 you know, draw some parallels to the MSI initiative. So Dr. McCambley is interdisciplinary scholar of higher education. She studies a role of organizations in their production or reproducing of systemic racial inequalities. She draws upon a large range of both analytic and interpretive methods that to study the influence of aspiring change agents or institutionalized racial inequities within higher education. So with that, you know, she focuses on constructs related to racialized organizations, institutional persistence and change, racial brains, political development and racial backlash. And then lastly, organizational sense-making. And so she has a larger research agenda but the research that she'll kind of speak to here, you know, sort of examines the conditions under what conditions do equity agendas address racialized inequalities rather than operating as new labels for older practices. And so with that, I am incredibly excited to have Dr. McCambley join us here this afternoon. And with that, I will turn it over to her. So thank you, Dr. McCambley. Thank you, Edmund. I'm so happy to be here with my old colleague, Edmund and I'm so happy to receive this invitation. Let me go ahead and share my screen and get started here. All right, so Edmund, if you don't interrupt me, I'm gonna assume you can see my slides and you can hear me. So I'll go from there. So again, good afternoon and thanks again for having me and a huge thank you to the rest of the folks at Rackham for welcoming me into community with you today. I'm coming to you from my home in Pittsburgh and as such, I and my university occupy the ancestral lands of the Haudenosaunee, Lenape, Osage and Shawnee peoples. I recognize in my work and the ways I raise my children and my relationship to lands and waters that displacement and erasure are not just histories for native peoples, but they are the present. And I honor the legacies of both the land and the many indigenous people who call this land home past, present and future as an exercise in preservation and reconciliation. So my talk today, I'm sorry, little thing. My talk today is called More Than a DEI Label, Engaging and Racialized Change Work. So by way of introduction to myself and my work, my projects, at the core of my research program is a refusal to center the settler colonial gaze that demands proof of either harm to a worthiness of historically marginalized communities. So instead the underlying question guiding my research is by what mechanisms does white supremacy as a structured set of processes and outcomes get reproduced over time? Under what conditions are those processes weakened or replaced? So put another way, we all know at this point that equity initiatives in higher education are and have been under different names, pretty ubiquitous. And yet many of us bring a healthy dose of skepticism of their likely success, born out of years of seeing only one of many such initiatives produce measurable results. So rewarding this kind of research program to focus on hope rather than skepticism, we might ask, what do we know about the conditions that make equitable change as systemic as the causes of educational inequity? One of the foundational frameworks I build on for asking and answering these questions is Victor Ray's 2019 theory of racialized organizations. And I identify the field of higher education as a collection of these racialized organizations. In Ray's theory, it's organizations rather than individual intentional acts of bias that routinely privilege one racial group over another. We can identify such organizations by noticing and attending to the normed and accepted ways they deliver unequal resources and magnify privileges of the dominant group. This is the institutionalized or ongoing outcome I identify there on the right. And the core tenants of this theory are as I discuss them, the modes of reproduction that routinely create inequity on the left include first the differentiation between white and non-white organizations that legitimates the unequal distribution of resources. So we're talking about MSIs today and I think this is kind of the crux of my connection to this program, right? As we think about how MSIs are routinely and legitimately meaning we think it's normal the MSIs are routinely given less access to prestige and resources than predominantly white institutions, right? And second, the way that whiteness is used as a credential or a call toward legitimacy and bureaucratic processes. And third, the racialized decoupling of formal rules in ways that benefit whiteness at the expense of minoritized communities. And we'll get into in the course of empirical example kind of what these more theoretical statements look like. So while this framework is a useful lens for coming to spot and understand how racial equity is so persistent it is not necessarily intended to help us find our way out of these racialized conditions. So to this end in my work I'm putting forward the construct of racialized change work. Racialized change work refers to the purpose of action that organizations take to build new equitable organizational arrangements or tear down old inequitable ones. So more specifically racialized change work is the focus attention on dismantling racialized organizations and the routines within them that magnify the agency of dominant groups at the expense of minoritized racial groups. And I'll give an example and I believe Raman is on the call. So in a recent piece that I really loved for Raman Lieta and his co-author Teresa Hernandez in the review of higher education we saw a vivid example of racialized organizational practice in the routines involved in faculty hiring processes. So think for example of hiring processes where you have been a part of where greater scrutiny has been placed routinely on candidates of color based perhaps on skepticism of the relative quality of their PhD institutions or perhaps a perception of them as activist researchers that might