The Political Development of Disrupting Educational Inequality at FIPSE

• In Event: American Political Development and Social Change

Abstract

A central, recurring puzzle in studies of the rights revolution is the proper role of agencies in championing and spearheading civil rights policy enforcement in the U.S. How and whether civil rights agencies are able to effectively and authoritatively navigate the constraints imposed by the fragmented American regulatory state is a question that has been explored in both academic and practitioner circles for the last half-century. Many recent treatments, in fact, emphasize the policy successes that result from the entrepreneurial, and sometimes more informal, regulatory actions developed by actors working within civil rights agencies – actions that at their base demonstrate the power and importance of autonomous and discretionary bureaucratic behavior to the enforcement of civil rights policy (Carpenter 2001, Epp 2009, Mulroy 2018). What we suggest that these accounts sometimes underestimate, however, is how these claims of bureaucratic autonomy – built as they often are on claims of expertise, knowledge, and institutional prestige - can also work to undermine policy goals specific to addressing racial inequality.

To address this concern, in this paper, we explore a longitudinal case study of the development of reputational expertise at the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) and focus, specifically, on how these frames, over time, shifted the policy aims of the agency and the target population ultimately served. Founded in 1973, FIPSE was modeled after the flexibility of a private philanthropic foundation and charged, until its shuttering in 2018, with disrupting postsecondary educational racial inequalities by investing in innovative projects that expand opportunities to underrepresented groups. Through a historical analysis of the development of this agency charged with addressing expansive inequality in U.S. higher education, we employ a qualitative content analysis of congressional hearings, budget appropriation documents, and congressional research service materials from 1969 to 2018 to analyze the relationship between claims of agency expertise and different conceptualizations of inequality (e.g., race or class, sharply or vaguely defined), and find that a reliance on arguments for institutional autonomy based on agency innovation, expertise, and prestige are associated with a shift in the conceptualization of the proper target populations of the agency - one that shifted the gaze of this grantmaking agency away from higher education institutions serving underrepresented racial groups.

By closely examining how policy expertise and innovation at civil rights agencies affect which recipients actually benefit from educational aid programs, this paper complicates scholarship emphasizing autonomous, entrepreneurial bureaucratic action in mitigating racial inequalities in the U.S.

Authors

• Quinn W. Mulroy, Northwestern University

• Heather McCambly, Northwestern University