My research offers a rhetorical framework for helping educators and leaders in higher education shape education policy.

My book Championing a Public Good examines the argumentation strategies, frames, and competing rhetorical styles that are used in debates about the future of U.S. higher education. Drawing on qualitative methods from rhetoric and discourse analysis, I investigate controversies surrounding cases of higher education policy, such as the 2006 Spellings Commission on Higher Education. More recently my work has traced the rhetoric of “global citizenship” in establishing U.S. higher education partnerships internationally.

In parallel with my research on higher education policy, I engage in two forms of pedagogy research: (1) studies of failure and intellectual risk-taking and (2) studies of how to teach rhetorical histories.