About the Dean

Ryan Evely Gildersleeve, Dean

Ryan Evely Gildersleeve (RyanEG) has dedicated his career to expanding educational opportunity with historically marginalized communities and to cultivating the public purposes within and through education. RyanEG began his career in higher education as a professional residence hall director at Iowa State University. Since then, he has worked with and for a variety of educational institutions, including public and private research universities, minority*-serving institutions, national and international professional associations, community colleges, American Association of University member institutions, and a national philanthropic foundation. His scholarship investigates educational opportunity and the public purposes of education through cultural analyses of college access and success, critical analyses of higher education policy and organization, and philosophical analyses of the foundations of higher education.

Leadership Highlights

As an academic leader, RyanEG works to build capacity for impact through justice-oriented, people-centered, and engaged leadership. Prior to becoming Dean for the College of Education at Eastern Michigan University, he served as Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Research, Diversity-Equity-Inclusion & Justice, and Special Initiatives in the Morgridge College of Education at the University of Denver. He championed faculty and staff development and shared governance, instituting a college-wide, deliberative DEI-J Council to effect policy, procedure, and organization. Prior to serving as associate dean, RyanEG served as Department Chair and co-led an effort to redesign curriculum built upon a radical engagement with community and educational organizations. In 2018-2019, RyanEG was a Senior Visiting Fellow with the Spencer Foundation where he co-led the development of strategic priorities, piloted two innovative funding programs focused on field-building in education research, and created an institutional outreach plan to help diversify the foundation’s grantmaking. In 2019, RyanEG was a Visiting Scholar in Residence for Equity and Inclusion with Colorado Mountain College, a nine-college/13-site dual-mission community college system. Through system-wide collaboration, RyanEG developed a framework for sustainable, system-wide DEI-Justice engagement as well as individual campus-based DEI-J action plans. From 2018-2022, RyanEG served as the Executive Editor for About Campus: Enriching the Student Learning Experience, which is the premier practitioner-focused journal in higher education/student affairs. Under his leadership, the journal diversified its authorship, content, and editorial board while structurally adopting more inclusive and equitable review procedures.

Scholarship Highlights

As an educator, RyanEG has partnered with Latinx (im)migrant communities in deep engagement and investigation of educational opportunity. His book, Fracturing Opportunity: Mexican Migrant Students and College-going Literacy (Peter Lang Publishers) documents his ethnographic engagement with Mexican migrant families in California, which, among other findings, developed the “college-going literacy model” for understanding college access. As the focus of his National Academy of Education/Spencer postdoctoral fellowship, RyanEG completed a series of studies analyzing in-state resident tuition policies affecting undocumented students in higher education. Through funding from the Spencer Foundation, he examined how ritual culture at Hispanic-serving institutions shaped and reflected the college-going experience and outcomes for Latinx (im)migrant families. As a critical methodologist, RyanEG has collaborated with colleagues to investigate the intersections of economic and academic imperatives of universities and education research broadly. In 2022, he co-edited an international volume titled, Transformation of the University: Hopeful Futures for Higher Education with Dr. Søren S. M. Bengtsen from Aarhus University. The book includes authors writing from 10 different countries and across five continents to put forth productive ideas for engendering justice and sustaining knowledge production in colleges and universities globally. RyanEG scholarship has been funded with support from the Spencer Foundation, Lumina Foundation, Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, and the University of California, among others. Currently, he is investigating college affordability and income-share agreements in higher education with support from the Spencer Foundation.

Personal and Educational Background

Born in the East San Francisco Bay of California, raised in suburban Phoenix of the Sonoran Desert, and educated in the northeast and west sides of Los Angeles, California, the “American West” has an indelible influence on RyanEG’s leadership, scholarship, and desire to recognize the assets inherent in and across difference and the influence of geography and political history on education. RyanEG’s practical experience has focused on out-of-classroom learning experiences with non-dominant youth, including after-school learning clubs, educational outreach programs, college bridge programs, and higher education student affairs. RyanEG is married to husband, Rod, an independent higher education consultant and college admissions advisor, having prior work experience in Ivy League admissions and higher education policy. RyanEG earned his MA in Higher Education and Organizational Change and his PhD in Education from UCLA. He is a graduate of Occidental College.

*language used by the institutions, reflecting federal policy and regulations.

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