1

My competency reflection on Values, Philosophy, and History is that I never knew higher

education or Student Affairs had such a long history dating back to the Civil War times. The

creation of colleges, universities, and higher education is very significant for today’s history.

Without the land grants and such there wouldn’t be such prestigious colleges and universities

that are part of the 200 year history. Some of these colleges that were created so long ago are

still here today in modern 2017 and it’s very significant, it comes to show that higher education

has a long history of changes and improvements. Comparing higher education then and now is

so different and so much has changed since then. More colleges and universities were created

and are now spread throughout the whole US. Higher education administration has been adding

more departments to help students succeed. It went from a male dominant professional job to a

female dominant professional job. Women are taking on more jobs in higher education and

women of color are also in it too. I challenged myself in asking why did this happen in history

and what can I do to not change but to grow from learning about history of Student Affairs and

higher education.

I work in Student Support Services (SSS) as my GSI and SSS has a long history too of

how it began and how it became a branch off of TRIO. I never knew about SSS until I came

here to UWRF back in my old institution, I didn’t have SSS, just learning the history of it was so

significant. Because of history, what I have today wouldn’t exist at all and without history none

of this would have ever existed. History maybe boring but if I make it interesting to myself and I

want to learn more about it then I will have to do research on it. My oral history project that I

chose to do was on women of color (WOC) in higher education. I chose to do this area of

research because since the 1980’s WOC started showing up more in higher education whether it

was pursuing a Master’s degree or a professional. WOC started challenging and engaging
 2

discussions in controversial topics that were not covered in books and classes. The creation of

Women’s Studies was also a big change because it wasn’t until late 1970’s when Women’s

Studies became part of the course catalog being offered. Bringing in new perspectives and

challenging the heteronormative viewpoint engaged students, staff, and faculty to expand their

knowledge. I chose to do my project because WOC are not mentioned and researched a lot on.

It is a topic that still fairly new but not much research has conducted on it to see how WOC

influenced higher education and what changes it made to it. I am a WOC myself, it’s not very

surprising that not much research has been done on it because when people talk about women

they are talking about the whole population not just a specific population. So I decided to

challenge myself a little and do my own research on WOC to see what differences and

similarities it had.