Announcing the 2020 ASHE Award Recipients
ASHE awards recognize exemplary achievements and contributions to the study of higher education through research, leadership, or service to ASHE and the field of higher education. The ASHE membership plays an essential role in identifying persons who should be honored by the Association, and this year the eight awards committees received 117 nominations for the 16 association and council awards.
ASHE Presidential Medal
Tamara Bertrand Jones
Florida State University
Tamara Bertrand Jones has consistently develops institutional change at a systemic level, combats “scarcity mentality” in that she filled a void in needed support of others, and creates space for others to grow and shine. While making change, she has also developed structures that will ensure the success and sustainability of her change initiatives, even if/when she is no longer involved.
Honorable Mention
Ansley Booker
Mercer University
Tara L. Parker
University of Massachusetts Boston
ASHE Distinguished Service Award
Michelle M. Espino
University of Maryland, College Park & Latinx/a/o Scholar Collective
Since 2008, every November at the ASHE annual conference, Michelle M. Espino has organized the Latinx/a/o Scholar Collective Dinner, growing from 11 attendees in the first year to 143 in 2019. Her dedication to offering this dinner each year and creating a space of celebration and support is a true testament to her commitment to the Latinx/a/o community.
Bobby Wright Dissertation of the Year Award
"Collective Resistance in Higher Education: A Participatory Action Study With & For Undocumented College Students in Virginia" by Cinthya Salazar, University of Maryland
Cinthya Salazar’s dissertation extends and challenges previous research about students without documentation; most notably, by strengthening current theories on persistence and employing Participatory Action Research (PAR) with co-researchers who identify as undocumented students. Her efforts centered immigration status and race/ethnicity within a specific geographic context that is critical and social justice focused.
Honorable Mention
"The Facade of Fit and Preponderance of Power in Faculty Search Processes: Facilitators and Inhibitors of Diversity" by Damani White-Lewis, University of California, Los Angeles
Early Career Award
Jessica C. Harris
University of California, Los Angeles
Jessica C. Harris is a gifted scholar who effortlessly engages complex theoretical ideas and distills them into practical steps that practitioners can implement into their work. Jessica has deployed Critical Race Theory to explore the experiences of Multiracial students, staff, and faculty and has interrogated the varied ways race and racism emerges across various higher education contexts.
Howard Bowen Distinguished Career Award
Estela Mara Bensimon
University of Southern California
Opportunity, equity, and justice have always been at the center of Estela Mara Bensimon’s scholarly agenda. Her expertise on these topics has greatly advanced our field from her early research on leadership in higher education from a critical feminist standpoint, to coining the term “Equity mindedness," and her founding and directing the Center for Urban Education, which has worked with more than 600 colleges and universities and has procured more than $17 million in grants and contracts.
Mentoring Award
Gloria Crisp
Oregon State University
Gloria Crisp has a long record of sustained, wide-reaching, and transformative mentoring of emerging scholars. Above and beyond mentorship as a condition of academic service, Gloria has studied mentorship as a mechanism for addressing inequities facing marginalized group and, most notably, has extended this line of inquiry into her everyday practice. In ASHE, she has consistently mentored new faculty members as chair of the Early Career Faculty Workshop.
Outstanding Book Award
Gay Liberation to Campus Assimilation: Early Non-Heterosexual Student Organizing at Midwestern Universities by Patrick Dilley, Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Gay Liberation to Campus Assimilation: Early Non-Heterosexual Student Organizing at Midwestern Universities outlines the beginning of student organizing around issues of sexual orientation at Midwestern universities from 1969 to the early 1990s. Besides chronicling the movement for gay liberation on 16 midwestern college campuses, Patrick Dilley also documents and describes a unique history of student activism and student organizations.
Research Achievement Award
Mitchell J. Chang
University of California, Los Angeles
Mitchell J. Chang has applied his research to advance social justice in educational policy and practice for over two decades. His scholarship includes nearly 100 publications. His research has shaped existing knowledge and discourse in areas ranging from the reduction of racial bias to how diversity in educational organizations shapes campus climates, interracial relations, and student outcomes.
Special Merit Award
The Indigenous Scholars Collective
The Indigenous Scholars Collective has initiated a transformation in ASHE that tilts towards justice and makes ASHE a better educational organization. The Indigenous Scholars Collective has generously worked with ASHE to help the organization recognize, understand, and transform its complicity in colonial norms and practices. The presence and contributions of Native and Indigenous voices around ASHE have and continue to broaden the epistemological and philosophical basis for planning and decision-making in ways that prioritize the importance of relationships, reciprocity, and the possibility of reparative justice.
CAHEP Barbara Townsend Lecture
Xueli Wang
University of Wisconsin—Madison
Xueli Wang is among the most prolific scholars, and a leading voice around myriad community college topics and, in particular, upward transfer. She is a leader in training community college researchers for tomorrow. 
CEP Mildred García Award for Exemplary Scholarship
Senior Scholar:
Heather J. Shotton
University of Oklahoma
Through her scholarship, service, and mentorship, Heather J. Shotton embodies the spirit and gifts of cultivating with love exemplary scholarship that unearths, unhinges, and uplifts those in which academy refers to “underrepresented” populations.
Junior Scholar:
Chayla Haynes Davison
Texas A&M University
Chayla Haynes Davison has made significant contributions to the study of Black women in higher education, college pedagogy, and strategies to improve how faculty members incorporate diversity and equity in their classrooms.
CIHE Award for Significant Research on International Higher Education
Education Abroad: Bridging Scholarship and Practice, edited by Anthony C. Ogden, Bernhard Streitwieser, and Christof Van Mol
The edited volume presents a timely and much-needed analysis of existing research and scholarship on key areas in the study of education abroad with a truly global focus, as well as a careful analysis in each chapter on what scientific findings mean for programming and practice.
CPPHE Excellence in Public Policy Higher Education Awards
Liliana M. Garces
University of Texas at Austin
Liliana M. Garces regularly produces research that advances evidence-based and equity-focused public policy, especially as it relates to admissions practices. She has co-authored multiple amicus briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Barmak Nassirian
American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU)
Throughout his 30 years of service to the higher education policy community, Barmak Nassirian has demonstrated excellence as a scholar and practitioner of higher education policy on a broad range of issues confronting students and institutions of higher education.