Hostile Institutions: Faculty Service Work in the Context Of Anti-DEI

• In Event: 21061 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 6: DEI in the Workplace and Higher Education

Abstract

Education has been lauded as essential to the American Dream. Operating under the guise of meritocratic ideas of talent, productivity, and hard work, education has been referenced as the “great equalizer” (Marina & Holmes, 2009), however, contemporary institutions of higher educations are shaped by multiple and interlocking systems of power including by not limited to race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability, reflecting and reinforcing broader social inequalities (Collins 1993). This is evidenced by the current political regime’s attack on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). As of February 2025, 119 bills have been introduced in 29 states to curtail DEI initiatives at public colleges and universities, with 13 states signing anti-DEI bills into law. As departments and campus communities reel from this legislative articulation of institutional violence, there is growing uncertainty and precarity for students and faculty alike. In this paper, we use an intersectional framework to examine the impacts of anti-DEI policies on faculty mentoring and service work by asking 1) how the current anti-DEI climate impacts faculty experiences with service work and mentorship, and 2) how this labor varies by race, class, gender, and sexuality. The data from this project comes from an ongoing qualitative interview project that examines how faculty members in the social sciences and humanities at institutions primarily in the South and Midwest (many of which have been increasingly targeted by these anti-DEI policies) understand and engage in service labor. Preliminary results center on three main themes: (1) the current sociopolitical context is making higher education an increasingly hostile institution, particularly for those with multiple marginalized identities; (2) anti-DEI policies compound the preexisting disproportionate service burden of multiply marginalized faculty; and (3) faculty engage in extra-institutional form of resistance in the face of institutional hostility.

Authors

• Alexia Angton, University of Arkansas

• Kathryn Norton-Smith, University of Arkansas

• Uchenna Ounoha