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Tempering transformative change: whiteness and racialized emotions in graduate leaders' implementation of equity plans

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TEMPERING TRANSFORMATIVE CHANGE:
WHITENESS AND RACIALIZED EMOTIONS IN GRADUATE LEADERS'
IMPLEMENTATION OF EQUITY PLANS
by

Deborah Elizabeth Southern

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(URBAN EDUCATION POLICY)

August 2022

Copyright 2022 Deborah Elizabeth Southern
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Dedication
This dissertation is dedicated to my family. Thank you for your endless support and
encouragement. From near and afar, you remind me of what is important, and I am so fortunate. I
love you. Thank you for helping me become the first Doctor in our family!

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Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to my mentors and friends for their guidance, support, and encouragement
throughout my time as a PhD student. Thank you to my advisor, Julie Posselt, for your
mentorship, constructive feedback, care, and advocacy. Thank you to my committee, Estela
Bensimon, Shaun Harper, Ben Carrington, and Cheryl Matias, for your continued guidance from
the early stages of this project in my qualifying exam to my final defense. I am grateful for your
thoughtfulness, time, and intellectual generosity. Thank you to the Posselt Research Team for the
community and peer mentorship we shared. Thank you to my cohort, Jude Paul Dizon, Eupha
Jeanne Daramola, and Nicole Yates, for our shared commitment to one another as we navigated
our program and research with love. Thank you to my dear friend, Aireale Rodgers, for our
regular check-ins and soul-enriching affirmations. Finally, thank you to my partner, Juebong, for
being a gracious sounding-board, a great caffeine maker, a wonderful dad, and ultimately, an
important protector of my time. Because of you, my love, I had the capacity to engage with the
work I care so much about.

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Table of Contents
Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
List of Tables vi
List of Figures vii
Abstract viii
Introduction 1
History of White Supremacy and Higher education 5
The Persistence of Whiteness and White Supremacy 6
White Individuals Enforce Whiteness 7
Chapter 1: Attempts and Barriers to Equity Work in Higher Education 11
Diversity and Equity Initiatives as Nonperformative 12
Nonperformance of Leaders 16
Whiteness as a Barrier to Racial Equity 19
Institutional Discourse: University Plans and Statements 20
The Problem of Race-Evasiveness and Potential Change via Race-Conscious Equity Work 21
Racialized Emotions and Emotional Labor in Equity Work 24
Chapter 2: Contestation of White Supremacy as a Racialized and Hegemonic Power in
Organizations 32
Core Theoretical Constructs 32
Whiteness as Property 33
Racialized Organizations 34
Equity-Mindedness 36
Incorporating Race into New Institutionalism 37
Organizational Level Analysis of Racialized Power Contestation in Higher education 39
Frames 41
Schemas 43
Routines 45
Agency 47
Racialized Power Contestation in U.S. Society 49
Chapter 3: Critical Hermeneutics of Whiteness and Case Study Methodology 55
Case Selection and Setting 58
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Participant Sample 60
Data Collection 60
Data Analysis 66
Positionality 72
Trustworthiness and Limitations 74
Chapter 4: Tempering Transformative Change in Graduate Education 76
Case Settings and Context 78
Organizational Constraints on Transformational Change 85
Isolating DEI Work to a Role or Committee 98
Unspecified DEI Language 105
Whiteness Tempering Transformative Change in Graduate Education 108
Disconfirming Evidence and Future Research 119
Chapter 5: Whiteness Tempering Transformative Change at Ponderosa Pine University 123
Ponderosa Pine University 124
Whiteness via Nonperformative Change 132
Whiteness via Racialized Emotions 148
Chapter 6: Implications and Significance 165
Review of Findings 166
Connections to Conceptual Framework 171
Implications for Leaders' Practice in DEI 179
Recommendations for Institutions' Organizational Support of DEI 182
Implications for Future Research 184
Project Significance 186
References 189
Appendices 206
Appendix A – Conceptual Framework Model 206
Appendix B – Collecting Examples of Whiteness Table 207
Appendix C – Document Collection Protocol 208
Appendix D – Observation Protocol of Graduate School / Program Meetings 209
Appendix E – Interview Protocol with Graduate School / Program Leaders 210
Appendix F – Analytic Protocol 213

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List of Tables
Page 82 Table 1: Participant Equity Lens and Racial/Gender Identities
Page 130 Table 2: PPU Participant Equity Lens and Racial/Gender Identities
Page 175 Table 3: Themes from Analysis

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List of Figures
Page 50 Figure 1: Contestation of white supremacy as a racialized and hegemonic power
across U.S. society

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Abstract
As higher education institutions grapple with issues of racial equity, few consider how whiteness
and white supremacy may be embedded in organizations or implicated in their equity work.
Indeed, it may be counterintuitive to some that efforts ostensibly aimed at creating equity would
themselves be characterized by white supremacy. However, analyses reveal that diversity
initiatives in higher education can reproduce whiteness by evading critical discussions of race
and structural forms of racism (Ahmed, 2012; Cabrera et al., 2016; Warikoo, 2016). Presently,
however, there is little evidence on how organizations and their leaders support or resist
whiteness. Thus, understanding how white supremacy at the organizational level via specific
mechanisms is necessary to comprehending how racial inequity persists in higher education
(Bensimon, 2018; Cabrera et al, 2016; Ahmed, 2006).
In this critical comparative case study, I focused on equity work as a window into
whiteness as embedded in organizations, and how agents navigate whiteness in their pursuit of
equity. I focused on graduate education as a site of the academy’s self-reproduction (Walker et
al., 2008), where practices may be shared across programs within the same field or discipline
(Posselt, 2016; 2020). Its equity efforts are therefore a prime context for analysis of endemic
whiteness and/or change. Through sixty nine one-hour interviews, fifty eight hours of
observation, as well as documentary analysis, I examined how leaders from nine graduate
programs and three graduate schools in three public research universities interpreted and enacted
equity efforts. I answered four research questions: 1) How do graduate schools and programs
utilize organizational mechanisms (e.g., routines, practices) to advance racial equity? 2) How do
leaders approach racial equity within the graduate program and school? 3) How is whiteness
manifesting in equity planning and initiatives in the graduate school and programs? 4) How do
equity efforts reproduce and/or mitigate whiteness within the graduate program and school?
I found five mechanisms of whiteness that operated in DEI work to temper
transformative change: 1) organizational constraints on time and resources limited leaders’
capacity to carry out change, 2) isolating DEI work to committees or roles unintentionally
centered the buy-in of faculty, 3) using underspecified language (i.e., DEI) dulled critical
consciousness and missed opportunities to introduce equity-mindedness, 4) nonperformative
changes reinforced white priorities and ease, and 5) racialized emotions distracted leaders away
from equity and towards the comfort of privileged faculty. Thus, although DEI planning and
initiatives were designed for changes in graduate education that would advance equity,
organizations and leaders inadvertently constrained possibilities of transformative change
through implementation processes that centered whiteness. Implications are offered for future
theory and research on whiteness in organizations, as well as future design and implementation
of organizational equity efforts.

Keywords: equity, whiteness, organizations, graduate education
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Tempering transformative change: Whiteness and racialized emotions in graduate leaders'
implementation of equity plans
Introduction
As higher education institutions grapple with issues of racial equity, few consider how
whiteness and white supremacy may be embedded and implicated in their equity work. Indeed, it
may be counterintuitive to some that efforts ostensibly aimed at creating equity would
themselves be characterized by white supremacy. However, analyses reveal that diversity
initiatives in higher education can reproduce whiteness through decisions and actions like
evading critical discussions of race and structural forms of racism (Ahmed, 2012; Cabrera et al.,
2016; Warikoo, 2016). Thus, understanding how white supremacy operates is a core component
of comprehending how racial inequity persists in higher education (Bensimon, 2018; Cabrera et
al, 2016; Ahmed, 2006). I engage in identifying how white supremacy manifests and functions in
higher education as “a means of corrective justice for the educational debt owed to the
descendants of enslaved people and other minoritized populations willfully excluded from higher
education” (McNair et al., 2020, p. 20) with the ultimate goal of abolition.
I define equity as “a critical understanding of the omnipresence of whiteness at the
institutional and practice levels” (Bensimon, 2018, p. 97). In this study, I focus on equity work as
a window into whiteness as embedded in organizations, and how whiteness might be disrupted
by agents in their pursuit of equity. In order to narrow my examination of whiteness, I focus on
graduate education due to its position within higher education as a site of the academy’s self-
reproduction. Graduate education is the site for the socialization of the next generation of
disciplinary stewards (Walker et al., 2008) where practices may be shared across programs
EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
2

within the same field or discipline (Posselt, 2016; 2020); its equity efforts are therefore a prime
context for an analysis of endemic whiteness and/or change.
Central to my study are two key constructs: white supremacy and whiteness. Using race
as a distinction for power and oppression, white supremacy adapts to uphold the racialized power
of whiteness and white people, despite civil and legal opposition, demonstrating its malleability
to maintain hegemonic power (Harris, 1993; Bonilla-Silva, 2018; Hall, 1983). Whiteness, a
manifestation of white supremacy, is "the set of assumptions, privileges, and benefits that
accompany the status of being white… whites have come to expect and rely on these benefits,
and over time these expectations have been affirmed, legitimated, and protected by the law"
(Harris, 1993, p. 1713). I use this definition to ground my understanding of whiteness as
structural as well as socially constructed to privilege white people. Paired with Leonardo’s
(2003) concept of critical hermeneutics (or interpretation) of whiteness, Harris’ (1993) definition
of whiteness guides how I identify whiteness in worldviews, language, feelings, decisions, and
actions. In graduate education, as with higher education generally, whiteness persists to sustain
white supremacy and impede racial equity (Harris & Linder, 2018; Bondi, 2012).
Higher education scholars and sociologists have published very little about how
whiteness functions within organizations to reproduce white supremacy as a hegemonic power.
Further, there is little empirical evidence on how organizations and leaders support or resist
whiteness at the organizational level, including in graduate education. To redress these gaps in
research, I conducted a critical comparative case study of nine graduate programs and three
graduate schools across three public research institutions as they implemented DEI plans. In
order to reflect language commonly used by leaders in this study, I used the term DEI which is
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an acronym for diversity, equity, and inclusion
1
. I examined how leaders at the program level
and graduate school interpreted and enacted a DEI plan locally via the organization's established
mechanisms such as routines, policy, and practices. For this study, leaders included graduate
school administrators such as Associate Deans and Directors, and graduate program faculty like
chairs or Diversity Officers who have DEI plan or implementation oversight. In some cases,
graduate students also took on leadership over DEI, often as members of DEI committees. I used
the term DEI plan to represent documented initiatives or efforts designed to address diversity,
equity, and inclusion issues like underrepresentation or climate. Evidence from this study
informs our understanding of equity planning, how this emerging area of work plays out in
graduate education specifically, and how whiteness may be directly or inadvertently supported or
resisted within organizations. To guide this study, I posed four research questions: 1) How do
graduate schools and programs utilize organizational mechanisms (e.g., routines, practices) to
advance racial equity? 2) How do leaders approach racial equity within the graduate program and
school? 3) How is whiteness manifesting in equity planning and initiatives in the graduate school
and programs? 4) How do equity efforts reproduce and/or mitigate whiteness within the graduate
program and school?
My conceptual framework, which elucidates dynamics of whiteness and the contestation
of racialized power within organizations, guided the development and process of answering all
my research questions. Critical scholarly traditions, including Black feminist thought and the
movement to decolonize the academy, framed the purpose of this study: to further understand
how to disrupt whiteness in higher education organizations toward abolishing white supremacy.

1
While I understand the limitations of the term “DEI,” mainly that it is an unclear amalgamation of distinct issues,
my findings speak to “DEI” as problematic and unspecified language in detail.
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My own critical race consciousness and the conception of this study is indebted to the labor of
critical Black, Latinx, and Indigenous scholars such as Audre Lorde, Paulo Freire, and Eve Tuck.
Research questions three and four interrogated where whiteness manifested within
graduate program and school initiatives. Questions one and two examined how organizations and
their leaders possibly supported or resisted whiteness as they pursued equity. The conceptual
framework paired with critical hermeneutics of whiteness (Leonardo, 2003), a methodological
tool focusing on interpretation that I employed, informed my data collection and analytic
approach by centering racialized power contestation in organizational processes and individual
interpretation of equity efforts. By understanding how whiteness is directly or inadvertently
supported or resisted within an organization as leaders address racial equity, education
practitioners can more effectively implement transformational organizational change.
The organization of my dissertation is as follows: In this introduction chapter, I
foreground my dissertation with an abridged overview of higher education’s history with white
supremacy as the ongoing socio-historical context for current racial equity efforts in higher
education and my empirical study. I then discuss how whiteness persists in higher education and
white supremacy is enforced by white individuals. In chapter one, I review relevant higher
education research on DEI work, followed by a discussion of my conceptual framework in
chapter two. I detail my research study design in chapter three, which is accompanied by
protocols in the appendices. Next, I share findings on how leaders and organizations across the
cases temper transformative equity in chapter four. Then, in chapter five, I focus my discussion
on how whiteness tempered transformative change at Ponderosa Pine University in particular.
Finally, I discuss implications for research, practice, and institutional policy in chapter six.
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History of White Supremacy and Higher education
The contestation of white supremacy as a racialized and hegemonic power is both
historical and present, and this conceptualization of white supremacy guides how I understand
racial inequity in higher education and within this study. White supremacy, born out of
colonization and covertly manifested through whiteness (Bonilla-Silva, 2018; Foster, 2013;
Goldberg, 2002), is evident in institutions of higher education (Wilder, 2013). Institutions of
higher education are apt sites to examine because “it was in the university that colonial
intellectuals developed theories of racism, popularized discourses that bolstered support for
colonial endeavors and provided ethical and intellectual grounds for the dispossession,
oppression and domination of colonized subjects” (Bhambra et al., 2018, p.5). Whiteness and
colonialism are intertwined, and they permeate institutions of higher education including
disciplines, research, and pedagogy: “the transplanting of research institutions, including
universities, from the imperial centers of Europe enabled local scientific interests to be organized
and embedded in the colonial system” (Smith, 2012, p. 8). In Europe, the United States, and their
colonies, institutions of higher education were founded and resourced through colonialism and
slavery (Bhambra et al., 2018); and through slavery, whiteness became synonymous with
humanity:
Slavery as a system of property facilitated the merger of white identity and property.
Because the system of slavery was contingent on and conflated with racial identity, it
became crucial to be ‘white,’ to be identified as white, to have the property of being
white. Whiteness was the characteristic, the attribute, the property of free human beings
(Harris, 1993, p. 1721).
More than a privileged racial identity, whiteness functions as a property legitimated by law and
history that is exclusive (Harris, 1993).
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The first U.S. colleges were instruments of British colonization used to violently steal
Indigenous lands and further justify slavery and slave labor (Wilder, 2013). Established to serve
white people and their interests at the expense of Indigenous and Black peoples, U.S. higher
education is embedded in white supremacy. In higher education, “white agents and social
structures are interconnected: whites create the institutions, they oversee their operations,
maintain, protect, and legitimize them, which in turn maintains their power” (Foster, 2013, p. 5).
White supremacy along with systemic racism are products of white colonial America, which is
defended by social structures and individuals who benefit from whiteness (Foster, 2013; Harris,
1993).
The Persistence of Whiteness and White Supremacy
Today, a wide-spread racial ideology frames society as post-racial and therefore implies
racialized power does not exist. The myth of a post-racial society is often evidenced by the
election of President Obama, which is framed as the remedy to America’s history of racial
violence (Carrington, 2009). However, the majority of white voters did not elect President
Obama, and his presidency experienced racist backlash (Carrington, 2009). This aligns with the
racial ideology of “colorblind” or race-evasive racism, which one uses to explain “contemporary
racial inequality as the outcome of nonracial dynamics” (Bonilla-Silva, 2018, p. 2). Bonilla-
Silva’s (2018) theory of race-evasive racism details the historical origins of whiteness in the U.S.
and connects white peoples’ contemporary racial ideology and belief in meritocracy to the
racialized social system of white supremacy. Here, race-evasive racism works to conceal
racialized oppression while simultaneously maintaining white supremacy (Bonilla-Silva, 2018).
In higher education, we see the persistence of whiteness through university faculty who are
EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
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majority white and male, and implicitly and explicitly preserve Eurocentric epistemology and
patriarchy within the academy (Alexander, 2005).
Ongoing today, race is socially constructed and unstable, and yet racism produces stark
disparities in systemic, structural, and individual power and privileges in the U.S. (Bonilla-Silva,
2018; Fanon, 1976; Feagin, 2010; Feagin & Ducey, 2019). White supremacy persists as a
racialized social system that awards structural privileges to white people at the expense and
exclusion of peoples who are racially marginalized; it encompasses the totality of the social
relations, practices, and attitudes that reinforce whiteness (Bonilla-Silva, 2018). Education policy
is one area where white supremacy is supported by white decision-makers, perhaps
unintentionally but not accidental (Gillborn, 2005). For instance, education reforms largely
benefit white students and schools, and are rarely concerned with racial equity (Gillborn, 2005).
Further, anti-Blackness embedded in higher education practices and policies directly reifies
white supremacy, positioning Black bodies as property (Dancy et al., 2018). For example,
universities extend a version of their historical slave labor into the present: “The labor
expectations placed on Black women in academia are not just comparatively excessive, but they
are also reflective of domestic servitude” that is uncompensated, imposing caregiving and
repairing white negligence on to them (Dancy et al., 2018, (p. 183). Higher education and white
supremacy are historically connected and remain intertwined, and thus, whiteness within higher
education must not be omitted from examinations of persistent racialized inequities.
White Individuals Enforce Whiteness
Within the larger U.S. social context, white people socially and spatially segregate
themselves from racially marginalized people through where they live, go to school, and work
(Bonilla-Silva, 2018). Bonilla-Silva (2018) argues this white racial isolation creates a white
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habitus: “a racialized, uninterrupted socialization process that conditions and creates whites’
racial taste, perceptions, feelings, and emotions and their views on racial matters” (p. 121).
Within white habitus, white people develop a set of structuring mechanisms of sincere fictions of
whiteness, like the myth of meritocracy, and race is kept from being discussed substantively
which allows white people to perceive themselves as innocently non-racist (Foster, 2013).
Through white habitus, racial privilege is reproduced in a covert, institutional, and non-racial
manner that is anchored in egalitarianism and does not depend on overt expressions of hostility
(Bonilla-Silva, 2003).
Implications of white habitus manifest in higher education. For instance, white people are
segregated from the experiences of racially marginalized people in where they live and attend
school in ways that are purposeful or taken for granted as ‘just the way things are’ (Bonilla-
Silva, 2018). By extension, college students who are socialized to a white habitus prior to
enrolling in higher education interpret their white racial segregation as something they liked,
thought was normal, or did not notice (Bonilla-Silva, 2018). Thus, white racial privilege is
invisible to white people because it is normalized through social norms and a collectively
constructed reality that makes racial inequality justified (Bonilla-Silva, 2003). White habitus
germinates a racially ignorant (Mueller, 2020) viewpoint on the world, which is then used by
white people to justify the racial status quo and receive the benefits of white privilege, while
exculpating them from any responsibility for racial inequity or oppression (Bonilla-Silva, 2018).
Racially marginalized individuals experience the racial exclusion of whiteness (Cabrera
et al. 2016), which is invisible to white individuals for "it is hard to get whiteness recognized by
those whose political agency benefits from it not being recognized" (Ahmed, 2012, p.152).
Whiteness allows white people to enter college and adulthood without examining their race or
EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
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privilege (Bonilla-Silva, 2018), including the ability to exist without thinking about issues of
race (Cabrera, 2014). Instead, white individuals discuss race-related issues with arguments that
appear to be reasonable or moral, while simultaneously opposing practical approaches to
challenge racial inequality (Bonilla-Silva, 2003). For instance, white students who oppose
affirmative action believe it is a violation of the norm and value of equal opportunity (Bonilla-
Silva, 2003) and do not comprehend how affirmative action addresses historical and systemic
racial inequality. White students often cite equal rights legislation, the decline of overtly racist
attitudes, and the overall growing prosperity for many racially marginalized people as evidence
against racism (Warikoo & De Novais, 2015). Similarly, the success of racially marginalized
people in higher education, like students or professors, is read as a sign of overcoming
institutionalized whiteness, although it persists and is detrimental (Ahmed, 2012).
When racial exclusion is noticed by white individuals it is often framed as a problem with
racially marginalized communities rather than a problem with whiteness embedded within the
school (Ahmed, 2012; Bonilla-Silva, 2018; 2019). Moreover, when racially marginalized groups
advance academically or economically, white people frequently confuse an erosion of their
exclusive privilege for an experience of racial oppression (Cabrera, 2014). Alternatively, in one
study, white students explain contemporary racial inequity as a function of class inequality,
judging the racial authenticity of racially marginalized peers by being skeptical about students
who are perceived to have ‘white’ experiences growing up (Warikoo & De Novais, 2015). This
assumption reveals how white students “collapse whiteness with socio-economic privilege and
reduce race to a visibly expressed, performed cultural dimension of identity that one can embody
authentically or not” (Warikoo & De Novais, 2015, p. 867). Even when race is framed as a
positive cultural identity shaping individuals’ world views and cultural practices, and that
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interaction across racial lines is positive and important, individuals often fail to understand how
inequities are structural (Warikoo & De Novais, 2015).
It is in evidence from studies like these that we see how white supremacy continues to
persist in higher education, and even according to some research, within university equity efforts
(Ahmed, 2012; Bonilla-Silva, 2003; 2018; Warikoo & De Novais, 2015; Cabrera, 2014). This
creates a potential paradox between stated goals and actions about institutional equity, diversity,
and inclusion (Harris & Linder, 2018; Ahmed, 2012; Iverson, 2007). These works also highlight
how individuals and institutions are unknowingly and often unintentionally complicit in white
supremacy by simply continuing work as-is because higher education norms perpetuate the
inequitable racialized status quo which prizes whiteness. Herein lies the importance and tension
around agency: individual leaders have the potential to work against whiteness within everyday
practices and organizational norms, so long as they are aware of whiteness and white supremacy.
This study aims to understand how white supremacy is enmeshed in higher education
organizations by examining equity planning and implementation in graduate schools and
programs as an example, in order to design equity-minded ways to disrupt practices and routines
that support whiteness and reify white supremacy. I turn to the next chapter to examine research
about equity work in greater detail.
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Chapter 1: Attempts and Barriers to Equity Work in Higher Education
The nascent research literature on graduate education equity efforts shows that
underlying design, motives, leadership, and division of labor matter much for their outcomes. On
the one hand, leadership and graduate-level initiatives that are attuned to race and structural
inequities can advance racial equity (Posselt, 2018; 2020; Posselt et al., 2017; Griffin & Muñiz,
2011). For example, Posselt and colleagues (2017) found in a longitudinal case study of a
prominent physics graduate program that upon the leaders realizing that their admissions process
systematically privileged white and male applicants, they subsequently revised both their
selection criteria and collective conceptualization of the ideal students. However, this was just
one element in a broader set of race-conscious reforms to the program, including their
recruitment processes, the curriculum, the role of staff in the program, and their very
conceptualizations of the intellectual paradigm that grounded their program; as a result of these
changes, over time, the program significantly increased the enrollment and retention of Black
doctoral students (Posselt et al., 2017).
However, some diversity efforts protect whiteness or are simply unsustainable due to
their design or implementation (Harris & Linder, 2018; Bondi, 2012; Slay et al., 2019). For
instance, Harris and Linder (2018) found in a narrative study of racially marginalized graduate
students in higher education student affairs programs that graduate programs often lack depth in
their engagement with diversity and social justice, particularly in curriculum and student
development. Similarly, in her narrative study of white graduate students in student affairs
programs, Bondi (2012) found that white students protected their racial privilege within the
classroom and expect to be centered, even in courses that discuss diversity and equity. Finally, in
a case study of a psychology department, Slay, Reyes, and Posselt (2019) found a disconnect
EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
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between how the department espoused its commitment to diversity in their recruitment practices
and the racialized experiences of its enrolled students; while faculty worked to increase the
numerical representation of racially underrepresented students, the program did little to engage
the racial climate or student well-being.
However, there is little research on whiteness and racial equity efforts in graduate
education, and no empirical analysis to my knowledge of whiteness in graduate education.
Therefore, in this chapter I draw on broader higher education and sociology literatures to discuss
efforts to engage with racial equity in higher education. Often, these efforts include diversity
plans or initiatives, but these can be largely nonperformative and they may even evade
accountability for racialized exclusion and inequity within the spaces they are trying to change
(Ahmed, 2012; Squire et al., 2019). I put these literatures in conversation with empirical research
on equity in graduate education to clarify specific intellectual needs for research in these areas.
Diversity and Equity Initiatives as Nonperformative
Critical research indicates that diversity initiatives are often race-evasive, allowing
institutions to omit reparations for racism from their agenda and for white people to avoid
acknowledging their racial privilege (Ahmed, 2012; Alexander, 2005; Warikoo, 2016; Burke et
al., 2017; Iverson, 2007). What Ahmed (2006) calls the nonperformativity of diversity initiatives
"works because it fails to bring about what it names" (Ahmed, 2006, p. 105). Nonperformativity
describes activities that seemingly take action to address issues, but actually focus on cursory or
adjacent tasks that avoid and even cover-up the root cause of the problem (Ahmed, 2006; 2012).
Institutions address equity through espoused rather than demonstrated commitments, and this
nonperformance often replaces actionable practices or implementation of policies that would
potentially change the culture or racialized experiences. In an example of the critical race theory
EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
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tenet of interest convergence, institutions only support diversity work in as much as it aligns with
espoused institutional values and benefits white students and the institution’s reputation (Ahmed,
2012; Warikoo, 2016; Chang, 2002; Berrey, 2015; Marichal, 2009). Thus, diversity work
exposes the limits of institutional transformation: “the alignment of diversity with institutionality
in other words is maintained only at the level of appearance” (Ahmed, 2012, p.65).
Developing diversity grants the organization legitimacy without requiring the institution
or its leadership to address racialized realities and inequities across campus (Berrey, 2015;
Hoffman & Mitchell, 2016; Cole & Harper, 2017). Further, institutions use diversity to frame
accusations of racism as attacks to the institution and such attacks as opportunities to reassert
their commitment to inclusion without following-through with action (Ahmed, 2012; Hoffman &
Mitchell, 2016; Cole & Harper, 2017). For example, in her phenomenological study of diversity
practices in higher education, Ahmed (2012) draws on interviews with diversity practitioners to
argue diversity is deployed in higher education as an institutional practice only insomuch as it
aligns with pre-existing institutional values and norms. Similarly, in her comparative case study
of two universities, Warikoo (2016) argues institutions and students enter a “diversity bargain”
where diversity is supported only as far as it benefits white students and the institution’s
reputation.
To summarize, critical research on diversity initiatives suggests that rather than taking
responsibility for and acting to remediate racial inequalities on campus, institutions tend to
symbolically adopt equity in ways that merely espouse commitments to diversity and inclusion
(Ahmed, 2012; Berrey, 2015; Hoffman & Mitchell, 2016; Cole & Harper, 2017). Further,
institutions place the onus for solving institutional problems on racially marginalized peoples,
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particularly when students experience incidents of discrimination (Ahmed, 2012; Berrey, 2015;
Hoffman & Mitchell, 2016; Cole & Harper, 2017).
Planning for equity can also be misunderstood as practicing equity. Organizations with a
DEI plan are generally perceived as doing diversity and equity work, and writing a ‘good’ equity
policy is misunderstood as being effective at practicing equity (Ahmed, 2006; Warikoo, 2016;
Iverson, 2007; Cole & Harper, 2017). In graduate education research, equity initiatives in
recruitment and admissions without integral faculty support or congruence with procedure may
fall short of a program's diversity goals, sometimes leaving diversity as a secondary rather than
primary concern (Posselt, 2016; Glasener et al., 2019; Griffin & Muñiz, 2011; Griffin et al.,
2012). Additionally, equity initiatives in graduate student support like faculty mentoring and
racial climate require leaders and programs to consider students' racialized experiences (Griffin
et al., 2012), rather than merely espousing a commitment to diversity and inclusion (Harris &
Linder, 2018; Slay et al., 2019). Higher education institutions frame diversity and equity
statements as action-items in themselves and may be the extent of the institution’s equity work
(Ahmed, 2006; 2012; Hoffman & Mitchell, 2016).
Within higher education, a racially mixed student body is increasingly understood as an
indication of a school’s prestige, academic strength, and national reputation (Stevens & Roksa,
2011). Therefore, changing student demographics at the university have led to the adoption of
diversity rhetoric and policies, the creation of campus programs for students of color, and the
incorporation of diversity into existing programs (Berrey, 2011). Another institutional focus
regarding diversity—often due to student demands—is racial climate. In their qualitative study
on the influence of campus racial climate on diversity in graduate education, Griffin and
colleagues (2012) found that while institutions were committed to diversity in recruitment and
EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
15

retention, they did not necessarily foster a positive racial climate. Campus environment,
comprised of how many students and faculty of color are a part of the institution, as well as
department environment are two influential factors in fostering both diversity and a positive
racial climate in graduate education (Griffin et al., 2012).
Additional factors in racial climate include access to financial resources, the admissions
process, and support from senior leadership, which were often barriers to fostering diversity
(Griffin et al., 2012). Anti-affirmative action sentiments were found to limit efforts to increase
compositional diversity and “influence decisions about, and sometimes the elimination of,
recruitment and fellowship programs targeting underrepresented populations” (Griffin et al.,
2012, p. 556). Affirmative action policy has a direct impact on graduate education, but few
studies have explored how affirmative action or bans on affirmative action impact graduate
enrollment of students of color (Garces, 2012). In her quantitative study of the impact of state
affirmative action bans on graduate school enrollment, Garces (2012) found that bans on
affirmative action led to a decline in students of color enrolling in graduate programs. This
finding has implications for who will be leaders in our diverse society.
When racial incidents and protests about campus climate arise, administrators rely on
diversity statements to respond and direct students to diversity policies and programs (Berrey,
2011; 2015; Hoffman & Mitchell, 2016; Cole & Harper, 2017). These diversity policies often
center whiteness and eurocentric epistemologies, while subordinating alternative ways of
knowing and people who are not white (Alexander, 2005). For instance, in her autoethnographic
account of engaging diversity and equity in the academy as a faculty member, Alexander (2005)
describes how adjunct and part-time faculty are primarily racially marginalized faculty, and how
her collective efforts to critically educate graduate faculty about eurocentric curriculum and
EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
16

research are refused by the institution (Alexander, 2005). Neutrality in university statements
about equity distances the institution from its racist history and present racist realities. Here, an
institutional commitment to anti-racism may be a “self-declaration that ironically can participate
in the concealment of racism within the university” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 110). When race in higher
education is debated at the federal level, it is framed through diversity due to the Supreme
Court’s logic for diversity under Bakke. In their pro-affirmative action argument in the 2003
Grutter case, for example, the University of Michigan proposed a diversity rationale that built on
Justice Powell’s opinion in Bakke that not only racial diversity, but diversity generally, carried
educational benefits for students (Berrey, 2011; Marichal, 2009). Implications for this argument
in higher education include diversity as a shift to race neutrality or race evasiveness (Mueller,
2020) in language and consciousness, and redirection from explicitly discussing and considering
race and racial inequity (Berrey, 2011; 2015).
Nonperformance of Leaders
Other research indicates a tendency among some institutional leaders to implement
diversity initiatives as "nothing more than a performance of political correctness, rather than a
deeply conscious effort to shift the campus climate and address injustices" (Patton et al., 2019, p.
189). For example, in their critical analysis of empirical education research, Patton and
colleagues (2019) found that few articles discuss diversity initiative implementation, and of the
studies that discuss diversity initiatives, very few authors employed a critical race-conscious lens
or challenged structural forms of oppression. This finding has important implications for
university leaders who may look to education research for guidance on how to design and
implement diversity and equity initiatives. Through this nonperformance by leadership, various
higher education institutions and units therein appear to actively pursue equity—and indeed,
EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
17

their members may think that they are doing so—but initiatives are not designed to alter the
racialized status quo of the school which privileges white people and whiteness (Patton et al.,
2019; Squire et al., 2019; Cole & Harper, 2017). For example, in their queer phenomenological
study of institutional statements regarding undocumented individuals, Squire, Nicolazzo, and
Perez (2019) found the statements were used to subdue activism and demands for change rather
than taking tangible action to address students’ safety and well-being.
This leadership strategy resonates with literature on organizations that constrain equity
transformation by embracing diversity without challenging systems of oppression (Squire et al.,
2019; Chang, 2002; Patton & Haynes, 2018; Stewart, 2018). For instance, graduate education
leaders and campus administrators frame diversity in varied and often divergent ways, making
specific changes difficult to enact (Glasener et al., 2019; Posselt, 2016). For example, in their
study of campus administrators working on diversity initiatives, Glasener and colleagues (2019)
found individuals diverged in their understanding and philosophies of diversity, including their
motivation to pursue diversity; this posed a challenge to implementing cohesive efforts across
the institution. Additionally, in her study of graduate admissions committees Posselt (2016)
noticed that faculty generally interpreted diversity as an obligation within admissions work or an
opportunity to gain a competitive advantage over peer programs; sometimes, diversity was
perceived as a trade-off with academic merit. Meanwhile, faculty often rely on racially
marginalized graduate students to be informants on racism rather than learners (Harris & Linder,
2018). Patton Davis and Bondi (2015) argue that white faculty and administrators who engage in
equity are not all transformative, but often just “nice people” whose approach neglects to
examine structures and systems of power and oppression. Just as their institutions performed
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18

equity, few leaders took risks or sacrifices to engage in equity work, but were nonetheless
perceived positively because of their stated commitment to equity (Patton Davis & Bondi, 2015).
Alternatively, white individuals in particular may learn how to embody nonperformitivity
in how they approach and discuss racism publicly, which may not represent their private
interpretation of racial inequity (Picca & Feagin, 2007; Burke et al., 2017). For instance, white
individuals may align with racially progressive theoretical understandings of structural racism
and whiteness while simultaneously disconnecting from a critical examination of their own
privilege and positionality (Burke et al., 2017). This nonperformance of equity manifests in
white students too, who navigate campus while knowingly or unknowingly protecting their
privilege and whiteness; white students maintain their privilege by adjusting to racial progress
and becoming conscious of the politically and racially progressive campus, while also avoiding
change in any way that would sacrifice their racial group advantage or dismantle the status quo
(Burke et al., 2017).
White individuals’ comfort and positive self-perceptions are protected in schooling
environments where whiteness is institutionalized and meritocracy is centered (Burke et al.,
2017). The institution, however, has the capacity to develop students’ understanding of race
while in college through opportunities with compositional student diversity and programs that
influence campus culture (Warikoo & De Novais, 2015). Ahmed (2012) argues that
nonperformative diversity and equity efforts intentionally or inadvertently support whiteness
within the organization. She writes, "diversity becomes about changing perceptions of whiteness
rather than changing the whiteness of organizations" (original italics, Ahmed, 2012, p.34), and
ultimately fail to advance racial equity (Ray, 2019; Squire et al., 2019; Harris & Linder, 2018;
Bondi, 2012; Iverson, 2007). For graduate education, even with espoused commitment to
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19

diversity and equity, racial inequity persists (Harris & Linder, 2018; Slay et al., 2019; Posselt et
al., 2017).
Whiteness as a Barrier to Racial Equity
Recall our previous discussion of the pervasive and often covert nature of whiteness and
white supremacy in higher education, particularly how it manifests in well-established ways of
thinking and doing work that does not require intentional maliciousness. While a higher
education organization may claim a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, when
whiteness at the core of the university is not disrupted, the work is not transformative but rather
episodic or incremental (Patton & Haynes, 2018; Stewart, 2018). Because white supremacy
shifts when it is challenged in order to maintain power, for example framing diversity with vague
race-evasive (Mueller, 2020) language which converges with the interests of whiteness, we can
assume it will not collapse when faced with an isolated university initiative. Students, faculty,
and staff inhabit a culture dominated by and an institution founded on whiteness, regardless of
their level of awareness or experience with its effects (Ahmed, 2012; Bonilla-Silva, 2018;
Cabrera et al., 2016; Gusa, 2010), including within graduate education (Harris & Linder, 2018;
Bondi, 2012).
Whiteness persists through diversity initiatives and statements that are race neutral and
deflect attention away from racism on campus (Ahmed, 2012). Changing perceptions of race can
be how an institution supports and conceals whiteness, particularly through vague interpretations
of diversity: “diversity becomes so broad that racism and other issues that deal specifically with
dismantling oppression get neutralized” (Patton, 2016, p. 321). In her article on Critical Race
Theory in education, Patton (2016) offers the example of whiteness prevalent in curriculum,
which:
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20

