What’s the Story Here? How Catholic University Leaders are Making Sense of Undocumented Student Access.

Abstract

This study examines how leaders make sense of an unsettled, contemporary issue facing higher education. It deepens our understanding of how stories may operate in the process of sensemaking, which has been described as “the experience of being thrown into an ongoing, unknowable, unpredictable streaming of experience in search of answers to the question, ‘What's the story?’” (Weick, 2008, para. 1). Sensemaking is a powerful tool for understanding how people engage volatile issues. The study addresses two research questions: How are Catholic university leaders making sense of undocumented student access? and What role do stories play in the sensemaking of these leaders? Situating the study in Catholic higher education, with its own unique history— serving as a vehicle for assimilation into American society, especially for immigrants—allows us to explore the spiritual and religious values that operate differently within this sector than elsewhere in U.S. higher education. That the issue remains unsettled in policy and practice highlights the effects of volatility on sensemaking. To learn more about how leaders respond to the challenge of this situation, I conducted 55 interviews in 12 Catholic universities in regions of the U.S. with relatively high undocumented populations. I find that identity, social context, extracted cues, and stories play especially important roles in leader sensemaking. Leaders engaged in “constructing Catholic identity,” a process of reflection upon the espoused mission values in their institutions which led to the decision to admit undocumented students. Because of the volatility of undocumented access and leaders’ fear of negative consequences resulting from engaging the issue, leaders employed numerous behaviors to manage their commitment (Salancik, 1977). This resulted in strategic ambiguity that provided some protection for leaders; it also led to communication breakdowns in universities and the alienation of important institutional leaders. Canonical stories played an important role in sensemaking, as leaders referred to “community narratives” and “dominant cultural narratives” (Rappaport, 2000), often alluding to them in shorthand. Because their meaning is shared among group members, canonical stories were especially useful as leaders reflected on the link between institutional histories and charisms and the decision to admit undocumented students.