Student Leader - Administration Relationship
More specifically, we see this model in action with student leaders on campus. It would be naive to argue that all students engage in these forms of leadership or activities; rather, there are a select group of students that engage with and hold these positions of power. This idea of “Elite Leadership”--“typically from gifted and talented programs, largely from middle-class backgrounds, and often representing privileged classes in society with disproportionate access to resources” (Komives 2014: 8)--problematizes the relationship between students and administrators in that the latter is no longer engage with all of the student population but instead with a select few. However, Komives fails to acknowledge the different types of leadership positions that are demanded by social circumstances.
Students from marginalized backgrounds have the burden of acquiring student leadership positions in hopes of bringing about change to their campuses: “higher education practices, policies, expectations, and norms tend to place the responsibility for redressing inequities on members of marginalized groups instead of on the institutions and practitioners that have a professional responsibility to remedy equity gaps” (Malcom-Piqueux 2017: 3). Using Harvard again to contextualize this, students on campus from marginalized communities lead the charge, meet with administrators and work within and around the community to bring progressive changes. For instance, when the pre-orientation program for underrepresented students was rejected, the first-generation community mobilized to work with administrators to bring the change. The literature of higher education often fails to address this; this causes the issues on campus to seem as if it pressing for all students when in reality they affect a specific population, erasing the extra labor put forth by these students. On a similar note, the literature also lacks content in discussing the inequalities in the partnerships with students and the normalization of unpaid student labor. These students are often overworked and while the institutions boast about having strong partnerships, the students are left to create and execute action plans while simply receiving nothing more than the approval of administrators.