Abstract

What happens when, under the guise of student inclusivity and accessibility, your Communication Center gets taken from your hands? Recently, such an administrative change occurred at the Communication Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Troth Yeddha’ (UAF) where, less than a year after opening a consolidated, cross-disciplinary student support space within the main campus library, the UAF Communication Center now operates without any support from the Department of Communication. As more universities seek to compete for the attention of fewer students, operating on smaller budgets, the troubling trend of streamlining student support centers into one “Student Success Center” seeks to undermine decades of Communication Center work related to building students’ critical communication competence. As such, this autoethnographic article documents and problematizes the experience of three scholars at UAF who lost their Communication Center and years of involved campus-wide support services as a result of the “consolidation” of resources into a larger SSC umbrella. From this article, we hope to provide a guide for scholars who may be facing similar calls from their administrations to avoid losing their centers to through the intentional obfuscation of neoliberal values through inclusive language (e.g., increased academic managerialism, uneven development of resources/competition, meritocracy, etc.). 

Keywords: Communication Centers, equity, autoethnography, meritocracy, academic managerialism, equity, autoethnography, meritocracy, academic managerialism

How to Cite:

Jacob, N., McDermott, V. & May, A., (2025) “Toxic Inclusivity: When Student Support Centers Fall Victim to Neoliberalism”, Communication Center Journal 11(1). doi: https://doi.org//ccj.2897