Excludes diverse perspectives and allows the rights of use and enjoyment via a
Eurocentric lens that aligns more with white people’s experiences (Harris, 1993). The
curriculum operates with a disposition toward “canon” knowledge and information that
has been passed down throughout generations, ensuring whiteness remains embedded,
regardless of subject matter. Given its normalcy, the curriculum is rarely questioned
because it provides a “good” education without accounting for the benefits that accrue for
white people (p. 320).
However, diversity-related courses will likely continue to be required by institutions because
they promote the institution’s commitment to diversity while doing little to disrupt systemic
oppression which is historically embedded in the institution (Patton, 2016). Here, systemic
oppression, often experienced as violence, theft, and harm, historically converges with race and
property in the formation of higher education (Patton, 2016). On campus, institutional whiteness
fosters an environment where universities often position racially marginalized students as
opportunities to enrich white students’ educational experiences (Berrey, 2011; 2015; Iverson,
2008), where “interactions with peers of color is a resource some white students feel entitled to -
or sometimes wrongly deprived of” (Warikoo, 2016, p.10). Here, whiteness under the guise of
diversity is a barrier to racial equity.
Institutional Discourse: University Plans and Statements
Although DEI plans may seek equitable change, Iverson’s (2007) critical race discourse
analysis of university plans and statements identifies a troubling pattern: “whiteness as a
standard in policy against which to measure the progress and success of people of color and
exposes the inherent racism in diversity policies” (p. 587). Diversity plans posit the need for
racially marginalized students to create a diverse campus but position them as outsiders of the
institution and ignore structural racial inequality which reinforces oppression (Iverson, 2007;
2012). In diversity plans, students were compared to white male norms and whiteness, and only
exemplar diverse students were deemed worthy to gain insider status in the institution (Iverson,
EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
21

2007; 2012). The race-evasiveness of diversity plans supports whiteness and distracts attention
away from racist realities on campus. As institutions embrace the notion of equity and work
towards equitable practices, equity is often stripped of its anti-racist foundation and replaced
with a white-washed and racially ignorant focus (Bensimon, 2018).
Similarly, university statements on racial incidents that do not discuss the racial incident
censor the reality of race and communicate a white-washed version of the truth that appears to be
undeniable (Cole & Harper, 2017). In their evaluation of college presidents’ statements, Cole and
Harper (2017) found college presidents addressed the racist incident or individual within their
statements, but rarely racism as a social system. Therefore, racial incidents on campus were
rarely framed within larger issues like institutionalized whiteness, but rather were crafted to
support positive public relations and distance the institution from the perpetrator (Cole & Harper,
2017). Institutions are embedded in and constrained by systemic and institutionalized racism and
whiteness, and if leaders do not recognize or interrogate these, then the institutional response is
ineffective (Cole & Harper, 2017). It is not uncommon for discussions and plans for institutional
reform to completely omit race, racism, and whiteness, emptying the meaning and power of
equity efforts (Bensimon, 2018). To be effective, Bensimon (2018) argues, equity work requires
an awareness of whiteness within the institution, including awareness of systemic and historic
inequities that require structural changes.
The Problem of Race-Evasiveness and Potential Change via Race-Conscious Equity Work
As racial inequities and oppression persist in higher education (Patton et al., 2019),
leaders often fail to "see or know that whiteness circulates through structures, policies, practices,
and values that are typically assumed to be fair and race-neutral" (Bensimon, 2018, p. 97). Many
leaders make racist statements or support racist actions (Harper & Patton, 2007) and even with
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22

goals for equity and diversity, often do not directly confront systemic racism or its effects on
campus (Harper, 2012). This includes research on higher education leadership, where literature
on diversity and equity implementation is race-evasive and neglects to include discussions of
structural racial inequity (Kezar, 2007; 2008; Kezar et al., 2007; 2008). Mirroring race-evasive
diversity plans (Iverson, 2007; 2012), research on diversity and equity implementation that is
race ignorant falls short on understanding how higher education organizations and leaders are
embedded in socio-historical contexts and structures (e.g. white supremacy, racism) that carry
implications for racialized experiences and inequity on campus (Patton & Haynes, 2018).
Research and practices that are race conscious, however, have the potential to enact
equity across multiple spaces within the institution (Bensimon et. al., 2016; Dowd & Bensimon,
2015; Dowd & Liera, 2018; Ishimaru & Galloway, 2014; Felix, et al., 2015; Liera & Dowd,
2018; Harper & Hurtado, 2007). Critical race conscious approaches to equity engage structural
and systemic forms of racialized inequities and how they impact the institution’s policies, data
collection and analysis, and practices (Bensimon et. al., 2016; Dowd & Bensimon, 2015). Some
examples of this include redesigning syllabi to be culturally responsive and collecting internal
data to understand disproportionate student outcomes (Dowd & Bensimon, 2015).
In order to practice equity, universities must first assume responsibility to address
racialized inequities and undergo institutional changes (Dowd & Bensimon, 2015). Effective
transformation engages individuals, the institution, and the social contexts and policies
surrounding the institution (Dowd & Bensimon, 2015; Stewart, 2018; Chang, 2002). Equitable
leadership that catalyzes organizational transformation involves collective vision, practices, and
collaboration across the institution (Ishimaru & Galloway, 2014; Stewart, 2018). Framing of the
university and its persistent inequities is collectively understood as systemic and historically
EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
23

embedded, and the institutional culture is the target of change through inclusive and
collaborative work (Ishimaru & Galloway, 2014). Intentionally engaging institutional culture,
including its espoused and enacted values, assumptions, and daily work of all constituents, is
necessary for transformational change (Harper & Hurtado, 2007; Patton & Haynes, 2018;
Stewart, 2018; Chang, 2002). Otherwise, a university may limit its engagement with equity to
isolated areas of campus, shallow intervention, or temporary adjustments that do not shift
institutional culture (Harper & Hurtado, 2007).
In their case study of one university where individuals worked to implement equity goals,
Dowd and Liera (2018) argue one approach for facilitating race-conscious organizational change
emphasizes the learning that occurs via regular and iterative cycles of inquiry between
individuals and the institution. Here, data about the university is reviewed by practitioners with a
goal to practice equity and interrogate how the institution produces racialized inequities, while
also redesigning equity efforts and identifying their own role in inequity (Dowd & Liera, 2018).
Transcending all three levels of transformation, a critical perspective on educational policies and
routines is essential to uncovering how inequities are institutionalized, even by well-intentioned
leaders (Dowd & Bensimon, 2015; Stewart, 2018). Equity transformation relies on the
development of equity minded agency within the organization (Felix, et al., 2015; Liera &
Dowd, 2018). When agents within the organization are “empowered with language to talk
critically about race and given the tools to shift to equity-minded action, they can bring about the
kinds of changes that cumulatively transform the teaching and learning environment” (Felix, et
al., 2015, p. 40). When leaders work with critically conscious peers in supportive environments,
there is a potential to strengthen agency for equity (Liera & Dowd, 2018).
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24

By contrast, if and when researchers and practitioners omit race from their diversity and
equity work, it constrains the potential for equity: “until institutional and structural inequities are
addressed, the status quo remains intact and the benefits accrued by whiteness continue to
unfold” (Patton Davis & Bondi, 2015, p. 506). Ultimately, whiteness enmeshed in organizations
(Ray, 2019; Rojas, 2019; Wingfield & Alston, 2013; Ray & Purifoy, 2019) obscures leaders'
understanding of race (Bonilla-Silva, 2018; 2019; Zembylas, 2012; Matias, 2016) and prohibits
racial equity in higher education.
Racialized Emotions and Emotional Labor in Equity Work
How individuals and organizations interpret race within their enactments and
nonperformance of equity work is part of a broader pattern of the human experience
understanding and navigating racial inequity. Another aspect of this experience involves
practitioners’ racialized emotions and the emotional labor of engaging in equity work.
Discussions about race and inequity are often accompanied by feelings like anger, fear, and pain
(Ahmed, 2004; Zembylas, 2011; Zembylas, 2012). Individuals manage their emotions, either by
expressing them or withholding them, according to what is appropriate given the context or
situation (Hochschild, 1979). Emotions are also managed to follow social rules about feelings,
defined as emotional labor, like when to show happiness, sadness, or anger, where rules are
social guidelines (Hochschild, 1979). These interpretations of appropriateness are referred to as
feeling rules.
Research and theory suggest that embedded in racialized organizations and equipped with
interpretations of race, individuals also experience emotions that are connected to race and
racialization (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Wingfield & Alston, 2013; Wingfield, 2010; Zembylas, 2011;
2012, Ahmed, 2004). Common racialized emotions experienced in racialized organizations
EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
25

include fear, comfort, anger, and guilt (Bonilla-Silva, 2019); how these emotions are managed
can be the difference between a change agent growing or disengaging, and between a
collaborative effort more deeply engaging or falling apart. The consideration of how leaders
experience racialized emotions (Jensen, 2005) more fully informs our understanding of leaders’
potential to constrain or facilitate racial equity efforts within the institution and ultimately
support or mitigate whiteness.
Racialized Emotions in Social Contexts
Race carries an emotional subjectivity that reflects one’s racialized position according to
white supremacy, in addition to objective material interests, and it is essential to consider both in
order to effectively challenge racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2019). Racialized emotions are socially
engendered, relational, and interactional, and they “suffuse all the ‘objective’ practices and
behaviors that comprise a racial order” (Bonilla-Silva, 2019, p. 3). Thus, seemingly neutral
practices or values within an organization are entangled with racialized emotions by way of
being intricately connected with racialized individuals. Emotions are connected to movement and
influence how people socially engage, including power relations (Ahmed, 2004).
Much like worldviews and ideology, racialized emotions are embedded in shared
historical and social contexts, like white supremacy and slavery, which shape perceptions of
one’s race and assumptions about other racialized groups that condition what prompts reactions,
including emotional experiences (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Wingfield, 2010). Our socialization of
race involves our emotions as well as our consciousness. Everyone experiences positive, like
satisfaction or pleasure, and negative, like anger or shame, racialized emotions (Bonilla-Silva,
2019). Navigating racialized emotions requires one to “recognize the emotional undercurrents
and foundations of race and racism, and develop pedagogical strategies to unearth the powerful
EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
26

affective component in the ubiquitous manifestations of racial practices” (Zembylas, 2012, p.
117). Racialized emotions are constitutive, yet unstable forces, and therefore have the potential
to change, particularly when individuals experience ambivalence (Bonilla-Silva, 2019).
Although, white individuals are likely to resist confronting uncomfortable racialized emotions
because they reap privilege from whiteness and therefore may resist the transformation that may
accompany anti-racism (Zembylas, 2012; Patton & Haynes, 2018).
Racialized Emotions in Spaces
Racialized emotions can be imprinted on to spaces, shaping racial comfort and
discomfort, and in response of racial discomfort white people experience white fragility and seek
out racial control to reinstate their comfort (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Wingfield, 2010; Evans &
Moore, 2015). Within schools, emotions are connected to racialized processes like justifications
for inclusion or exclusion of racial groups (Zembylas, 2011). In their theory development of
“safety” in race dialogue, Leonardo and Porter (2010) argue a common component of racial
diversity and equity initiatives on college campuses are public dialogues about race, but the
dialogues are created as emotionally safe spaces for white people who want to avoid appearing
racist. Although they are designed to be inclusive, “students of color feel immobilized and
marginalized within spaces and dialogues that are supposed to undo racism” (Leonardo & Porter,
2010, p. 147). Placing whiteness or white privilege at the center of dialogues offers emotional
safety to white participants but at the cost of violence towards racially marginalized participants
in forms such as personal threats and prizing whiteness (Leonardo & Porter, 2010). Further, in
teaching anti-racism in higher education, white students express emotional resistance, rendering
efforts to alter racial ideology or race frames ineffective (Zembylas, 2012).

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Emotional Labor in Equity Work
Additionally, who bears the burden of racialized emotional labor carries implications for
equity within organizations (Wingfield & Alston, 2013; Wingfield, 2010; Evans & Moore,
2015), including who is tasked with the emotional labor involved in equity and diversity work
(Leonardo & Porter, 2010; Porter et al., 2018). Emotional labor is experienced when individuals
repress their racialized emotions (Bonilla-Silva, 2019) and refrain from expressing their true
emotional response to instances of microaggressions and discrimination (Porter et al., 2018). For
example, in a study of graduate student emotional labor Porter and colleagues (2018) found
“students not only engaged traditional forms of diversity work through recruitment events and
peer mentoring but also described emotional burdens associated with “being the diversity” that
programs are actively striving for” (p.137). Similarly, within graduate education it is important to
consider racialized emotions and the emotional labor of engaging in equity work as we examine
how racialized power is contested within graduate education organizations.
Whiteness within organizations and institutional spaces places the onus of racialized
emotional labor on racially marginalized individuals (Wingfield, 2010; Evans & Moore, 2015;
Wingfield & Alston, 2013). Navigating white institutional spaces carries an undue emotional
burden:
People of color carry the burden of having to choose between tacitly participating in their
marginalization or actively resisting racist ideologies with the possible consequence of
institutional alienation, exclusion, or official reprimand… As a result of the additional
burden of emotion work for people of color in these racialized institutions, and the need
for people of color to sometimes choose an emotional strategy to not engage or challenge
racial oppression in order to succeed in these spaces, the racialized relations of power are
reproduced (Evans & Moore, 2015, p. 452).
Both racialized power and emotional labor inequities persist in organizations, culminating in the
structural privileging of whiteness and white individuals (Wingfield, 2010; Evans & Moore,
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28

2015; Wingfield & Alston, 2013). Racially marginalized leaders within higher education, for
example deans, navigate racism and racialized emotions within their leadership role while also
pursuing change within the institution, including managing reactions to racialized hostility from
colleagues (Jensen, 2005). Similarly, racially marginalized doctoral students engage in the
emotional labor of diversity and equity work within their programs, often without compensation
(Porter at al., 2018).
White Racialized Emotions
Although everyone experiences racialized emotions, white racialized emotions are
privileged and develop affective interests mirroring the structure of their racialized privilege
(Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Wingfield, 2010). White peoples’ racialized emotions often distance them
from feelings of racial oppression, allowing their feelings to be ‘objective’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2019).
For example, when faced with student protests, white university leaders disregard students’
racialized connection between campus practices and larger systemic oppression as subjective
feelings (Hoffman & Mitchell, 2016). Emotions connected to whiteness are privileged and
naturalized, and emotions of whiteness recategorize and redefine race in favor of white interests
(Matias, 2016). White individuals often avoid race and repress feelings about race: “in avoiding
responsibility, whites exonerate themselves of their own emotional culpability of race… [and]
develop a deep shame around whiteness and how they experience humanity” (Matias, 2016, p.
10). Expressed through anger, defensiveness, and guilt, white emotionality centers whiteness and
allows white individuals to avoid responsibility for their racialized privilege and emotions
(Matias & Zembylas, 2014; DiAngelo, 2018). For example, in a study of a teacher education
program, Matias and Zembylas (2014) found white educators use
Terminology of equity and social justice to present themselves as socially-just urban
teachers, yet have repressed their deepened feelings about people of color until they are
EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
29

challenged, a process which surfaces their emotional discomfort and eventually their
distaste – moreover their disgust – for people of Color (p. 36).
Further, white people expect racial comfort and are often ill-equipped to navigate racial stress or
emotions (DiAngelo, 2018). So, when racialized emotions and emotionality of whiteness surface,
white individuals experience defensiveness and fragility, likely resulting in disengagement or
argumentation (DiAngelo, 2018). For instance, rather than practice racially responsive
leadership, higher education executives often seek race and equity consultants only after a racial
protest or embarrassing public incident (Cole & Harper, 2017).
Conclusion
One area of general agreement within the literature reviewed is the nonperformative
aspects of diversity initiatives in higher education, which risk distracting from or potentially
evading the challenging work of interrogating organizational and individual practices that
support whiteness and the persistence of racial inequity. Specifically, Iverson’s (2007; 2012)
critical discourse analysis on university strategic plans and statements is evidence of how
institutional documents both represent the organization’s values and assumptions regarding
diversity and equity and act as nonperformative substitutions for engaging in transformative
(Patton & Haynes, 2018; Stewart, 2018; Chang, 2002) equity efforts. I see my work as closely
aligned with Iverson in that I will analyze DEI plans as one way to examine the organization, but
I depart from Iverson in my inclusion of interview and observational data in order to understand
how the DEI plans are implemented.
Research also points to race-evasiveness as a common approach to diversity and equity
that often fails to subvert whiteness and racial inequity within higher education. Unfortunately,
literature on higher education leadership, including literature on diversity and equity
implementation, is largely race-evasive and neglects to include discussions of structural racial
EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
30

inequity (Kezar, 2007; 2008; Kezar et al., 2007; 2008). Also, the literature reviewed agrees that
whiteness is a barrier to racial equity, but it is not clear exactly how to notice or disrupt
whiteness within higher education. My study builds from these literatures, keenly aware of
nonperformative and race-evasive forms of engaging equity, to learn how graduate schools,
programs, and leaders potentially notice whiteness within their organization and work as they
implement DEI plans and initiatives.
While the majority of empirical studies I discussed center individuals as the primary level
of analysis, a few examples position their findings in connection with social systems and
structural mechanisms of racialized inequity in higher education (Ahmed, 2012; Warikoo, 2016;
Bensimon et. al., 2016; Dowd & Bensimon, 2015; Dowd & Liera, 2018; Liera & Dowd, 2018;
Felix, et al., 2015). Of the empirical studies that use individual interviews and institutional
contexts to ultimately inform arguments about the universities and their practices, Ahmed’s
(2012) phenomenology and Warikoo’s (2016) comparative case study inform my approach to
understanding how organizations and their leaders frame race. Further, Dowd and Bensimon
(2015) demonstrate how critical race conscious approaches to equity engage structural and
systemic forms of racialized inequities, and how they impact the institution’s policies, data
collection and analysis, and practices. Their approach to practicing equity, which requires
universities to first assume responsibility for racial inequity and engage individuals as well as
policies (Dowd & Bensimon, 2015; Patton & Haynes, 2018; Stewart, 2018; Chang, 2002),
informs my conceptualization of equity-minded transformation.
Recent research on equity efforts in graduate education focus on how organizational
practices and routines may sustain inequities or lead to change within programs (Posselt, 2016;
2020; Posselt et al., 2017), and equity-minded organizational transformation (Bensimon et al.,
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31

2016; Dowd & Bensimon, 2015; Dowd & Liers, 2018; Patton & Haynes, 2018; Stewart, 2018).
However, there is a need to examine how graduate leaders engage in this work – and whether or
not that work interrogates or upholds whiteness. To the extent that equity work is increasingly
guided by planning and reporting processes (see, for example, Ahmed, 2012), empirical research
also stands to clarify how DEI plans are implemented and participants’ experiences of
implementation, including their emotional engagement in it. With these gaps in the literature in
mind, the theoretical framework described in the next chapter will build a means of exploring
how graduate leaders interpret and utilize mechanisms of institutional change to advance racial
equity and disrupt whiteness.

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Chapter 2: Contestation of White Supremacy as a Racialized and Hegemonic Power in
Organizations
Facilitating change in longstanding organizations, much less examining and dismantling
white supremacy are no small tasks. Theoretical perspectives on whiteness and racialized
organizations hold potential to expand organizational analyses from new institutionalism (Powell
& DiMaggio, 1991; Sewell, 1992) to consider how mechanisms of institutional change and
individuals might specifically ignite change towards racial equity by disrupting whiteness. I
combine Harris’ (1993) theory of whiteness as property, Ray’s (2019) theory of racialized
organizations, and Bensimon’s (2018) concept of equity-mindedness to design a theoretical
framework that examines how organizational mechanisms of change may be used to implement
DEI plans in an attempt to advance racial equity and possibly obstruct whiteness. Additionally, I
incorporate relevant elements of new institutionalism (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Sewell, 1992;
Feldman & Pentland, 2003; Zucker, 1977) and recent literature on racialized organizations (Ray
& Purifoy, 2019; Rojas, 2019; Wingfield & Alston, 2013) to ground my organizational analysis.
Core Theoretical Constructs
Theories by Harris (1993), Ray (2019), and Bensimon (2018) align in constructing
whiteness as pervasive in institutions and practice, which has implications for racial equity in
higher education. I bring these theories together in order to theoretically understand how
whiteness functions in organizations, and then apply this conceptualization to higher education
and graduate education specifically. The empirical evidence I collect in this study will further
clarify and develop these theories, in the hopes of contributing specifically to the development of
theory about how whiteness functions within organizations and DEI work in organizations. For
all their strengths in illuminating dynamics of race and racism, Ray’s (2019) and Harris’ (1993)
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33

theories could be further understood with empirical data on how whiteness manifests and is
resisted. By combining Harris (1993), Ray (2019), and Bensimon’s (2018) theories, I construct
an analytic framework to examine how graduate education leaders and organizations implement
DEI plans, particularly how individuals and organizational mechanisms abet or critique
whiteness as they work to advance racial equity.
Whiteness as Property
Harris (1993) argues whiteness is a racialized privilege status legitimated by law and
history with four primary property functions: 1) rights of disposition; 2) right to use and
enjoyment; 3) reputation and status; and, 4) the absolute right to exclude. The property functions
of whiteness benefit white people, like the right to exclude on the basis of race, and over time
white people expect the privileges of whiteness as a form of racial comfort (Harris, 1993).
Whiteness is both unable to be taken away from or forfeited by the possessor, and can be used by
the beholder as a resource (Harris, 1993). Carrying a privileged ideological reputation and
material status, whiteness is exclusive, racially subjugating ‘others’ (Harris, 1993).
Two ways that whiteness is protected are via whites’ racial ignorance (Mueller, 2020)
and via ideology that evades race, rather than linking racialized oppression to systemic white
supremacy (Harris, 1993; Mueller, 2020). Maneuvers of racially ignorant (Mueller, 2020)
ideology to protect properties of whiteness is evident in higher education affirmative action,
where consideration of race contradicts a surface value of equality and nondiscrimination
(Harris, 1993). Harris’ (1993) concept of whiteness situates white individuals and their racial
privilege within a larger social structure of racialized power that permeates world-viewpoints and
institutions. In my study, whiteness as property primarily functioned through Harris’ (1993)
second construct, right to use and enjoyment, as leaders’ racial comfort. This theory also further
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34

grounded literature on whiteness in higher education from authors, like Ahmed (2006; 2012) and
Bonilla-Silva (2018; 2019), that I drew from to examine how whiteness specifically functioned
in programs and through leaders. Finally, this theory helps connect findings on how whiteness
functions in DEI work back to important historical and ongoing social contexts, even when
participants do not make those connections explicit. This comprehensive understanding of
whiteness lays a foundation for my multi-level conceptual framework and further supports my
focus on how whiteness functions within Ray’s (2019) concept of racialized agency and
organizations.
Racialized Organizations
More recently, Ray (2019) made a profound contribution to the study of organizations by
arguing they are racialized structures in which whiteness is a credential that serves several
functions: it provides access to organizational resources, legitimizes work racial hierarchies, and
expands white agency. The credential of whiteness helps organizations appear racially neutral
(i.e., not racialized in its history, structures, norms, etc.) in principle, when in reality the
organization is embedded in the property interests of whiteness. Central to Ray’s (2019)
argument is agency and its role within organizations:
Habituated responses accounting for both the stability of a racialized social system and,
under situations of unpredictability, changes in that system, as people respond creatively
to emergent problems. In isolation, individual prejudice and racial animus may matter
little; but when these are put into practice in connection to organizational processes such
as racialized tracking, job-typing, or exclusion, they help shape the larger racial order (p.
27).
Herein lies the importance of understanding individuals, their interpretations, and actions when
studying organizations, because individuals wield the organization and carry the potential to
bring about or stifle change.
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Ray (2019) proposes four tenets: First, individual agency is shaped by one’s position
within the racialized organization, including their control over their time and flexibility to take
action within their role or express themselves (Ray, 2019). The second tenet is that unequal
distribution of resources across and within organizations are racialized (Ray, 2019). For
example, historically white universities typically have more financial resources than historically
Black universities (Ray, 2019). Further, white students are frequently tracked into honors courses
whereas racially marginalized students are academically tracked into occupational careers (Ray,
2019). Third, Ray’s (2019) concept of racialization as a relational credentialing process, where
whiteness is a benefit to white racialized agents, further connecting them to resources, comfort,
and power. This concept resonates with Harris’s (1993) conceptualization of whiteness as a form
of property in its enjoyment, use as a resource, and racialized exclusion. Finally, variance
between organizational rules or policy and how they are practiced or enforced is often racialized.
For instance, race-evasive disciplinary policies are applied differently to the rule-breaker based
on their race (Ray, 2019). Additionally, diversity policies are often separate from formal
decision-making, portraying a nonperformance of equity rather than altering racialized inequity
within the organization’s distribution of resources or agency (Ray, 2019). In this study, Ray’s
(2019) second tenet on unequal distribution of resources showed up in findings around
organizational constraints on advancing equity. Also, Ray’s (2019) third concept of whiteness as
a credential emerged in findings pertaining to the prioritization of white racialized emotions in
DEI work. Overall, Ray’s (2019) focus on racialized agents’ role in contributing to racialized
inequities via organizational mechanisms aligns with Harris’ (1993) emphasis on white
individuals’ use of whiteness and Bensimon’s (2018) positioning of individuals as possible
change agents within higher education.
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Equity-Mindedness
Bensimon (2018) argues equity-mindedness is an approach to center equity in practice
that “raises consciousness of the need to consider equity in connection with historical and
political understandings of racial stratification” (p. 97) and is aware of whiteness omnipresent
within the institution and practice. Bensimon (2018) directly connects individual agents to their
practice within higher education, aligning with Ray’s (2019) positioning of agents as drivers of
organizational processes. The pursuit of transformation (hooks, 1989) and liberation (Freire,
1970) within the field of higher education embodies various forms, one of which is the
development and cultivation of equity-mindedness (Bensimon, 2018).
Equity-minded agents (Bensimon, 2018) facilitate racial equity in higher education
organizations when they engage in reflexivity, become critically conscious of their race frames
and how they manifest in their professional roles, and when they further extend their awareness
to their evaluation of the higher education organization where they work (Sewell, 1992). Equity-
mindedness transfers among agents who choose to adapt equity-mindedness and address
whiteness, which in turn coordinate agency efforts en masse (Bensimon, 2018; Freire, 1970;
hooks, 1989). An equity-minded agent has the potential to educate agents about equity-
mindedness and habitual practices of whiteness, as well as guide agents’ development of critical
race consciousness, racialized emotions, and reflexivity (Freire, 1970; hooks, 1989; Bensimon,
2018; Bonilla-Silva, 2019).
Equity-mindedness (Bensimon, 2018) takes up both resistance (hooks, 1989) and
liberation (Freire, 1970) in the pursuit of education transformation. Freire's (1970) classic book
Pedagogy of the Oppressed frames oppression as dehumanization but also as a situation that can
be transformed; he believed in the potential of both oppression and resistance, where the
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37

oppressed will struggle for their liberation which will ultimately liberate oppressors as well.
hooks’ (1989) use of space in the margin as a place of resistance is relevant in institutions of
higher education both as a space within the mind that is decolonized as well as physical spaces
within the university that are attempting to meet in the margin as a place of resistance to engage
in transformation.
Engaging equity and equity-mindedness requires individual and organizational responses
that change systems, particularly those embedded in institutionalized racism and white
supremacy (Bensimon, 2018; Freire, 1970; hooks, 1989). Practicing equity-mindedness includes
critical race consciousness, cognizance of how racism and whiteness are enacted through taken
for granted policies and everyday practices, and awareness of racialized assumptions and beliefs
(Bensimon, 2018). Developing equity-mindedness requires one to learn about equity and the
principles of being equity-minded, and continually refine their ability to center racial justice in
their work (Bensimon, 2018). In transforming ideology and institutions, equity-mindedness as a
form of resistance to white supremacy works to liberate the marginalized, and in doing so
liberates the oppressors (Bensimon, 2018; Freire, 1970; hooks, 1989).
Incorporating Race into New Institutionalism
Institutions are socially constructed, and therefore can ostensibly be reconstructed. In this
section, I briefly introduce mechanisms within new institutionalism (frames, schemas, routines,
agency) that explains how this may occur before detailing them in the following section. A new
institutionalist view of organizations recognizes roles for agency, routines, frameworks and
schemas, all of which are potential sources of both constraints against change as well as
initiations of change (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Zucker, 1977; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998;
Snow, 2004). Frames socially construct how people collectively operate according to culturally
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38

relevant principles without necessarily recognizing how frames shape their perception or
understanding of the world (Snow, 2004; 2000; 1986). When embedded in the organization,
racial frames covertly guide assumptions about race and informs the allocation of opportunities
and resources (Wooten & Couloute, 2017). Schemas are “generalizable, often unconscious,
cognitive ‘default assumptions’” (DiMaggio, 1997, p. 269) that act as templates for social action,
including how to create new rules. Similarly, scripts are also rules or common expectations of
acceptable social behavior (Posselt, 2014). In this way, schemas connect to resources through
organizations and (re)produce racial structures (Ray, 2019). As racialized organizations, schools
and universities utilize schemas of whiteness to connect resources, norms, and values that reward
whiteness in ways that do not require consciousness, which then accumulates racialized power
like white privilege (Ray, 2019).
Routines are practices and processes that contribute to the organization’s structure, are
often tied to the allocation of resources, and are enacted by individuals (Pentland & Feldman,
2005; Feldman & Pentland, 2003). Racialized organizations often separate commitments to
equity from policies or practices that might reinforce racial inequities, and seemingly objective
rules may be enforced in ways that racially discriminate (Ray, 2019). This separation allows
organizations to “maintain legitimacy and appear neutral or even progressive while doing little to
intervene in pervasive patterns of racial inequality” (Ray, 2019, p. 42). Similar to Ray’s (2019)
and Bensimon’s (2018) definition, in new institutionalism agency is individuals’ position within
the organization where individuals interpret and carry-out routines via schemas and connection
to resources (Sewell, 1992; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). Agency is shaped by whiteness within
organizations, particularly via racialized exclusion and ex/implicit discrimination (Moore, 2008).
In new institutionalism, individual agents’ and organizations’ thinking and behavior are
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39

embedded within--and a function of--social contexts and shared frameworks, and so the frames
through which they interpret the social world are important to consider when examining how
organizations might transform. Specifically, if an individual or organization can change its
frame, it can also change their understanding of reality and behavior.
Although founding scholars of new institutionalism omit a discussion of race in their
consideration of organizational structure and mechanisms, race is nonetheless at the core of
conceptualizing organizations, agents, and their social contexts (Rojas, 2017). New
institutionalism emphasizes the embeddedness of organizations within wider political, social, and
cultural where organizations are products of shared cultural, historical, and cognitive frameworks
(Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Zucker, 1977). Recent literature on race in new institutionalism and
organizations argues U.S. organizations are racialized and embedded in a larger social system
which is also racialized (i.e., white supremacy) (Ray, 2019; Rojas, 2019; Smith, 2019).
Organizational Level Analysis of Racialized Power Contestation in Higher education
Organizations contribute to the social construction of race and its disparate conditions
and outcomes (Ray, 2019; Bonilla-Silva, 2018). Situated between individuals and social systems,
organizations transfer resources and norms through legitimation processes provided via schemas
and scripts which are often unconscious (Ray, 2019). When analyzing race and organizations,
The most fundamental aspect of the relationship between race and institutions is that race
is about inequality and institutions, which stabilize and govern behavior, by their nature
solidify social inequality. Thus, any change in race is bound to alter institutions and
changes in institutions have the potential to revise social inequalities (Rojas, 2017, p. 17).
Through their formal and informal behavior, organizations either reify or change racialized
systems of inequity, where agents decide how to factor race into the routines and structure of the
organization (Rojas, 2019). Nearly in tandem, mechanisms of the organization are racialized and
the organization participates in racialization where “the processes of racial construction and
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40

institutional evolution grow together and mutually influence each other” (Rojas, 2019, p. 18).
The process by which organizations are racialized is concerned with how meaning is socially
constructed and connected to race in ways that are crafted by the organization and adapted
according to the organization’s needs (Smith, 2019). From their historic and contemporary racial
exclusions of access to the visible racial stratification of professional roles, higher education
institutions are clear examples of racialized organizations (Smith, 2019). Additionally, racialized
meanings can be placed on to organizations, sometimes in ways that are not inherently bad like
an affinity group or student cultural center; for example, the Second Morrill Act forbade racial
discrimination in college admissions for land-grant institutions (Smith, 2019). Organizations are
also racialized through clearly racist policies of overt discrimination, or via explicit racial
missions such as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (Wooten & Couloute, 2017).
Therefore, it is appropriate to examine racialized power contestation at the organizational level
of higher education.
How institutions of higher education frame equity, as organizations that connect racial
schemas to resources via routines and agents (Ray, 2019), discloses principles regarding
racialized power and reveals the set of rules pertaining to social conformity and alignment to
institutional norms. For example, prospective college students must adhere to an institution’s
narrow and racialized expectations of student excellence in order to gain admission, and current
students are expected to assimilate to an institution’s white campus culture so they may be
continually deemed worthy of its education (Iverson, 2007). On campus, racialized resource
allocation is evident in the frequent off-campus locations and under funding of identity centers
and Black Studies departments (Rojas, 2010). Further, the knowledge production in the academy
is primarily white eurocentric, marginalizing or omitting alternative epistemologies (Alexander,
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41