discredit their scholarly contributions. So racialized change work in this domain then might look like strategic action to permanently invalidate those types of routines and introduce new routines in their place. So I wanna ground today's talk in an empirical example to give us sort of a concrete jumping off point for thinking about how the policies and norms and routines we have all engaged in with regard to MSIs as racialized organizations and our own work can be sites for renewal for change and for healing. I hope this example helps us find some common connections to your work as a graduate school as faculty members, as staff and students to help us engage in the discussion at the end of my talk. I will then use key findings from this empirical study to give a closer look at this idea of racialized change work as an analytic and an actionable tool for change and use that model for kind of a segue into questions and discussion about connections to your own work and our collective work as a field. So my empirical example today comes from a study that centers the work of the fund for the improvement of post-secondary education. So it's a federal agency founded just after the civil rights movement designed to encourage institutional changes within higher education that would transform the way colleges and universities served what they called, quote unquote, new students that is returning adults, women, low income and racial minorities to bring about equitable college completion. So FIPSI has ostensibly been charged since its beginnings in 1972 with doing something about inequitable kind of completion and higher education at large. But under the Obama administration, we saw a stark change that newly centered matters of race, class and equity in the agency's expressed policy. So the shift ties back to the big puzzle I presented. If we see this move as an equity policy intervention successful, we should see some meaningful effects on how this organization delivers resources and agency to minorities, minoritized communities. And if we don't, by what mechanisms does that occur? So while this case is a federal agency at its core, this is a case no different from the functional units we all work in. It is an organization shifting its policies from being race neutral to more directly centering minoritized students and the colleges that serve them. But how does kind of the rubber hit the road once we start to implement this new frame? So making my research questions specific, I asked, does equity framing as a practical intervention affect the distribution of resources? And how did this organization's implementation of this new kind of commitment to equity weaken or not racialized patterns of affording privileges to predominantly white institutions? So in order to answer this question, we also need to kind of tap into how would we know practically if a policy or an organization or a department's actions are more or less disruptive to racial inequity? So I measure, sorry. So I measure this organization's impact and we could just as easily say a graduate school's impact, a hiring committee's impact on the status quo in terms of the degree to which they dismantle or adhere to rules that disproportionately benefit white populations. In higher education, this looks like the histories and taken for granted rules that maintain inequitable resources and legitimacy afforded to the most prestigious and predominantly white institutions of higher education at the expense of the broad access institutions, the tribal colleges, the HBCUs that serve a majority of our nation's students of color. By awarding preference to these types, organizations reproduce the conditions of a racialized field wherein non-white organizations like MSIs by formal or demographic designation are also the most poorly resourced. In this way, the treatment of MSIs via policy and inter-organizational relationships as a critical lens on the degree to which an organization or actor is perpetuating or diminishing racial inequity. So I began my work on this case with kind of a beginning assumption that perhaps the change I came across under the Obama administration was just one in many changes over time in terms of how this agency kind of took up issues of equity. From a bird's eye view, I found via archival analysis that the guidelines in the pre-change period from 95 through 2011 were remarkably stable. These guidelines, which I quoted as equity evasive fit a really common pattern in U.S. racial meaning that references diversity broadly but does not center specific identities in its problem diagnosis, nor does it commit to action on specific injustices. Whereas in the post-period after Obama appointees intervened in the program, the agency's priorities shifted to using what I quoted as an equity conscious frame which targets and names specific identities and the need to remedy an inequity. I also discovered other important policy design features of this era that are material to my findings that I'll walk through in just a moment. So I wanna show you kind of quick exemplars to illustrate what I'm saying in practice, right? So here in this text exerpted from Fipsi's 2006 guidelines, we see the agency urging the field to develop education reform proposals for a changing world. They go into a list of eight priorities, three of which I have here highlighted in green or yellow, including the dramatic rise of information technology, the increasing diversity of post-secondary learners and the rise in competition among providers. So here Fipsi urges its applicants to anticipate these dynamic forces for change and develop bold new project ideas. The text in yellow represents the only reference in these grant guidelines to specific student identities or needs and it's just kind of a quick reference to diversity. So while some of the equity evasive guidelines that I analyzed actually don't mention identity at all, I selected one that does just to emphasize here in this talk