Canaries in the Field: Admission Professionals, Varsity Blues, and Systemic Inequity in a Colorblind Organization

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Leveraging Organizational Theory to Understand and Address Racial Inequities (Table 17)

Abstract

Operation Varsity Blues (OVB) and new challenges to affirmative action marked the beginning of a crisis and a new era of color-evasiveness in elite admissions. Admission professionals are canaries in the field—as ground-level actors within elite colleges and universities, they can offer useful assessments of the field’s current state. This paper presents emergent findings from a qualitative case study. The case study used the modern phenomenon of OVB as a lens to examine how admission professionals frame mechanisms of systemic inequality in elite admissions. The study also examined how admission professionals enable and impede systemic inequality through routine practices. The emergent findings provide critical insights regarding systemic inequality by illuminating colorblind organizational politics within a typical elite admissions workspace.

Author

• Kamil Brown, University of Texas at Austin