When Social Movements Matter: Black Lives Matter and Black Faculty Hiring in U.S. Colleges and Universities

• In Event: Organizational Responses to Crisis

Abstract

A rich scholarship documents that organizations align their responses to social movements with industry peers and local communities, yet we know less about how political contexts shape organizational responses to large-scale, national movements. We leverage the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement to address this gap. Drawing on faculty hiring records at 1,831 U.S. colleges and universities, we find that Black scholars' representation among new tenure-track faculty increased during the BLM protests, especially in Democratic-leaning states. However, this increase was short-lived, as the representation of Black hires returned to pre-BLM levels within a year. By contrast, institutions in Republican-leaning states did not see a significant change in Black faculty representation. These contrasts were more pronounced at institutions heavily reliant on state funding, suggesting that organizational dependence on the state may intensify the influence of political demands relative to the influence of social movements. Overall, these findings imply that contradictory demands in the local political environment reduce organizational receptivity to social movements, and that large-scale movements can be powerful catalysts but not sustainable drivers of organizational change.

Authors

• Kwan Woo Kim, University of California-Merced

• John M. Towey, Harvard University

• Alexandra Kalev, Tel-Aviv University

• Frank Dobbin, Harvard University

• Gal Deutsch, Tel-Aviv University