Unlikely Alliances: Academic Discourse and the Politics of Admissions Testing

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Politics of Education (Table 4)

Abstract

Universities across the United States are reconsidering admissions testing requirements adopted during the post-2020 wave of test-optional and test-free policies. The prevailing explanation treats both movements—the elimination of tests and their reinstatement—as responses to partisan political pressure: equity advocates and pandemic disruption drove the first; conservative backlash and the Trump administration drive the second. This paper challenges that account through a historical-sociological case study of the University of California, tracing three temporally contiguous and causally connected episodes: the 2018–2020 debate over standardized testing that culminated in the Regents overriding the Academic Senate's pro-test recommendation; the 2021–2024 controversy over math standards in the California Math Framework and UC's course validation rules; and the 2024–2026 reckoning with math underpreparation, centered on a UC San Diego faculty report that was cited by conservative media and a Republican senator despite its authors' complete indifference to partisan politics. Drawing on Abbott's linked-ecologies framework, Boltanski and Thévenot's orders of worth, and Streeck and Thelen's vocabulary of gradual institutional change, the paper argues that these episodes are best understood as hinge issues connecting partially autonomous ecologies—academic, governmental, and partisan—in which actors operate according to their own internal logics. Methodologically, the study draws on meeting minutes, committee reports, legislative testimony, journalistic accounts, conversations with participant-observers, and a systematically assembled corpus of approximately 35 open letters merged with Academic Senate participation data. The central finding is that what appears from the outside as the politicization of higher education is substantially the academicization of politics: genuinely autonomous academic motives—epistemic commitments, governance grievances, disciplinary dispositions—generate discourse that acquires partisan valence as it crosses institutional boundaries, producing alliances that neither side engineers or recognizes.

Author

• Hart Robert Hornor-Jones, University of California-San Diego