oppressive higher education policies. 
  • Engaging in critical self-reflexivity as part of an intergenerational, collective, and life-long (un)learning process.  
  • Serving and partnering with communities to build knowledge and enact policy and practice that dismantles systems of oppression. 

As a policy-aware and globally conscious department, we recognize that U.S.-based institutions of higher education are founded on ideologies of stolen land, bodies, and labor. We align our commitments to uplift critical scholars who name the ableism, genderism, genocide, heterosexism, homophobia, nativism, racism, settler colonialism, sexism, transphobia, and xenophobia continuously informing the operations of education.  

As a community of learners, we traverse the boundaries of valuing education as a human right, while understanding the complicated and problematic relationship higher education has with communities that continue to be systemically marginalized. DUHigherEd welcomes learners who seek to actualize a critical praxis for making meaningful contributions that shift the landscape of higher education.