Title: Assistant Professor of Education, Indiana University
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Title: Assistant Professor of Education, Indiana University
Education: Ph.D., M.Ed., Administrative and Policy Studies, University of Pittsburgh; B.A., Sociology, Latina/o Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Age: 35
Career mentors: Shaun Harper, USC; Gina Garcia, UC Berkeley; Lucy LePeau, Indiana University.
Words of wisdom/advice for new faculty members: “Enjoy the process.”
As a first-generation college student who attended Chicago Public Schools, Patrón experienced firsthand the resource challenges that many students from marginalized communities face. Yet his parents’ unwavering commitment to education provided a foundation that would carry him through his academic career.
“My parents valued education to the point that they told my siblings and I that we didn’t have to worry about anything except for doing well in school,” he recalls. That support, combined with his participation in the McNair Scholars Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, opened pathways he hadn’t previously imagined.
“I didn’t even know what a Ph.D. was until I got to college,” Patrón admits. His McNair graduate student mentor — who remarkably also grew up in La Villita — made the doctorate feel achievable. “That just made it seem to me more real,” he says. Once he learned about the possibility, pursuing a Ph.D. felt like the natural next step.
Patrón earned his doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh, where he worked with advisor Dr. Gina Garcia. In the final two years of his doctoral studies, he moved to Los Angeles to work at USC’s Race and Equity Center under the mentorship of Dr. Shaun Harper, who created a position for him. This arrangement allowed Patrón to collect dissertation data in Los Angeles while receiving exceptional mentorship — a testament to the power of networks and mentors invested in their students’ success.
After completing his Ph.D., Patrón made the intentional decision to pursue a postdoctoral position at Indiana University from 2019 to 2021.
“From the moment that I started pre-K to the moment that I got my Ph.D., I never took any time off of school,” he explains. The postdoc provided crucial space to develop his research agenda before launching into a tenure-track position in fall 2021.
Now in his fifth year as faculty and preparing for tenure review, Patrón’s scholarship challenges long-standing deficit frameworks in higher education research. Rather than examining why students of color struggle, his work theorizes about the processes and values that contribute to their success.
“For a long time, communities of color have been pathologized and
labeled as deficient,” he notes. “Instead of blaming students or examining why so few graduate, I operate from a standpoint that allows me to theorize about the factors that contribute to their
successes.”
Central to his work is the concept of “race-silience”—a reconceptualization of resilience that accounts for resistance to oppression and social identities. This framework moves beyond understanding resilience as merely a personality trait, offering instead a broader lens that examines different vulnerabilities and protective factors.
Patrón’s current research includes a major study of graduate students of color, involving over 90 individual interviews exploring faculty consciousness, navigation of challenges, and the role of peer networks. He’s also examining how institutional leaders’ knowledge, beliefs, and practices around racial equity influence their decision-making and service to Latino and Black students—research that has gained unexpected relevance given current political attacks on diversity initiatives.
“Oscar’s ambition reminds me of mine, though I am certain he will someday become far more influential than me,” says Harper, who added that Patrón’s dissertation has since grown into “an impressive body of scholarship on queer Latino male collegians” and “deepens what we know and shifts how this population is typically studied.”
Despite the challenges and criticism that comes with uplifting historically marginalized communities, Patrón reminds himself of his powerful role.
“I think that oftentimes we overlook the influence that we can have on younger generations,” he says.
