Promoting student empowerment in student partnership-student representation integrations

In the twenty-first century, the growing decline and collapse of democratic student governments in higher education around the world has been paralleled by the spread of the student partnerships approach to student leadership. While attempting to foster collaboration between students and other education relevant parties, if the student partnerships approach is not implemented in a way that is cognizant of the inherent power disparities between student and non-student relevant parties, it can run the risk of supplanting student democracy with undemocratic structures in which students have no structural power to effect educational change. This article responds to attempts to deterritorialize student partnerships and student voice approaches in Cornelius-Bell, Bell, and Dollinger’s (Higher Education, 2023) article in Higher Education by adding a student power lens to demonstrate how student leadership approaches that integrate student partnerships and student voice can be implemented in ways that contribute to student empowerment and mitigate the risk of students being manipulated to serve non-students’ micropolitical goals. Political philosophy scholarship is applied to such student leadership contexts to illustrate the power imbalances between students and non-students. Two examples of healthy integrations, a liberal democratic student government and an open participation student partnership, are theorized as ways forward that can equitably and effectively garner both structural student power and mutually beneficial collaborations between relevant parties.