that this era is not about being openly anti-equity, right? However, this is just one of eight invitational priorities, which is the equivalent of something that's a good idea but you don't actually get extra points for taking it up, okay? By contrast in green here, I've highlighted that in the post-period Fipsi has moved from eight invitational priorities to a set of five absolute priorities. The uniting theme of these priorities highlighted here in yellow is that each goal, access or completion or transfer rates must focus on underrepresented, underprepared and low-income students. Maybe not the language I'd use but we could impact that later. A refrain that references the extensive text in the grant guidelines dedicated to problematizing unequal college success outcomes specifically in terms of race and class. In short, applicants were required to attend to specific educational inequities directly to even receive a full grant review. Every applicant was also required to disclose their MSI status and the income and racial demographics of their student body. So this gives you a sense of what this change in framing looked like and indeed this shift looks similar to many shifts towards equity we see or initiate in our own organizations. But as I conducted these analyses, I noticed that the equity framing was not the only change in this policy. The enactment of the policy, that is the rules, the guidelines, the benefits and the burdens of the work also changed. So to this end, I analyzed the policy designs to understand the relative benefits and burdens assigned to target recipients. These types of policy features often pivot around power and social beliefs about the deservingness of those the policy will serve. So this is sort of something like a trap that policy folks often fall into, which is we can center minoritized communities in a policy, but then how do we treat them and how do we treat them differently? So first I found a shift from unrestrictive to restrictive project design standards. So while applicants in the pre-period were welcomed to propose nearly an infinite variety of innovative project proposals on topics like civic engagement or engaged or global learning, in the post-period, each absolute priority had a tight set of potential project types, mostly but not all focused on discrete and often remedial interventions that would fix a specific gap in a pipeline. I also found a shift for more to less generous funding plans in terms of the total dollars awarded in this funding period and in the concentration of even fewer but larger grants to fund the extensive evaluation expenses that the new surveillance requirements made necessary. Which brings us to in perhaps the most striking shift of this period, applicants were faced with much higher evidentiary standards up front in order to be considered for funding. So gone was the emphasis on kind of innovative teaching practices. Funders were looking for either RCT or other causal evidence that the proposed project would change student outcomes. As well as a fully developed evaluation plan comprising of an RCT or intensive quasi-experimental evaluation that met the metrics set by the what works clearinghouse. Indeed, they required involvement on the project by experts specifically trained in WWC methods, a distinctly white group of research and evaluation professionals. None of these requirements were in place in the pre-period. And finally, there's also a shift in how project were evaluated. So whereas 50 in its pre-period evaluated projects in terms of institutional change, that is they were looking for programs that had become institutionalized meaning they were continued after the grant ended and diffused, meaning other colleges picked up the programs. In the post-period, as mentioned, evaluators were hired using grant funds to report causal effects on individual student outcomes. So referring back to the racialized organizations as both contingent on not only the inequitable distribution of dollars or other resources, but also the benefits and burdens that come along with those resources as indicators of community agency. So we see a shift here from an equity evasive era that offered high agency and low burden to an equity conscious era that offered low agency and high burden. But then I had to ask, okay, put that aside for a moment, did these changes in frame and policy affect how dollars were delivered? To this end, I conducted a triple difference causal analysis using trio student support services as a comparison group. I won't get into any depth at all about this analytic approach, but for the data nerds out there, I'm happy to talk or to share the full paper. But what I will do is share a few visuals. So let's begin first with the obvious, most obvious of my measures. So the effect of this policy on dollars distributed to colleges as measured by their student enrollment features. So first on the left, I show the effects here of this change in relation to grant dollars delivered to minority serving students on the left or minority serving institutions on the left. The basic gist of this figure is that for years prior to first in the world, this change in in frame, MSIs were at a disadvantage for receiving FIPSI grant funds. This line here is shown in black and could expect to see at least $2,000 or more dollars less in any given year than a predominantly white institution, even as MSIs did receive more funding from trio student support services than PWIs. And similarly, FIPSI had long underserved high Pell serving institutions relative to other non-high Pell serving institutions prior to this change, a trend that flipped above and beyond the control group in the post-period. So if we think about the question, does an equity conscious frame have material effects on how we spend money, right? As a higher ed organization, whether it's a grant maker, whether it's institution. And in this case, an organization that was always technically focused on