Essays by Dr. Donald Easton-Brooks
On education, leadership, and the cultural context of knowledge.
Signed essays on the research, on leading higher education, and on the questions behind The Cultural Context of Knowledge podcast.
All essays.
Newest first · Use the filter above to sort by kindLifting as We Lead: A Preview.
A preview of a forthcoming chapter on Black male deans mentoring Black male faculty — the benefits, the structural costs, and what the institution's reliance on a small number of people reveals about how leadership development is organized in higher education.
Leadership Without Stability.
Thirty years of watching institutions has taught me that what the conventional account calls stability is better understood as the temporary absence of disruption. An essay on leading higher education when the ground does not sit still.
The Other Half of Brown.
Integration happened to the students. It did not happen to the teaching profession. A companion essay on the history of Black teacher displacement after Brown v. Board, and the ethnic-matching research it set in motion.
When the Lens Turns.
San Francisco State in 1968, the California Gold Rush, and ethnic studies as a method rather than a position — the written version of the argument the episode had fourteen minutes to hold.
Purpose That Actually Works.
A purpose statement that can be recited is not the same as one that can resolve a trade-off. An essay on what operational purpose has to do to function under pressure, and why most mission statements do not.
Ethnic Matching Beyond the Classroom.
The matching research has begun to extend from K-12 classrooms into college transitions, faculty-student mentoring, and academic leadership. An essay on what three recent extensions are telling us about the construct, and why the policy response will have to extend with them.
AI Should Compress Time, Not Development.
Episode 1 let NotebookLM narrate a set of writings about learning; Episode 2 I told them myself. The written extension of that second telling — on struggle, Bloom, what LLMs actually do, the cultural context they inherit, and why AI should compress time without compressing development.
How do you actually measure belonging in a classroom? A note on methods.
The word shows up in every grant proposal and half the conference titles. Here is what the instruments actually measure, what they can't, and the one I keep going back to.
The Cost of Being Indispensable.
The leader who keeps everything together through personal effort is running a unit whose capability lives in one person. An essay on the difference between being essential and producing the appearance of being essential.
Twenty Years on Ethnic Matching.
A retrospective on how the ethnic-matching field has matured over two decades — from the correlational critiques of the early 2000s to the rigorous designs that followed, and what remains contested.