Mapping the Racialized Organization of STEM Academic Departments

• In Event: Mapping Racial Projects in Postsecondary STEM: Interrogating Scripts, Schemas, and Structures for Justice

Abstract

--Objective
STEM academic departments are important organizational units in higher education, serving two primary functions: fulfilling the university’s bureaucratic needs, such as managing course enrollments and degree conferrals, and advancing their respective disciplines through innovative research (Edwards, 1999; Ikenberry & Friedman, 1972). Traditional conceptualizations portray STEM academic departments as neutral, meritocratic organizations where all peoples and knowledge systems are equally valued and resourced (Harding, 2006; Hearn, 1996). Nevertheless, empirical research demonstrates otherwise – STEM academic departments can be a terrain of inequity (McGee, 2020). Understanding how and why this occurs requires an analysis of more than just micro-level dynamics; it necessitates an examination of how mundane organizational structures, policies, and routines in STEM academic departments operate as handmaidens of racial inequity.
--Theoretical Framework: Reconceptualizing STEM Academic Departments as Racialized Organizations
This paper presents an original conceptual framework describing how STEM academic departments legitimize and perpetuate the fallacy of White supremacy and racial stratification through four domains of practice: graduate admissions and hiring, instruction, research, and service. We employ Ray's (2019) theory of racialized organizations to make our case. Racialized organizations are those that couple norms, policies, and practices with White racial schemas to rationalize the allocation of economic, material, and psychological resources. White racial schemas are cognitive frames that position White peoples, objects, and things as superior to non-White peoples, objects, and things (Golash-Boza, 2016). The connection between White racial schemas and organizational resources reproduces White racial dominance within the organization and society (Ray, 2019).
--Our framework illustrates how organizational rules (i.e., policies, routines, and norms) and resource flows (e.g., how material resources are allocated) are governed by White racial schemas that legitimate, automate, and reproduce the ills of racial inequity and White supremacy in the lives of STEM faculty, staff, and students. For example, in faculty hiring, STEM academic departments rely on White racial frames to devalue the scholarly contribution of candidates of color, sustaining White racial hierarchies among departmental faculty (Blair-Loy & Cech, 2021). Through a thorough review of higher education literature, we identify specific organizational mechanisms (as well as the racial schemas that undergird them) that contribute to the everyday reproduction of the fallacy of white supremacy in STEM.
--Significance
This paper contributes to efforts in higher education to demonstrate how seemingly mundane structures and mechanisms at play in organizations, operate in ways that legitimize and uphold the fallacy of white supremacy (ideologically) and racially-stratified outcomes (materially). Positioning STEM academic departments as racialized organizations helps animate how they couple their resource allocation functions with racial schemas, leading to differential treatment and outcomes based on race. Further, by illustrating some of the specific organizational mechanisms that re/produce racism in undergraduate, graduate, and faculty domains, this work identifies potential levers for change. Ultimately, this work provides a lens on how STEM academic departments can be structured to equip all people (especially those who have been historically disenfranchised) with the agency and resources necessary to thrive.

Authors

• Meaghan Pearson, Vanderbilt University

• Aireale J. Rodgers, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Tatiane Russo-Tait, University of Georgia