inequality and higher education. These figures give some compelling evidence that this is indeed the case. For at least two decades leading up to this policy change in question, colleges serving higher proportions of underrepresented minoritized students and poor students were actually at a relative disadvantage in grants competition. This changed markedly on both measures above and beyond the control group that had consistently tracked positive. But we might ask, what about other measures? There are many other measures of colleges and universities which correlate in important ways with these constructs. I use these measures to more deeply interrogate the different facets of this change. And I'm just gonna present a couple of those here. So first, we can look at this in terms of how grants were awarded to different institutions in relation to their relative field level or field measured prestige. So you can see, for example, on the left that FIPSI has long favored R1 doctoral institutions. A trend that remained constant and even grew slightly compared to the control group in the post period. Similarly, while TRIO, Student Support Services has almost never favored US News Top 100 schools, FIPSI long has. And again, a trend that slightly increased in the post period. On the flip side here, low endowment or low instructional spending institutions on the left had long been disadvantaged for FIPSI funding, a trend which did not change in the post period. And while FIPSI did not have a track record for giving a great deal of preference to community colleges, this track record actually dropped off a bit in the post period as seen on the right. Given what we know about the relative traits of MSIs, community colleges being the most frequent MSI organizational type, these findings are a bit counterintuitive. For example, if we look just descriptively at the proportion of the college going population served by doctoral granting universities, almost 22%, while a total proportion of underrepresented minority students enrolled in college served by doctoral is only about 15.1%. So the pattern here is that MSI status aside, the types of organizations that show persistently higher funding from FIPSI over time see the three X's in that first grade column are the very institutions that do not serve a higher proportion of underrepresented minority students overall in both the pre and post period. Indeed, less than 10% of doctoral universities are MSIs, while over 30% of associate granting colleges are. This presents something of a puzzle given the first figures we went through in this presentation, how can we understand this trend? So to better understand this contradiction, here are figures in which I intersect the college type with MSI status. As you can see, these figures help to clarify where the effect I showed you on my first slide came from at MSI doctoral and not these other types. So from this perspective of service to the most underserved US populations, this finding is not at all intuitive as the very institutions that on average serve the most minority students do not see benefit and even some negative effects from FIPSI's new racial frame. And these are also the MSIs where the kind of highest need and lowest resource students attend. So integrating this information in the equity evasive period, we know that money was delivered to predominantly white, wealthy and elite institutions. Under these conditions, which centered all students in its inequality frame, funds were delivered awarding high agency to applicants and recipients to pursue innovative projects including broad civic, technological and learning concerns. By contrast, under the equity conscious frame, we find a much more arduous application process with a significant portion of grant assets going to funding complex accountability and evaluation designs with a focus on projects more limited and remedial in scope with an emphasis on individual level rather than institutional change in effect delivering lower agency and higher administrative burdens to a subset of institutions. Still mostly PWIs, but with a greater proportion of the relatively highly resourced minority serving institutions. So looping back to my starting questions, did framing matter to fund distribution? The short answer was yes. Under equity evasive conditions, white and wealthy institutions received disproportionate benefits. And we see a large statistically significant effects on the number of poor and underrepresented minoritized student populations served after decades of under service. These effects were accompanied by new application requirements and priorities that replaced rather than eliminated processes that maintain funding inequity. What's notable about this case is that while the funding pattern changed drastically, so did the parameters of grant making related to requirements for intensive grantee evaluation, surveillance and accountability which essentially put non doctoral or lower resource colleges at a huge competitive disadvantage. So just to drive that point home, these kind of intensive evaluation surveillance and accountability requirements, we have to pause and think, in many ways we think of this as kind of a neutral or positive or good requirement, but it is also highly coordinated with predominantly white institutions with high access to resources. So even these types of neutral decision making processes, apparently neutral or apparently neutral requirements, made it difficult, if not impossible for minority serving community colleges to even compete for the funds. These changes also potentially made inequities more durable by moving from an implicit set of processes that legitimized inequitable grant making to legitimated organizational routines and processes that structured this outcome. And by that I mean in the first kind of in the first equity evasive condition, it was sort of a latent or hidden process by which the things that we consider legitimate in the