How Organizational Investments in Campus Cultural Centers Can Demobilize Equity

• In Event: Studies of Equity-Minded Organizational Learning in Educational Contexts

Abstract

In response to ongoing discrimination and racial violence post-Brown v. Board, grassroots activism by minoritized students, staff, and faculty helped establish campus cultural centers (e.g., Patton, 2006). Today, these centers exist at over 50 colleges and universities, particularly within PWIs (Williams, 2021). Center staff work to mitigate negative campus climate impacts by affirming minoritized students’ identities (e.g., Patton, 2006), building community to improve psychological well-being (e.g., Keeton et al., 2021), and motivating students towards graduation (e.g., Cisneros & Valdivia, 2020). Despite well-documented benefits, these physical spaces remain underfunded and understaffed, unable to adequately serve the growing minoritized student population (e.g., Harris & Patton, 2017).

While organizational investments through financial resources and infrastructure can help realize the full benefits of these centers (e.g., Freeman-Wong et al., 2022), organizational learning processes inherently embedded within PWIs can ultimately serve to demobilize equity by undermining the fundamental role and purpose of these spaces. Thus, scholars and administrators need to better understand how organizational efforts to formalize support for campus cultural centers—an ongoing product of activism—can shape their role and purpose in serving minoritized students and staff. This inquiry is timely and urgent as PWIs contend with and respond to the proliferation of restrictive legislation targeting race-focused equity initiatives.

This inquiry bridges theoretical and empirical literature across higher education (e.g., Kezar, 2007) and social movements (e.g., Maher et al., 2019) to examine how organizational learning can help or hinder transformational, equity-minded change at PWIs. I also leverage Ray’s (2019) theory of racialized organizations to help conceptualize how organizational change can create new routines, structures, and policies within these centers that can lead to racialized administrative burdens (Ray et al., 2023) and the diminishing of minoritized student and staff agency. This paper shares findings from a multiple case study (Yin, 2018) of three PWIs whose Latinx campus cultural centers were initial products of grassroots student activism. Currently, the three centers have varying levels of resources and support from their universities. Data sources for this study include in-person observations, contemporary and historical documentary data (e.g., student newspaper clippings), and 60–90-minute semi-structured (Maxwell, 2013) interviews with purposefully-selected (Patton, 2002) students, staff, and alumni for a total of 60 interviews across all sites.

Preliminary findings from this study show how racialized organizational dynamics (e.g., resource distribution) —a product of organizational learning,—serve to constrain equity-minded efforts and transformational change, leading to the demobilization of campus cultural centers. As the centers became more structurally connected to the larger institution, minoritized staff and students lost agency within the space as university leaders used these spaces to serve their own interests. This paper builds upon theories of organizational learning and change while also providing university leaders with critical guidance on how to substantively and adequately support diversity initiatives, like campus cultural centers, without undermining the intended student-focused, equity-driven mission of these initiatives.

Author

• Jacqueline Pedota, University of Texas at Austin