Meditations on the Ideology of Inquiry in Higher Education: Exposition, Critique, and Conjecture

This paper, presented as the ASHE presidential address, looks critically at four conventional beliefs that guide research in higher education. These beliefs concern stakeholders, aims of inquiry, paradigm and modes of inquiry, and inquiry perspectives. The author contends that higher education should be viewed not as a narrow academic discipline but as a field of study in which the major stakeholders—scholarly peers, administrators and faculty, and the educated public—provide the lodestar for inquiry.