2005; Bhambra et al., 2018). Therefore, to understand the organizational operation of in/equity in
higher education, including the dynamics of whiteness and racialized power contestation, we
must examine how these organizational frames, schemas, routines, and agency can be used to
support or resist whiteness. In the following sections, I further discuss these organizational
mechanisms of change which I briefly introduced in the previous section.
Frames
Frames are institutionalized in various ways and are subject to change throughout history;
they are the organization of experience (Snow, 2004; 2000; 1986). Frame refers to the set of
rules governing a given type of activity, and people often operate within a frame without
recognizing its principles (Snow, 2004; 2000; 1986). Organizations of higher education and are
embedded in social context of white supremacy as a hegemonic power which informs their
frameworks and accounts of history (Ray, 2019; Wooten & Couloute, 2017). One theory of a
racialized frame is Feagin’s (2010) white racial frame, a worldview filled with persistent
ideologies, perspectives, and norms which is foundational to how a majority of white Americans
view race and society (Feagin, 2010). This white-created racial frame “provides an overarching
and generally destructive worldview, one extending across white divisions of class, gender, and
age” (Feagin, 2010, p.10). One key function of the white racial frame is to conceal the brutality
of our racist history which involves rewriting history from a white point of view (Feagin, 2010).
This racial frame is both “embedded in individual minds, as well as in collective memories and
histories, and helps people make sense out of everyday situations” (Feagin, 2010, p. 9) and used
to understand the operation of racial inequity. Central to the white racial frame is the collective
memory and forgetting that shapes racist pasts and legitimates the racist structure of U.S. society
(Feagin, 2010).
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The white racial frame protects and shapes society’s unequal racialized structure of
resources and hierarchy of power, and it persists because it is constantly validated through white
people and whiteness (Feagin, 2010; Bonilla-Silva, 2018); it situates white people as decision
makers and actors in both racial privilege and oppression (Feagin, 2010; Feagin & Ducey, 2019).
Organizational processes are filtered through race frames, largely racially ignorant (Mueller,
2020) or race-evasive frames (Ray & Purifoy, 2019). Considering Snow’s (2004; 2000; 1986)
theory of frames and Bonilla-Silva’s (2018) discussion of race socialization beyond individuals,
it is unsurprising that organizations may use racially ignorant frames (Ray & Purifoy, 2019).
Whether the omission of race and racialized inequities is intentional or unconscious,
organizations employ race-evasive assumptions and mechanisms that are actually racialized to
prize and assimilate to whiteness (Ray & Purifoy, 2019).
The locus of organization is in the activity or interaction of people, and people reinforce
the operation of the appropriate frame (Snow, 2004; 2000; 1986). People operating in a primary
framework have an answer to the question of ‘what is going on here’ and conduct themselves
according to the organizing principles that are appropriate for the type of activity (Snow, 2004;
2000; 1986). White peoples’ racialized emotions (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Matias, 2016) and white
agency (Harris, 1993; Ray, 2019) protect their racial comfort and affective interests within and
through the organization and are consequential, contributing to racialized work hierarchies and
emotional labor (Wingfield & Alston, 2013; Leonardo & Porter, 2010). In higher education, this
is evidenced through the centering and serving of white people:
Today, as in the past, campus cultures at most historically white institutions remain
strongly white-oriented and resistant to fundamental changes in practices that involve
conventional white racial framing. At most such institutions the majority of white
trustees, administrators, advisors, faculty members, and students have shown little desire
to remake their campuses to fully integrate the interests and concerns of students of color
into campus culture (Feagin & Ducey, 2019, p. 151).
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However, shared cognitive organizational frameworks that embody equity enable modifications
to routines and schemas, and could contribute to the transmission of equity-mindedness across
the organization. Gradually, how the organization participates in racialization may shift, and the
socialization of agents may develop to include notions of equity-mindedness.
Isomorphism is the spread of ideas and strategies rooted in frameworks that make
organizations more similar (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991), and higher education institutions share
racially ignorant frameworks (Ray & Purifoy, 2019) and standards for racialized resources and
exclusion through isomorphism (Ray, 2019). Pressure via isomorphism (Zucker, 1977) within
and among higher education organizations to practice equity-mindedness (Bensimon, 2018) may
also facilitate racial equity efforts and diminish whiteness. For example, universities that revise
their account of institutional history to include colonialism and slavery grapple with their
connections to racial violence (Patton & Haynes, 2018), and also influence their peer institutions
to investigate their histories. In graduate education, isomorphic equity processes assist
organizational change by diffusing innovative practices or policies that are equity-oriented,
typically through disciplinary conferences or research grant foundations (Posselt, 2020).
Overtime equity-mindedness may be associated with an organization’s reputation or recognized
as a rule within the field, and peer organizations may adapt equity-minded practices in pursuit of
mirroring peer institutions.
Schemas
As default assumptions, schemas mobilize the allocation of organizational resources and
rely on resources to survive in the organization (Sewell, 1992); they are templates for social
action and unequally distribute resources according to racialized frames and assumptions (Ray,
2019). Organizational schemas function with a race-evasive framework (Ray & Purifoy, 2019)
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and protect affective interests of white people (Bonilla-Silva, 2019). From racial exclusion
protected by law to racial ideologies that justify unequal access to resources, racial schemas
adapt to defend “an underlying racial structure endowing actors with differential forms of
agency” (Ray, 2019, p. 32). Schemas can also include critical consciousness and equity-
mindedness, and directly engaging individuals about their racialized emotions and ambivalence
is central to introducing critical race consciousness (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Bensimon, 2018).
Collectively, equity-minded agents can coordinate their efforts to review, critique, and gradually
transform parts of the organization that they realize center whiteness and institutionalize racism
(Bensimon, 2018; Patton & Haynes, 2018; Stewart, 2018; hooks, 1989; Sewell, 1992). For
example, in a study on graduate admissions and equity efforts, departmental change was
facilitated when there was a willingness to shift or eliminate practices that contributed to barriers
to access and inclusion (Posselt et. al., 2017). Specifically, redefining characteristics of ideal
applicants and changing how applications are evaluated both engaged equity (Posselt et. al.,
2017). As agents work together to practice equity-mindedness and communicate their desire to
engage in transformative action, notions of equity have the potential to spread across the
organization (Patton & Haynes, 2018; Stewart, 2018; Chang, 2002; hooks, 1989; Sewell, 1992).
Similarly, organizational scripts can be used by agents to both progress change and
justify the status quo (Posselt, 2014; Ford, 2012). Scripts can signify hegemonic or
counterhegemonic narratives that elaborate (mis)understanding of and resistance to social norms
(Ford, 2012). Agents individually and collectively use scripts to justify social behavior and how
they understand the world (Posselt, 2014; Ford, 2012). For example, conventional scripts about
merit in education narrowly define academic excellence, but by introducing scripts that counter
meritocracy as the status quo, agents can develop new scripts that center diversity in their
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understanding of academic excellence (Posselt, 2014). Frame and schema analysis can be applied
to the study of higher education to understand the common principles of an institution, and the
set of rules that govern an institution and the aggregate of its community. For instance in higher
education, ideas and practices that constitute official and commonly recognized understandings
of race are expressed and supported by strategies of institutional action and activity, and are
communicated by institutional leaders (Berrey, 2011). Here, racial inclusion is rationalized as
instrumental to better learning and more marketable skills for students, and appeal to competitive
applicants which are majority white students (Berrey, 2011).
Routines
Routines are a source of both stability and flexibility, and thus important mechanisms for
potential change in organizations; once a new routine is established, it becomes self-reinforcing
(Feldman & Pentland, 2003). Together, schemas and routines produce and reinforce racialized
structures (Ray, 2019), but as a disruption, equity-centered schemas and routines can facilitate
racial equity by de-centering whiteness in higher education organizational policies and practices
(Bensimon, 2018; Ray, 2019). Equity-minded efforts include the review of diversity plans and
race-evasive policies, and redesigning them as critically race conscious (Bensimon, 2018; Ray,
2019). As a source of organizational flexibility, routines are key access points to practice equity-
mindedness and transform the organization.
A routine has two related components. Feldman & Pentland (2003) write, “one part
embodies the abstract idea of the routine (structure), while the other part consists of the actual
performances of the routine by specific people, at specific times, in specific places (agency)” (p.
95). Importantly, there may be a misalignment between the intention of an organizational routine
and how it is enacted (Feldman & Pentland, 2003). Racialized variance between the ostensive
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and performative aspects of organizational routines (Ray, 2019) subjugates racially marginalized
groups while privileging whiteness (Harris, 1993). As a form of resistance, critically conscious
agents have the potential to reallocate resources in a way that intentionally centers equity and
disrupts whiteness, and applies their awareness to new contexts (Ray, 2019; Bensimon, 2018).
By interpreting and enacting policy, equity-minded agents perform and potentially alter routines
that center whiteness or protect the racial comfort of white people.
The engagement of structure and agency is a source of potential change (Feldman &
Pentland, 2003). Organizational routines, schemas, and frameworks shape and regulate one
another (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Feldman & Pentland, 2003), and so the infusion of equity-
mindedness into routines could influence the distribution of resources or shared cognitive
framework that disrupt whiteness. The ostensive aspect of an organizational routine, the
structure, may not match with the performative aspect, agency, which brings the routines to life
through actions by people (Feldman & Pentland, 2003). For example, the mobilization of
whiteness as a resource (Harris, 1993) and credential (Ray, 2019) reinforces the racialized
hierarchy of white supremacy within the organization while appearing to be a race-neutral
process of opportunity (Wingfield & Alston, 2013).
In racialized organizations, racially marginalized individuals are often coerced to take on
the burden of emotional labor in order to preserve white peoples’ racial comfort at work, for
instance hiding emotions of anger and downplaying effects of every day practices of
institutionalized racism (Wingfield & Alston, 2013; Ray, 2019; Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Harris,
1993). Moreover, racialized tasks “[illuminate] the ways that organizational hierarchies are often
racially segregated, and that the work expected of employees at different levels of the hierarchy
includes labor that is subtly racialized and continues to perpetuate inequality” (Wingfield &
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47

Alston, 2013, p. 285). However, agents who engage equity-mindedness have the potential to
directly disrupt whiteness as a property and credential in how they refrain from deploying
whiteness within the organization and instead use their position within the organization to
critique its racialized structure (Ray, 2019; Harris, 1993).
Agency
How leaders may change or regulate organizations via routines, frames, and schemas
involves understanding their agency. However, whiteness within organizations constrains racial
equity through racialized limitations and allowance of agency (Ray, 2019). Leaders in
organizations that reproduce racialized structures effectively reify racism and contribute to the
legitimation of racial categories of work and roles (Sewell, 2016). Ostensive aspects/structures of
an organization can be actualized through agency, where agency is generated by human
resources and schemas (Sewell, 1992). Knowledge of a schema enables one to transfer, extend,
and creatively apply it to new contexts, giving way to the potential of agency to wield change
within an organization (Sewell, 1992). But, agents who hold a racially ignorant (Mueller, 2020)
frame are generally unaware of racialized structures and emotions within the organization and
may be resistant to efforts to address racial inequity, like affirmative action (Harris, 1993;
Bonilla-Silva, 2019).
Agents are “capable of exerting some degree of control over the social relations in which
one is enmeshed, which in turn implies the ability to transform those social relations to some
degree” (Sewell, 1992, p. 20). Uniquely situated in organizations, agents are aware of schemas
and scripts that inform their social life and have access to resources which they may control
(Sewell, 1992; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Ford, 2012). With this awareness of schemas and
scripts, agents can counter scripts that they find unjust or unreasonable (Posselt, 2014). Critical
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examination of routines that result in disparate racialized outcomes due to ostensive and
performative misalignment can be adjusted using a equity-minded framework (Ray, 2019;
Bensimon, 2018). Transformative change will only occur, however, if assessments of
organizational policy and practices are conducted by agents who understand the violence of
racial oppression, either through experience or empathy, and their duty to take action (Bonilla-
Silva, 2019). Importantly, individual agency varies significantly by the agent’s social position
within the larger sociocultural context, position within the organization, knowledge of schemas
and resources, and desire for transformative action (Sewell, 1992; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998).
White agents carry their racial privilege and racially ignorant (Mueller, 2020) frame in to the
organization (Ray, 2019) which also uses a race-evasive frame (Ray & Purifoy, 2019) and
centers white privilege (Wingfield & Alston, 2013).
Beyond an individual, agency is also collective, requiring communication, mobilization
of resources, and coordination of actions (Sewell, 1992). White agents benefit from the property
functions and affective privileges of whiteness stemming from the social context of white
supremacy, and therefore are less likely to use their position within the organization to
coordinate collective action that appears to alter their privileged status (Harris, 1993; Bonilla-
Silva, 2019). Moreover, all white people un/consciously participate in maintaining white
supremacy and derive a positive emotion like satisfaction, ease, or comfort, further entangling
whiteness and racialized emotions (Bonilla-Silva, 2019). But, whiteness within organizations can
be mitigated by agents who are equity-minded (Bensimon, 2018). Individuals can use their
agency to bring their concerns about a practice to the attention of their colleagues and attempt to
construct an alternative approach. For example, equity-minded faculty may notice the curriculum
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relies on white-dominated perspectives and disciplines, and propose the department blend in
multiple perspectives drawing from critical, feminist, and anti-colonial traditions (hooks, 1994).
Racialized Power Contestation in U.S. Society
How do these micro and meso-level mechanisms of change play out within higher
education organizations to support or mitigate whiteness as a manifestation of white supremacy?
In order to examine how whiteness is supported or mitigated in higher education organizations, I
consider how white supremacy as a racialized and hegemonic power is contested across society
(Freire, 1970; Hall, 1983; hooks, 1989; Leonardo, 2003). While the conceptual framework I
developed here describes racialized power contestation across three levels of analysis (social,
organizational, and individual), the inclusion of social and individual levels of analysis are
intended to inform a fuller conceptualization of how white supremacy is reproduced or resisted at
the organizational level. Specifically, these frame my interest in DEI plan implementation in
graduate education. I turn now to describe how these levels fit together, via Model 1 below (also
in appx. A).

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Model 1
Contestation of white supremacy as a racialized and hegemonic power across U.S. society

White supremacy is a hegemonic power (Freire, 1970; Hall, 1983; Harris, 1993; hooks,
1989) which is embedded in higher education (Ahmed, 2012; Wilder, 2013). That is, it is a
dominant culture that appears to allow alternative possibilities and freedom rather than
destroying opposition, and which requires regular forms of control, typically through leadership,
to maintain (Hall, 1983; Freire, 1970). Here, white supremacy and hegemony are not only
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associated with extreme violence and domination, but are more commonly expressed in every-
day mundane actions and ways of perceiving the world that center whiteness. White supremacy
is reconstituted by individuals through their wielding of or resistance to power, and their actions
inform organizational norms (Bensimon, 2018; Ray, 2019; Rojas, 2019; Harris, 1993; hooks,
1989; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991). In the case of DEI plans, instances where statements directly
name white supremacy and interrogate how whiteness manifests within higher education attempt
to dislodge hegemony. However, DEI plans that avoid discussing the role of white supremacy in
higher education, for example in rosy accounts of the institution’s history with racial exclusion,
support whiteness and reify hegemony (Southern, under review).
Given its positioning within higher education and its means of reproducing itself,
graduate education can also be thought of as an organization embedded in white supremacy as a
socio-historical context. From this perspective, how leaders address racial equity will be
informed by their interpretation of race in society and in/ability to practice equity-mindedness
within their organization (Bensimon, 2018; Dowd & Liera, 2018; Felix, et al., 2015; Liera &
Dowd, 2018). Individuals interpret hegemonic ideas, history, laws, and institutions, which then
informs their support or resistance to hegemony (Leonardo, 2003; Hall, 1983; Bensimon, 2018;
Sewell, 1992). Interpretation is also tied to racialized emotions (Bonilla-Silva, 2019) and comfort
(Harris, 1993), and so how an individual feels about race is as important as how they think about
race. Within graduate admissions, for example, leaders may interpret proposals to eliminate the
GRE as a violation of merit or removal of a biased test depending upon their understanding of
race and education opportunity (Posselt, 2016; Posselt et. al., 2017) or possibly feel the decision
is a personal affront.
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Any person’s behavior may appear to involve movement between resistance to and
support of white supremacy; at times, they may engage in critical consciousness and act in ways
that facilitate transformation, but at other times they remain silent, complicit, or stagnant amidst
whiteness and racism within their organization (Bensimon, 2018; Sewell, 1992; Ray, 2019;
Wingfield & Alston, 2013; Ray & Purifoy, 2019; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Freire, 1970; Hall,
1983; hooks, 1989). For instance, in program meetings to discuss equity and racial climate, white
faculty may avoid or distract from discussions of race, particularly when they are involved
personally, effectively supporting whiteness within that space and discussion. Alternatively, a
Black graduate student at the program meeting may actively resist white racial ignorance and
evasiveness within the space by discussing the racism they have experienced in the program. In
graduate education, graduate programs may take an equity-minded approach to evaluating their
student funding models but neglect to interrogate racially marginalized students' experience with
faculty mentors (Slay, et al., 2019; Posselt, 2018).
At the organizational level, individuals can uphold or critique hegemonic routines,
policies, and practices, such that organizations contribute to the reproduction or contestation of
white supremacy as a hegemonic power in myriad and possibly inconsistent ways (Bensimon,
2018; Leonardo, 2003; Sewell, 1992; Ray, 2019; Rojas, 2019; Hall, 1983; Freire, 1970; Powell
& DiMaggio, 1991). Whiteness does not abstractly float within an organization but is historically
embedded and reconstituted by agents who make decisions and act upon policies and practices
(Feagin, 2010; Feagin & Ducey, 2019). Thus, the role of agency within the organization structure
is essential to unpack in order to understand how whiteness endures and organizational change
occurs. In DEI plans, authors who use racially ignorant (Mueller, 2020) language to discuss
diversity and equity allow whiteness to persist unnamed within the institution (Southern, under
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review). In graduate education, for example, how leaders address hostile racial climates carries
consequences for access and retention of racially marginalized students and faculty (Slay, et al.,
2019; Posselt, 2018; Harris & Linder, 2018). Racial equity efforts are incomplete when leaders
only focus on the underrepresentation of racially marginalized individuals without also
examining how white individuals are structurally centered and privileged within the organization
(Ray, 2019). In examining graduate education at the organizational level specifically, we better
understand how leaders support or resist whiteness across the school and program, and how
graduate schools as organizations can institute change to advance racial equity that may contest
or reproduce white supremacy.
In summary, I have argued in this chapter that whiteness works to protect property and
organizational interests of white supremacy (Harris, 1993; Ray, 2019). Racially ignorant
(Mueller, 2020) approaches to equity by higher education organizations and their leaders that do
not challenge racialized structures and inequity, therefore enable the persistence of white
supremacy and racism. While racial ignorance is often tied to inexperience with race and racial
inequity, it also stems from an ontological refusal to contend with the harsh realities of racism
(Mueller, 2020). However, contestation of white supremacy as a racialized hegemonic power via
equity-mindedness (Bensimon, 2018) has the potential to embody the work of liberation (Freire,
1970) and resistance (hooks, 1989) in order to transform (Patton & Haynes, 2018; Stewart, 2018;
Chang, 2002) higher education. As an organizational analysis studying how change happens or
not within higher education organizations, we also learn how institutions function. Particularly,
we further understand how agency—as reflected in the use of specific schemas, scripts, and
routines—helps account for the stability or alteration of the racialized organization when
connected with organizational processes (Ray, 2019). In the following chapter, I connect this
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conceptual framework with critical hermeneutics of whiteness to propose a research design that
examines how whiteness manifests, and may be mitigated, in graduate education organizations as
leaders implement equity plans.
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Chapter 3: Critical Hermeneutics of Whiteness and Case Study Methodology
To examine how graduate programs implement DEI plans in an attempt to advance racial
equity, and to consider the role of whiteness in this process, I paired comparative case study
methodology (Creswell, 2007; Stake, 2005) with critical hermeneutics of whiteness (Leonardo,
2003) to answer the following research questions:
1) How do graduate schools and programs utilize organizational mechanisms (e.g., routines,
practices) to advance racial equity?
2) How do leaders approach racial equity within the graduate program and school?
3) How is whiteness manifesting in equity planning and initiatives in the graduate school
and programs?
4) How do equity efforts reproduce and/or mitigate whiteness within the graduate program
and school?
The implementation of DEI plans and initiatives is an appropriate avenue to study these issues
because discussions of equity include considerations of racial inequities; therefore, leaders
engaging equity as a goal hold the potential to notice whiteness within their graduate school and
programs. Further, in their designs and plans for equity, leaders have the opportunity to discuss
racism and white supremacy and how those manifest within graduate education. As leaders work
to potentially enact equitable changes to their policies and practices, they use their agency to
connect their interpretation of and feelings about racial equity (Leonardo, 2003; Bonilla-Silva,
2019) to resources and decisions in ways that are observable and which have implications for
whiteness within the graduate school. In this study, we learn more about how human agency
within the graduate school shapes the racialized organization, further informing Ray’s (2019)
theory about "the role of human agency in generating new mechanisms while also explaining the
stability of organizational inequality" (p. 28), and how agents confront whiteness embedded in
the organization as they work to advance equity.
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For this study, I utilized case study methodology to guide my data collection and
analysis. I chose case study methodology because of its flexibility with multiple data collection
methods and sequence, and capacity to pair with critical approaches to methodology like critical
hermeneutics of whiteness (Leonardo, 2003). Additionally, case study allowed me to examine
and compare multiple cases, which was essential as I aimed to empirically understand and
inform complex theories like racialized organizations (Ray, 2019) and whiteness as property
(Harris, 1993) with findings that are theoretically generalizable. Finally, case study permitted me
to directly connect my research questions to my theoretical framework to create sensitizing
concepts during analysis and use the constant comparative method (Charmaz, 2014) to analyze
my data. Because this study is interdisciplinary and draws from multiple methods to inform my
research questions, I relied on comparative case study as my methodology.
Case study allows researchers to operationalize their research questions while also
incorporating important historical and social power contexts like racism and whiteness (Stake,
2005). Multiple levels of participant involvement as well as varied types of data such as
documents, interviews, and observations are characteristics of case studies, where the goal is to
gain a deep and complex understanding of the cases as a bounded system or example (Stake,
2005). Examining more than one case and engaging in strategic comparison further nuances and
contextualizes the findings of case study, allowing the researcher to generalize from phenomena
present within the cases to problems beyond the cases themselves (Stake, 2005). Importantly,
comparative case study combined with critical hermeneutics of whiteness sharpened my
methodological and analytical approach as a researcher centering racialized power contestation
in organizational mechanisms and individual interpretation (Leonardo, 2003).
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Critical hermeneutics (Leonardo, 2003) is the study of interpretation, and allows
researchers to critique historical and contemporary grand narratives, ideology, and assumptions
present in participant data. With critical hermeneutics, critical awareness can be cultivated and
knowledge can be transformative (Leonardo, 2003). Particularly, critical hermeneutics carries an
opportunity to understand and change people’s interpretation of history and social problems, and
subsequent actions, decisions, and practice (Leonardo, 2003). Critical hermeneutics of whiteness
(CHW), as a specific application of critical hermeneutics, critiques whiteness within ideology,
interpretation, and practice (Leonardo, 2003). In my methodology, I layer CHW on to
comparative case study to employ a critical lens oriented to notice whiteness within the data.
Thus, my methods are from case study methodology and my interpretation derives from CHW.
CHW held several affordances for the purposes of my study:
First, with CHW, I was able to examine how leaders interpreted race and equity through
their discussions of their DEI plans and work within graduate education, and intentionally notice
whiteness. I was also able to interpret individuals’ racialized emotions as they discussed their
engagement with equity (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Leonardo, 2003), while being sensitive to
functions of whiteness. I aimed to identify whiteness (Harris, 1993) using CHW as it manifested
through program language and decisions in DEI plans, and through leaders’ expressed
perspectives of racial equity. CHW paired well with my conceptualization of racialized power
contestation (Freire, 1970; hooks, 1989) in my framework and goal to examine both how
whiteness functioned in organizations and how it was mitigated because CHW kept my
interpretations sensitive to whiteness.
In addition, to center racialized power contestation and whiteness in my data collection, I
used CHW to learn how participants interpreted equity, race, and their program's initiatives while
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being aware of whiteness (Leonardo, 2003). For instance, CHW helped me discern what Freire
(1970) calls "false generosity of paternalism" (p.54), a strategy to maintain racialized power
when it is contested while appearing to support change. This was particularly helpful as I
interpreted connections between whiteness and nonperformitivity (Ahmed, 2006). CHW also
oriented my observation and interview protocols towards noticing covert and overt examples of
whiteness and racialized power contestation (Leonardo, 2003). For example, CHW helped me
notice critically conscious individuals within the margins of higher education who were
continuously decolonizing their minds and were attempting to invite institutions and leaders to
join them in the margin where transformative praxis thrives (hooks, 1989; Patton & Haynes,
2018; Stewart, 2018). Finally, CHW allowed me to consider the presence of whiteness within
larger social contexts relevant to graduate education that socialize leaders’ interpretation and
feelings about race and equity. For instance, U.S. higher education’s racialized history and grand
narratives that explain present-day racial inequality in education.
Case Selection and Setting
This study is bound by three graduate schools and nine graduate programs across three
public research universities, totaling twelve cases. All three graduate schools were coordinating
the implementation of a DEI plan either designed by the graduate school or their institution.
Additionally, all nine graduate programs were working on implementing their graduate school's
or university's DEI plan alongside program-specific equity initiatives in graduate admissions and
education. By examining the graduate school as an organization alongside graduate programs, I
was able to compare organizational behavior within the cases while also collecting data on how
that behavior was embedded within the organizational structure of the graduate school.
Specifically, I was able to understand the graduate school's DEI plan and implementation efforts
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across two levels of the organization, including comparisons of how the programs interpreted
and carried out tasks set by their graduate school. Together, the graduate school and graduate
programs allowed me to examine how whiteness functioned within higher education
organizations, how programs instituted change to advance racial equity, and how leaders
supported or resisted whiteness across the school and program levels of the organization.
I used a mix of sampling techniques–purposeful, convenience, and snowball–to recruit
for this study. I purposefully targeted research universities with substantial graduate schools that
carry-out work across academic schools and programs, including graduate admissions,
education, and student support. I targeted graduate schools with an espoused commitment to
diversity and equity that was demonstrated through activities like graduate student support
groups, graduate diversity officers, or reconsideration of admissions requirements such as the
GRE. I gathered information about graduate schools through university websites, particularly
pages dedicated to diversity and inclusion.
I utilized convenience sampling by reaching out to graduate schools aligned with my
sampling criteria, three that I was working with through a research project and two via my
affiliation with the USC Pullias Center for Higher Education. Finally, I practiced snowball
sampling by consulting with the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) to learn of graduate schools
engaging in diversity and equity work, and subsequently reached out to six graduate schools
because of their leadership in diversity and equity work to solicit participation. After I recruited
graduate schools to participate in the study, I practiced snowball sampling to recruit participation
from graduate programs at each institution that were working with their graduate school to
implement DEI plans.
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Three large public research universities participated in this critical comparative case
study, which I refer to as Ponderosa Pine University (PPU), Western Juniper University (WJU),
and Red Cedar University (RCU). All institutions, programs, and participant names are
represented with pseudonyms. At each institution, the graduate school and three graduate
programs participated, all from varying disciplinary and field backgrounds including the
humanities, social sciences, and STEM. All three graduate schools were appropriate sites to
study because they were involved in implementing DEI plans, and they had an espoused and
demonstrated commitment to racial diversity and serving their racially diverse graduate students
and faculty.
Participant Sample
Participants in this study were purposefully sampled across various levels of association
with equity planning and implementation within each graduate school and graduate program,
specifically leaders such as deans, associate deans, program chairs, admissions committee chairs,
and diversity officers (Creswell, 2007). From purposefully sampled participants, I sought
snowball sampling for additional participants engaged with equity implementation within either
the graduate programs or graduate school organization (Creswell, 2007). For example, members
of program DEI committees, graduate school staff, and graduate students. Multiple levels of
participant involvement and data collection formed a robust examination of the graduate schools
and programs as cases, and my conceptualization of racialized organizations (Stake, 2005; Yin,
2014; Ray, 2019). By including program leaders across the organization, I learned how
individual and collective agency sustains or transforms the organization.
Data Collection
Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, I conducted all recruitment, data collection, and
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analysis virtually from my home. This came with some limitations and unexpected affordances.
Virtual observations were limited by the detail of context I could notice and record from the
environment and the social interaction of participants. However, because cases and participants
were also connecting virtually during this study, participants were not in a shared physical space
and therefore the natural shared space for meetings was a virtual meeting room. An unexpected
affordance of virtual data collection of cases and participants who were also virtual, is that I was
able to be in multiple meetings and interviews in a day that were not confined by physical
distance. This allowed me to include three institutions, which were not geographically near one
another, in this critical comparative case study without sacrificing how much time and
engagement I had with each site.
During data collection from January 2021 to July 2021, I memoed after each observation
and interview. Data collection and memoing were guided by interview, observation, and
document protocols that drew on my conceptual framework and CHW in order to increase my
awareness of whiteness in organizational mechanisms, interactions, interpretations, and feelings
(Leonardo, 2003; Bonilla-Silva, 2019). For instance, I combined CHW and Ray’s (2019) concept
of whiteness as an organizational credential in my document protocol to illuminate how
discourse in DEI plans carried implications of whiteness when racially ignorant (Mueller, 2020)
language was used to describe equity. Also, I paired Harris’ (1993) concept of racial comfort
with CHW in my interview protocol to discern how leaders felt about race and equity (Bonilla-
Silva, 2019), and their comfort discussing racial in/equity. See appendix B for additional
empirical examples of whiteness I compiled guided by CHW and my conceptual framework. I
also took open notes during each observation and interview about what I was noticing and
learning generally. For example, for each observation I reflected, "how did leaders use their
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agency?" and for each interview I reflected, "how did the participant frame or express racial
equity when asked about it directly?" After each observation and interview, I would take the next
30 minutes to an hour immediately following my time with participants to write out my memo
while thoughts and quotes remained clear in my memory.
I began by collecting publicly available primary documents pertinent to graduate school
and program equity, particularly the graduate school or university’s DEI plan, graduate
admissions and education policies, and program specific equity initiatives. Generally, DEI plans
outlined recommendations for leaders on how to increase the diversity of underrepresented
students, staff, and faculty, and how to improve their experience and student academic outcomes.
I used DEI plans, along with relevant graduate school and program policies, as evidence about
how the organization interprets race and equity. The DEI plans typically outlined
recommendations through established organizational mechanisms like admissions policy or
practices for student recruitment, and thus I assumed program leaders would also conceptualize
changes with regard to existing ways of working such as referring to policy, using typical
divisions of labor and resource allocation, and relying on pre-existing practices rather than re-
envisioning the practice altogether.
Additionally, I collected secondary data like the university’s diversity statement or
policy, student responses to a campus racial climate survey, and historical information about the
university and race equity (Hodder, 2000). See appendix C for document collection protocol. In
analyzing documents like DEI plans, graduate policies, and surveyed student experiences using
CHW, I became familiar with the graduate schools’ and programs’ established mechanisms (e.g.,
policy, divisions of labor and resources), learned how the organizations interpreted race and
equity, and where whiteness was manifesting in the graduate schools and programs. Specifically,
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I learned how diversity and equity were interpreted at the organization-level and used in
organizational documents as written representations of values and assumptions within the
institution. Findings relevant to how the organization interpreted and engaged racial equity
empirically further informed my understanding of Ray’s (2019) concept of racialized distribution
of resources and whiteness as a credential. By including historical information about the
university, I scratched the surface of how past racialized exclusion and inclusion shaped
contemporary racist realities within the graduate school as an organization. While concentrated
collection of documents took place at the beginning of the study, additional document collection
occurred throughout the study as they become relevant, usually via DEI committee activities.
Documents were organized according to their specific graduate school or program affiliation as a
case.
Data collection also included observations of meetings and interviews with graduate
school and program leadership tasked to implement DEI plans in order to learn how graduate
programs used organizational mechanisms of institutional change to advance racial equity.
Observations are key when studying power dynamics that are designed to be covert, like
whiteness, because participants may be unaware of racial power, oppression or inequity within
organizational spaces (Khan & Jerolmack, 2013; Emerson, et al., 2011). Observations of
leadership meetings guided by CHW allowed me to see how participants expressed their
understanding of race and motivation to engage equity as they collectively worked to implement
DEI plans. Moreover, drawing from CHW in my observation of meetings helped me notice
leaders’ taken-for-granted practices which were embedded in whiteness, like deciding to require
GRE scores to measure merit, even if participants may be unaware of how their actions center
whiteness (Khan & Jerolmack, 2013). See appendix D for observation protocol. During
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observations, I typed notes on a document dedicated to this study to record fieldnotes (Emerson,
et al., 2011). Immediately following each observation, I copied my fieldnotes into an analytic
memo for the observation followed by a summary of what I observed, including any connections
to my conceptual framework and CHW (Emerson, et al., 2011). I later revisited memos when I
analyzed data (Emerson, et al., 2011). During each observation, I noted moments where I
required clarification or more information, and followed-up with a participant through an
interview.
Semi-structured interviews with graduate leaders guided by CHW permitted me to go
deeper below the surface of responses and ask open questions about equity efforts to unearth
thoughts, feelings, and ways of thinking about race that may not be immediately evident to the
participant (Charmaz, 2014; Leonardo, 2003; Bonilla-Silva, 2019). For example, leaders often
showed discomfort when discussing race or avoid it altogether. Interviews with participants also
informed my understanding of agency within the organization and how leaders interpreted their
role and potential to enact change, particularly when it came to advancing racial equity. Findings
relevant to leaders’ interpretation and use of agency within the organization further informed my
understanding of Ray’s (2019) concept of racialized agency. See appendix E for interview
protocol.
I also interviewed participants as a way to follow-up after observing them in meetings in
order to attain greater detail about interesting episodes that occurred, or to verify my
interpretations of exchanges. Such discussions were especially important because observations
occurred online. Interviews were audio-recorded and then professionally transcribed by
Matchless Transcription with the support of a University of Southern California Rossier School
of Education Dean's Research Grant. Upon receiving the transcripts, I checked a sample of
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transcripts for accuracy. Simultaneously interviewing and observing graduate leaders also
unearthed instances of misalignment between leaders' espoused or planned intentions for equity
and how they enacted aspects of DEI plans within their graduate programs and schools (Khan &
Jerolmack, 2013). Findings relevant to intentions of DEI plans versus implementation further
inform my understanding of Ray’s (2019) concept of racialized decoupling of organizational
rules and the racialized distribution of resources.
During data collection, I also recorded what I was learning from across the cases and
implications for practice in two separate memos. In my implications for practice document, I put
on my practitioner lens to consider what I was learning specifically with regard to practice across
the cases because I am committed to translating findings from this study into practical guidance
and information for graduate education leaders. In my meta memo across cases, I recorded early
notions and patterns that I later used to develop sensitizing concepts for data analysis. After data
collection was completed in July 2021, I revisited my analytic protocol based on my conceptual
framework and added sensitizing concepts based on what I memoed during data collection.
The summation of my data collections includes fifty-eight observation hours, sixty-nine
one-hour participant interviews, and over one-hundred documents from eighty participants
across nine graduate programs and three graduate schools from three public research institutions.
I assigned pseudonyms to each institution and solicited pseudonyms from participants. To
maintain confidentiality but still offer some academic context for the graduate programs, I
renamed each program as a generic field or discipline such as social science, natural science,
STEM, or humanities.
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Data Analysis
Together, data collection and analysis drew from multiple methods (e.g., primary and
secondary documentary analysis, observations, interviews) over seven months. I engaged with
the graduate programs and schools in order to learn how leaders used organizational mechanisms
of change to implement DEI plans to possibly advance racial equity and mitigate whiteness. To
guide my data analysis, I used the constant comparative method by Charmaz (2014) which is
adapted from grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1994). My approach to data analysis was
grounded in several key ideas that, together, comprise my conceptual framework: whiteness
within organizations and its resistance (Harris, 1993; Ray, 2019; hooks, 1989), leaders’
interpretation of and feelings about equity via CHW (Leonardo, 2003; Bonilla-Silva, 2019),
racial exclusion, and comfort (Harris, 1993).
I used CHW and my conceptual framework to create sensitizing concepts in order to
intentionally interrogate whiteness within the cases and reflect Ray’s (2019) racialized
organizations theory and Harris’ (1993) theory of whiteness as property. For example, I
combined CHW and Harris’ (1993) concepts of racial status and exclusion to look for whiteness-
informed interpretations of equity and history across DEI plans and leaders. I also paired Ray’s
(2019) concept of racialized agency and CHW to see how leaders and plans framed
responsibility and labor for equity within the organization. See appendix F for analytic protocol.
By using the same data analytic techniques across each type of data collection, I sought to
strengthen the connection between written equity documentation findings with leaders’
implementation findings for each case in the study.
In my organization of data analysis, I bounded cases (Stake, 2005) by their institution site
consisting of the graduate school and three graduate programs. I organized the data by sites in
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order to keep the cases together so I could more easily notice patterns within the university site
and across cases within the site. I also organized data by site in an attempt to simplify my
transition from round one to round two of analysis where I compiled case study summaries.
Use of Data Sources
In my analysis, I used interview data to understand participants' individual perceptions
and conceptualizations of racial equity, change, their program or school, and their role as a
leader. I used observation data to understand how participants discussed and engaged equity
work collectively with colleagues, particularly how they made decisions about their approach to
and prioritization of initiatives. I also used interview and observation data in tandem to fortify
my understanding of how individuals reconciled and puzzled together personal approaches and
commitments to equity to form a collective team effort as a committee. In pairing the two data
sources in analysis, I also noticed where there were convergences and divergences in how a
participant expressed their commitment to equity in an interview and demonstrated their
commitment in a meeting. Likewise, I used document data to understand how leaders
communicated their equity work to audiences outside of a formal role or committee tasked to
advance equity. I considered the document data alongside what I was learning in observation and
interview data to understand how representative a document was of the program/school and its
leaders' approach to equity. In each of the sites, the graduate schools were leaders for equity and
often influenced how graduate programs also engaged in equity, and so to mirror this structure in
analysis, within each site I began analysis with the graduate school.
Documents. Within each site, I first analyzed documents, followed by observation notes
and memos, and then interview transcripts for each of the four cases within the institution. I
began analysis with documents because they were designed to be plans that connect participants
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to one another within each case and to their shared work to advance equity. Documents also
often included espoused values and goals, and they offered language for how the graduate school
or program framed equity. Finally, documents offered additional case context for how the school
or program approached equity work and plans to engage equity.
Observations. I followed document analysis with analysis of observation notes and
memos because they offered insight to how groups of participants within the case engaged with
one another and their shared equity work. Observations also included participant referrals to and
discussions of their DEI plans or planning, which offered an additional connection to document
data. Observations revealed how leaders within the case engaged one another, equity goals, and
the expectations and their motivations to advance equity. Finally, observations offered additional
case context for how individual leaders used their agency to connect knowledge and resources to
possibly initiate or stall change.
Interviews. I completed analysis of each case with analysis of interviews because they
offered insight in to how the individual leader conceptualized equity and their engagement with
equity within their school or program. Interviews also included personalized information about
each participant including why they were engaging in equity work and how they saw themselves
as equity leaders. Finally, interviews offered additional case context on how participants
understood racial inequity and possibly noticed racial inequity within their school or program,
including manifestations of racism and white supremacy. As I conducted round one analysis for
each case, I recorded emerging themes in my analytic memo. At the conclusion of round one
analysis, I organized my codes and preliminary findings in my analytic memo and prepared to
develop case study summaries in round two analysis.

