Chris Taylor publishes chapter in book about masculinity

Chris Taylor, director of community standards and student conduct, examined ways to work with male students on masculinity issues in a new book chapter.

Chris Taylor, Wright State University’s director of community standards and student conduct, recently had a chapter published in a book titled “Men and Masculinities: Theoretical Foundations and Promising Practices for Supporting College Men’s Development.”

The book, edited by Daniel Tillapaugh and Brian L. McGowan, was published in 2019 and focuses on ways to break down patriarchal stereotypes and support the development of male college students.

Taylor’s chapter, titled “Building a Campus Coalition,” has five key concentrations: accounting for your own identities and learning, goals and framing, different models, logistics and the role of developmental readiness.

Taylor said one of the main goals of the chapter was to find ways to work with male students on masculinity issues.

“I feel the audience for this is a lot of student affairs staff, but also parts of institutions, colleges or universities who work with male students and want to tackle masculinity issues,” he said. “What our chapter focused on is how to form a working group, or a coalition, to work on these issues on your campus.”

Another focus in the chapter is finding a number of different ways to solve these issues that can fit all budgets across college campuses.

“If it’s a situation where there’s only one person, or if there’s little to no budget for that, some of the resources can be very low cost, or even free,” he said.

Taylor’s interest in this topic goes back to his days at Miami University, where he received his undergraduate degree in philosophy in 1990. The following year, he received his master’s degree in higher education administration from Ball State University. In 2015, Taylor received his Ph.D. in educational leadership from Miami University.

“I knew I didn’t want to focus on conduct with this degree,” he said. “One thing I did have interest in was men in fraternities, and Miami has a pretty robust fraternity program. So I decided I wanted to look into masculinity in fraternities and see how that develops.”

The book is available for purchase at many of the country’s top bookstores, including Barnes and Noble and Amazon.