Pork-Barrel Politics as an Opportunity for Organizational Transformation? A Study of the Racialized Distribution and Use of Federal Academic Earmark

• In Event: Constructing New Possibilities for Racialized Organizations Theory in Educational Research

Abstract

Recent scholarship has demonstrated the role of competitive federal grantmaking (e.g., National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health grants) in maintaining racialized organizational hierarchies (Bol et al., 2018; Aguilar-Smith, 2022; Aguilar-Smith & Doran, 2023; McCambly & Colyvas, 2022; Taffe & Gilpin, 2021). In particular, racialized organizational identities, routines, and criteria disadvantage minoritized scholars and institutions’ access to resources--a hallmark of racialized organizations (Ray, 2019). Competitive grantmaking routinely advantages well-resourced, historically white-serving institutions (WSIs) within the grantscape, whereas minority-serving institutions (MSIs) perpetually receive the least grant funding over time. Importantly, when MSIs do secure funding, the resources are typically less generous, more restrictive in scope, and hold greater administrative burdens (McCambly & Colyvas, 2023; McCambly et al., 2022; Ray et al., 2022). Troubled by the inequities in competitive grantmaking and committed to uncovering possibilities for meaningful and enduring racialized change, we explore one mechanism by which policymakers could weaken competitive grantmaking as a mode of racialized reproduction in higher education: capacity-building investments via federal earmark grants to colleges and universities (i.e., academic earmarks).
Deploying Ray’s (2019) theory of racialized organizations (TRO) and McCambly and Colyvas’ (2023) framework for racialized change work (RCW), we conduct a critical quantitative analysis of the 2022–2023 tranche of academic earmarks (N=806 earmarks to 505 institutions, totalling $1.73 billion) and explore the extent to which earmarking maintained or undermined a racialized status quo. Specifically, we ask: 1) Did Congress distribute academic earmarks in ways that reinforced or weakened the racialized stratification of resources across organizations in the field?, 2a) How do funding levels vary for capacity-building vs. specialized and restrictive earmark grants?, and 2b) How does the distribution of more or less burdensome earmark types vary by recipients’ racialized organizational identity?
As a practice unfettered by criteria or standards of merit based in whiteness, federal earmarking offers a potential pathway toward undermining racialized infrastructures, including those guiding competitive grantmaking decisions. This study thus applies and advances work on racialized organizations to consider how infrastructural policymaking can be used to advance long-lasting shifts in racialized outcomes.

Authors

• Heather N. McCambly, University of Pittsburgh

• Stephanie Aguilar-Smith, University of North Texas