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Round One of Analysis
In September 2021, I began round one of data analysis. I uploaded all interview
transcripts, observation notes and memos, and equity planning documents for each graduate
school and program in to NVivo, a qualitative data software I used to code my data. In round one
of analysis, I engaged in open-coding where patterns emerged to create a new code to understand
the data (Charmaz, 2014; Saldaña, 2013). Then, I used an analytic protocol that reflected my
conceptual framework and CHW, including sensitizing concepts representing theoretical
concepts, to practice line-by-line coding of each document, interview transcript, and observation
fieldnote (Charmaz, 2014; Saldaña, 2013). Simultaneously open-coding with sensitizing
concepts allowed me to remain open to what I could learn from the data that was both outside of
and reflected in my conceptual framework. I was also able to ensure that I connected my
conceptual framework and research questions to data analysis via sensitizing concepts. For
example, when open coding, I created a new code called reflection of one's leadership to
represent how participants thought of themselves as equity leaders, and a new code called
emotional labor to represent the emotions participants managed while they engaged equity
efforts. Some sensitizing concepts I developed included equity framing to represent how
participants understood and defined equity, and incentives to engage equity to represent
in/formal expectations from the university, school, or program to address equity. As new codes
emerged from open-coding, I added them to my analytic protocol alongside my sensitizing
concepts. As I engaged in round one of data analysis, I wrote notes and thoughts about what I
was learning in an analytic memo, including preliminary themes and refinement of research
questions.

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Round Two of Analysis
Next, I engaged in axial coding to see how codes related to one another (Charmaz, 2014;
Stake, 2005; Saldaña, 2013). For round two of analysis, I created a template for case study
summaries based on my round one analysis codes and preliminary findings. Templates included
a description of the case, rationale for selecting the case for this critical comparative case study,
sections to include excerpts of document, observation, and interview data, and a list of
preliminary themes seen across most cases, and space for case-specific themes that emerged
during round two of analysis. Examples of preliminary themes included on the template were
agency as a driver of change and new to equity. Each case was written on its own document,
typically ranging between 80 and 100 pages in length. I again bounded the cases by institutional
sites to better understand the institutional contexts of the cases. I also bounded the cases by
institution sites to prepare to compare the cases within their institutional sites and across all three
sites in round three of analysis. In round two of analysis, I returned to the data by case and
conducted axial coding by looking for patterns across the data and pull data excerpts to develop a
detailed summary of each case. In the case study summaries, I wove in analysis and write-ups of
findings throughout selected data excerpts. At the end of each case summary, I detailed where
and how themes for this study emerged within the case and referenced data as supporting
evidence.
Round Three of Analysis
Finally, I practiced selective coding to see how the codes related to the generation of
understanding and theory regarding the operation of whiteness and equity efforts in graduate
education organizations (Charmaz, 2014; Stake, 2005; Saldaña, 2013). For round three of
analysis, I returned to the twelve detailed case summaries to compare and contrast the cases. As a
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comparative case study, it is both important to understand a case deeply and then expand my
view of the case to include how it varies or resembles additional cases in the study. Returning to
the detailed case study summaries as my sources of data for round three of analysis allowed me
to narrow my focus to data that was selected as central and relevant to my research questions and
conceptual interests for this comparative case study. Reviewing each case summary, I organized
data into themes that emerged throughout coding in round one of analysis and the development
of case summaries in round two of analysis. For example, data from the case summaries were
organized into themes like race evasive equity and emotional labor of equity work. Using case
summaries as units bounded by institution, I was able to view themes by case and therefore begin
to understand where cases merged or diverged in their framing of equity and approaches to
advancing equity.
Based on my analysis, I identified findings and organized each finding with its evidence
from the data (Charmaz, 2014; Stake, 2005; Saldaña, 2013). Then, I memoed about each finding
with incorporations of theory and my interpretations. Returning to my analytic memo, I recorded
trends and patterns within the themes that emerged from and across the cases to understand how
the cases compared and contrasted from one another. Concluding my analysis, I selected key
themes where I saw active engagement across the majority of cases to focus on for my
dissertation findings chapters. From the findings, I identified major findings relevant to change
and whiteness within graduate organizations to discuss in detail. Specifically, in one chapter, I
discuss how equity was tempered relative to transformative change; in a second chapter, I
discuss how whiteness tempered transformative change at PPU.
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Positionality
I identify as a cis-gendered white womxn who is an american citizen and who holds
educational privilege as a doctoral candidate at an elite institution. I proudly come from a
LGBTQ family, and through our identity and experiences I first cultivated my awareness of
power and privilege in society. Through experiencing and learning intersections of race-sexuality
and race-gender in college, I developed critical race consciousness. Now, as a researcher I am
working to dismantle whiteness within higher education as a way to abolish white supremacy.
Thus, it is essential that my practice as a scholar align with my research; that I continuously
interrogate how whiteness functions within my program, school and professional roles; and that I
use my agency to resist whiteness. Critical scholarly traditions, including Black feminist thought
and the movement to decolonize the academy, frame the purpose of my work: to disrupt
whiteness in higher education organizations toward abolishing white supremacy. My ongoing
critical race consciousness and the conception of my work is indebted to the labor of critical
Black, Latinx, and Indigenous scholars such as Audre Lorde, Paulo Freire, and Eve Tuck.
Thinking about their work within the margins to liberate and transform, I recall both Freire
(1970) and hooks (1989) also speak to the possibility of oppressors—in this case white folx—to
join the work of transformation (Patton & Haynes, 2018; Stewart, 2018; Chang, 2002). As a
white womxn, I continue to work to decolonize my mind and subsequent actions, and take
responsibility for how I am complicit in white supremacy, colonization, and racism.
I believe it is the responsibility of white folx to examine and disrupt whiteness in our
society, institutions, and personal lives. Regardless of individual intentions to avoid hatred and
support racial equity (see Patton and Bondi's (2015) paper, “Nice white men or social justice
allies?”), white folx carry a collective ancestry of violent colonialism and are the sole
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73

beneficiaries of white supremacy; by extension, we are also the gatekeepers of white supremacy
and its structural manifestations in policies, practices, beliefs, and values. So long as white folx
are ignorant and stagnant to how we alone are centered and valued in U.S. institutions like
education, policing, law, and labor, we are complicit in the violence, oppression, and death of
racially marginalized folx. Within U.S. education, taking responsibility to recognize and abolish
white supremacy includes the work of examining structural whiteness in higher education in
order to fully transform these institutions. By being accountable for whiteness and racial inequity
at both the college or university and programmatic levels, we as researchers and practitioners
collectively contribute to the important work of dismantling white supremacy in education and
our society.
As a white person I have racial privilege, which means I am working to dismantle the
very structural benefits I am simultaneously receiving. I am entangled in my subject because I
cannot divorce myself from my race and its oppressive history or systemic power. Noticing,
showing, and disrupting whiteness as a white researcher requires regular reflection on what I
learn from literature and observe in data and experiences in education (Milner, 2007). I practice
reflexivity in how my racial identity engages the study of whiteness within empirical studies,
beginning with my motivation to pursue this work and throughout the life of the project (Pillow,
2003; Bergerson, 2003). CHW facilitates my reflexivity of discomfort throughout the project and
helps to address equity issues within my design and engagement with participants (Leonardo,
2003; Pillow, 2003; Glesne, 2011). Finally, practices like relying on the conceptual framework to
guide my data collection and analysis and regularly sharing my findings with peer scholars
strengthens my role as researcher.
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As I designed this study, I considered potential ethical concerns like possible risks to
participants. There was a real possibility that I could cause harm to racially marginalized
participants through either my presence as a white womxn in these spaces (adding to what Sara
Ahmed calls a “sea of whiteness” (2012, p. 35)) or my possible inaction as a bystander when
harm, like racialized microaggressions or dismissals of expressed equity concerns, occurred in
meetings or social interactions. I could have also learned through interviews about harm that
participants have previously experienced on campus. I do not want to remain idle as a bystander
or numb as a researcher (Milner, 2007), and so I aimed to mitigate harm that I became aware of
through this study by directly addressing it.
Trustworthiness and Limitations
Limitations of this study’s design includes the narrow scope of examining cases from the
same institution type. However, the theoretical understanding that this study develops is a strong
contribution to the field of higher education and our understanding of racial equity organizational
efforts. Specifically, we further understand how leaders wield their agency to potentially bring
about change through organizational mechanisms, and what this means for racialized inequities
and whiteness embedded within the organization. Another limitation could potentially be that
some graduate schools have a particular way of approaching equity implementation that is
unique to their structure, and thus difficult to replicate outside of this structure. Also, collecting
data virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic is a limitation of this study because equity
implication is not typically carried out virtually but in-person on campuses. The virtual format of
data collection was a particular difference for observations of meetings, especially if participants
turned off their video.
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I ensured validity of my findings by practicing triangulation of data sources for this
critical comparative case study, which includes document analysis, observations of participants,
historical analysis, and interviews with participants (Saldaña, 2013; Stake, 2005; Yin, 2014).
Additionally, I practiced validity by engaging in member checking by sharing findings with peer
education scholars and graduate education leaders to see if they resonated with experience in
graduate education. I also engaged in regular reflection throughout the data collection and
analysis phases of the study as I am a tool of research in an iterative process (Pillow, 2003;
Glesne, 2011). Not only do these practices help to establish trustworthiness, they also strengthen
the study (Saldaña, 2013).
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Chapter 4: Tempering Transformative Change in Graduate Education
Central to this study is the possibility of racially just transformative change (Patton &
Haynes, 2018; Stewart, 2018; Chang, 2002; hooks, 1989). Imagining what a racially just future
for higher education could be, Patton & Haynes (2018) argue leaders should look to models of
liberation in education, for example, Black women; we need to rectify how education institutions
and leaders, historically and presently, marginalize liberators while also benefiting from their
labor.
Institutional change efforts that were formed using the Master’s Tools ultimately serve
the interests of the Master’s House (Lorde, 2007) by making sure that that the race equity
workers on their campus remain occupied with the Master’s concerns (e.g., white
innocence and white fragility) in the name of institutional change (Patton & Haynes,
2018, p. 6).
Moving from the margins as a space of resistance (hooks, 1989) and beyond diversity discourse
prevalent in our institutions, transformative change challenges traditional practices (Chang,
2002) and encompasses “equity and justice in institutional structures, processes, and practices”
(Stewart, 2018, p. 1) that alter the institution. However, institutional change models that do not
disrupt whiteness within organizations may ultimately fail to alter racist structures and cultures,
and in not addressing whiteness, prohibit racially just transformative change (Patton & Haynes,
2018; Stewart, 2018; Chang, 2002, hooks, 1989).
Before proceeding, I want to define two key terms: equity and whiteness. I define
whiteness as "the set of assumptions, privileges, and benefits that accompany the status of being
white… whites have come to expect and rely on these benefits, and over time these expectations
have been affirmed, legitimated, and protected by the law" (Harris, 1993, p. 1713). A central
argument of my findings is that diversity initiatives in higher education can reproduce whiteness
through decisions and actions like evading critical discussions of race and structural forms of
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racism (Ahmed, 2012; Cabrera et al., 2016; Warikoo, 2016). Therefore, understanding how white
supremacy operates is a core component of comprehending how racial inequity persists in higher
education (Bensimon, 2018; Cabrera et al, 2016; Ahmed, 2006). A manifestation of white
supremacy is whiteness, which whiteness is both structural as well as socially constructed to
privilege white people.
I focus on equity work as a window into whiteness embedded in organizations, and how
whiteness might be navigated by graduate leaders in their pursuit of DEI. I define equity as “a
critical understanding of the omnipresence of whiteness at the institutional and practice levels”
(Bensimon, 2018, p. 97). In this critical comparative case study, I examined how graduate
schools, programs, and leaders planned and implemented diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)
2

initiatives in pursuit of equity. In particular, I addressed four research questions: 1) How do
graduate schools and programs utilize organizational mechanisms (e.g., routines, practices) to
advance racial equity? 2) How do leaders approach racial equity within the graduate program and
school? 3) How is whiteness manifesting in equity planning and initiatives in the graduate school
and programs? 4) How do equity efforts reproduce and/or mitigate whiteness within the graduate
program and school?
Keeping in mind the goal of transformative change, the data reveal that change was
largely tempered. I find that this tempering occurred through three standard organizational
processes that tend to impede change of any sort, and through drawbacks in programs’ approach
to DEI-related changes specifically. The latter includes isolating DEI work and mechanisms that
reproduce whiteness in diversity, equity, and inclusion work. In this chapter, I present these
findings from three institutions including their graduate schools and three graduate programs

2
Reflecting language used in the cases, I use the term DEI
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each across STEM, humanities, and social science: Ponderosa Pine University (PPU), Red Cedar
University (RCU), and Western Juniper University
3
(WJU). Before moving into these findings, I
introduce the three case studies.
Case Settings and Context
Participants' motivations to engage DEI were largely framed by important social
contexts. They spoke during data collection from January to July 2021 about four significant
social phenomena that demanded organizational change towards equity: the Black Lives Matter
movement, a series of graduate student worker strikes around the country, COVID-19, and Anti-
Asian violence. The Black Lives Matter movement resurfaced large-scale social awareness of
racism and state sanctioned violence against Black people. The movement was visible on social
media, national news, and through local and student protests. The graduate student working
strike drew national attention to the high cost of living and low pay for graduate students at
universities, often with inequitable and unhealthy work expectations. The COVID-19 pandemic
drew attention to socioeconomic, racial, and gender inequities across the nation. In higher
education specifically, COVID-19 also highlighted how access to costly exams like the GRE is
inequitable, and heightened scrutinized what the exam predicts – student race and SES, not
academic success. Anti-Asian violence connected to COVID’s origins in China that resurged
into national awareness was also highlighted on campuses through racialized incidents and
student protests. For the institutions in this study, these social and national forces impacted why
and how programs and participants thought about DEI, and specifically equity. These national
and social events also created an environment where issues around inequity were inescapable,
even for white privileged graduate education leaders who could otherwise live distanced from

3
All institutions and participants are represented with a pseudonym.
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racial and social oppression, violence, and bias. Therefore, these events brought new, often
privileged individuals, to the conversation about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Subsequent
calls for change within higher education, including graduate education, rang loudly, making it
difficult to avoid realities of racism without active ignorance or resistance.
All three institutions are large, public, research institutions that are historically white
serving. Each graduate school offered support to the three graduate programs at their institution
within this study as those programs designed and worked toward specific DEI goals. Graduate
schools also offered graduate programs guidance on best practices and shared financial resources
to support DEI initiatives. While graduate schools and graduate programs across the three
institutions outlined some DEI goals and commitments that had the potential to be
transformative, enacting those was met with various restraints or further realizations that more
was required to change the organization. For example, a common DEI goal at WJU, PPU, and
RCU was to significantly increase the representation of historically under-represented and
excluded groups in graduate education, which could be construed as an example of
transformative change because it shifts who is included among the graduate student community
along racial, gender, and SES social identities. However, in working towards this goal, leaders
learned, often from graduate students themselves, that more than numerical representation was
needed to change graduate education. In particular, graduate school and program leaders at WJU,
PPU, and RCU learned they also needed to examine and redress their culture, training, and
financial support for graduate students.
Western Juniper University
Around the time of data collection, Western Juniper University graduate school had
recently appointed their Dean, Julia. The graduate school has a longstanding commitment to DEI
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and was in the process of implementing their multi-year DEI plan that was race conscious. A
primary role of the graduate school during data collection was to financially support and guide
equity-focused initiatives coordinated by graduate programs across the institution. The graduate
school also connected leaders and graduate programs to external expert resources on how to
practice DEI. WJU graduate programs represented in this study are from the social sciences,
natural sciences, and STEM. During data collection, graduate programs were primarily focused
on implementing DEI initiatives, which were supported by the graduate school, and
communicating DEI work to their program communities. All three graduate programs had
recently created DEI committees to plan and carry-out initiatives.
Ponderosa Pine University
Within the year prior to data collection, Ponderosa Pine University appointed new DEI
leadership for the institution that worked to streamline and coordinate DEI planning and roles at
the Department level. The graduate school Dean, Elena, was also recently appointed. In previous
years, the graduate school took on DEI leadership across PPU for about a decade and
demonstrated its commitment through leaders who were personally interested in initiating and
coordinating opportunities to increase diverse graduate student representation at PPU. Graduate
school leaders offered guidance to graduate programs on how to increase the diversity of their
graduate applicant pools and practice equity within graduate admissions. Often, graduate school
leaders functioned as DEI consultants for graduate programs as they faced specific challenges.
PPU graduate programs represented in this study are from the social sciences, natural sciences,
and humanities and were all relatively new to leading DEI. During data collection, graduate
programs primarily focused on forming DEI committees, writing DEI plans in response to the
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81

university’s DEI leadership’s request for Department DEI plans, and coordinating professional
DEI roles to match PPU’s DEI leadership’s newly proposed DEI network structure.
Red Cedar University
The Red Cedar University graduate school had recently appointed their Dean, Donna,
around the time of data collection. The graduate school has a longstanding commitment to DEI
and was in the process of implementing a multi-year DEI plan that is race conscious. A key role
of the graduate school was to guide and support graduate programs and their leaders as they
supported racially marginalized graduate students within their programs. The graduate school
offered financial resources to graduate programs and regular workshops on racially conscious
DEI topics. Graduate school leaders, particularly its staff, also worked as equity consultants for
graduate programs. RCU graduate programs represented in this study are from the social
sciences, natural sciences, and humanities. During data collection, graduate programs were
primarily focused on developing DEI initiatives and communicating DEI work to their program
communities. Of the three graduate programs, the natural science and humanities programs had
recently created DEI committees to plan and carry-out tasks.
Participants and Race
As I discuss racialization and whiteness in graduate organizations, it is important to also
consider the racial identities of leaders who position themselves to plan and advance equity.
Similarly, it is also relevant to consider leaders’ conceptualization of or lens towards equity as
they construct and carry-out DEI initiatives. In the table below, I summarize PPU participant’s
pseudonyms, equity-lens, racial identity, and gender identity. Race and gender identities were
self-identified by participants when they signed up for an interview. In the interview, I asked
questions about the participant’s definition of equity and motivation to pursue equity to help
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82

identify their equity-lens. I also drew from observations of participants to further identify their
expressions of their equity-lens.
In the column “Equity-lens,” “RC” represents race-conscious, which I define as:
expresses awareness of race in definition and discussion of equity/DEI, but not often in structural
or institutional ways connected to their role/work in education. “RE” represents race-evasive,
which I define as: does not express awareness of race in definition and discussion of equity/DEI.
“EM” represents equity-minded, which I define as: expresses awareness of race and
whiteness/white supremacy in definition and discussion of equity/DEI, and applies lens to their
role/work in education. Finally, an asterisk* represents new to equity, which I describe as:
formally engaged with equity/DEI in roughly the prior three years from 2021, often becoming
aware or deciding to engage in DEI because of national and local events like Trump politics,
police violence, Black Lives Matter movement, and graduate student protests and demands.
Table 1
Participant Equity Lens and Racial/Gender Identities
PPU Participant Equity Lens Racial Identity Gender Identity
Graduate School Elena RE white W

Luis EM Black/Asian M

Oscar EM Black/Latinx M

William RE white M

Brittney *RE white W

Madeline *RC white W

Rose *RE white W
Natural Science James *RE white M

Elias *RE white M

Abby *RE Latinx W

Luca *RC white M

Kate *RE white W

Henry *RE white M

Diane *RE white W
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83

Victoria *RE white W

Amir EM Black M
Social Science Alice *RE white W

Leah *RC white W

Kavi RC Asian M

Daniel *RE white M

Aditi EM Asian W

Zoey EM Black/white W

Alex *RC Mixed race M
Humanities Phoebe *RC white W

Steven *RE white M

Marilla *RC white W

Christy *RE white W

Eric *RC white M

Hannah *RC white W

Amy *RE white W

Jonathan *RE white M
WJU

Graduate School Julia EM Latinx W

Andre EM Black M

Emily EM Latinx/Mixed race NB

Ariana RC Latinx W
STEM

Anna RC* white W

Michael RE Other M

Caroline RC white W

Miriam RE* white W

Laura RE* white W

Kira RE* white W
Natural Science

Adam RE* white M

Charles RC* white M

Hugo RE* white M

Santiago RC Latinx M

Bridget RE* white W
EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
84

Khari RC Black M

Arthur RC* Asian M
Social Science

Albert RC* white M

Harrison EM Black M

Lillian RE* white W

Chris RE* Mixed race M

Zara EM Mixed race W
RCU

Graduate School Donna EM Black W

Sonia EM Black/Asian/white W

Camilla EM Black W

Daniella EM white W

Erin RC Asian W

Sabrina RC Black/white W
Social Science

Eleanor RC white W

Anh EM Asian M

Issac EM Mixed race/Native M

Simon RC* Asian M

Naomi EM Asian/white W

Josephine RC* white W

Luke RC* Asian M

Angela EM white/Native W
Natural Science

Betsy RE white W

Peter RE* white M

Lucy RE* white W

George RE* Asian M

Nathan RE* white M

Renee RE* white W

Frederick RE* white M

Cora EM Latinx/white NB
Humanities

Summer RC white W
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85

Art RC* white M

Claire EM white W

Olivia EM white W

Nicholas RC* white M
Note. RE is race-evasive, RC is race-conscious, EM is equity-minded, and * is new to equity. W
is woman, M is man, and NB is non-binary.
In the following sections, I first discuss how transformative change in graduate programs
is constrained by standard organizational resources necessary for any change to occur including
time and financial resources. Next, I discuss how leaders and programs themselves temper
transformative change by isolating DEI work and using unspecified or underspecified DEI
language. Finally, I consider how whiteness works to temper transformative change. In
particular, I consider how whiteness via the ease of what Ahmed (2006) calls nonperformative
(i.e., symbols or representations of activity that replace action) change and leaders' concern over
racialized emotions limits the scope and possibility for transformative change. That being said,
readers may notice that racialized emotions are woven throughout the findings and experiences
of participants in change.
Organizational Constraints on Transformational Change
Leaders’ agency is necessary but not sufficient for transformative change because it is
limited by what the organization is providing to support DEI efforts (Sewell, 1992). The majority
of participants at the program level expressed feeling unsupported by their program and/or
institution, however all nine graduate programs
4
shared how their graduate schools were a source
of support. Therefore, findings in this section on organizational constraints speak to program and

4
This is partially due to snowball sampling where graduate schools suggested graduate programs to participant in
this study.
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institution limitations generally unless specified otherwise, which the graduate schools also
endured.
Organizational Structure as Barriers
At PPU, like many institutions, the organizational structure of how to propose official
changes to a graduate program or school can pose a challenge. For example, William described
how he has heard criticisms of the new DEI structure and expectations from program leaders at
PPU:
[PPU leadership] is coming up against a fair amount of resistance and people saying, you
know, ‘why do we – we’re fine, why do we need to do this.’ And you know, I don’t care
how fine you are. There’s always more, right? That can be done. And so it is
disheartening to hear some of the criticisms that have come out and some of the, frankly,
unfortunate comments that I’ve heard about this is – you know, ‘this just strikes me as a
waste of time, why are we doing this, we’re already an inclusive campus, what more do
they want us to do.’ But you know, if you look at the demographics of the campus you
realize that’s not really – There’s a lot farther that we could go in attaining that goal
(Interview).
You can feel the frustration in William’s comments, as he described that even with new
leadership and structure for DEI at PPU, program leaders and faculty expressed feeling burdened
by change and complained about institutional expectations. Portraying organizational structure
for DEI as cumbersome or confusing, leaders framed institutional attempts at support as a
restraint and rationalized inaction (March & Olsen, 1985). In this example, faculty tempered
transformative equity by resisting structural change, albeit marginal structural change, by
focusing on flaws over potential.
Similarly, imagining how practices might change within the PPU natural science
program, Elias, the chair of the DEI committee, shared how structures within faculty
independence and the Academic Senate were challenging when initiating and implementing
change:
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The structural parameters that are required to see policy change I think, I mean, they
include a vote of the – or the sort of acquiescence of the other faculty… that’s one big
kind of mediator of whether things can change. Another is the academic senate and the
office of academic personnel… And there’s like a year long process of having curricular
changes approved by the people, right? (laughs) And not only that, but you can’t just sort
of snap your fingers and say, yeah, the whole – like the [sub field] faculty has voted on
this thing or even the entire [program] faculty has voted on this thing. You need to write
justifications for every single curricular change which then need to be approved by some
committee of other people… it’s all so cumbersome, and it takes a long time (Interview).
In this example, even when the natural science program faculty voted on a curriculum change,
the organizational structure of the official change process took an inordinate amount of time
which slowed progress. A lack of organizational structure to support DEI is also a challenge to
implementing transformative change. As chair of the RCU humanities program, Olivia described
how she did not feel she had support structures from the institution to lead DEI work:
Honestly, I don’t feel especially supported. I do feel as though institutional values align
with departmental values, and so in that regard, I feel as though the university certainly
supports the work that we want to try to do and so that feels very comfortable. But by and
large there don’t seem to be a lot of explicit support structures for chairs trying to deal
with these situations or a lot of guidance (Interview).
Although RCU espoused DEI values that aligned with the Department, the institution did not
offer structural supports that Olivia felt adequately helped her navigate the barriers to change in
the humanities program as chair. Here, there was not sufficient structural support, and absent
structural support, all that remains is espoused values. Without support structures to facilitate
DEI, espoused values risk becoming nonperformative change and a restraint on transformative
change.
Another challenge to implementing transformative change is a lack of action from
existing organizational entities that exist to support DEI. The WJU STEM program DEI
Committee chair, Anna, shared how the organizational process of guiding DEI strategic plans
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88

