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Penny A. Pasque Named ACPA Senior Scholar

Penny A. Pasque, Ph.D., head of the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development and a professor with the NC State College of Education, has been selected as an ACPA Senior Scholar in recognition of her exemplary contributions to the American College Personnel Association’s mission of advancing research related to student affairs.

ACPA started the Senior Scholars Program in 1984. Senior Scholars are generally full professors and senior student affair officers; and there are only 12 Senior Scholars at any given time, each serving a five-year term. They “represent the best of engaged scholarship relevant to student affairs work in higher education and advocate for the integration of scholarship into the practice of student affairs.

Pasque joined the NC State College of Education as professor and head of the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development in July 2017. Previously, she was the Brian E. & Sandra O’Brien Presidential Professor and program area coordinator of Adult and Higher Education in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She also served as a core faculty member for Women’s and Gender Studies and the Center for Social Justice at the University of Oklahoma.

Pasque has received over 15 research grants and dozens of awards throughout her academic career, including ACPA’s Diamond Honoree, Faculty Fellow from the Coalition for Critical Qualitative Inquiry (CCQI), Researcher of the Year Award from the University of Oklahoma’s Educational Leadership and Policy Studies department, and Advocate Award from ACPA’s Standing Committees (now coalitions).

Her research focuses on higher education organization and administration, qualitative inquiry, educational equity and diversity, indigenous methodologies (PI with the RED-DIRT research team) and the relationships between higher education and society. Her publications include nearly 100 books, monographs, articles, reviews, chapters and academic papers.

Pasque’s research has been published in the Journal of Higher Education, Review of Higher Education, Journal of College Student Development, Qualitative Inquiry, Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, among others. Her most recent book is Qualitative Inquiry in Higher Education Organization and Policy Research, which she edited with Vicente M. Lechuga, an associate professor of educational administration and human resource development at Texas A&M.