field of higher education in terms of who's pursuing or wants to pitch projects about global learning, about learning communities, undergraduate research, all of these things. It was really an implicit delivery of dollars favoring white and wealthy institutions. But in the post period, we got really kind of structured and structural requirements put in place that put minority serving institutions at a distinct disadvantage even without naming minority serving institutions in a particular way. So in this way, this program further entrenched old patterns while creating a small window for an emergent set of relatively rare MSIs to receive greater funding. But historically racialized categories like the HBCU's tribal colleges and community colleges that still serve the lion's share of minority students were left systemically underfunded. So under the new condition, a traditional source of legitimacy among academic elites, quantitative scientific evaluation of interventions on individuals of color begets a new mechanism that protects the preference for higher ranked and resourced colleges and universities. And similarly, rather than emphasizing learning and institutional transformation, FIPSI's enactment emphasized individual level interventions built on the assumption of student deficits as the driver of post-secondary inequity. This outcome codified in deep in modes of reproduction that limit the relative agency of minoritized organizations and their students and the types of education that they're expected to pursue. An outcome I mark as the process of institutionalizing inequality anew. So this finding points out that we must be attentive to help policy designs embed our biases. A majority of social scientists might agree that accountability and evaluation probably matters or can matter. But how are we applying this standard inequitably to whom and how does it place the highest need students at a disadvantage? So while Ray's 2019 theory of racialized organizations gives us a sharp lens with which to identify the operations of racialized organizations embodied in this figure that I showed at the beginning, which shows the connection between core modes of reproduction and the institutionalized outcome of inequitable use of dollars and agency towards minoritized groups and organizations by bringing in this lens of kind of institutionalization as a process by which we can either support or break down a racialized status quo. I'm putting forth a novel construct of racialized change work. So in the spirit of using this framework to both critique inequity, right, but also to build towards more just futures. So racialized change work is the focus attention as I said at the beginning on dismantling kind of those connections that magnify agency of dominant groups at the expense of minoritized racial groups. So in the full paper forthcoming, and I'll give a link at the end at the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, I, my co-author, Jeanette Kalevis develop actionable and testable propositions for the conditions under which racialized change work is likely to be taken up, how it attempts at racialized change work either maintain or weaken racialization and the mechanisms by which this work has material and lasting implications. So as a means of illustrating the application of our framework, I wanna go back to this example I just offered you. So while 50 deployed a new equity conscious frame, one potential mechanism for weakening the racialization and organizations, which then legitimize greater resource distribution to minority serving institutions which had a measurable impact on delivery of dollars. The organization also developed new policy designs that built up new and more deeply embedded modes of reproduction via burdens and formal rules that significantly limited the agency of both MSIs and their students. So racialized change work as a framework and a set of testable and actual propositions is thus intended to help us think as practitioners engaged in historically racialized processes like admissions, hiring, funding and grant making about the myriad ways our status quo practices implicitly and routinely preference whiteness and white organizational types. This framework challenges organizations to give renewed attention to how our own ontological attunements toward things like educational quality, scientific rigor, the purpose of higher education and best practices for our work in admissions, retention or funding may reinscribe the very inequities they set out to diminish. We can also use this framework to push ourselves to see and understand how our commitment commitments to DEI on paper are valuable but they must be more than a label to change embedded racism. And we can think concretely here about what that means. So with that, I wanna thank you and open up the space for discussion and questions. I'll leave you with a few kind of parting practical questions you can ask regardless of your personal rules and responsibilities to help think about enacting racialized change work. So how are you framing your work as disruptive to racial inequity? How do you use as markers, what do you use as markers of quality, rigor or best practice as criteria in your own decision-making processes? Which of these criteria correlate with the norms or resources of white institutions or students in which do not? And how can you re-imagine those criteria? I put my email here and also these two yell key links which for the next 24 hours at least give you access to the two working papers that I am referencing throughout this presentation. One is the empirical paper and then the other is the paper specifically on racialized change work. And so I was only able to give a taste. So if you wanna get deep into it, you can go to yellkey.com backslash point or yellkey.com backslash sing. And just thank you again. I look forward to hearing your questions and also examples in your own work of how you're seeing these things show up.