was not actually practiced, and the STEM program’s plan was not reviewed by WJU’s DEI
leadership as intended:
The biggest thing that has been frustrating is we went through this whole process of
revising our strategic plan, and then the campus division of equity and inclusion like
basically wouldn’t even look at it… officially in the process after you generate a new one
your dean is supposed to meet with the head of equity and inclusion… and talk about it
and get feedback on it, and the campus kind of blesses it – Or tells you not to do certain
things, and that’s I think really important. It’s not just a rubber stamped meeting because
you want to know do they support you – it’s easy to make very serious mistakes that can
have legal consequences for the university in this kind of planning, or that are just really
offensive to different segments of the community. And so that never happened, and I
pushed for it, and two of the faculty equity advisors pushed for it, and they really just
ghosted us. And that’s really disheartening. And so at first I was frustrated, and then I
was like we just have to go it alone. (laughs) Like everyone’s busy. Got to move on.
We’re just doing it (Interview).
In this example, Anna sought guidance from WJU’s DEI leadership on the STEM program’s
DEI plan but did not find support among university leadership, even though an organizational
structure and process for DEI planning had been established. Anna expressed concern over
consequences due to the lack of structural support and guidance she and her program received
from WJU’s DEI leadership, specifically where DEI initiatives could be harmful to communities
or have legal ramifications.
Oscar, a Director in the graduate school, described a need for PPU leadership to put
energy towards DEI in order to spark real change throughout the institution:
I know we just got a DEI [leader] and that’s great, but just starting from the top, whether
it’s a corporation or university… if that’s their number one priority, their mission, it’s
going to trickle down and hopefully create a culture within that institution (Interview).
Similarly, William described how investment in DEI at the institutional level is lacking: "At the
campus level, however, I’m afraid I don’t think there is a proper investment being made there in
this area" (graduate school, Interview). Even with new DEI leadership, Oscar explained how
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more dedication is needed at the institutional level, particularly if departments are expected to be
involved in DEI:
If they’re hearing it from [PPU leadership] then it makes the message a whole lot easier.
The mission, the culture. But it has to be genuine… over the years there’s been a lot of lip
service, things on paper in terms of diversity and equity but there’s not that support
(Interview).
Here, Oscar described how PPU’s written commitment to DEI was insufficient for organizational
change because it lacked action through support.
Organizational structure around tenure and promotion also constrained how
transformative equity could possibly flourish at PPU. In a move to acknowledge DEI
contributions in tenure and promotion cases, PPU has a component of faculty promotion cases
where faculty can share their formal involvement with DEI at PPU (Document). However, the
DEI contribution section is labeled “optional” and faculty who choose not to engage are not
penalized (Document). However, if another area like teaching or research were similarly labeled
as optional, the institution would likely find faculty who opted out as shirking their
responsibilities. By documenting one’s DEI contributions as an optional part of the tenure review
process, PPU allowed faculty to disengage without consequence – a missed opportunity for
faculty accountability for engagement. In this example, faculty DEI involvement was given some
optional recognition within the organization, but it did not change or challenge the structure of
the institution. Another form of organizational constraint on transformative equity is leaders’
limited time to dedicate to developing and facilitating equity.
Limited Time
Recalling their various responsibilities as administrators, faculty, staff, and students,
leaders identified time constraints as a significant challenge to DEI planning and
implementation. Learning is a significant element of engaging toward equity in many higher
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education institutions, but the time that it requires can be a challenge. At PPU, which offered a
series of workshops, participants spoke about the time needed for attendance as being
uncompensated and conflicting with other responsibilities. Describing organizational constraints
on pursuing DEI, Marilla, a faculty member in the humanities program, shared how PPU's
workshops did not offer support to allow faculty to join the workshops, such as by covering or
moving their teaching schedule so they could attend:
The whole university received the opportunity to attend I think it was 11 hours worth of
workshops, all voluntary, including this one big day at this outsourced DEI company –
like who’s teaching my class while you want me to go to this 11 hours of training?
(Interview).
The lack of structural support for engaging with DEI made it difficult for faculty to attend
educational opportunities like workshops within the university. Relatedly, the chair of a social
science department, Alice, tiredly explains how labor for DEI is uncompensated, which is a
challenge because the work is added on top of faculty's expected tasks like teaching and
research:
This is unpaid labor and uncompensated labor. So there is no course release, there is no
additional stipend. There is no compensation whatsoever for doing it. It’s just added on
top of our other tasks, which feels a little – especially when you’ve got multiple agencies
asking you for these products so that they can show that they’ve been doing something,
but you’re the one who is producing them, and you know, it’s on top of your other work,
and you’re not being compensated (Interview).
Alice’s comments reflect the pressures of “producing” for the university and funding agencies on
top of their previous tasks without being compensated with time, such as a course release. To be
clear, it is often difficult for leaders to juggle all the demands on their capacity, and service of
various sorts – including by not limited to DEI-related labor – is often viewed as auxiliary to,
rather than integral to, the faculty role.
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Describing how limited time to work on DEI poses a challenge, and echoing the absence
of resources discussed above, George expressed how time, work, and emotional pressures
combine to leave him feeling drained by his DEI leadership in the RCU natural science program:
There’s also by and large a complete lack of resources to do this sort of stuff. I think
serving on the diversity committee does count as service to the department, whatever that
means and however that is counted towards your promotion and whatever, but it’s sort of
ambiguous, and I think most of the time these sorts of initiatives are considered to be
extra, on top of the billion responsibilities we already have, and so that’s not ideal. And
another challenge is just finding the time and the energy, particularly when I feel like a
lot of these issues – they don’t just hit away at your mental time, but they’re emotionally
draining and end up oftentimes taking a lot more – like you take a lot of this stuff home
with you and so that’s also a challenge (Interview).
Although George regularly dedicated a portion of his time and personal capacity towards the
natural science program DEI committee, his service work on the committee was not balanced by
a reduction of tasks elsewhere within the organization. Adding DEI labor on top of faculty
responsibilities without formal time adjustments, in addition to the emotional demands of DEI
work, caused George to feel drained. In a more general sense, for faculty who are committed to
DEI like Hannah in the humanities program, constraints on time and capacity may limit how
much of themselves faculty can dedicate to DEI:
I’m really passionate about these issues, but at the same time, I only have so much time
to be able to devote to them and really engage in them to the depth that I want to in
addition to my own research or my own teaching. It’s the conundrum of time (Interview).
The service demands of faculty's responsibilities were not adjusted by the institution to allocate
significant time and energy towards DEI, and so faculty added tasks on to already cumbersome
research, teaching, and service expectations.
Feeling overtasked and with limited time also had faculty leaders feeling strained,
particularly when comparing their service with colleagues outside of DEI work. Abby, chair of
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the PPU natural science program DEI committee, shared how she and the DEI committee were
overtasked with work they did not have enough time to carry out:
I do think it's too bad that the DEI committee does so much extra service… we just get
tasked with more service. And so maybe if there was like less of a teaching load or
usually service is one of those things where it’s just kind of this whole, you know
(laughs) and it doesn’t get as much recognition from the university as, you know, a
publication or something like that. So I think if there were a way to provide actual like a
person support or to provide more like merit and promotion type incentives, those two
things could help (Faculty, Interview).
Abby suggested more institutional support like administration and recognition in tenure and
promotion would further incentive engaging in DEI. Similarly, Elias, the chair of the natural
science program's DEI committee, described constraints of time and financial resources as he and
the committee labor in DEI planning on behalf of the program. He credited a lack of substantial
progress to these issues:
I think that the university administration and almost (laughs) more specifically the
amount of money they’re willing to throw at it or not throw at it is another big obstacle.
There are lots of great ideas that we have, and we just don’t have the resources to do it.
And actually I want to bump all these two things down to my number one obstacle, which
is time. (laughs) We don’t have enough time, right? We just like – I don’t have enough
bandwidth. No one has enough bandwidth to devote the time to actually make quick and
effective progress that we could without that constraint (Faculty, Interview).
Elias’ sentiment was also shared by his colleagues on the DEI Committee. In natural science
program DEI committee meetings, faculty bemoaned how DEI initiatives involved "oh my god,
so much work" (Observation) which they expressed as often feeling overwhelming. If faculty are
tasked to carry-out DEI but are not meaningfully supported by the institution in terms of time
and demands required to do so, then the work is likely to be deprioritized because it requires too
much of a career risk or trade-off for faculty.
Michael, a faculty in the WJU STEM program shared how a lack of time and institutional
support for leaders’ labor posed a challenge for faculty working in DEI:
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just human hours or human power… people who might be willing to volunteer are
overworked, they’re overburdened, maybe they don’t feel that they have institutional
support and so they’re like why am I going to throw myself into this situation that doesn’t
look like it’s going to succeed (Interview).
Reflecting on how she would feel adequately supported in her leadership of the humanities
program's DEI committee and role as the DEI officer, Phoebe shared how she needs the
organization to allocate protected time:
I need something concrete that gives me space in my life to do the work. And the way
that it would matter to me, where I’m in my career right now, would be relief from
something else – so it’s very mathematically clear to me. If you want me to do this,
you’ve got to relieve me from something else. So I think the university, not just our
department, needs to really, really think that through (Interview).
Without “relief from something else,” Phoebe was limited in the time to dedicate to DEI labor.
restrained how actively leaders’ could plan and pursue equity within their organizations. In
addition to constraints on time, leaders also shared how limited guidance on how to practice DEI
was a challenge.
Finally, Charles shared the challenge of leading DEI work in the WJU natural science
program as an Assistant Professor. Colleagues advised him not to dedicate too much time to DEI
although they appreciated his work: “you really shouldn’t be doing it, but you’re doing a great
job” (Interview). If faculty are tasked to carry-out DEI but are not meaningfully supported by the
institution in terms of time and alleviating some labor demands of their capacity, then DEI work
is likely to be deprioritized because it requires too much burden and career risk or trade-off, in
particular for faculty concerned with tenure and promotion. Limited time to design and pursue
DEI tempered possibilities for transformative change because leaders felt burdened by the
demands of DEI work on top of their other responsibilities. Along with feeling constraints of
time, leaders also identified limited financial resources as a barrier to advancing equity.
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Limited Financial Resources
Limited financial resources were another barrier to implementing DEI. From budgets to
support DEI programming and initiatives, to adequate funding packages to support graduate
students, leaders pointed to limited financial resources as a constraint on equity. Although
leaders planned DEI goals and designed DEI initiatives, they identified insufficient ongoing
funding to support their programming as a constraint. Elias shared how the DEI committee's
work could use more financial support from the institution, stating,
[PPU is] telling us to do all these things, but they’re not rewarding this work with much
or any extra money in terms of salary, in terms of time or whatever… It does feel like it’s
time to say, you know, every department gets – if we have $10,000, and there aren’t that
many departments, you know, you can do whatever you want with it towards DEI goals.
That would be real support (natural science program, Interview).
As the natural science program moved out of planning and in to implementing DEI initiatives,
Elias described the DEI committee’s need for funds to put towards their goals. Additionally,
Luis, the Director of Diversity programs in the graduate school, argued how limited financial
resources are a constraint for faculty involvement in DEI:
Faculty who are thinking of advancing their research to be much more mindful of
diversity shouldn’t have to be begging administrators for extra support to do outreach to
an HBCU or to a Hispanic serving institute or to a teaching intensive university. It should
already be there (Interview).
Here, Luis described how ad hoc funding for initiatives, like recruitment, is a challenge for
faculty and programs.
Reflecting on challenges as a DEI leader in the RCU natural science program, Betsy
expressed how there are not enough resources for the work that needs to get done: “it’s definitely
a (pause) you definitely end up feeling like there’s always a lot to do and there’s not many
resources for doing it” (Interview). Here, Betsy described DEI work as endless and resources as
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lacking. Adding to the sentiment, George who is also a faculty in the RCU natural science
program, shared how DEI is under resourced: “The biggest resource that’s lacking is money, and
that’s across the board for everything, but in particular trying to get substantial amounts of
money for programmatic efforts to support these initiatives” (Interview). While the RCU natural
science program DEI Committee created DEI programming, George described how funding for
those initiatives was difficult to secure.
Similarly, limited financial resources also means limited staff to carry-out DEI. Oscar,
the Director of Admissions in the graduate school, shared how limited financial resources from
PPU is holding back the graduate school's DEI work: "the only thing that’s kind of holding us
back is just support from the top in terms of funds and just kind of taking it to the next level [of
commitment from leadership]" (Interview). Additionally, William shared how the graduate
school needs more financial resources for professional roles and programming to support DEI:
"money and resources. I mean, the financial money to put on programming, the – or to hire staff,
the lack of bodies to be doing this work. I mean, you know, Luis is essentially a shop of one"
(Interview). Explaining that while he and his team make the best of what they have, Luis
explained how DEI initiatives could be even stronger with adequate funds and resources from
PPU:
I wish I had more money for my office, you know, to offer programming to graduate
students. I wish I had more staff members, because there were – there’s many things that
need to be done, and so I’m having to farm out things to departments (Interview).
Central programming and staff, Luis believed, would free up pressures on departments. Oscar,
William, and Luis all explained how the PPU graduate school is limited by financial resources,
and while they lead DEI under financial restraints, they describe how funds for additional staff
and DEI programming would strengthen the graduate school and its ability to support graduate
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programs. Further, Luis offered a metaphor from an equity learning activity to illustrate his
argument about the impact of resources on the scope of change within the organization:
I make due – it’s basically the mobile experiment where in equity exercises you have
bags full of different items. Some are really cool paper, origami and what not, and some
are really cheap things like a rubber band or a twist tie, and everyone gets a hanger, and
you tell them make the best mobiles you can make. And some people can make some
really beautiful stuff because they’re given all these beautiful resources, and then others
are just scrap. And they have to produce. But the funny thing is that they all produce –
it’s just a little bit more difficult for those to produce with the fewer resources, so I still
produce (Interview).
graduate school leaders like Luis, Oscar, and William pursuing equity are making use of what
they have rather than flourishing with what they need—which tempers the possibilities of
change. Their work is strained by limited resources – time, guidance, and finances– that temper
the kind of equity changes that may be possible. Oscar summarized,
We can be revolutionary really just in terms of our ideas and the way that we go about
diversity, equity, and inclusion… the only thing really stopping us again is getting that
buy-in from the top and then also just the funding (Interview).
Oscar believed that graduate school leaders could pursue “revolutionary” change if only they had
the resources to do so.
Unstable financial resources were also a barrier to DEI implementation in the WJU
natural science program. Charles explained how limited financial resources at WJU constrained
ongoing natural science program DEI programming, which
Should have been baked into budgets already… there are a lot of programs that get set
up, and then they run for a while, and then they might be supported on soft money and
then they go away. And the institution doesn’t commit to it (Interview).
Referring to unstable financial resources as “soft money,” Charles described how the natural
science program struggled to keep DEI programming running due to a lack of institutional
commitment.
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Another organizational constraint on pursuing transformative equity is financial support
for graduate students. Luis, a Director in the PPU graduate school, explained how it is
commonplace at PPU for graduate students to have offers of admission without full funding
packages, which depresses their yield,
So the pressing one is financial. So ideally in a graduate program, I think when students
are being presented an offer to become a graduate student to a department, they should be
rest assured that there’s some type of minimal amount of funding. That’s not a practice
here (Interview).
Adequate funding packages for admitting graduate students was commonly identified as a
financial need for graduate programs across this study, and indeed this is the case nationally.
However, Hannah shared that recruiting is a pressing equity issue for her humanities program at
PPU, specifically the recruitment of racially marginalized students, because the program does not
offer adequate financial support to admitted students: "[we were] very conscientious this year to
recruit graduate students of color. Of course they didn’t come to [PPU], because we don’t pay
enough money (laughs) to live here" (Interview). Although the humanities program admitted
racially marginalized students into their program, they could not offer them sufficient financial
support which was a barrier to recruiting the students to accept the program’s offer.
Limited financial resources to compensate DEI service was also identified by leaders as a
barrier to faculty involvement. Madeline, an Associate Dean in the PPU graduate school, shared
how limited financial resources to compensate leaders was a constraint on faculty involvement in
DEI, which in our discussion she refers to as “certain things,”
It would probably make things a little bit easier if there were incentives that were more
readily available to faculty to get them to do certain things… in some way compensating
that time, compensating that work. And it’s very difficult to do that when you don’t have
the resources (Interview).
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Without financial resources to compensate labor, Madeline explained how faculty were not
incentivized to dedicate their time to DEI.
Alongside organizational constraints on time and resources, the approaches to DEI work
that participants discussed tempered the extent, depth, sustainability, and effectiveness of
change. While it is often difficult to carry-out any organizational change in higher education
(March & Olsen, 1985; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991), DEI work in particular is limited by existing
organizational structures in part because they are historically designed to serve white privileged
males (Patton & Haynes, 2018; Wilder, 2013), which transformative equity directly challenges
(Patton & Haynes, 2018; Stewart, 2018). Thus, in addition to constraints that are typical in
organizational change like limited resources and ambiguity (March & Olsen, 1985; Powell &
DiMaggio, 1991), leaders advancing equity also navigated structures of racialized power and
oppression within the organization (Ray, 2019). Isolating DEI work within the organization was
another way transformative change was tempered within this study.
Isolating DEI Work to a Role or Committee
Isolating DEI work tempers transformative change by limiting who is pursuing these
goals and excessively diverting leaders' energy to building colleague buy-in. All graduate
program cases isolated (i.e. marginalized, delegated) DEI work to a role or committee,
sometimes at the suggestion or request of the institution (i.e. Diversity Officer roles) and often
putting students in a role of carrying significant burdens of the work. In the graduate schools,
DEI was isolated to a few overburdened individuals (Griffin & Muñiz, 2011; Cole & Harper,
2017), which graduate school leaders Luis, Oscar, Rose, and William would like to remedy by
adding more professional roles to share in DEI labor (Interviews). Explaining current DEI roles
within the graduate school, Oscar stated,
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We’re lacking people power… We try to help [one another] as much as we can but it’s
always lacking, so we need at least one or two full-time employees… if we had that we
would pretty much be pretty awesome in terms of our approach and what we can do
(Interview).
To minimize the risk of burnout and expand involvement in DEI, graduate school leaders desired
more staff roles. However, financial constraints made it difficult for the graduate school to
expand their leadership over DEI.
Isolating DEI work within a role or committee has trade-offs. It may be more efficient
because the members share some interest and commitment to designing and pursuing DEI goals,
and leaders can get through ideas and designs of a DEI plan fairly quickly. However, if change is
to happen within a graduate school or graduate program, the work needs to extend beyond a
committee or role at some point for buy-in or implementation. Alternatively, if the graduate
school or graduate program prioritized full involvement of faculty and leaders to work through
DEI and the creation of a DEI plan together, the graduate program or graduate school may still
experience resistance to participation or fail to meet institutional deadlines or time-frame
expectations. Thus, how to coordinate DEI work is one of the structural issues of organizational
change that cases in this study regularly faced, particularly the tension in programs between
balancing the work of the committee and relaying those efforts to the full faculty (Posselt, 2020).
Isolating DEI work also occurred when participation in DEI initiatives were reduced to a
recommendation or volunteerism, which often led to workshops attended by leaders who were
already involved with DEI. For example, Alice from the PPU social science program described
the lack of attendance at PPU workshops as a problem, especially for incentivizing involvement:
The people who do show up for [workshops] are the people who are already on board and
not the people who need it – who need to really rethink how they do things. They don’t
want to rethink how they do things, right? So if there’s no reward for enticing those
people in it sounds very crass, you’re only going to get the people who are willing to
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fling themselves on the fire for no compensation, and that’s not enough to really make
institutional change (chair, Interview).
Similarly, Marilla shared how PPU's DEI workshops were voluntary for faculty, which made it
difficult to make changes across her humanities program because there wasn't an assurance that
her colleagues would also attend:
Our DEI office I think is very good at organizing a bunch of – at doing a lot of diversity
stuff and like I think it falls repeatedly on people who are already on the train, rather than
– and so I think it is really easy to opt out and it goes back to structure… Are other
members of my department going to be there, so that when you turn around after that
training and say you know what, I think we need to do this differently, they were at least
there at the meeting, right?… if you aren’t mandating it or you’re not getting people on
the same page, then it doesn’t actually make sense for me, as somebody who cares, to go
to that training because I’m not going to be able to use it (Interview).
Although PPU offered educational workshops as a faculty resource, the possibility of the
workshops to have an impact across campus were constrained by limited faculty time, capacity,
and motivation to attend.
Hopes for Sharing DEI Labor
While DEI work was often designated to select leaders within graduate schools and
programs, a few leaders expressed how they hoped DEI would be shared across the organization.
A faculty member in the WJU STEM program, Michael, explained how a program needs a DEI
committee and individuals outside of the committee to buy-in to DEI initiatives in order for them
to progress:
I think you need a committee, but you also do need individual people, because otherwise
like if it’s just this abstract committee it’s like, again, you need to overcome the
collective action problem. You need certain people on point saying you’re responsible for
this, you’re responsible for this. So (sighs) I mean back to the institutions and the power
structures. We need buy in. Maybe not the highest levels, but at least the highest levels of
the department. So that could be the chair, probably the Dean too, so that the Dean’s like,
‘yeah, chair, spend your time on this.’ So you need buy in (Interview).
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Michael cautions how isolating DEI work to a committee could result in a “collective action
problem” where the committee does not secure buy-in from colleagues. As a remedy, Michael
suggests recruiting leaders outside of the DEI committee to take on some relevant
responsibilities. In an adjacent attempt to involve everyone in learning about DEI and its
importance, Brittney, an Assistant Director in the PPU graduate school, explained how she
believed DEI workshops should be required:
What I keep hearing that students want is more diversity training for faculty and
undergrads, because they are getting microaggressions or flat out racism from both levels.
And it feels like the work that we do from the graduate division does not require the
faculty – and certainly we don’t have influence on undergrads, -- so I know that Luis now
has a relationship with the new [PPU leadership], and I’m hoping that [their trainings]
will be required (Interview).
Relaying what she has learned from graduate students, Brittney shared how bias and racism
remained rampant in graduate education, despite DEI efforts that were voluntary. Brittney
identified how offering DEI trainings on a voluntary basis allowed faculty to disengage DEI.
Although there was some tension around how to coordinate DEI planning and
implementation across the cases, DEI work was often isolated to a role or committee. However,
Aditi, a PPU social science graduate student, shared how she hoped her equity work would not
be isolated to her and the DEI committee in the future, but would instead be important to the
whole program:
Some hopes I have is to kind of bring the whole department together on this program.
Right now it’s very much, you know, our committee is the only like five people who
really know what we’re doing (laughs). But then having this like overall collective goal
of the department be to think about, okay, like equity, this is important, like this is
something we need to really focus on and prioritize… I think that’s one of the biggest
hopes that I have for the department, having all of us kind of on the same page on this
(Interview).
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While the PPU social science program coordinated DEI initiatives through a committee, Aditi
expressed her hope that the whole department would buy-in to the belief that equity is important
and progress together.
Concern Over Buy-in
Concern over DEI buy-in was expressed from leaders across all the graduate program
cases. I argue many DEI committees and leaders were cautious of experiencing resistance or a
lack of care among their colleagues to carry out change. As DEI leaders and committees planned
and coordinated DEI programming, they anticipated push-back from colleagues. In the PPU
humanities program, Hannah described how faculty needed to agree via a vote for DEI initiatives
to be official:
We vote on most things as a department. Like the DEI statement and whether we want to
accept it or not. So I would say that for change to actually happen most of the faculty
would have to be on board (Interview).
However, Hannah shared how it was challenging for the DEI committee to convey their work to
the full program, and the faculty meeting to discuss the program's DEI statement did not go as
the committee expected:
It became clear in the meeting that people were not on board with certain word choices
and certain phrasing, so we just said let’s table the vote. We gave people [the week] to
kind of get their comments in, and then we’re going to send out a revised version
(Interview).
Describing the PPU humanities program faculty meeting discussing the DEI statement, Phoebe
expressed "I also felt sorry for this working group who had put a lot of work into it, and then to
have to make these changes – like accept a change from someone who hasn’t had any experience
doing this" (Interview). Isolating DEI work to a committee risks not representing the mindsets or
values of the full program, resulting in challenges with implementation. Additionally, the
program struggled over language choices in the DEI statement, which returns to the risks of
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unspecified DEI language. Without a baseline of shared understanding and clear values and
goals, a program will likely find difficulty in communicating collective meaning and intention in
DEI statements and plans (Posselt, 2020).
Albert, the WJU social science program chair, shared how divisions within his
Department regarding the importance of DEI were challenging, particularly as he attempted to
navigate his role as a leader. I quote his description of these challenges at length:
Views on DEI are really, really different with divisions being defined by generation to
some extent, right? Younger folks and older folks, it doesn’t break down perfectly, but
that is one division – divisions between men and women, people of color, and people
who are experienced with the issue and have been working on it, engaging with it in a
sustained way for a while versus those who have not. I think there’s not consensus. Some
people think it’s not a problem at all and that we should just do our business without
really paying attention to it – I think at the extreme there are people in our community
who feel this way, that efforts to improve DEI in particular sort of training and
educational efforts are counter productive, right? So you’ve got those people, and then
you’ve got on the other end of the extreme people who think that’s the obvious way to go
and the obvious move to make.... So as a leader, you’re torn – it’s easy to lead when
everyone agrees. But when there’s such differences in terms of experience and
understanding, but also commitment to the issue, and the academy has a reputation for
being very like-minded, everyone is like a woke leftist. It’s not the case… on DEI there’s
a huge difference of opinion. So crafting policies or setting a direction that doesn’t
further those divisions, that is a real challenge, and trying to figure out a balance between
leading from above and responding to impetus that’s coming from below. It’s very tricky
(Interview).
Grappling with his role as chair and DEI leader, Albert explained how it isn’t easy to lead DEI
changes because there are divisions rather than consensus within the Department. Albert
identified his primary goal of minimizing divisions over DEI within the Department, which was
a challenge, but also a distraction away from prioritizing equity. Navigating how to minimize
divisiveness while leading change is a challenge for department leaders as they pursue equity
(Posselt, 2020).
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A challenge central given the isolation of DEI work to a committee or role was recruiting
colleagues to participate and support DEI plans and programming. Describing colleague
inaction, Charles, the WJU natural science program DEI Committee chair, expressed frustration
with challenges regarding DEI buy-in:
I think especially in the sciences the prevailing attitude is often, ‘racism and DEI work is
outside of what I do,’ and that they really see themselves as scientists having no
connection to (laughs) the social world or the political world, which I see as a total
fallacy. But it can be difficult, right? That attitude makes it seem like, oh, it’s just
something extra to do later as some kind of service work. It’s not like they think it’s not
important, they just don’t see it as part of their main job (Interview).
In his frustration, Charles also identified difficulties with colleague buy-in that is specific to
disciplinary traditions that have not incorporated equity historically and don’t perceive DEI as
relevant to their identity or work as scientists (Posselt, 2020).
In addition to challenges with recruiting faculty buy-in, leaders also expressed concern
over the longevity of DEI initiatives that were contingent on leadership. Explaining a concern
over faculty buy-in for DEI at PPU and the continuity of practices through transitions in
leadership, Alice shared,
Well, it’s hard to lead faculty or graduate students anywhere. I think – You know, one's
personal influence is always more limited than you think. And so sometimes the pace
feels slow or you just know there’s four or five people who are just never going to get on
board, and you can sort of see coming down the pike that, you know, one or two of them
are going to end up being chair, and then everything’s going to get undone, and you
know, what do you – sometimes it feels a little pointless. You know, you can – I just
recently accepted a second term as chair, in part because I thought we needed more time
to normalize some of these practices, but I have friends in other departments who have
told me that they thought they had done the same thing and then somebody else became
chair and there was regression. And so I’m trying to prepare myself for that (social
science, chair, Interview).
Alice expressed difficulty to lead colleagues to change and concern for how faculty resistance to
DEI would shape the future of the department. Alice also described how it was difficult to
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maintain DEI initiatives as leadership transitioned. DEI work isolated to a role, such as
department chair, that can be upended with a new leader is a barrier to transformative equity
because the work is too easily undone by a single person’s absence (Zucker, 1997; Posselt,
2020). Transformative work transforms the organization, its practices, structures, and policies; it
is not quickly constructed or undone (Stewart, 2018; Patton & Haynes, 2018; Chang, 2002;
Sewell, 1992). Another restraint on transformative equity within this study was the common use
of unspecified language to describe equity, its importance, and motivation to pursue equity.
Unspecified DEI Language
One graduate school and eight graduate programs used unspecified language when
setting goals, describing initiatives, and framing purpose in advancing equity. The acronym
“DEI,” which I use in my writing to reflect the language of the participants and cases, is
problematic because it groups three separate values together as one rather than distinctive issues.
Similarly, the RCU humanities program commonly used terms like “URM” (under-represented
minorities) and “broad spectrum of social identities” without further definition within DEI
documents (Documents). Unspecified language limited the scope and use of terms, and made it
difficult for leaders and colleagues to have a shared understanding about the meaning of “DEI”
within their program. I argue unspecified language tempers transformative change by diverting
attention away from critical conversations about systemic racial inequities towards terms that are
assumed to be comfortable and palatable, particularly for audiences that are not engaging with
DEI (Freire, 1970; Iverson, 2007). In using unspecified DEI language, programs and graduate
schools also risked sliding into race-evasiveness (Mueller, 2020; Ray & Purifoy, 2019),
including leaders who at times expressed equity-mindedness and intended to be racially aware.
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Using unspecified DEI language in documents and conversations is a missed opportunity
to delve deeper into rationales and motivations regarding what DEI issues the graduate school or
program are grappling with and why engaging equity work is important. Particularly for
programs and leaders who are new to thinking about DEI, documents from the graduate school
may be a first point of contact and consideration for leaders to think about program practices and
equity. How it communicates these issues is critical. For example, in a PPU graduate school
document designed to guide graduate programs' DEI efforts, the graduate school used unspecific
DEI language. Diversity and motivation to support diversity was framed as "people from
different backgrounds and with varied lived experiences bring different perspectives that enrich
academic dialogue. Excluding those perspectives reduces academic potential and diminishes
scholarship" (Document). While generalized language could be an attempt by the graduate
school to be inclusive of multiple social identities and groups that have been historically
excluded from graduate education, without explicitly including this lens, I read the document as
vague and underspecified. For instance, which identities and communities have been historically
and are currently excluded, and why should programs intervene to address these inequities?
Michael, faculty in the WJU STEM program, described how undefined DEI language
caused confusion among faculty and was a barrier to comprehending equity practices:
I think part of my struggle sometimes is how do we slow things down at a time when
these needs are often so immediate, but how do we slow things down to be like what are
we trying to do here… it’s okay that we have different conceptualizations of what it
means to promote equity, but if we’re talking about decolonializing [a course] and no one
knows what that means, let’s start with a working definition. I think that’s also the source
of the challenge is that these concepts are sometimes pretty fuzzy (Interview).
Getting caught-up on unpacked or undefined terms that were used in DEI workshops, like
“decolonizing,” was a barrier to delving into the purpose of the discussion. For leaders who were
relatively new to learning about DEI, like Michael, new concepts were fuzzy or confusing.
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On example of this is white supremacy. Eric, a faculty member on the PPU humanities
program DEI committee, also shared how the language of white supremacy may confuse
colleagues, and so alternative language was preferred to discuss equity:
For colleagues, people that for whatever reason have not been part of those conversations
who may be thinking of white supremacy and what we might think of, I don’t know, a
broader sense, I think it’s potentially confusing in ways that might make communications
from us less effective (Interview).
In this example, constructing a shared understanding of important and relevant terms related to
DEI would help clarify assumptions, motivations, and goals among leaders working collectively
to pursue equity rather than getting distracted by worries over misunderstandings throughout the
process.
Sometimes these debates and misunderstandings play out in real time. Additionally,
unspecified DEI language in the department’s diversity statement was scrutinized in the PPU
humanities program faculty meeting. Hannah explained, "[the statement] was kind of talking
about the dismantling of kind of power structures I think was like in the phrase. People were
quibbling with kind of the wording choice" (Interview). Again, unspecified DEI language limits
the scope of critical language that could be used to directly discuss issues relevant to racial
equity like racism and white supremacy (Iverson, 2007). Unspecified language also leaves
interpretation up to listeners and readers, which can cause confusion and misalignment in
program goals and values. A gap in leaders’ critical shared understanding about the historical
context and importance of racial equity in graduate education, which continues through the
unspecified language in “DEI” planning and implementation, is a persistent barrier to pursuing
transformative change because it redirects awareness away from critical consciousness (Freire,
1970). In the final section, I discuss whiteness as another way transformative change is tempered
within this study.
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Whiteness Tempering Transformative Change in Graduate Education
In addition to the organizational challenges discussed and problems in how DEI work is
isolated and discussed, I find whiteness within organizations works to temper transformative
change. Whiteness works via two primary mechanisms: the ease of nonperformative changes and
leaders' management of colleagues’ racialized emotions. The nonperformativity of DEI
initiatives "works because it fails to bring about what it names" (Ahmed, 2006, p. 105).
Nonperformative diversity and equity efforts intentionally or inadvertently support whiteness
within the organization, working to change the perceptions of racial inequity rather than
dismantling whiteness (Ahmed, 2012). Embedded in racialized organizations and equipped with
interpretations of race, leaders also experience emotions that are connected to race and
racialization, themselves (Bonilla-Silva, 2019). Common racialized emotions experienced in
racialized organizations include fear, comfort, anger, and guilt (Bonilla-Silva, 2019). Racialized
emotions can be imprinted on to spaces, shaping racial comfort and discomfort, and in response
of racial discomfort white people experience white fragility and seek out control to reinstate their
comfort (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Wingfield, 2010; Evans & Moore, 2015).
In this section, I first consider how whiteness manifests through forms of
nonperformative change. Then, I consider how whiteness manifests through the centering of
white colleagues' racialized emotions, which effectively decenters focus on transformative
equity. In discussing how whiteness is woven throughout the organization in normative ways of
knowing and working, I illustrate how whiteness works by diverting energy away from equity
goals to temper transformative change.

