What's in a name?

What is in a name? For many in higher education, our names mean a great deal. We can find our names on such sites as Academia, LinkedIn, ResearchGate, and Google Scholar. When we are feeling down, we can go to Amazon and look up the books we’ve written to see if anyone has reviewed them. In many ways, our names are our currency. I will never forget my first year in higher education. I was attending a conference where my paper had been selected as the focus of a town hall. All conference attendees were given a copy of my paper as they registered for the conference. While sitting at a bar before the town hall, a “senior scholar” – a man who’s work I’d read as a doctoral student - seemed surprised that a first-year assistant professor had written the paper. “Under whom did you study?” he asked. Their names meant something. They represented the academic mentoring I received and the level of expectations to which I had been held within my doctoral program.

So, after twenty-five years in higher education, after nearly fifty publications and another fifty conference presentations under the name “Breault,” why would I return to the last name “Adair”? As “Donna Breault,” I have mentored more than a hundred doctoral students. I’ve served as a coordinator of master’s and doctoral programs. I was a department chair and a dean. As “Donna Breault,” I was recognized by ROI NJ for the work I have done as Interim Provost at NJCU over the past three years. During that time, we have led the institution from fiscal crisis to a mission-focused community where our faculty, staff, and administrators are doing amazing work to serve Northern New Jersey’s most marginalized students. At some level, changing my name now may even seem professionally reckless. With NJCU’s impending merger, my own position is tenuous. If I were to find myself without a position, how would I explain a name change at my age and at this point in my career when seeking another executive position?

Granted, some of the reasons for the change are personal and neither relevant nor appropriate for a blog entry. However, the most salient factor in choosing to return to my birth name of Adair is to honor my father, Harold Adair. My father was also an academic. He did not hail from a university. He was a nuclear physicist for Oak Ridge National Labs. He did so long before Google Scholar or LinkedIn, so no one would really know about his work or his impact. He doesn’t have an H-index score. He did, however, receive an award from NASA for being part of a US-Soviet Apollo-Suez project diffusing isotopes in the absence of gravity. He also helped develop the DXA scanner that measures bone density. I remember having a bone density test at the Cleveland Clinic years ago. When I mentioned my father’s role regarding the machine the technicians were using, their faces lit up. That means far more than any citation.  

Don’t get me wrong, I love research. I am proud of the work I have done as an academic under the name “Breault.” While I wish I had more publications on my CV (as most academics do), I am proud that I have published in top journals in multiple areas of education – curriculum, foundations, teacher education, and educational leadership. I see those publications as evidence that each of my mentors pushed me to learn and, as Dewey contends, “the educative process is a continuous process of growth, having as its aim at every stage an added capacity of growth” (Democracy and Education, p. 54). There will be more lines on my CV under “Adair.” Even more importantly, I hope to honor the kinds of impact my father had. I want to continue to create conditions through which those whom I serve thrive. I want to continue to help others navigate the changing and challenging landscape of higher education. I want to continue to help others see their own potential and how not all leaders look or act the same.  

Ultimately, we all have our professional legacies to consider. I’ve known scholars who have clung how others in the field recognize their names - the number of their publications and how they impact their fields. This is important. They can influence how individuals look at their disciplines and how scholars conduct research. Others lose perspective and cling to their names for their name's sake - their ego. Sadly, more than once at a conference I've heard a colleague chide someone with, "Don't know you know who I am?" Those who matter know. They know us by the conditions we create, the institutions we stabilize, the faculty and staff we empower, the communities we impact, and the students we serve.