New Journal Emerges at UNC Charlotte - Veterans in Higher Education

The focus of Veterans in Higher Education is on the experiences of student veterans in higher education.  Specifically, all currently and formerly serving military members as inclusively considered in the definition of student veteran advanced by Vacchi (About Campus, 2012).  The scope of this journal will be to stay limited to those topics that concern research, theory, and scholarly best practices as they affect our understanding of student veterans as a population and to help the field conceptualize the experiences of student veterans in order to support the success of veterans in college.  The appeal of this journal will be wide, and includes student affairs professionals, faculty and staff of various fields such as Education, Sociology, Psychology, Anthropology, and offices of veterans’ services and offices of non-traditional student services.

Born out of a distinct need to centralize scholarship on student veterans and to raise the quality bar of knowledge getting into the field, VHE has a rigorous double blind review process for one issue each year and has a structured non-blinded process for the other issue.  This unique open format for an issue is designed to meet emerging scholars where they are, assuming excellent ideas that scholars may have difficulty translating to prose for a rigorous academic journal proposal process.  In recent years, we have observed first-hand how much potential there is for knowledge generation that is not making it into higher education publications.  One of the biggest obstacles for scholars of student veteran topics is to overcome the traditional editorial review process without getting rejected by a journal's editorial staff.  Many times these editorial boards have no idea what the relative importance of a veteran topic is and without a knowledgeable board member that knows the veteran population and the trajectory of the scholarship in the field, the editorial team is left to review for APA style and what "sounds good".  This has resulted, and continues to result in, bad scholarship in higher education journals that VHE aims to bring to an end. 

To ensure at least two annual issues, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte hosts, and funds, an annual Veteran Scholars Retreat in early June to develop selected concepts and manuscript proposals to populate the VHE issue the following spring.  Please see the VHE website for a preview of the first issue that was born out of this process.  The call for proposals opens early in December and will close on January 15th, with decisions coming by the end of January.  Veteran Scholars (who are not limited to military veterans, but are scholars that write about student veterans) are expected to prepare a draft manuscript prior to the retreat during which the draft will be workshopped by members of the editorial staff and the other veteran scholars attending the retreat.  The retreat takes place at Martha's Vineyard, MA and is fully funded throug the generosity of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

VHE currently has an open call for both submissions and for reviewers with inquiries to be sent to Kelsey Wolf at [email protected].  Manuscript submissions may be submitted online according to the parameters available on the journal website at https://journals.uncc.edu/vhe/index. Please check this website frequently as the call for proposals for the Scholarly Retreat will open on December 1.