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Whiteness via Nonperformative Change
I argue whiteness worked to distract leaders away from systems of racialized inequity,
dull DEI language so it lost meaning and power, limited organizational resources toward change,
and isolated DEI work to individuals who became overburdened; In doing so, institutional
whiteness tempers transformative change within graduate education. I argue that across the
cases, most change was focused on quick, practical, and marginal updates rather than re-thinking
how programs and policies could fundamentally change to center equity and diversity. Also, DEI
labor and leadership was marginalized to a role or small committee rather than expecting
everyone in the organization to be responsible for equity. Although most leaders worked hard to
lead DEI and address issues they were aware of within their program, they were also learning
how to do this work at all; many program leaders were not yet equipped to imagine
transformative organizations and futures because they were new to thinking about equity within
their programs and schools. Thus, nonperformative changes had a welcoming ease to leaders
seeking to take actions towards DEI without taking an inordinate amount of capacity, time, and
resources (Ahmed, 2006; 2012; Patton & Haynes, 2018; Chang, 2002).
Many programs and leaders reacted to social events like the Black Lives Matter
movement by planning DEI initiatives and writing diversity statements. Noting the reactionary
nature of DEI, George in the RCU natural science program described a long and concerning
historical pattern within the academy where unsustained reactionary DEI initiatives emerged as a
form of nonperformative change:
A concern of mine is basically how this is all going to be balanced, because I think that if
these sorts of efforts have peaked up and died out a lot in the history of academia, very
few of them are sustaining, and that’s partly why we’re still doing such a bad job in so
many areas (Interview).
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George explained how the coming and leaving of DEI commitments and actions were an
ongoing issue in the academy and natural science program. Similarly, although faculty may
espouse a commitment to DEI, their commitment may not translate into action, manifesting as a
form of whiteness via nonperformative change. Charles, the WJU natural science program DEI
Committee chair, expressed frustration with colleague inaction and faculty’s cavalier attitude
regarding accountability to DEI:
There are lots of people who will say, oh, yeah, right, I agree with that, but then they
don’t do a damn thing, and so being able to make goals and then have those goals
followed through can be difficult if it involves, you know, actual changes that people
have to make, an actual commitment… the graduate student community – they’re
frustrated because they always bring up this word accountability, which (laughs) the
faculty, they always laugh at that, because you know, they’re like, ‘ha, I’m a tenured
faculty member. Like nobody can fire me or tell me what to do,’ and so there is no such
thing as accountability in their eyes, and that’s a problem, because we are all accountable
in a sense. If you’re really committed to doing a good job and making changes then there
is accountability. You have to change the way you do things, and that could be very
difficult for some people who don’t see what the problem is in the first place, or even if
they see what the problem is, they don’t think it applies to them (Interview).
Here, Charles was frustrated with lip service among colleagues and their brash attitude regarding
accountability to equity and where they may be responsible in progressing or stunting the
program. In this example, whiteness in the organization was supported by faculty’s lack of
follow-through and resistance to accountability. Faculty who ended their support of equity at
words were nonperformative leaders placating to whiteness.
How to incentive DEI is also complicated: if the organization does not compensate DEI
labor than the work likely remains marginal and falls to leaders who are directly impacted by
systems of oppression like racism. However, if the work is incentivized it could also draw in
leaders who participate with ulterior motivations. Within this tension, whiteness via
nonperformative DEI lurks among leaders who required personal incentives to motivate them to
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participate in equity efforts. For example, Alice, chair of the PPU social science program, framed
faculty motivation to join DEI primarily as incentives, stating that colleagues would only
participate if they got something out of it:
I can see where it could happen… If people who are not intrinsically in favor of it still
can see benefits coming out of it, then it’s much more stable than if you’ve got a situation
where you’re supposed to do it because it’s the right thing to do. Forget about it. Some
people are just not going to believe it’s the right thing to do. And then so I think it's
constantly about incentives and trying to show people, look, this is what we got out of
this (Interview).
Leaders who were motivated by what they got out of DEI involvement risked supporting
whiteness via nonperformative change, lured by its ease and symbolic commitment to DEI
without requiring considerable dedication or capacity. Seeking something for his work with DEI,
Art, a faculty member in the RCU humanities program shared how he felt unsupported by a lack
of formal incentive for his DEI work in graduate education: “There’s also no particular
incentives. I’m very motivated by superficial things like prizes. There’s not a prize – that I know
of, for innovation in equity graduate program or anything like that” (Interview). A lack of a prize
is framed as a lack of support as Art reflected on his involvement with DEI. Focusing primarily
on incentives to participate in DEI is a form of whiteness manifesting through nonperformative
change because it centers the participation of privileged and majority white leaders within the
organization throughout the process rather than prioritizing the justice needed for communities
marginalized by the organization (Patton & Haynes, 2018).
Whiteness manifesting through nonperformative change has implications for missed
opportunities to advance change that is equity-minded (Bensimon, 2018) and transformative of
structures and the cultures (Patton & Haynes, 2018; Stewart, 2018; Chang, 2002). Leaders and
their initiatives regarding diversity and equity are already engaging in the work of bringing new
ideas, concepts, and perspectives to graduate education to re-think practices and assumptions
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about diversity, equity, and inclusion. We are also in a specific time where institutional change in
education is again demanded by students and national movements for racial awareness and
equity like Black Lives Matter. Together, movements in society and within the institution are
setting up a context where new ideas may be considered by more leaders than if these social
contexts were not actively in the social consciousness or awareness of higher education leaders.
Thus, this is a ripe time for action and to engage the possibilities of change that mirrors the
critical minds of the thought leaders and graduate students doing their part to transform their
institutions. However, largely in graduate school and graduate program documents, meetings I
observed, and most of the interviews I conducted, the content of discussions was often lacking in
language that reflected critical consciousness, depth, or radical imagining of how to change the
graduate school or graduate programs. In an example of unspecified DEI language, Albert
explained why he chooses not to use the term white supremacy directly as a DEI leader because
he believed it may interfere with DEI buy-in:
I don’t throw out white supremacy in the way that other people use it more casually… as
the leader of the Department I kind of feel like it’s my role to try to get as many people as
possible on board, and using language that’s a little more moderate I think is the main
tool actually to do that (Interview).
Prioritizing colleague comfort and buy-in, Albert opted to use “a little more moderate” language
rather than explicit concepts like white supremacy. Similarly, George, a faculty member in the
RCU natural science program, explained how people were cautious about directly discussing
white supremacy:
Whispering ‘white supremacy is bad, Nazis are bad’ (laughs) that’s a thing. People feel
very uncomfortable verbalizing that. I think partly because they’re afraid that if they say
something like white supremacy that it’s somehow a catch all for all white people or
something, which clearly it’s not, but it's important to identify these just insane
challenges that still exist (Interview).
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In this example, George described how white colleagues were fearful that discussions of white
supremacy would indicate them as personally problematic. This is a manifestation of whiteness
where white colleagues racialized comfort is prioritized in DEI discussions and as a result, DEI
language is nonperformative in its under specificity. Although prominent social events like the
Black Lives Matter movement brought concepts like racism and white supremacy to the
forefront of conversations about race in the U.S., leaders working towards DEI in their graduate
programs often chose not to discuss white supremacy directly, and instead used underspecified
DEI language.
Along with nonperformativity via unspecified language in DEI discussions, diversity
statements can often be a form of nonperformative change that could inadvertently support
whiteness (Iverson, 2007). The chair of the WJU social science program, Albert, shared how he
felt about crafting a DEI statement on behalf of the Department even though some of his
colleagues and graduate students pushed back against the statement, stating it was merely “lip
service”
What was more interesting to me was there was like a more radical, progressive
opposition which was basically ‘talk is cheap. Don’t issue a statement. Talk is cheap.
You know, what you do matters, not what you say matters. We’ve heard this enough.
Yadda, yadda, yadda.’ Which was quite annoying to me given the difficulty of putting the
statement together and consulting people, etc. We had sort of done it, and still the kind of
avant garde on the issue were very critical based on this talk is cheap argument. And I
actually, looking back on it now, this was in the last summer, I sort of come away really
feeling – really disagreeing strongly with the talk is cheap radicals. Why? Because there’s
something about putting a statement out that then kind of forces you to measure your
future behavior against it. I didn’t really know what we were going to do, but just the fact
that statement was out there saying ‘we realize that we have problems with racial equity
in our department. We have had in the past.’ I was kind of dimly aware of what those
problems were… I was always aware that I had sort of made a public commitment to this,
and that if my energy on it disappeared, people would hold me accountable (Interview).
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Reflecting on critiques he received over the Department’s diversity statement, Albert expressed
frustration with the push-back from “talk is cheap radicals” who accused the statement of being
nonperformative. While statements could be used as a tool to identify inequities within a
program, statements alone are nonperformative.
Finally, nonperformative change also included unstable funding for DEI initiatives. Oscar
shared that often when the PPU graduate school received additional funding for DEI
programming and support it was a temporary rather than permanent source of funds:
It’s just kind of one off type funding, but… I think it’s basically something that needs to
be instituted or permanent. Or at least make it a multi-year type of thing. Like we’ll give
you this funding for three years and then we’ll re-evaluate the situation once again
(Interview).
Similarly, Brittney described how PPU graduate school DEI activities and roles relied on
discretionary funds and were therefore unstable, particularly funds that relied on the sole
discretion of leadership: "Luis’ role or even for [programming], if it’s coming from something
like a discretionary fund that’s something that will not always carry over, and so that does offer a
lack of stability in terms of structure" (Interview). Funding for DEI that is temporary or
fluctuating can be viewed as a form of nonperformative change that supports whiteness within
the organization because resource structures remain unaltered. In order for organized efforts at
change to be sustainable, and for equity work to be transformative, permanent and stable funding
structures are required.
Whiteness via Racialized Emotions
In addition to privileging nonperformative forms of change, racialized emotions are a
way that whiteness manifests to temper transformative equity. I argue organizational whiteness
coaxes white leaders to prioritize their own racialized emotional comfort (Bonilla-Silva, 2019;
Harris, 1993; Leonardo & Porter, 2010; Zembylas, 2011; 2012) as they led DEI efforts.
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Relatedly, whiteness also worked to redirect leaders' focus and work to center the anticipated or
expressed white racialized emotions of their colleagues (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Patton & Haynes,
2018; Zembylas, 2012); In doing both, whiteness tempers transformative change within graduate
education. Embedded in racialized organizations and equipped with interpretations of race,
leaders also experience emotions that are connected to race and racialization (Bonilla-Silva,
2019; Wingfield & Alston, 2013; Wingfield, 2010; Zembylas, 2011; 2012, Ahmed, 2004).
Common racialized emotions experienced in racialized organizations include fear, comfort,
anger, and guilt (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Ahmed, 2004; Zembylas, 2011; 2012). Emotional labor is
experienced when individuals repress their racialized emotions (Bonilla-Silva, 2019) and refrain
from expressing their emotional response to instances of microaggressions and discrimination
(Porter et al., 2018). Racialized emotions can be imprinted on to spaces, shaping racial comfort
and discomfort, and in response of racial discomfort white people experience white fragility and
seek out racial control to reinstate their comfort (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Wingfield, 2010; Evans &
Moore, 2015; Harris, 1993; Leonardo & Porter, 2010; Zembylas, 2011; 2012). I find that
anticipating and responding to racialized emotions can occur in any stage of the life cycle of DEI
initiatives, from introducing them, to implementing them, to organizational responses to that
work. Example of each of these follow.
When setting the pace for introducing DEI initiatives, leaders may prioritize colleagues’
and their comfort. For example, in building support for participation in a DEI effort, Rose, an
Associate Dean in the PPU graduate school, cautioned leaders to meet faculty where they are:
I think it’s important to sort of meet people where they are, (laughs) I think carrots are
better than sticks (laughs)... I think don’t judge people. Don’t assume that faculty are
maybe not putting time into this. Don’t assume that means they’re racist. It means they’re
busy – That’s just not on their agenda, so maybe you just need to sort of gradually build
awareness about this and realize it’s going to be slow and I think that’s important like not
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to judge, so sort of be really sensitive to where people are and understand where people
are coming from (Interview).
Rose emphasized not judging faculty and keeping in mind a variety of reasons for faculty
members’ lack of engagement, rather than “assum[ing] that means they’re racist.” In this
perspective, Rose rationalized faculty inactivity regarding DEI as busyness and the issues not
being “on their agenda”, this is certainly possible. However, transformative change is no doubt
tempered by prioritizing their set pace towards possible change over the urgency that people who
are directly affected by racism may argue is needed to redress racial inequity.
Some of this tendency may stem from leaders' own racialized emotions as they attempted
to lead DEI efforts, including navigating classroom spaces as faculty. These emotions may range
from ease to discomfort, and in some cases are significant enough to lead to tears. Olivia, the
chair of the RCU humanities program, described how faculty have emotionally responded to
facilitating contentious classroom discussions among graduate students:
We’ve had a case recently where there’s been some tension between a URM graduate
student and some other graduate students. And so this has erupted in contentious
discussions in class. And in a couple cases faculty have essentially been in tears, because
they don’t know how to handle it, and their attempts to moderate the discussion have
been unsuccessful, in part because the URM student is very opinionated (laughs) about
what should happen and what they should be allowed to say, and so it’s a just tough,
tough situation with no easy answer… at least one faculty member has said ‘when I look
back on some of our past stuff it looks a bit pollyannaish. Good heart, lots of optimism,
we care so it’ll all be okay. And it’s more complicated than that’ (Interview).
In this example, faculty were underprepared to facilitate racialized tension and conflict in
classroom discussions and expressed a breaking point in their racialized emotions through
crying. Reflecting on leaders’ naïve approach to facilitating DEI within the program, Olivia
explained that good intentions were not enough to carry-out change. In conjunction with
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managing ones’ own racialized emotions, leaders also navigated the racialized emotions of
colleagues.
Leaders regularly considered and frequently anticipated and prioritized the reactions of
colleagues outside of DEI committees and roles when designing equity initiatives. In particular,
leaders expressed concern over buy-in and hesitation to propose DEI changes that would be
perceived as too much work or too unfamiliar to colleagues. For example, Olivia shared how in
prioritizing the ease of faculty, the RCU humanities program DEI committee labored to identify
literature and materials for faculty to use to update their syllabi:
Gathered up a whole bunch of resources to try to help faculty diversify their syllabi in
terms of readings and the materials that were being included, and wanted to come up with
lots of online resources for faculty who didn’t have a lot of time so that people couldn’t
say, ‘oh yeah, that’s a great idea, but I just don’t have time for that.’ We can make it as
easy as possible for them, and I think that has been really helpful (Interview).
Although Olivia explained that the goal of the DEI committee was to “make it as easy as
possible” for faculty to diversify their syllabus, equity labor was shifted away from faculty, who
are the experts that would lead their course and all its materials, to the DEI committee who
would not later facilitate the literature they collected; this was a missed opportunity to involve
faculty in examining their courses through an equity-lens because the committee elected to
prioritize the ease of faculty.
In some instances, faculty’s racialized emotions were also prioritized after DEI changes
were made within the program. In an example where a DEI committee altered their previous
work to appease a disgruntled colleague, James, the chair of the PPU natural science program
shared,
I think in the DEI committee we’re often sort of – We’re preaching to the choir, and
(laughs) this might be of interest to you. I got an e-mail from a colleague who is not on
the DEI committee recently, who I guess hadn’t looked at our website in a year or more,
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(laughs) and was distressed to see that we have, you know, the banner for, you know, --
that emphasizes DEI issues (Interview).
In this example, James navigated the racialized emotions of his colleague's resistance to how
prominently DEI issues were included on the department website. In a DEI committee meeting,
the committee further discussed the push-back they received and decided to edit the website.
This is an example of centering faculty comfort within DEI, effectively tempering the scope of
equity to satisfy privileged leaders. This is also an example of how isolating DEI work risks the
possibility that the work of the DEI committee does not reflect the values of its program.
Appeasing faculty’s racialized emotions was often described as difficult for leaders. Alice
shared how her biggest challenge in leading DEI is pleasing all of her colleagues as she
navigated how to make changes within her program:
One of the biggest challenges that I have faced is trying to build a coalition in favor of the
changes, because I have been the target of some pretty abusive responses, both from
people who want – though think I’m not going fast enough and from people who think
I’m going too fast. So you tend to be – You can – You put yourself in a position where
trying to bring everybody along pisses off people who really just want to just sweep the
board clean, and trying to make any changes at all pisses off people who don’t really see
the necessity for it (social science, chair, Interview).
Alice expressed how navigating the racialized emotions of her colleagues was a consuming
challenge that she found abusive. In this example, whiteness worked through racialized emotions
to derail DEI efforts by focusing on reactions of faculty to DEI work.
Although to this point I have highlighted the general tendency for deep change to be
tempered through a variety of processes, in the following section, I briefly discuss disconfirming
evidence. The data within this comparative case study do include select leaders who noticed
whiteness and attempted to pursue equity-minded change that could be viewed as transformative
within their graduate schools and programs.
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Disconfirming Evidence and Future Research
Returning to my conceptual framework, I argued that although whiteness is embedded in
our higher education organizations (Harris, 1993; Ray, 2019), there is a potential for equity-
minded leaders (Bensimon, 2019) to wield their agency to notice and disrupt whiteness within
their graduate school or program. In my sample of eighty people, I identified ten leaders across
two graduate schools and one graduate program who actively noticed, critiqued, and worked to
disrupt whiteness within their organizations. In particular, the RCU and WJU graduate school
Deans, who both identify as racially marginalized women, Associate Deans, and three Staff
directly addressed whiteness within their pursuit of equity. For example, the WJU graduate
Dean, Julia, shared how she tried to explain the complexity of white supremacy in her work as
Dean:
It’s the system under which we’re all operating, but the way I’ve been thinking about it a
lot lately… that systems of social coercion work because they’re complex, right? So if
white supremacy were simply white people are on the top and everybody else is on the
bottom, we actually would have gotten rid of it, right? The difficulty is the power shifts…
I think that’s the struggle right now is how do you name that system, acknowledge it as a
system (Interview).
Similarly, the RCU graduate Dean, Donna, shared how she thought about white supremacy in
her role as Dean:
I think about it all the time. Like all the time. In my personal life as well as in my
professional life, and how it gets worked out and how it seeps in and how people
sometimes believe it’s invisible while others of us can see it. It masquerades as
something else, but it’s really white supremacy… so I’m not afraid to name it
(Interview).
In both cases, the WJU and RCU graduate school Deans took on the challenging work of naming
and grappling with white supremacy within graduate education.
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Among graduate programs, three leaders in the RCU social science program also noticed
whiteness as a barrier to achieving equity. For example, faculty member Naomi described how
academic preparation for graduate school was aligned with white supremacy:
Traditional preparation which would be in alignment with white supremacy culture and
what’s valued within the PhD program and the academy in general. So I think of it
showing up there and the way that some people have just an accumulation of privilege
and have accumulated this advantage, and that we’re not always set up well to try and
mitigate that (Interview).
Additionally, Isaac, the RCU social science program Committee chair, shared how he noticed
white privilege and defensiveness from colleagues during DEI discussions when he brought up
race:
[Saying something] becomes my responsibility. And if I don’t say it, then it just keeps
happening over and over and over again, and when I confront it, it’s confronted with this
white fragility. Or this sort of sense of, ‘I know all about white privilege.’ But that kind
of becomes almost even more offensive (Interview).
Within the RCU social science program, leaders used their professional roles as members of the
DEI committee to directly discuss white supremacy and white privilege as they addressed
racialized systemic inequities in graduate education.
Often, equity-minded approaches to graduate education and their roles within their
graduate school or graduate program facilitated leaders’ critiques of white supremacy and racism
within higher education. For example, the WJU Associate Dean, Andre, shared how the graduate
school was reconceptualizing its work by “looking at sort of how are structures and policies
replicating sort of white supremacy in these spaces and how do we redesign them by tackling
those sort of systemic issues” (Interview). And while DEI language is unspecified at RCU,
Camilla, a RCU graduate school Director, described how she understood the work as fighting
white supremacy:
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People are throwing around DEI now, and I’m like – it’s the same thing. It’s just a
different name. We’re still fighting white supremacy. We’re still fighting oppressive
systems. People are still not allowed – they’re still gatekeeping. It’s just different words,
but it’s the same thing that we’ve been fighting for years and years (Interview).
Although equity-mindedness was not prevalent within their institutions or among colleagues,
leaders like Camilla interpreted DEI initiatives and opportunities to encompass fighting white
supremacy and racialized oppression. Additionally, directly naming racism, white privilege, and
white supremacy in educational workshops, documents, and interviews articulated how these ten
leaders were attempting to understand and mitigate whiteness within their pursuit of equity. For
example, WJU and RCU graduate schools directly addressed systemic racism and anti-racism in
their DEI plans (Documents). Additionally, RCU graduate school centered critical discussions of
race and systemic racial inequities in their educational workshops for graduate leaders, including
topics like cross-racial mentoring and implicit racial bias (Observations).
Although these equity-minded leaders were the exception and not representative of the
study’s participants and cases, they could offer an early blueprint of how graduate education
leaders use their agency and position within their graduate program or graduate school to notice
and mitigate whiteness. Therefore, next year as a University of California Chancellor’s
Postdoctoral Fellow, I will return to my data to further examine how ten leaders used their
agency to resist whiteness within their organization as one way to initiate and carry-out
transformative organizational change. In returning to my original data from three cases, I seek to
further understand how leaders identify whiteness within their organization and what limits or
supports leaders' organizational agency to disrupt whiteness. I will also explore what changes
may have occurred within each of the cases and whether the changes were transformative. Based
on this data, I hope to offer a blueprint, modeled after Patton & Haynes (2018) blueprint drawing
from the experiences and agency of Black women, of how to notice and disrupt whiteness within
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higher education organizations. Returning to my data, I will be able to deeply (re)analyze and
conceptualize how whiteness might be disrupted in higher education graduate organizations and
who is positioned to engage in the important work of transformation.
Closing
In this chapter, I argued that although DEI planning and initiatives were designed to
implement changes to advance equity within graduate education, organizations and leaders
inadvertently constrained the possibilities of transformative change within graduate schools and
programs. Specifically, I argued organizational barriers constrained and whiteness moved
through DEI work to temper transformational possibilities. I identified five major ways
transformative change was tempered within this critical comparative case study: 1)
organizational constraints on time and financial resources limited leaders’ ability to carry-out
change, 2) DEI work isolated to committees or roles unintentionally centered the buy-in of
external faculty, 3) underspecified language dulled critical consciousness and missed
opportunities to introduce equity-mindedness, 4) whiteness manifested through the ease of
nonperformative changes and truncated possibility, and 5) whiteness via racialized emotions
distracted leaders away from equity and towards the comfort of privileged faculty. Data in this
chapter represented all three graduate schools and nine graduate programs that participated in
this critical comparative case study. To illustrate my examination of whiteness in graduate
education organizations and how leaders planned and implemented DEI, in the next chapter I
offer a close analysis and discussion of how transformative change was tempered at Ponderosa
Pine University.

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Chapter 5: Whiteness Tempering Transformative Change at Ponderosa Pine University
Returning to my conceptual framework on the contestation and reproduction of whiteness
as a racialized and hegemonic power in higher education, I argue in this chapter graduate
education leaders and their organizations have the potential to support or resist whiteness as they
implement DEI initiatives.
In my analysis, it quickly became clear that inexperience with leading equity work that
led to nonperformative change and the salience of racialized emotions (Bonilla-Silva, 2019)
tempered the potential of the work and protected whiteness among leaders and within their
organizations. This pattern was broadly evident across all cases, but as an illustration of these
dynamics, in this chapter I present data in particular at Ponderosa Pine University. I discuss more
explicitly how mechanisms of whiteness, especially racialized emotions and nonperformative
change, tempered equity and resisted the possibilities of transformative change at PPU.
At any time, PPU leaders, including leaders who expressed equity-mindedness, oscillated
and slid between actively noticing and critiquing whiteness, and inadvertently supporting
whiteness within their institution and departments. PPU leaders were well-intentioned and
desired to address inequities, yet mostly relatively new to equity. They worked hard to progress
their graduate program or school by implementing DEI initiatives, but they were ill-prepared to
disrupt whiteness and mechanisms of its persistence. In the case of racialized emotions as one
mechanism, participants not only struggled with anticipating and managing colleagues’
responses, but in some cases were themselves subject to racialized emotions. Ultimately, these
cases further demonstrate why we must notice, critique, and disrupt whiteness in higher
education organizations if we want to transform our institutions.
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I share data and findings from Ponderosa Pine University
5
(PPU), its graduate school, and
three graduate programs representing the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. By
narrowing my discussion to one of the three institutions in this comparative case study, my goal
is to present a deeper, more nuanced account of the themes intertwined with whiteness
introduced in chapter four, via the PPU case during a specific historical period of time. Among
the three universities, I selected PPU for this chapter because it is representative of many higher
education institutions as leaders attempt to plan and implement DEI, particularly in response to
national incidents of racial violence and social demands for change. While the phenomenon of
tempering transformative change (Patton & Haynes, 2018; Stewart, 2018; Chang, 2002; hooks,
1989) emerged across all three participating institutions, PPU and its three graduate program
cases are distinctive for being relatively new to engaging with equity. They mirrored recent
national trends in higher education where institutions called for diversity, equity, and inclusion
(DEI)
6
action following the police murder of George Floyd and subsequent social movements in
Summer 2020 (Baxter, 2021).
Ponderosa Pine University
Ponderosa Pine University is a large, public, research institution that is historically white
serving. At the time of data collection, the demographics of the graduate student body were
about 55% white American, 15% Asian American, 20% Latinx American, 5% Black American,
and 1% Native or Indigenous. About 50% of graduate students identified as female, 45% male,
and 2% gender non-binary. Approximately 67% of the graduate student body were domestic
students, and 33% were international students. As of 2017, 25% of PPU ladder faculty were
racially marginalized, and 35% were female. PPU underwent a campus-wide climate survey in

5
All institutions and participants are represented with a pseudonym.
6
Reflecting language used in the cases, I use the term DEI
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2014 which was then used to plan and implement DEI initiatives. In years prior to data
collection, PPU joined state-wide and national initiatives to increase the diversity of its students
and faculty.
Within the year prior to data collection, PPU appointed new DEI leadership for the
institution that worked to streamline and coordinate DEI planning and roles at the Department
level. The new DEI leadership at the university-level requested a DEI plan from all academic
units following a loosely structured template so initiatives would reflect the context and goals of
each department and school. In the call for DEI plans, university leadership offered areas of
consideration to include like climate, recruitment, faculty and student diversity, admissions, and
trainings (Document). The DEI leadership also introduced three new DEI-focused roles at the
department level, each representing faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students.
Finally, university DEI leadership offered educational DEI-focused workshops for department
DEI roles and faculty.
During data collection, graduate programs primarily focused on forming DEI committees,
writing DEI plans in response to PPU’s DEI leadership’s request for Department DEI plans, and
coordinating professional DEI roles to match PPU’s DEI leadership’s newly proposed DEI
network structure. Across the graduate school and three graduate programs, a variety of
individuals assumed leadership positions from graduate students to the graduate school Dean,
which are represented in this study.
Graduate School
In previous years, the graduate school took on DEI leadership across PPU for about a
decade and demonstrated its commitment through leaders who were personally interested in
initiating and coordinating opportunities to increase diversity in graduate student representation.
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Graduate school leaders offered guidance to graduate programs on how to increase the diversity
of their graduate applicant pools and practice equity within graduate admissions. Often, graduate
school leaders were informal DEI consultants for graduate programs. For example, the graduate
school offered support to the three graduate programs in this study as they designed DEI goals,
often through sharing practices and offering financial resources.
Graduate school leaders often met with department DEI advisors/officers to offer tailored
guidance on how to plan for and practice diversity and equity in admissions and recruitment, but
also attended department faculty meetings to share best practices. For example, in my
observation of a humanities program faculty meeting, Oscar gave a presentation on diversity in
graduate recruitment where he tailored his recommendations to fit the department specifically,
rather than offering a generic workshop. In his presentation, Oscar identified institutions and
programs with majors relevant to the humanities program and concentrations of undergraduate
students who are underrepresented at PPU. Oscar also shared recruitment best-practices from
peer institutions and offered to help the humanities program create a recruitment pipeline in
order to recruit diverse students. Acting as a key resource of knowledge and invaluable source of
labor, Oscar offered a foundation for the humanities program to build their recruitment network.
Graduate Programs
Within a year of data collection, the humanities, natural science, and social science
graduate programs in this study each initiated the establishment of a DEI committee
7
and
drafting of a DEI plan. While all three graduate programs were new to engaging equity, their
leaders had a commitment to DEI which they demonstrated through their personal volition and
activity on DEI committees.

7
Committees went by various names, but for anonymity purposes I refer to them as DEI committees
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Humanities Program. Reacting to national protests of police racial violence and
learning from graduate students about their harmful experiences in the program with support and
inclusion, Phoebe, a tenured faculty member, decided to make some changes in her classroom to
be more racially inclusive, specifically in regard to including relevant historical contexts. From
there, Phoebe was motivated by her graduate students and advisees to think about equity in the
humanities program more broadly. At the time, the humanities program did not formally dedicate
leadership or resources towards DEI. Realizing she was new to equity herself, Phoebe reached
out to the graduate school for guidance, where Luis recommended she become a DEI advisor for
her department. As a newly appointed DEI leader, Phoebe attended DEI workshops offered by
the graduate school and PPU to learn about equity and how to coordinate DEI work within the
humanities program. Phoebe also reached out to her colleagues to solicit volunteers to form a
DEI working group, per a recommendation from the graduate school and, together, the
committee of seven faculty and one staff member began to collect feedback from graduate
students and draft a DEI plan. The committee worked asynchronously on tasks led by Phoebe
and met a few times throughout the year. Participants characterized the humanities program as
somewhat fractured by department sub-fields, where each area has its own practices and specific
training which made it difficult for the committee to coordinate consensus on DEI goals. The
DEI committee primarily focused on learning about DEI, identifying problem areas within the
program, and finding resources and guidance on how to plan and lead DEI. Among their
preliminary goals, the committee focused on increasing diversity in graduate student recruitment
and admissions.
Natural Science Program. After receiving a list of demands from students to address the
department’s climate and learning of PPU’s request for a DEI plan, the natural science program
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created a DEI committee. Comprised of seven faculty and one staff member, the committee
regularly met once a week for one-hour meetings to identify DEI issues, brainstorm solutions
and initiatives, and draft their DEI plan. The committee strategically included the chairs of the
department, graduate education committee, and undergraduate committee in an attempt to
disperse DEI activity from the committee into longstanding department committees. The
committee also included the vice chair of the department in an attempt to smooth the transition of
leadership the following year. In my weekly observation of the DEI committee meeting, I
noticed how the two co-chairs, Elias and Abby who were early-career faculty, kept the
momentum of the work at a progressive pace and the committee’s focus on practical changes.
After the DEI plan was drafted and submitted to the university, the committee delegated tasks to
sub-groups within the committee in order to begin implementation. As we will see in the data,
the efficiency of the committee’s work later had trade-offs for colleague involvement and buy-in.
Participants characterized the natural science program as in need of structural changes in their
curriculum and faculty diversity, and they expressed concern about colleague support as they
carried-out their careful DEI planning. The DEI committee primarily focused on accessibility
and diversity in their academic programs, specifically in their undergraduate introduction courses
and graduate admissions policies.
Social Science Program. Responding to the call for a DEI plan and a funding
opportunity through its academic school, the social science program formed a DEI committee.
The committee proposed a diversity initiative to their academic school to review the program’s
curriculum and teaching, which they received financial support to implement. The DEI
committee was comprised of two faculty, including Leah who was early-career faculty and chair
of the committee, and three graduate students. All three graduate students were financially
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supported through the academic school’s diversity initiative to work on the DEI committee as
research assistants. The committee met a few times a year, and the graduate student RAs worked
asynchronously to complete the objectives of the curriculum and teaching review which the
faculty on the committee advised. Participants characterized the social science program as
fragmented by sub-areas with their own course requirements and foci, which was a challenge for
graduate student RAs as they identified literature for faculty to incorporate into their courses.
The DEI committee primarily focused on planning and implementing their literature and
teaching review, which was largely led by graduate student RAs.
Participants and Race
As I discussed in chapter four, in examining racialization and whiteness in organizations
it is important to consider the racial identities of leaders who position themselves to advance
equity. Similarly, leaders’ conceptualization of equity as they construct and carry-out DEI
initiatives are relevant. The table below I summarizes PPU participants’ pseudonyms, equity-
lens, racial identity, and gender identity. As a reminder, “RC” represents race-conscious, which I
define as: expresses awareness of race in definition and discussion of equity/DEI, but not often in
structural or institutional ways connected to their role/work in education. “RE” represents race-
evasive, which I define as: does not express awareness of race in definition and discussion of
equity/DEI. “EM” represents equity-minded, which I define as: expresses awareness of race and
whiteness/white supremacy in definition and discussion of equity/DEI, and applies lens to their
role/work in education. Finally, an asterisk* represents new to equity, which I describe as:
formally engaged with equity/DEI in roughly the prior three years from 2021, often becoming
aware or deciding to engage in DEI because of national and local events like Trump politics,
police violence, Black Lives Matter movement, and graduate student protests and demands.
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Table 2
PPU Participant Equity Lens and Racial/Gender Identities
PPU Participant Equity-lens Racial Identity Gender Identity
Graduate School Elena RE white W

Luis EM Black/Asian M

Oscar EM Black/Latinx M

William RE white M

Brittney *RE white W

Madeline *RC white W

Rose *RE white W
Natural Science James *RE white M

Elias *RE white M

Abby *RE Latinx W

Luca *RC white M

Kate *RE white W

Henry *RE white M

Diane *RE white W

Victoria *RE white W

Amir EM Black M
Social Science Alice *RE white W

Leah *RC white W

Kavi RC Asian M

Daniel *RE white M

Aditi EM Asian W

Zoey EM Black/white W

Alex *RC Mixed race M
Humanities Phoebe *RC white W

Steven *RE white M

Marilla *RC white W

Christy *RE white W

Eric *RC white M

Hannah *RC white W

Amy *RE white W

Jonathan *RE white M
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Note. RE is race-evasive, RC is race-conscious, EM is equity-minded, and * is new to equity. W
is woman, M is man, and NB is non-binary.
Following the major findings presented in Chapter 4, in the remainder of this chapter, I illustrate
how the trends presented there – specifically, how whiteness tempered transformative change –
at PPU.
Whiteness Tempering Transformative Change at PPU
At PPU, whiteness manifested through forms of nonperformative change (Ahmed, 2006;
2012) and the centering of colleagues' white racialized emotions (Bonilla-Silva, 2019), which
effectively decentered focus on possible transformative equity (Patton & Haynes, 2018; hooks,
1989). Whiteness worked by dulling DEI language (Mueller, 2020; Ray & Purifoy, 2019),
constraining structural support (Ray, 2019; Wingfield & Alston, 2013; March & Olsen, 1985),
and protecting white racial comfort (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Leonardo & Porter, 2010; Zembylas,
2011; 2012). Most PPU leaders were new to equity and either uncritical of whiteness within
graduate education or in capable of fully managing it as a reality in organizational life. While
many PPU leaders expressed a desire to advocate for racial equity, few were equipped to notice
how whiteness within their graduate school or program restrained their equity frames, schemas,
and the routinized practices of their organization.
In this section, I first consider how whiteness manifests through forms of
nonperformative change, particularly through the tendency of leaders to follow ease in their
planning and initiatives, that inadvertently temper equity. Then, I consider how whiteness
manifests through the centering of colleagues' white racialized emotions, which effectively
decenters focus on possible transformative equity. In discussing how whiteness is woven
throughout the organization in normative ways of knowing and working, I illustrate how
whiteness works by diverting energy away from equity goals to temper transformative change.
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Whiteness via Nonperformative Change
Most DEI change at PPU was focused on quick, practical, and marginal updates – such as
updating websites, handbooks, and mission statements to reflect DEI values – rather than
seriously re-thinking how programs and policies could change to center equity and diversity.
Such changes are consistent with what Sara Ahmed calls nonperformative change. The
nonperformativity of such initiatives, she writes, “works because it fails to bring about what it
names” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 105). Nonperformative activities distract away from the problem
source, in this case racism, while appearing to address it (Ahmed, 2006; 2012). For DEI
initiatives, the busy-work of strategic planning appears to address inequity but avoids or glosses
over how the institution is white supremacist (Ahmed, 2012). Also, many program leaders were
not yet equipped to imagine transformative organizations and futures because they were new to
thinking about equity within their programs. Thus, nonperformative changes had a welcoming
ease to leaders who were seeking to take actions towards DEI in the wake of police violence that
demanded some kind of action, yet which did not take an inordinate amount of capacity, time, or
resources (Ahmed 2006; 2012; Patton & Haynes, 2018; Stewart, 2018; Chang, 2002). As
discussed in Chapter 4, constraints on time, resources, and information limited change work,
raising the profile of changes that ultimately appeared nonperformative.
Confusion & Lack of Coordination as Barriers to Change
Lacking sufficient information and guidance to lead organizational change is a function
of nonperformative change. Here, nonperformative change does not address structural change
and constitutes whiteness within the organization that has historically persisted relatively
unchallenged. One form is confusion regarding structure and expectations (i.e., organizational
ambiguity, see March & Olsen, 1985). Recall in Chapter Four that across cases the
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organizational constraints on transformative change included time, resources, and guidance. At
PPU, guidance was most salient among these. For example, having no models to draw from as
she began DEI planning, Phoebe in the humanities program reached out to the graduate school
for guidance:
I wrote to them and said I need some help with like where do I start. Like I don’t have a
model. I don’t think any of my department has a model. My chair doesn’t have a model.
I’m willing to hear out what we need to do (Interview).
While PPU administration called for DEI leadership across schools and departments, they did not
offer their community guidance on how to be critically aware of racialized systems of inequity
within education or prepare leaders on how to dismantle these systems. Without guidance on
how to address structures of white supremacy and racism within organizational processes and
resources (i.e., schemas and routines), DEI leaders risked unintentionally supporting existing
racialized structures (Ray, 2019) and property interests of whiteness (Harris, 1993).
PPU’s recent reorganization of DEI officer roles and requests for DEI plans under new
leadership was a frequent topic in data coded to organizational constraints. Previously, there was
not substantial investment in DEI at the institutional level, which William, an Assistant Dean in
the graduate school, framed as a challenge for new DEI leadership: “part of the challenge that
our new [leadership] is having is no one was pushing these topics. Nobody was pushing these
conversations, really previously other than the graduate division” (Interview). PPU’s call for DEI
plans from each program was fairly unstructured, and this afforded departments flexibility to
tailor plans to specific program goals. However, the lack of structure also left under-prepared
programs scrambling to simultaneously learn about DEI issues and make plans to address them,
albeit with little guidance. Natural science, social science, and humanities program DEI leaders
framed organizational ambiguity (March & Olsen, 1985) as challenging (Interviews;
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Observations). Phoebe, the chair of the DEI committee in the humanities program, summarized a
general concern regarding the new DEI structure at PPU: "for people who are not already
involved in the DEI efforts, the leadership mandate and chaos might be used to rationalize not
getting involved, which is concerning” (Interview). Here, Phoebe described how individuals may
continue to disengage DEI, and they referenced PPU’s recent restructuring of DEI roles as a
rationale for inaction.
Even as the institution was pushing leaders in new ways, open, unclear, or poorly
coordinated institutional expectations regarding how to plan for and lead DEI caused confusion
among graduate education leaders. We see examples of this both in expectations for planning
from two different entities on campus, as well as expectations for diversity leadership from
multiple entities. At PPU following the summer of 2020 when George Floyd was murdered by
police and there were national protests against police brutality and in support of Black Lives
Matter, the institution called for DEI plans and initiatives. However, there was also some
confusion around what PPU was asking of its schools and programs. For example, the social
science program recalled being asked to design a plan for their academic college and a separate
plan for the institution, which created some confusion for the graduate program. The plans could
not be one in the same because each office outlined different objectives and templates for the
plans. Alice, the chair of the social science department explained,
The first two years that I was chair there was nothing. Nobody was tasking us with
anything. Nobody was providing us with any resources. Nobody really cared… Now it’s
almost too much that’s being tasked. We were tasked last fall by the dean’s office to
come up with a racial equity plan. Now the university is tasking us with coming up with a
strategic plan for advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion… And so it sounds like we’re
having to produce all of these reports for all these different people, and they want them in
different formats so the racial equity plan can’t be turned in for the diversity, equity, and
inclusion strategic plan. It has to be reformatted. It has to have a different set of
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questions, and so it just kind of feels like it’s almost gone the opposite direction. There’s
too much. And they’re not coordinating with one another (Interview).
Alice expressed confusion and some frustration regarding how to meet institutional expectations
around DEI planning. In particular, Alice recalled how in the past she was not provided
resources or guidance on how to lead DEI as chair of her department, and then felt overwhelmed
with PPU’s sudden requests for DEI deliverables.
DEI leadership at PPU also established new DEI representative roles at the department
level as a form of support for reporting between the institution and department leadership.
However, the natural science and humanities graduate programs met the new role requirements
with confusion. For example, soon after Phoebe agreed to serve as the graduate Diversity Officer
for the humanities program, PPU introduced the new DEI department roles:
I had signed up to do the graduate diversity officer, and I’m getting all these e-mails and
requests and sign ups for workshop this, workshop that, do this, do that, because now I’m
like the diversity officer writ large (laughs) (Interview).
Likewise, in a natural science program DEI committee meeting, faculty expressed frustration
with PPU as they discussed how to organize the new DEI roles within their department: "the
appointment of three new 'officer' positions to represent DEI across graduate, faculty, and
undergraduate areas for each department, who also need to be separate from chairs of
committees and must be three different people" (Observation). The faculty members continued,
trying to solve where the new roles fit in to their existing department structure, "the graduate
advisors are different from graduate chairs, but can graduate advisors be the graduate DEI
representative?" (Observation). Over multiple DEI committee meetings, the natural science
program faculty discussed what they were observing among PPU leadership as "a
miscommunication or understanding of department structures and how to embed new DEI
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representatives" (Observation). Similarly, Phoebe shared in a humanities program DEI
committee meeting,
There is a lot of frustration with the [university leadership], but I don't want that to
discourage us from our work that we have been doing. The work has to get done, it is
really important that we do this work, we should not get bogged down by the difficulty of
coordinating this work on campus (Observation).
As with the expected development of both racial equity and DEI plans from the college and
university, a poorly coordinated set of expectations from the college and university around who
should be leading DEI work led to confusion. This confusion inadvertently acted as an
organizational constraint on equity simply because it distracted leaders away from the purpose of
DEI and towards logistics of structure (March & Olsen, 1985). PPU’s attempt to coordinate DEI
roles across the institution could have forged a path towards shifting racialized structures and
agency (Ray, 2019; Sewell, 1992) to carry-out collective change. However, leaders largely
reacted to PPU’s new DEI coordination with frustration and discomfort (Bonilla-Silva, 2019),
effectively overshadowing the potential for institutional change. This is an example where well-
intentioned PPU graduate education leaders prioritized their comfort (Bonilla-Silva, 2019) over a
process of change, which inadvertently allowed whiteness within the organization to persist
(Ray, 2019; Harris, 2019).
Hannah, a faculty member on the humanities program’s DEI committee, reflected on the
new Department level DEI roles created by PPU DEI leadership and recent requests for DEI
plans. Hannah shared how PPU’s new Department DEI roles and expectations around DEI may
be intended to be supportive of making significant change, but actually consists of busy work
and simple changes that would not actually substantially change the institution. Hannah offered
the extended metaphor of a cake to describe this discrepancy:
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I just feel like the university as a whole has kind of let down the diversity officers and the
working groups. You know, they were like we’re going to do all these things… I think
they thought they were being supportive, but I think that, well, how they chose very easy
ways to support us, which didn’t actually end up being supportive but ended up being
hindering… to really help these issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, to really follow
through on them, they can’t just be kind of frosting on the cake that you just kind of ask
people to kind of layer that on top, right? Like on top – So the cake is like everything else
you have to do in your job, right? Because academics, like you have like a million things
that you have to do. So cake is like everything else that you’re supposed to do. It’s like
the university kind of assumes that, well, if you just kind of do this DEI stuff on top as
like frosting. That’s going to be kind of good enough… Sure, it changes the flavor of the
cake a little bit, but if you’re not fundamentally like changing the cake, and you’re not
actually – a lot of the cake isn’t being devoted to this, and the frosting is not structural,
right? You can easily get rid of like frosting and the cake is still fine. And so versus kind
of, you know, having it, giving people time and the opportunity to kind of learn about it
and to bake the knowledge in these issues kind of into the structure of kind of your job
and being kind of part of the cake. So as opposed to asking people to kind of just like
layer it like extra on top, because also that’s like not time that you’re being compensated
for a lot of the times (Interview).
Hannah described how the structure of the institution, in particular faculty job expectations, is
not addressed or shifted by PPU’s new DEI leadership or their efforts to reorganize DEI officer
roles across the institution. Rather, PPU’s DEI initiatives were experienced as busy work on top
of institutional demands that remain unaltered like teaching, research, and service. Like frosting
on a cake, the institutional approach to equity is not transformative because it is “extra on top”
and easily removed without impacting the structure or processes of the organization (Stewart,
2018). These comments are helpful in clarifying that transformational equity work should be
structural, fundamental, and supported with time and the opportunity to learn. Another form of
constraint on transformational change was some leaders’ tendency to opt for ease and over-
delegation, resulting in nonperformative leadership.

