For Dr. Molly Hall-Martin (Kul Wicasa Oyate/Lower Brule Lakota), students are at the center of everything she does, and they should be at the center of higher education policy. This isn’t always the case, especially when it comes to Indigenous students, and that’s exactly what Hall-Martin wants to change.
Hall-Martin, who defended her PhD in April 2022, has been working hard “to make policy related to higher education better, so that the higher education system in the United States can better serve all students, but Indigenous students and tribal communities specifically.” Her passion for student-focused work led her to the PhD program in the Department of Educational Policy and Leadership Studies (EPLS), working as a Higher Education and Student Affairs (HESA) graduate student. Although a policy program was a more natural choice, given her interest in higher education policy, Hall-Martin deliberately chose a student affairs program instead because, as she explains it, “I never wanted to forget that students are at the receiving end of every policy decision that we make.”
In her multi-article dissertation, Hall-Martin explores equity in U.S. higher education policy from multiple vantage points. Considering that her goal is to “find ways to get my research into the hands of the people who need it and can do something with it,” this format made perfect sense, as opposed to a conventional monograph.
In researching equity in higher education policy, especially as it relates to Indigenous students, Hall-Martin has also dedicated a great deal of energy to thinking about language. “I think that sometimes plays out in policy spaces and within academia as well, where we just assume everyone knows what we’re talking about all the time when we say things. I’m working to make sure that people are really thinking about the words that they’re using and the way that they’re naming things,” she explains.
Her dissertation analyzes the relationship between language and policy in several ways. In one article, she challenges the popular term “education desert” (communities without reliable or easy access to post-secondary education) because it fails to acknowledge “the decisions people and organizations have made about which communities deserve easy access.” In its place, Hall-Martin proposes the term “denial of service areas,” borrowing from cyber security to clarify how these spaces are “areas where legitimate users of would-be educational services are denied access because of the decisions of policy actors.” In another article, she analyzes proactive admissions, focusing on the disconnect between language used between internal policy actors versus external researchers and advocates.
Challenging people to choose words carefully is one of many steps to better address equity in higher education. Acknowledging Indigenous students’ existence and factoring them into policy decisions is another. As Hall-Martin notes, even as student affairs has rapidly expanded support services and other resources in the past 15 years, policy has lagged, even with tasks as simple as including Indigenous students and tribal colleges in research.
“Higher education as a field in recent years has been really focused on issues of equity and inclusion, but at the same time, it’s pretty bad about including Indigenous students,” Hall-Martin says. “Tribal colleges are regularly excluded from studies. Native students don’t show up a lot in higher education policy literature.” By focusing on student affairs, she has made students—Indigenous students in particular—the focal point of her research. “These are people. They’re whole humans. They exist within the entire sphere of everything that is chaotically going on around them. And the policy system should work to make their educational process better, not add more chaos and trouble to their lives.”
More than anything, Hall-Martin hopes she can continue to “challenge ongoing traditions of Indigenous erasure” for Indigenous students, tribal communities, and tribal colleges. “People have excuses [about not including Indigenous students in research and policy], but there are ways to get it done, whether that’s using methods that aren’t traditional to policy analysis, like critical discourse analysis or conceptual theses, or using well-favored statistical methods in a way that makes it feasible to center tribal colleges. I found a way to do quantitative methods with tribal colleges, so now people don’t have an excuse.” At the end of the day, she says, “I just want to make the world a better place. I want to make the system better for the people who come after me. And for me, that means keeping students at the center of everything I do.”