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Nonperformative Leadership
In opting for ease and over-delegation, nonperformative leadership does not grapple with
how to dissemble complex structures and processes that support whiteness. In avoiding or being
unaware of whiteness within the organization, nonperformative leaders un/intentionally allow it
to persist. In some instances, department chairs and faculty tasked with DEI leadership over-
delegated their work to early-career faculty and graduate students. In doing so, leaders placed the
onus of DEI labor on to individuals with less institutional agency to propose and carry-out
change (Sewell, 1992; Ray, 2019; Wingfield & Alston, 2013), effectively limiting the structural
scope of DEI initiatives. For example, James, the chair of the natural science program, shared
how new hires are turning out to lead equity efforts in the program because they are positioned to
notice the need for change, as newcomers:
I think especially with equity issues it’s the youth, it’s your generation that are taking a
lead… I mean, there are people of my generation who are much more resistant to change
than I am… Like somebody has to speak for this, or somebody has to work on that, and
it’s – more often than not it’s a more recent hire. Because the other thing is that they are
coming to it – coming to our department with fresh eyes (Interview).
However, if tenured faculty or chairs look to new hires to lead change, then change will be
tempered because responsibility is constantly delegated to faculty who are newer to the
organization and don't yet have the organizational agency to wield institutional power to
implement change (Sewell, 1992; Porter et al., 2018). Additionally, early career faculty are often
persuaded to prioritize their research over any form of service in order to satisfy the expectations
of tenure and promotion, whereas advanced career faculty have already surmounted the tenure
process and may have more discretion and influence (Tierney & Bensimon, 1996).

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Zoey, a graduate student, critiqued racial inequity in graduate student hiring and program
completion,
When you do take on Black graduate students, you’re not making sure these Black
graduate students graduate. So you can get the benefits of the hiring and having them as
part of your percentages for a little while, nobody’s actually tracking how well these
people are doing. And that’s another thing, that the focus on the hiring and not the but
did they actually finish, did they actually succeed professionally here, upholds racial
inequities as well (social science, Interview).
In this example, the optics of racial diversity for a program that does not support the academic
success of Black graduate students is a form of whiteness manifesting in nonperformative change
because the program's practices do not change beyond admitting a few racially marginalized
students.
Graduate programs tasking their graduate students with DEI can be viewed as a form of
nonperformative change because graduate students have less agency over wielding change
relative to faculty (Sewell, 1992; Porter et al., 2018). Moreover, not compensating graduate
students for DEI labor may contribute to burnout and reflects a broader pattern of failing to
structurally support DEI (Porter et al., 2018). Brittney, an Assistant Director in the graduate
school, shared how paying graduate students for their DEI work is important to practicing equity:
Just paying graduate students for their equity work. You know, a lot of times they’re
tapped by their department to be on committees or meet incoming students, and all of that
is volunteer work, and we just want to pay them for the work that they’re already doing
(Interview).
Here, Brittney identified how programs inequitably tasked their graduate students with unpaid
DEI labor, delegating responsibility to them without compensation. However, even in programs
where graduate students were paid for their DEI labor, they were not afforded organizational
power to lead DEI changes.
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DEI labor was also overly delegated to graduate students. The social science program
includes graduate students on their DEI committee and regularly tasks them with program labor.
While the graduate students are financially compensated hourly for their DEI labor, a large
amount of the DEI committee's work is allocated to graduate students. Zoey, a graduate student
on the DEI committee, shared how the program burdens racially marginalized and female
graduate students with diversity work, including being on the DEI committee, without proper
support like counting the work towards graduation requirements:
All of the work that you now ask of marginalized students, like being part of diversity
committees, that should be recognized as part of your degree. So if I’m on the graduate
diversity committee now for a whole year, that should equal to, you know, one quarter of
a course, because you are now taking more of my time, more of my time that again,
you’re probably not going to listen to, and you do this to all marginalized students. Like
all non-white students, all female students, because obviously you can’t have an all white
male diversity committee board, that would look weird. You can’t have an all white
diversity committee board. So now you’re going to be asking these students, who are a
minority because again, you didn’t hire enough non-white faculty, you didn’t hire enough
non-white students, and so now this burden that they’re having to do is unrecognized
work. It’s just more work on top of the fifty million things graduate students have to do,
tenure-track faculty have to do. And so I think recognizing that as equal to your research
work and your teaching work is essential. You have to pay people more (laughs)
(Interview).
In this example, the social science program DEI work is mainly isolated to racially marginalized
graduate students, which is both fundamentally unjust given the roles and which constrains
transformative equity because graduate students are disempowered within the organization
(Sewell, 1992). Here, Zoey also describes diversity work as frosting: simply added on to
graduate students’ numerous responsibilities. Zoey explained how it is especially difficult for
graduate students to assume leadership roles for equity because of their lack of power and
stability within the program:
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And I think also structurally – not having full guaranteed contracts for let’s say the
minimum five years that is considered standard… nobody’s contractually obliged to give
you anything. Like that kind of anxiety – if you’re thinking about this, you’re going to be
thinking well, let me not rock the boat because I need this now, because I don’t even
know if I’m going to have a [funding] in the spring (social science, Interview).
Although graduate students were delegated responsibility over DEI via roles on the committee,
and though they were tasked with DEI labor on behalf of the program, their stability in the
program could be threatened or revoked. Without stability and protection, graduate students were
not in an organizational position to lead transformative change (Sewell, 1992).
Although students like Aditi were equity-minded and critiqued whiteness, their critical
lens was not shared by the whole social science program. This divergence limited Aditi’s
potential influence. For example, Aditi critiqued the white supremacist core of her field's
curriculum,
Only recently are we really like considering maybe this shouldn’t be the canon or maybe
if it is the canon there should be like maybe a critical kind of overview over like what we
understand to be, you know, baseline theory. We see this a lot in the sub-fields as well,
like very like white supremacist kind of ideas" (Interview).
Aditi further explained how the program is only recently beginning to grapple with the field's
canon through their curriculum redesign: "So something that is definitely I think needs to be
more part of the conversation for our field, consciously that is, and with the redesign, that’s
something that we’re trying to like grapple with more" (Interview). Although Aditi would like to
lead DEI in her program through an equity-minded lens, she is limited as a single graduate
student in her influence over the program and faculty leaders. Positioning graduate students as
program leaders over DEI is a form of nonperformative change because, although they may have
the perspective and ability to lead transformative change, the organization does not afford them
the agency to make such changes (Sewell, 1992; Ray, 2019; Wingfield & Alston, 2013).
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Whiteness constituted by nonperformative leadership tempered transformative change.
Transformative change was also tempered by whiteness through nonperformative language.
Nonperformative Language
Whiteness dulls language used to discuss and design for equity to render it
nonperformative, avoiding critically naming systems like white supremacy (Mueller, 2020; Ray
& Purifoy, 2019; Harris, 1993). Most PPU leaders expressed what could be classified as racially
ignorant (Mueller, 2020) or race-evasive (Ray & Purifoy, 2019) frames as they planned and
implemented DEI initiatives. By this, I mean that in PPU graduate school and graduate program
documents, meetings I observed, and most of the interviews I conducted, the content of
discussions were often lacking in critical race consciousness, depth, or radical imagining of how
to change. Zoey, a graduate student, shared that leaders do not talk about white supremacy,
including the faculty in her social science program:
academia doesn’t talk about white supremacy. And getting them [faculty] to engage
meaningfully with that term is almost impossible. You can talk about racism, you can
(laughs) talk about exclusion of this and we don’t have enough of that, but you can’t
actually use the words white supremacy. I’ve never heard any faculty member outside of,
you know, Black studies or Chicano studies who uses this term – And even the ones who
do, they’re not in administrative roles. They don’t use that term in their administrative
roles. They use that term in their scholarship, but not when they’re talking about policy
(Interview).
Similarly, Leah described how as chair of the DEI committee, she does not use the term white
supremacy in DEI work because she believes her colleagues will resist:
One of the reasons that I like to think that our work on the diversity committee will
hopefully be successful is that we’re trying to see where people are and push them as far
as they can go without pushing them into the 'I’m not going to do anything. I’m shutting
down. I won’t talk about this issue'. And some people could rightfully say maybe we’re
not pushing them enough. Maybe we need to be calling [white supremacy] out and that is
a very defensible point of view. But I’m saying like I think the reason we haven’t
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explicitly adopted that approach is because we sort of know some of our colleagues, and
we know how some of that might be greeted (social science, Interview).
In both of these examples, the approach taken by leaders privileges faculty and the language they
are comfortable using over directly identifying systems and structures of racial inequity within
the organization like racism and white supremacy. Some at PPU recognized the risks of this.
Aditi, a graduate student in the social science program, summarized: “I think there will be a point
where we have to consider the white supremacist like concept more institutionally, otherwise like
there’s only so far that equity can go” (social science, graduate student, Interview). Indeed, this
may be strategic in keeping people involved, but they are, no doubt, involved in a weaker
endeavor than what is possible – or perhaps needed.
Unspecified DEI language was also used in PPU diversity statements. Zoey described
how language was unclear in the social science program's diversity statements, and
accountability for racism was unspecified:
I mean, the students might talk about white privilege. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that
word come out of any faculty members’ mouths. Yeah, no, they just don’t engage with
it… The closest we got is to talk about racial justice, because during last summer’s
protest and all the departments were releasing their statements, like oh, this is horrible,
this is really bad, and you know, the graduate students were getting frustrated with these
statements, because they were acting like racism is this police issue over there and is not
a part of this institution and so our department (graduate student, Interview).
After years of diversity statements accompanied by inaction, Zoey and many of her graduate
student peers felt frustrated with how statements following racialized police violence in Summer
2020 framed racism as an external issue, and opted to avoid grappling with how programs were
themselves culpable in racism. Whiteness manifesting through PPU leaders’ unspecified and
nonperformative DEI language (Ahmed, 2006; Iverson, 2007), and leaders’ avoidance of
critically important concepts like white privilege and supremacy (Mueller, 2020; Ray & Purifoy,
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2019; Harris, 1993) tempered the possibilities of equity within the organization (Patton &
Haynes, 2018; Chang, 2002). Whiteness also tempered transformative change through
nonperformative DEI work.
Nonperformative Work
In decisions at PPU that appear to center equity, a closer look at the rationale and
execution of policy change, syllabus change, and offering townhalls to discuss student concerns
reveals nonperformative change partly because the change is fueled by non-equity motivations
(Ahmed, 2006). Nonperformative work, including substantive changes like policy or curriculum
that may have equitable outcomes but do not center equity in their design, inadvertently supports
whiteness within the organization. Often, changes occur because of interest convergence (Bell,
1980), a property interest of whiteness (Harris, 1993), where the outcome is desired and framed
as beneficial to white stakeholders. For example, the natural science program DEI committee
strategically positioned its members who are on the graduate committee to present a GRE policy
change to their full faculty because “the faculty would be more receptive if the presentation came
from the graduate committee and not the DEI committee” (Observation). Preparing for the
faculty meeting, the DEI committee expressed concern over faculty resistance to removing the
GRE because faculty continued to want the GRE in admissions (Observation). Arguing the
program should no longer require the GRE, the DEI/graduate committee members presented
research on the GRE’s “flawed data” and shared how many peer programs no longer required the
exam (Observation). Upon learning their competitors had removed the GRE requirement, the
natural science program faculty voted to also remove the GRE from their admissions
(Observation). Luca, who helped lead the GRE policy discussion, summarized the decision to
remove the GRE:
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It didn’t matter how much research we could show about whether the GRE was effective
or not. What killed it is when they saw that all the other significant competitors had
discontinued it, and they went okay, we’re not going to get any applicants if we don’t get
with the program. So those are wrong motivators, but (laughs) that can be very effective
(Interview).
This is an example of organizational change that appears to center equity and mitigate whiteness
in admissions policy, but in practice equity was not relevant to faculty deliberations or their final
decision. Instead, faculty were motivated to preserve their reputation and competitiveness with
peer programs and institutions (i.e., interest convergence, Bell, 1980), which in this case meant
removing their GRE requirement. While the outcome of the decision has ripple effects for equity,
the change process was nonperformative because equity was not considered.
Curriculum. The social science program’s DEI committee identified curriculum as an
important area for change. The committee worked to adjust the program's centering of white and
Euro-centric canon literature, which Zoey explained “upholding the canonical literature that we
choose to uphold, upholds racial inequity because most of this literature rarely deals with racial
issues” (graduate student, Interview). The committee’s solution was to create a reading list from
which faculty would select literature to incorporate into their lesson plans as a way to make “it
easy for faculty to incorporate underrepresented perspectives throughout their courses”
(Document). While the committee worked to make progress on the program’s curriculum, how
faculty use the reading list is unstructured and leaves untouched how faculty teach those
readings. Rather than incorporate critical race conscious literature throughout the curriculum or
shift the epistemologies of how the disciplinary literature is used, the committee pursued an
auxiliary change to course literature.
Crisis Response Statements. In the social science program's DEI committee meeting,
Leah, the committee chair, asked whether the committee should draft a statement about anti-
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Asian violence since the department has not made one, and Daniel, a faculty member, agreed that
it may be expected. Leah shared her motivation for the statement to be a sign of solidarity
because there are a lot of Asian and Asian American students at PPU, adding that a lack of a
statement may send the wrong message. Zoey, a graduate student, responded "I don't think these
statements make a difference unless they are tied to concrete action and policy changes"
(Observation) and added that the department does not center Asian or Asian American voices.
Here, Zoey called out how statements have been nonperformative and pay "lip service" to values
of inclusion without making any changes in the program (Iverson, 2007).
As an alternative to a statement, Zoey suggested the department think about how it is
complicit in the anti-Asian sentiment and discourse and has thus added to the unsafety of Asian
heritage students, to which Alex, a graduate student, added "[our field] is really the child of
British Imperialism, and bringing that attention could help with introspection of the discipline"
(Observation). Zoey concurred it would only be a valuable statement if it said something like
"We feel horrified about this and we see ourselves complicit in this way and this is what we are
going to do about it" (Observation). At the conclusion of the conversation, the committee
decided not to draft a statement.
In this example, graduate students offered the idea that the committee should focus
energies on making changes to the department rather than on writing a statement that is not tied
to action. Although they directed the committee towards considering how they might address
anti-Asian violence internally, the committee did not take-up that work in their meeting. In this
discussion, nonperformative change via a statement was preferred by the faculty who, at the end
of the meeting, decided to remain inactive regarding anti-Asian violence.
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Town Hall. Although often unintentional, department town halls can also hold the
hallmarks of nonperformative change that does not lead to structural change. They also highlight
the role of racialized emotions in this work, which will be the focus of the next section. Offering
a space for students to express critiques of their program and its leadership is nonperformative
when leadership does not meaningfully take action to address feedback. For example, the natural
science program's DEI committee framed town halls as an undesired expectation which they
were reluctant to attend, but which were nonetheless offered in order to appease students
(Observation). In a DEI meeting preparing for a town hall later that week, Elias expressed his
discomfort along with why he attends
The point of the town hall is to open up issues and I won't enjoy being the subject of it or
in the hot seat… to the extent of hearing uncomfortable things, they are out there whether
or not we hear them and they are our responsibility to address (Observation).
However, the town hall was announced only a few days before it occurred, resulting in extremely
low attendance (Observation). Further, the framing and coordination of the town hall is driven by
faculty's discomfort – a clear example of a racialized emotion. Indeed, committee members
discussed their own nervousness: "yeah the public part of making an accusation of a specific
person without any verification, like false accusations to a person could be damaging"
(Observation). In this example, both the scheduling and faculty's racialized emotions constrain
the potential of the town hall.
Nonperformative change (Ahmed, 2006; 2012) is another way of describing reform-
based changes, and the examples above demonstrate how easy it can be for DEI work to take this
path of least resistance, even as it mitigates the potential for transformational change at PPU. In
the following section, I elaborate on the phenomenon of racialized emotions as another a way
whiteness manifested to temper transformative equity at PPU.
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Whiteness via Racialized Emotions
At PPU, as in the other two universities in this study, whiteness is reflected in leaders
giving in to the ease of their own emotional comfort (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Harris, 1993;
Leonardo & Porter, 2010; Zembylas, 2011; 2012) as they worked in DEI-related activities. PPU
graduate education leaders did also experience fear, comfort, and anger (Bonilla-Silva, 2019;
Ahmed, 2004; Zembylas, 2011; 2012). Whiteness also reflected in leaders' focus and work to
center the anticipated or expressed white racialized emotions of their colleagues (Bonilla-Silva,
2019; Patton & Haynes, 2018; Zembylas, 2012). Many leaders experienced emotional labor as
they managed racialized emotions, both their own and those of their colleagues (Bonilla-Silva,
2019; Porter et al., 2018). Often when white faculty, students, and leaders felt racial discomfort,
they sought to control or redirect circumstances to reinstate their comfort (Bonilla-Silva, 2019;
Wingfield, 2010; Evans & Moore, 2015; Harris, 1993; Leonardo & Porter, 2010; Zembylas,
2011; 2012).
Leaders' Racialized Emotions
As Table 2 indicated, the majority of the graduate school and graduate program leaders
held white racial privilege and, therefore unsurprisingly experienced white racialized emotions
(Harris, 1993; Bonilla-Silva, 2019).
Comfort. The social science program administered a climate survey which showed white
men were dissatisfied with the program’s climate. Alice, the chair of the department, explained
The results of our departmental climate survey suggested that the group that was most
dissatisfied among faculty and students is white men, and I – so I don’t know whether
this is because they expect to be privileged and then unconsciously are disappointed
when they aren’t treated that way, or whether the – All the talk about diversity, equity,
and inclusion is turning people off, if you belong to the privileged group (Interview).
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Similarly, graduate student Aditi spoke about the climate survey finding, “white men didn’t feel
respected as a group, which I thought was really interesting” (Interview). The climate survey
revealed how white men in the program were feeling under respected or served. Although I did
not collect data from white men graduate students in the department, it may well be an example
of white men experiencing DEI activities as a lack of respect rather than the effects of efforts to
delegitimize inequitable racial privilege (Harris, 1993).
Racialized discomfort was also expressed through faculty retaliation against graduate
students who made equity demands in the social science program. Zoey shared an example:
We have had issues with retaliation in our department in the sense of faculty dropping
[RA and TA] support for certain graduate students… some students in the past in my
department have been retaliated against in these ways, or some of them have been
brought up for disciplinary action to say that, you know, they were maybe disruptive or
disrespectful and really what it was is that townhall they were holding the line and
insisting that professors respond to a specific thing (Interview).
In this example, white faculty used their power to protect their own racialized emotional comfort
and defend themselves against future critiques by silencing graduate students who demanded
more accountability. Such retaliation in response to demanding program action regarding DEI,
further making graduate student participation in equity work risky. Threatening and removing
graduate student research and teaching opportunities and financial support is a coercive
maneuver to shut-down critiques of the organization and effectively halt any attempts of
transformative change.
Fear. The racialized emotion of fear can be particularly overwhelming, narrowing
leaders' focus on hypothetical incidents where they could be harmed in the process of change.
For example, the natural science program's DEI committee established an anonymous complaint
system where students, faculty, and staff could report experiences with bias (Document). In a
meeting where discussion about the complaint system occurred, the DEI committee first
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expressed how they would build in accountability for handling complaints. One member shared,
"we, like our department, we aren't perfect, and we want to improve, and this mechanism will
help us do that." However, the discussion quickly transitioned to fears about how the complaint
system could have consequences for faculty, particularly regarding merit and promotion
(Observation). DEI committee members frequently returned to a hypothetical "troubling"
graduate student who could complain unwarranted about a faculty anonymously over and over
again, resulting in the faculty receiving some sort of undue punishment (Observation). One
member summed their fear as "someone complaining because they feel entitled is different from
a real complaint," while another added, "my goal is not to satisfy students who want to punish
bad faculty." Racialized fear came to the surface as leaders discussed an accountability system
designed to advance equity, but which left faculty feeling vulnerable to feedback, complaints,
and imagined consequences.
In response to their fear, the committee switched the discussion to how they could
balance students’ desire for anonymous complaint and accountability with their desire to not put
faculty at risk (Observation). In this example, equity is first discussed in a way that could be
transformative and connected to department practices of accountability. However, whiteness in
the form of white fragility (Bonilla-Silva, 2019) and fear of losing privilege (Harris, 1993) also
shaped the conversation. In response, leaders compromised by offering action to appease student
requests, like creating a complaint system and offering a town hall, but without changing
anything substantial about the department (Patton & Haynes, 2018; Stewart, 2018; Chang, 2002).
Defensiveness. White leaders also grappled with their own racial privilege and racialized
emotions as they took on leadership positions and supported DEI within their program. Recalling
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an instance of being accused of having white privilege and not taking racism seriously, Alice
expressed defensiveness with the idea that white people are synonymous with white supremacy:
Well, I’m white, so you know, I’ve certainly been accused of white power and privilege –
of not taking seriously the disadvantages of other races. I don’t think that being white is
the same as being white supremacist, and I think intentions matter. And I think that white
people are part of the solution, and that white people deserve opportunities as well as
people of other races… that really irritates me which assumes that all white people are
inherently racist and evil, and that there’s no remedying them. So I really don’t like that
approach. I don’t think it’s productive. (social science, chair, Interview).
Alice expressed some defensiveness with how she has been connected to white privilege and
power, which she further explained was a deterrent to her and her white colleagues to consider
the issues of white power and supremacy.
The same defensiveness that she expressed may be present in her program more broadly.
In speaking about a department workshop on privilege and power, Alice attributed its low
attendance due to the topic:
Very few people were interested in being lectured at about how being white was the
cause of all evil… what they were talking about was white power, right? So there were a
lot of people who just didn’t show up for it (social science, chair, Interview).
Whiteness through the racialized emotion of discomfort rationalized white faculty's choice not to
participate in DEI planning and implementation, including learning opportunities to grapple with
white privilege and power (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Leonardo & Porter, 2010; Zembylas, 2011;
2012; Wingfield, 2010; Evans & Moore, 2015). Whiteness manifesting through the white
racialized emotions of leaders’ and students also tempered the possibility of transformative
change when white leaders prioritized their comfort and ease.
Whether white leaders were aware, they navigated their own racialized emotions and the
racialized emotions of white colleagues as members of the same racially privileged group
(Harris, 1993; Bonilla-Silva, 2019) within a racialized organization that credentialed whiteness
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in resources and reputation (Ray, 2019; Harris, 1993; Wingfield & Alston, 2013). Whiteness
through the racialized emotion of defensiveness rationalizes white faculty's choice not to engage
in DEI, including learning opportunities to grapple with white privilege and power (Bonilla-
Silva, 2019; Harris, 1993; Leonardo & Porter, 2010; Zembylas, 2011; 2012). Whiteness
manifesting through the white racialized emotions of leaders’ and students also tempered the
possibility of transformative change when white leaders prioritized their comfort and ease.
Pandering to Colleagues' Racialized Emotions
As PPU leaders planned and implemented DEI initiatives, they often centered the
anticipated or expressed white racialized emotions of their colleagues (Bonilla-Silva, 2019;
Patton & Haynes, 2018; Zembylas, 2012). At PPU, DEI work was often isolated to a committee
which in itself fell short of transformative change because change efforts were not taken up
throughout the graduate program. As a consequence, program DEI committees regularly
considered and frequently prioritized the reactions of colleagues outside the committee when
designing equity initiatives. For example, the natural science program DEI committee often
expressed concern over colleagues' resistance to DEI initiatives, with particular anxiety regarding
town halls with students where faculty may express defensiveness or even argue openly
(Observation). In response, the DEI committee adjusted plans for town halls in an attempt to
minimize faculty confrontation (Observation). In another example, Leah, the chair of the social
science program's diversity committee explained how her leading DEI in the program is
palatable to colleagues because she isn't too radical and she is willing to present change in a way
that centers her colleagues and their comfort and ease, which is an example of her centering their
racialized emotions:
I think the thing that helps is that I feel like I kind of – I’m not too much of a radical, if
that makes sense. Like I understand that my colleagues need to have it – a lot of them
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need it spoon fed, right? It needs to be accessible. I need to hand them a list and say here
for each week is how you can update your syllabus, and here is a two page cheat sheet,
and I think some of the people who work on these types of issues come at it from the like
everyone’s going to care about this the way I care about this, and that’s – I just – I know
that’s not true. I know everyone is busy. I know – And so my approach from the
beginning has really been like how do we make it as easy as possible for people to do this
so that it’s really hard to defend not doing it basically (Interview).
This quote illustrated how the design of equity work for an organization not only resided with
one small committee but also that the committee's work was tailored towards the status quo.
where people were in their perception of DEI rather than where they could be—progressing
towards equity-mindedness. Scaffolding DEI education to meet individuals where they are at is a
fine goal for an individual workshop; however, if leaders set equity initiatives to suit faculty,
they inadvertently prioritize privileged faculty rather than the excluded communities they wish to
restitute.
Reflecting on perceived divisions among natural science program faculty regarding DEI,
Abby shared how she wished the DEI committee had worked to build buy-in from the whole
faculty before moving forward with changes:
I regret some of the like divisions that have happened in our faculty where I think at first
we were so like gung ho we were like sharing papers, and like oh my god, everything’s
going to be great. We’re going to do this, and this, and this. And if you don’t have the
backing of the rest of the faculty, like it’s going to be really difficult to make any
change… I wish I could have like brought the rest of the faculty together instead of like
just like dragging them from behind (laughs) and expecting them to come with us
(Interview).
However, in her conception of buy-in tension, Abby catered to the comfort of resistant faculty
rather than the need for change and equity. In this example, whiteness manifested through
faculty's racialized emotions of resistance which taxed Abby as she pursued DEI.
Leah frames the goal of creating the curriculum reading lists as being “easy” for faculty
to take-up so they “have no excuses” and are more likely to incorporate new literature:
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It is a slippery slope, we don’t want to put the onus on someone else to have those
conversations, we also don’t want faculty to have a one and done lecture on race and say
look at my DEI syllabus. I think this will begin the discomfort of some faculty because
they have different levels of commitment… we are trying to make it easier for them so
they have no excuses and so we need to build in bureaucracy and systems to standardize
procedures (Interview).
Here, faculty's racialized emotions are anticipated, and the DEI committee prioritized faculty
ease over the possible discomfort of pressing them toward racial justice by requiring them ti
learn about and find their own materials relevant to their course. In outsourcing the labor of
finding and reviewing racially conscious and critical literature to graduate students on a DEI
committee, the program further centered the comfort of faculty by not asking them to participate
in the labor of building racial justice into the curriculum.
Motivation. While I argue transformative equity is tempered by a lack of structural
support for the labor that DEI work involves, leaders' expectation of compensation to participate
in educational DEI opportunities also highlights their weak affective motivation for learning in
this area. By extension, institutions and leaders risk pandering to the racialized emotions of
faculty and leaders who want something in return when they over-incentivize participation in
DEI. For example, Phoebe, who chairs the DEI committee in the humanities program, stated
"how are you going to motivate people to do that if there’s very little recognition for doing
that?... It’s like how are you going to get people to do the labor if there’s very little reward for it,
right?" (Interview). Similarly, Alice argued low workshop attendance was because PPU did not
compensate faculty or graduate students to attend:
There’s no (laughs) compensation for faculty for attending. There’s no compensation for
graduate students for attending. It’s the end of the quarter. They’re all busy. You know,
why should I do this? And so I think that, you know, you want to see a situation where
people want to do diversity and equity work, but when it feels more like a penalty for
doing it without a compensation for doing it, you know, it can be difficult (social science,
chair, Interview).
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Alice framed attending DEI workshops as a penalty because it was uncompensated. Alice's quote
shows how spread-out she feels as she works on DEI as faculty and chair of her program, that
attending a workshop would be burdensome. Both quotes also show how whiteness worked to
shift leaders' focus of DEI work to center their comfort and when leaders didn't feel adequately
centered in the process, they justified low involvement. For instance, rather than framing an
educational DEI workshop as continuing professional development, Phoebe and Alice argue
attendance is labor that warrants compensation. Although PPU offers some educational resources
like workshops to faculty, Alice further argued that faculty were not incentivized to be involved
in DEI, which she rationalized was why engagement in DEI was low: "if there’s no incentives
for continue – if there’s no benefits for continuing, then the minute you get somebody who
doesn’t intrinsically think it’s important, it’s not going to be done. And changing hearts and
minds is really, really difficult" (social science, chair, Interview). Alice justified low
involvement in DEI as an organizational limitation, which is partially responsible, but whiteness
through the centering of faculty comfort was also to blame (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Patton &
Haynes, 2018; Zembylas, 2012). Although leaders often expressed concern over colleague’s
reactions to DEI initiatives, faculty were ultimately responsible for their own disengagement and
if faculty felt their desires must be met in order for them to participate in DEI conversations or
workshops, then they were resisting equity and possible change. Another barrier to
transformative change was leaders’ concern over colleague buy-in.
Concern Over Buy-In. Concern over colleague support of DEI often resulted in leaders
centering the racialized emotions of privileged faculty as they designed and carried-out
initiatives (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Leonardo & Porter, 2010; Zembylas, 2011; 2012). All three
graduate program DEI committees were cautious of experiencing resistance or a lack of care
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among their colleagues to carry out change. Elias described how navigating the expressed and
anticipated reactions of faculty to DEI within the natural science program presents a challenge,
particularly when also balancing the frustration expressed by students about DEI progress:
The big one that really does come to mind first is the reticence or obstacles or
unwillingness to be flexible on the part of other faculty members. I feel like you know, to
some extent when the students get frustrated with us, because they’re like this is in your
hands, and to some extent they’re right, and the people whose hands it is not in
exclusively is the DEI committee. We sort of have to run things by the wider faculty… I
think one of the biggest obstacles is the few faculty who are reticent or don’t see equity
as a place that we need to be investing our time into that time and some of the things that
we – some of the places we go with that, some of the actual initiatives and policies as
detrimental to the department, detrimental to education, detrimental to getting the best
graduate students, etc. So there’s certainly an obstacle. (Interview).
Abby also shared in a concern over natural science program faculty buy-in for initiatives led by
the DEI committee, stating "I think about the most is just that like there is the difference in
opinion between some of our faculty as to whether or not there even needs to be change to begin
with" (Interview). Likewise, Victoria, a faculty member on the DEI committee, expressed her
desire to avoid future division within the natural science program over DEI: "right now, one of
my primary concerns with the whole process is how to get the full faculty on board and not
create an us versus them sort of dynamic within the department" (Interview). Reflecting on his
role as natural science program chair, James shared how recent resistance from colleagues
regarding DEI signaled to him that there continues to be progress needed on engaging faculty
outside of the DEI committee within the natural science program:
[Recent resistance] signaled to me that I haven’t done a good job in broadening this
discussion. We have talked about it obviously in the department as a whole, but again,
there’s this reluctance on the part of those who are not as all in to, in fact get all in
(Interview).
Here, James described his realization that the DEI Committee’s discussions and work had not yet
broadened to the whole Department. DEI committee meetings and documents only represented a
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portion of the program's community and how they perceived DEI. In a natural science program
DEI committee meeting, committee members discussed how it will be "challenging to get faculty
and graduate students to be committed to DEI work outlined in the [strategic plan]"
(Observation). Multiple members of the DEI committee, including Elias, Abby, and Victoria,
described their concern over colleague resistance to the DEI initiatives they were pursuing on
behalf of the natural science program and the imagined ramifications for not securing buy-in.
Leaders’ also expressed uncertainty about how to navigate buy-in and strategies for
obtaining it. For example, preparing for a faculty meeting where the DEI committee was going to
argue for the discontinuation of the GRE requirement, committee members expressed concern
that it would be a tough discussion with colleagues and that they needed to draw from research
on the GRE's predictability to make a compelling argument (Observation). However, the
committee's primary motivation for removing the GRE requirement was bias in the exam and
peer programs that dropped the requirement. Concern over buy-in motivated the committee's
decision to tailor their argument to what they believed their colleagues would find compelling, in
this case data, rather than an equity-focused rationale, in this case bias in the exam. Similarly, in
a humanities program DEI committee meeting, members discussed how to communicate their
work to faculty along with expectations for involvement moving forward. Phoebe stated,
I think it is time for the faculty to know and appreciate of the work we have done, and
what the expectation of them are. I think there will be faculty who will be excited and
jump in, and some will be frustrated by the process (Observation).
Considering their approach to involving faculty in DEI, Eric offered "we often see change as a
threat. We need to frame change as something good" (Observation). Phoebe added to Eric's
perspective on giving up on change, "it seems like it is easy for people to engage in DEI until
they need to give something up, and this is especially true for recruitment of graduate students
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and faculty," and Hannah concluded by summarizing some of their colleagues having "zero-sum
beliefs" (Observation). The natural science and humanities program DEI Committees strategized
how to obtain colleague buy-in and tailored their framing of DEI initiatives to align with what
they perceived their colleagues valued. In addition to graduate program leaders who expressed
concern over faculty buy-in over DEI, graduate students leading DEI also described trepidation
regarding faculty approval of student-led initiatives.
Reflecting on challenges leading equity in the social science program as a graduate
student, Aditi shared how navigating faculty reactions to change was a concern. Aditi's work on
the DEI committee's curriculum redesign is largely isolated to her and she expressed
apprehension over faculty's protection of their course syllabi:
A lot of bureaucratic (laughs) kind of thresholds, so to speak or obstacles I think. So for
example, one of the big issues that we have for one of our kind of action items is to
restructure the undergraduate like intro syllabi so that they speak more with BIPOC
authors or represent BIPOC writings or even just subjects that aren’t so western or, you
know, Eurocentric or something like that. So thinking of, you know, one big obstacle that
we have is, you know, how many of the faculty will be open to changing their syllabi that
they’ve been structuring and working on for years and years, and is that something that
we have to kind of consider, be really like sensitive to that (Interview).
As a graduate student, Aditi also navigated faculty buy-in and expressed concern over whether or
not they would be open to changes she proposed.
Leaders in the graduate school were also concerned with faculty buy-in. The role of the
graduate school is to support graduate programs as they practice DEI and motivate departments
to develop a commitment to equity. For example, William explains how the graduate school
guides graduate programs towards equity, but does not have the power to implement change
directly:
We do a lot to try and provide departments with resources, with guidance, with anything
we can if we see something that we think is worthwhile and we would like to encourage
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them, because at the end of the day, as with the GRE, we can’t mandate they get rid of it.
That’s not within our purview. All we can do is say the graduate council, the faculty
committee that oversees graduate education on our campus has approved allowing
departments to make it optional. So it’s our role really to provide the argument and the
evidence to our departments about why they should be doing this, why this would be
beneficial to them (Interview).
Without the organizational power to implement changes at the program level, graduate school
leaders recruited program leaders to DEI and were therefore often concerned with buy-in. In the
graduate school, Oscar explains that since actively engaging toward DEI goals at PPU is
voluntary, outside of the recent requirement for department DEI strategic plans, programs vary
greatly in their involvement. Oscar shared how recruiting graduate programs to invest in DEI has
been a struggle:
There’s some really great departments within PPU that are just thinking outside the box
and get it. So it’s just very refreshing, but there’s some that are on the other side of the
spectrum. So just at least trying to get those individuals to kind of open up and realize
that diversity and equity, it’s only a plus… dealing with departments that really don’t see
the benefit of diversity or equity, at this time that’s always been a struggle, but we keep
moving on, and I think – the unfortunate murder of George Floyd kind of opened up a lot
of eyes so to speak, whether it’s genuine or not, but even if it’s not genuine, we’re taking
advantage of the situation in terms of educating as well as implementing a lot of
resources and equity within graduate education. Even in those situations there’s a lot of
brush back, but folks that are brushing back are looking a little weird, so to speak, right?
(laughs) So like, don’t you get it? (Interview).
Oscar described challenges with recruiting graduate programs to get involved with DEI even
with national attention on racial diversity and equity following the murder of George Floyd.
In the graduate school, leaders were also concerned with the general buy-in of faculty to
support DEI within their graduate programs and take on leadership roles. Madeline, an Associate
Dean of the graduate school, described how faculty often respond to change:
One of the issues of faculty reticence to take on issues that faculty, we are kind of
paradoxically (laughs) at least able to do things once we kind of get in our rut to do new
things and kind of moving out of – we figure that the way we’ve been doing things is the
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right way to do things, so why would we do things any differently, and convincing
faculty that there’s another way to do this, and there’s going to be a little bit of an up
ramp for you to do this differently. And you know, faculty they kind of bristle at that sort
of thing. Not everyone, but you know, there is that part of it. So there’s that challenge
(Interview).
Even with graduate school guidance regarding DEI, faculty resisted change and posed a
challenge to graduate school leaders. Reflecting on faculty buy-in, William explained how
faculty can be a challenge for the PPU graduate school as they attempt to advance equity because
some faculty still uphold the myth of meritocracy: "[they] have a fantasy that it’s a meritocracy,
that people get here because they merit to be here, not because they come from some position of
privilege that really did position them for success early on" (Interview). Further, William
described how regardless of how he approached the argument for leaders to support DEI, there
will be faculty who resist: "I think there are some faculty members there who are recalcitrant…
no matter what you present to them, research, data, whatever, they’re just going to say I want to
keep doing things the way we’ve done it" (Interview). In these examples, faculty resistance to
change and preservation of meritocratic practices stunts transformative equity. Across the cases,
isolating DEI work to a role or committee limited who participated in equity efforts and shifted
focus towards how to address faculty buy-in (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Leonardo & Porter, 2010;
Zembylas, 2011; 2012). Alongside the isolation of DEI within the organization, opting for
palatable DEI language was another way transformative change was tempered within PPU.
Opting for Palatable DEI Language. Opting for palatable DEI language was another
way transformative change was tempered within PPU. Why do even DEI programs prefer
language like diversity to racial justice or racism? Participants’ responses provide insight on this
important question, which is directly connected to racialized emotions (Bonilla-Silva, 2019) and
white racial comfort (Wingfield, 2010; Leonardo & Porter, 2010). When I asked participants
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whether white supremacy is discussed within equity work, Leah, who chairs the social science
program's DEI committee, shared how she thinks white supremacy is relevant to the program's
curriculum redesign although the issue is not directly addressed. Leah also shared how her
colleagues were irritated by the term privilege and she was concerned about their emotional
response to talking about white supremacy and white privilege, especially if she wanted them to
be open to change. Instead, Leah chooses to talk about diversity and equity, rather than white
supremacy, because her colleagues seem more initially open to those terms. I quote her at length:
the overarching mission of all of these curriculum redesigns are in part to like identify the
fact that these concepts and the way we traditionally teach are laden with white
supremacy, and that therefore like that’s the entire purpose. Whether people explicitly
kind of acknowledge that and go into that, I don’t know. I think – and I think that – This
might be controversial, but I think that politically when I think about getting my
colleagues on board, how much to put that conversation front and center… I have this
debate often with people about the term privilege, right? Privilege is a great term in that it
is clear in what it’s talking about, but the term privilege also irritates a lot of people,
right? It’s just something that people don’t want – it’s like they feel like if you want to
talk about the advantages you have because you’re white, fine, but it has these larger
connotations. And I have a good friend who is an anthropologist who will say, well, it's
about speaking your truth, and you shouldn’t worry about how people feel. And it’s not
on anybody else to make white people feel comfortable when we’re talking about race.
And like, yes, but if you’re trying to actually proactively convince people to do
something there is also the angle of what is the best way to do that. And I would say with
some of my colleagues if you start to talk about white supremacy, you’re losing them a
little bit. And so it’s easier to talk about diversity and equity and inclusion than it is to
talk about dismantling white supremacy, because – you know what I mean? One feels a
little bit more like (gasps). You know, like well, I’m not a white supremacist. Well, why
are you talking to me about this? And the other one feels like, okay, we can handle this.
To me it’s like there is – it’s about knowing your audience and what can – people can
handle (social science, faculty, Interview).
Here we see Leah describing how language choice was perceived as a means of securing faculty
buy-in by making the challenges under the banner of DEI feel more manageable. We also see
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how Leah anticipates colleagues’ racialized emotions in response to talking about white
supremacy and shifts to prioritize their comfort.
Just as Leah shifted her critical language from directly addressing white supremacy to
more approachable terms for faculty like diversity, Luis in the graduate school also translated his
critical race consciousness for the sake of faculty:
I normally don’t try to say the word white supremacy because it raises the hackle of a lot
of individuals. It sometimes turns off people from wanting to engage. And so I try to
frame it in other ways… like I show them how it gets ingrained in or inscribed in
policies, in law, and not necessarily in where they think of overt racism (Interview).
Although terms like diversity and equity are more palatable to leaders, when they replace
language that directly identities and critiques the source of racial inequity, they blur the core
issue that needs to be dismantled - white supremacy. Whiteness works through nonperformative
and unspecified language to dull the critical consciousness of leaders as they engage with equity.
Further, whiteness manifests when leaders like Leah or Luis who are aware and critical of white
supremacy within their graduate school and graduate program compromise their equity-
mindedness for the sake of their colleagues' racial comfort. Ultimately, whiteness via the
centering of white racialized emotions (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Wingfield, 2010; Leonardo &
Porter, 2010) slows down the process and dulls the transformative possibilities of change (Patton
& Haynes, 2018). Ultimately, leaders’ racialized emotions (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Harris, 1993;
Leonardo & Porter, 2010; Zembylas, 2011; 2012) and leaders’ pandering to colleague white
racial comfort (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Patton & Haynes, 2018; Zembylas, 2012) supported the
property interests of whiteness within the organization (Ray, 2019; Harris, 1993) and impeded
the potential for transformational change at PPU.

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Closing
Building from findings presented in the previous chapter, I discussed in more nuanced
and complex ways how whiteness tempered transformative change at PPU. Ultimately, the case
of PPU in this chapter illustrates several key findings introduced in Chapter 4 about how DEI
work may temper transformational change. It shows how leaders often opt for what feels feasible
and comfortable over what is necessary, resulting in what Ahmed called non-performative
change. Leaders’ own racialized emotions (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Harris, 1993; Leonardo &
Porter, 2010; Zembylas, 2011; 2012) and their pandering to white colleagues’ racial comfort
(Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Patton & Haynes, 2018; Zembylas, 2012) became a part of the work and
distracted them from the original work at hand, impeding the potential for transformational
change at PPU. Structurally, we see from this case how delegating the work of planning to a DEI
committee may be efficient and a starting point, but that as it goes out beyond the committee into
the implementation phase, that it takes on a political life of its own – one that leaders struggle to
manage. It also demonstrates the critical role that experience and knowledge play in how leaders
engage in this work; participants at PPU were open about being new to the work. Being novices
in work that is inherently complex on multiple dimensions (Posselt, 2020) surely reduced its
impact. Together, the data in this chapter about nonperformative change and racialized emotions
highlight pathways through which whiteness moves within graduate education organizations,
including their very DEI efforts (Ray, 2019; Harris, 1993). Findings from PPU’s case may be
theoretically generalizable to institutions who, like PPU, are relatively new to planning,
coordinating, and implementing DEI. In particular, it highlights how even in committed
organizations, the graduate school, its programs, and their well-intentioned leaders inadvertently
restrained transformative equity as they pursued diversity, equity, and inclusion. In the final
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chapter, I will discuss the importance of examining whiteness in organizations and their DEI
work, and offer implications for research, policy, and practice.

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Chapter 6: Implications and Significance
Understanding how white supremacy operates is a core component of comprehending
how racial inequity persists in higher education (Bensimon, 2018; Cabrera et al, 2016; Ahmed,
2006). In this critical comparative case study, I examined how three graduate schools, nine
graduate programs, and sixty-nine leaders planned and implemented DEI initiatives in pursuit of
equity across three public research institutions: Ponderosa Pine University (PPU), Red Cedar
University (RCU), and Western Juniper University (WJU). In particular, I addressed four
research questions:
1) How do graduate schools and programs utilize organizational mechanisms (e.g.,
routines, practices) to advance equity efforts?
2) How do leaders approach racial equity efforts within the graduate program and school?
3) How is whiteness manifesting in equity planning and initiatives in the graduate school
and programs?
4) How do equity efforts reproduce and/or mitigate whiteness within the graduate
program and school?
Diversity initiatives in higher education can reproduce whiteness through decisions and actions
like evading critical discussions of race and structural forms of racism (Ahmed, 2012; Cabrera et
al., 2016; Warikoo, 2016).
A manifestation of white supremacy is whiteness, which I define as "the set of
assumptions, privileges, and benefits that accompany the status of being white… whites have
come to expect and rely on these benefits, and over time these expectations have been affirmed,
legitimated, and protected by the law" (Harris, 1993, p. 1713); whiteness is both structural as
well as socially constructed to privilege white people (Harris, 1993; Ray, 2019). I focus on
equity work as a window into whiteness as embedded in organizations, and how whiteness might
be navigated by graduate leaders in their pursuit of DEI. I define equity as “a critical
understanding of the omnipresence of whiteness at the institutional and practice levels”
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(Bensimon, 2018, p. 97). Striving for transformative change (Patton & Haynes, 2018; Stewart,
2018; Chang, 2002; hooks, 1989), I argued findings from this study revealed equity-minded
change was tempered in its possibility and imagination. Transformative change was tempered
through standard organizational processes that tend to impede change of any sort, drawbacks in
programs’ approach to DEI-related changes specifically, and by mechanism that reproduce
whiteness in diversity, equity, and inclusion work.
Review of Findings
Below, I concisely answer each of my four research questions and then discuss primary
conclusions:
1) How do graduate schools and programs utilize organizational mechanisms (e.g., routines,
practices) to advance racial equity? I found that leaders layered initiatives involving new
routines and practices on to existing institutional structures and systems, rather than
implementing changes that shifted or transformed the organization (see findings 1, 2 and 4
below).
2) How do leaders approach racial equity within the graduate program and school? I found that
longstanding organizational barriers and limitations got in the way of change, and leaders
were also underperforming in DEI work specifically (see finding 1 below). Leaders also
delegated work to a role or committee (see finding 2 below), and often used unspecific
language to describe DEI (see finding 3 below).
3) How is whiteness manifesting in equity planning and initiatives in the graduate school and
programs? During DEI planning and implementation, I found that whiteness manifested
through unspecified and nonperformative DEI language (see finding 3 below),
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nonperformative leadership and work (see finding 4 below), and white racialized emotions
such as comfort and fear (see finding 5 below).
4) How do equity efforts reproduce and/or mitigate whiteness within the graduate program and
school? I found several important patterns here. Leaders’ prioritization of racialized emotions,
their own and their colleagues’, while planning and implementing DEI initiatives constituted
whiteness (see finding 5 below). Leaders’ tendency to pursue nonperformative changes during
DEI planning and implementation supported whiteness (see finding 4 below). Ten participants
in the sample, who offer disconfirming evidence, expressed equity-mindedness and attempted
to address whiteness as they carried-out equity-centered programming and practices.
Perhaps the primary conclusion of this study is that although DEI planning and initiatives
were designed to implement changes within graduate education that would advance equity, that
organizations and leaders inadvertently constrained the possibilities of transformative change.
Specifically, I found that mechanisms of whiteness moved through DEI work to temper
transformative change. I identified five major ways transformational change was tempered by
graduate organizations and leaders’ work within this critical comparative case study: 1)
organizational constraints on time and resources limited leaders’ scope to carry out change, 2)
DEI work isolated to committees or roles unintentionally centered the buy-in of faculty, 3)
underspecified language dulled critical consciousness and missed opportunities to introduce
equity-mindedness, 4) whiteness manifested through the ease of nonperformative changes and
truncated possibility, and 5) whiteness via racialized emotions distracted leaders away from
equity and towards the comfort of privileged faculty. In the paragraphs below, I discuss each of
these findings.
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I argued agency was necessary but not sufficient for transformative change because it
was limited by what the organization was providing to support DEI efforts (Sewell, 1992). I
found that the majority of participants at the graduate program level expressed feeling
unsupported by their program and/or institution; however all nine graduate programs shared how
their graduate schools were a source of support. Specifically, I found that core organizational
constraints on DEI work included confusion around university leadership and structure for DEI,
a lack of formal allocated time and incentives for faculty to work on DEI within their programs,
and insufficient financial resources for specific DEI initiatives like supporting graduate students.
Isolating DEI work tempered transformative change by limiting who was engaging with
equity and excessively diverting leaders' energy to concerns over colleague buy-in. Across all the
graduate program cases, DEI work was isolated (i.e., marginalized, delegated) to a committee
and/or role, sometimes following a suggestion from the graduate school or institution (i.e.,
Diversity Officer roles). Similarly, the graduate schools also isolated DEI work to a small group
of overburdened individuals (Griffin & Muñiz, 2011; Cole & Harper, 2017). However, if change
was to happen within a graduate school or graduate program, the work needed to extend beyond
a committee or role at some point for implementation. And implementation of actions that will
stick, culturally, requires some modicum of community buy-in (Posselt, 2020). Thus, how to
coordinate DEI priorities determined by a committee with the actions of a broader group of
professionals and stakeholders was one of the structural challenges of organizational change that
participants in this study regularly faced. It was a particularly salient tension in graduate
programs working to balance the work of the committee and relaying those efforts to the full
faculty.
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In this study, I found one graduate school and eight graduate programs used unspecified
language when setting goals, describing initiatives, and framing purpose in advancing equity. I
argued unspecific language tempered transformative change by diverting attention away from
critical conversations about systemic racial inequities towards terms that were assumed to be
comfortable and palatable, particularly for audiences that were not engaging with DEI. Also, in
using unspecified DEI language, programs and graduate schools also risked sliding into race-
evasiveness, including leaders who at times expressed equity-mindedness and intended to be
racially aware.
The combination of my findings and extant theory indicate that whiteness worked
through nonperformative change to distract leaders away from systems of racialized inequity
(Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Harris, 1993; Patton & Haynes, 2018), dull DEI language so it lost
meaning and power (Iverson, 2007; Chang, 2002), limit organizational resources toward change
(Patton & Haynes, 2018; Stewart, 2018; Ahmed, 2006; 2012), and isolate DEI work to
individuals (Harper & Hurtado, 2007; Griffin & Muñiz, 2011) who became overburdened. In
doing so, institutional whiteness tempered transformative change within graduate education. I
found that across the cases, most change was focused on quick, practical, and marginal updates
(Ahmed, 2006; 2012) rather than re-thinking how programs and could change to center equity
and diversity (Patton & Haynes, 2018; Stewart, 2018). However, what transformation looks like
in practice is an important question that, along with brilliant and trailblazing thinkers, I continue
to explore. Also, many program leaders were not yet equipped to imagine transformative
organizations and futures because they were new to thinking about equity within their programs
and schools. Thus, nonperformative changes had a welcoming ease to leaders seeking to take
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actions towards DEI without taking an inordinate amount of capacity, time, and resources
(Ahmed, 2006; 2012; Patton & Haynes, 2018; Chang, 2002).
I argued whiteness worked through racialized emotions to coax leaders to give into the
ease of their own racialized emotional comfort (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Harris, 1993) as they led
DEI. Relatedly, whiteness also worked to redirect leaders' focus and work to center the
anticipated or expressed white racialized emotions of their colleagues (Bonilla-Silva, 2019;
Patton & Haynes, 2018); In doing both, whiteness tempered transformative change within
graduate education. In this study, I found leaders experienced emotional labor as they managed
racialized emotions, both their own and those of their colleagues (Bonilla-Silva, 2019). Also,
often when white faculty, students, and leaders felt racial discomfort, they sought racial control
to reinstate their comfort (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Wingfield, 2010; Evans & Moore, 2015; Harris,
1993).
Connections to Relevant Literature
Given the national and social contexts surrounding WJU, PPU, and RCU, I conducted
this study during a time where there was potential for significant change—change that could
perhaps shift parts of institutional structure or culture. However, just as Ahmed (2012) and Rojas
(2007) have found in their examinations of institutionalizing change in higher education, my
study shows how demands and opportunities for change took on the norms of the organization as
they were institutionalized—namely by centering institutional and white interests. My findings
comport with Ray (2019), who argued that the norms of the racialized organization are
intertwined with whiteness. This study further reveals how significant institutional change did
not and does not occur in large part because of whiteness within the racialized organization (Ray,
2019; Rojas, 2017; 2019). My findings around racialized emotions and their connections to
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whiteness find, within the context of graduate education, patterns consistent with critical,
empirical work by Matias (2016), Leonardo and Porter (2010), and Evans and Moore (2015) who
found that whiteness in institutional spaces and among white individuals was expressed through
racialized emotions. My findings around whiteness and nonperformativity also extends empirical
work by Ahmed (2012), Squire and Colleagues (2019), and Patton and Colleagues (2019) who
showed how diversity statements, initiatives, and leaders appear to contribute to change, but do
not in reality alter the racialized institution. This study contributes to existing literature on
whiteness by examining empirically how whiteness manifests in organizations, including
through racialized emotions and nonperformativity, among leaders, structures, and processes.
Connections to Conceptual Framework
To summarize, although whiteness is embedded in our higher education organizations
(Harris, 1993; Ray, 2019), there is a potential for equity-minded leaders (Bensimon, 2019) to
wield their agency to notice and disrupt whiteness within their graduate school or program. As
mentioned above, in my analysis, I identified ten participants across two graduate schools and
one graduate program who actively noticed, critiqued, and worked to disrupt whiteness within
their organizations. Although these equity-minded leaders were the exception and not
representative of the study’s participants and cases, their actions offer an early blueprint of how
graduate education leaders could use their agency and position within their graduate program or
graduate school to notice and mitigate whiteness and progress towards transformative change
(Patton & Haynes, 2018; Stewart, 2018; Chang, 2002; hooks, 1989). In the following section, I
return to my conceptual framework and critical hermeneutics of whiteness (CHW) to reflect on
the affordances and limitations of both based on this study.

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Conceptualizing Whiteness and Racialized Organizational Mechanisms of Change
Organizational mechanisms of change, specifically organizational routines (Pentland &
Feldman, 2005; Feldman & Pentland, 2003; Ray, 2019), and individual leaders’ frames (Snow,
2004; 2000; 1986; Ray, 2019; Ray & Purifoy, 2019; Wooten & Couloute, 2017; Feagin, 2010),
agency (Sewell, 1992; Ray, 2019; Moore, 2008; Sewell, 2016), and schemas (DiMaggio, 1997;
Sewell, 1992; Ford, 2012; Ray, 2019), were revealed in analysis across the cases as mechanisms
toward imagining and designing equitable change within graduate schools and programs.
However, as may be expected given my conceptual framework’s assessment of how
organizations and leaders are racialized (Ray, 2019; Rojas, 2017; 2019; Smith, 2019), I also
found that whiteness manifested in their work to temper transformational change (Harris, 1993;
hooks, 1989; Patton & Haynes, 2018). Across the cases, I found that rather than transforming
racist structures and practices within the institution (Patton & Haynes, 2018; hooks, 1989;
Stewart, 2018; Chang, 2002), the change efforts I studied were largely layered on to historical
systems of racialized inequity like white supremacy and systemic racism that are foundational to
higher and graduate education (Alexander, 2005; Bhambra et al., 2018; Wilder, 2013; Smith,
2012).
In addition to these historical forces shaping the present in these universities, data from
this study connected in clear ways to the three core constructs in my conceptual framework
(Harris, 1993; Ray, 2019; Bensimon, 2018), which I will discuss below. I also identified an
additional mechanism by which whiteness persists in organizations – through racialized
emotions that emerge in the work and resistance to it (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Wingfield, 2010;
Zembylas, 2011; 2012, Ahmed, 2004). This study’s findings can inform how we conceptualize
whiteness within organizations and how it persists. In my analysis, it quickly became clear that
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racialized emotions (Bonilla-Silva, 2019) played an important, but under-examined by leaders
and researchers, role in the protection and persistence of whiteness within organizations. I
noticed racialized emotions (Bonilla-Silva, 2019) intersected with properties of whiteness
(Harris, 1993) when white leaders centered their racial comfort, with equity-mindedness
(Bensimon, 2018) when leaders compromised their expression of critical race consciousness to
prioritize colleagues’ white racial comfort, and with racialized organizational mechanisms (Ray,
2019) when leaders planned DEI initiatives they were comfortable with. However, a theory of
racialized emotions was not a core construct in my conceptual framework, making clear a
limitation in my conceptualization of the reproduction of whiteness. Below, I discuss the
affordances and limitations of my conceptual framework based on this study.
Theoretical Reflections: Affordances and Limitations
The size and stretch of the framework that I developed is both a strength and a weakness.
The framework covers a lot of areas of support or resistance of whiteness across the social,
organizational, and individual levels of society. A strength of the framework is the high-level
picture it offers of how white supremacy may function. However, a weakness of the framework
is a lack of specificity; with so many different dynamics in play, it is harder to narrow in on
mechanisms of whiteness at each of the levels. Whether due to my research methods or the
specifics of the cases, however, it was clear that the dynamics of whiteness involved racialized
emotions. In addition to missing a theory of racialized emotions, my framework was also limited
by the absence of relevant intersecting systems on inequity like patriarchy and capitalism. In the
findings chapters, I have tried to address these limitations of the conceptual framework’s scope
by tying in relevant literature and theories to ground each of my findings. For example, I heavily
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relied on Ahmed’s (2006) concept of nonperformativity and Mueller’s (2020) concept of racial
ignorance in my discussions of how leaders inadvertently supported whiteness.
An affordance of my framework was its explicit attention to racialized structures and
property interests of whiteness, which were central to equity by rarely addressed by leaders in
practice. Harris’ (1993) whiteness as property was evident in how white faculty, staff, and
students expected and protected the racial comfort of whiteness as a privilege, often through
race-evasiveness (Mueller, 2020; Ray & Purifoy, 2019). Ray’s (2019) racialized organizations,
in particular racialized structures and agency (Sewell, 1992), maps on to how DEI leaders were
under-supported and over tasked within their organizations, receiving unequal distributions of
resources and guidance relative to the institutional demands of their labor capacity. Further, the
credential of whiteness in organizational schemas (DiMaggio, 1997) and routines (Pentland &
Feldman, 2005) reinforced the property interests of whiteness (i.e., changes that center white
racial comfort) while espousing institutional race-neutrality (Ray, 2019; Wingfield & Alston,
2013), often resulting in nonperformative DEI initiatives (Ahmed, 2006; 2012). Finally,
Bensimon’s (2018) equity-mindedness identified leaders’ expression of critical race
consciousness as a frame (Snow, 2004) and subsequent examination of practices and structures
within their graduate schools and programs, which for a few leaders included critiques of
whiteness within graduate education in the pursuit of liberation (Freire, 1970) and transformation
(hooks, 1989).
Connections Between My Framework and Findings
Drawing from my conceptual framework and critical hermeneutics of whiteness, I
identified themes that informed my findings. However, I also identified themes that came from
the data, outside of what my conceptual framework explicitly examined. I created a table, below,
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to show which themes were identified from and outside my conceptual framework during
analysis:
Table 3
Themes from Analysis
Themes Drawn from my Framework Themes Outside my Framework
Whiteness via nonperformative change Whiteness via racialized emotions
Leaders’ frames Organizational confusion
Routinized organizational constraints on DEI Isolating DEI work
Unspecified DEI language Emotional labor of DEI
Equity-minded agency
Guided by my conceptual framework, I identified five themes: whiteness via nonperformative
change, leaders’ frames, routinized organizational constraints on DEI, unspecified DEI language,
and equity-minded agency. I also identified four themes that emerged from the data, outside of
my conceptual framework: whiteness via racialized emotions, organizational confusion, isolating
DEI work, and emotional labor of DEI. Returning to my argument around white supremacy as a
hegemonic power and the possibilities of agency, I merely began to scratch the surface of
theorizing how agency possibly contests and shifts hegemony embedded within higher education
organizations. However, findings regarding whiteness manifesting via nonperformative change
and racialized emotions revealed how agency unintentionally reified the hegemony of white
supremacy. Additionally, findings on organizational constraints and confusion pointed to how
hegemony created an inhospitable environment for transformational change.
Through my conceptual framework, I learned more about racialized organizational
mechanisms and consequences for transformational change. For instance, I noticed leaders’
frame of equity influenced their approach to DEI planning and implementation, including how
they thought of resources and their role to initiate change within their organization (i.e., use of
schemas and agency). In cases were leaders used their agency to create new initiatives or alter
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practices, change was often unstable (i.e., initiatives were not routinized or built into the
organization’s structure). I also recognized racial structures of the organizations, including
routinized resources and practices which remained largely unchanged during DEI
implementation (i.e., routines). These racial structures were also the environment for DEI, which
constrained the potential for transformational equity. Often, as a result, leaders’ DEI initiatives
were layered on to the racial structures of the organization. Along with my conceptual
framework, critical hermeneutics of whiteness as a methodology guided my study.
Methodological Reflection: Critical Hermeneutics of Whiteness
I paired critical hermeneutics of whiteness (CHW) with my conceptual framework to
orient my awareness as a researcher towards systems, structures, practices, and individual agency
to be sensitive of whiteness. I returned back repeatedly to critical hermeneutics of whiteness –
during protocol development, data collection, analysis, and writing. Critical hermeneutics of
whiteness functioned like a tool to sharpen and ground my lens as a critical researcher. Through
its methods, I was reminded that we cannot necessarily take participant narratives at face value.
They have discursive, axiological dimensions – particularly when gathered by a white woman –
that I also interpret through my own perspective. These are part of the reality I have been striving
to describe and my conceptual framework helps illuminate. For example, CHW sensitized my
awareness of how whiteness operates via racialized emotions and nonperformativity. CHW also
helped me notice where findings regarding organizational constraints and DEI language were
also connected to whiteness, in ways that my participants might not have explicitly
acknowledged.
Reflecting on the use of CHW, I believe the methodology effectively oriented my
methods and analysis towards the examination of whiteness. However, I would not use CHW in
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isolation – I have found it to be effective when paired with methodologies like comparative case
study and specific analytic approaches like the constant comparative method to use them
critically. By weaving CHW throughout my methodology and analysis, I also bridged my focus
on whiteness across my conceptual framework and methods. In summary, CHW oriented my
research design and analysis towards examining whiteness throughout the entirety of the project.
Reflection of How Whiteness Functions
My core research agenda is to identify and dismantle whiteness within higher education
organizations, with the goal of working towards abolishing white supremacy. As a white person
joining longstanding intellectual and labor efforts to establish racial justice, I see my contribution
as empirically identifying ways that whiteness works in higher education though organizational
mechanisms or leaders. With this knowledge, we can work collectively and could develop
interventions to notice and actively work against whiteness. What I found in my study is that
whiteness—most simply put as a set of structural benefits that white people enjoy (per Harris,
1993)— is not on the radar of most leaders. It therefore often persists in structuring
organizational life unnoticed. Ultimately, these cases further demonstrate why we must critique,
notice, and disrupt whiteness as a part of our pursuit of racial justice if we want to transform our
institutions.
Reflecting on what I have learned from this study about the relationships of whiteness
and white supremacy, I continue to see whiteness as a manifestation of white supremacy, but a
manifestation that holds its own shifting and varied properties, organization to organization.
Therefore, how and why whiteness functions and persists today to maintain white supremacy are
stories that will always be, to some degree, context specific. For instance, the organizations that I
studied varies in how whiteness was supported through racialized emotions and
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nonperformitivity, and why whiteness persists to preserve the historical racialized structures of
higher education. Whiteness does not abstractly float within an organization but is historically
embedded and reconstituted by leaders, every day, as they make decisions and act upon policies
and practices. Importantly, any leader’s behavior may appear to involve movement between
resistance to and support of white supremacy; at times, leaders may engage in critical race
consciousness and act in ways that facilitate transformation, but at other times they may remain
unaware, silent, complicit, or stagnant amidst actions that uphold disproportionate resources and
structures for white people (i.e., whiteness) and racism within their organization. To be clear,
upholding whiteness is itself a form of racism and a manifestation, specifically, of white
supremacy.
The theoretical questions that emerged from this work continue to revolve around how
whiteness functions in organizations. For instance, how does whiteness prohibit racially just
institutional transformation? It seems that focusing leaders’ attention on the comfort of skeptical
white faculty colleagues may be part of the answer, but this is likely not a complete answer.
Another question is, how do leaders use their agency to disrupt the whiteness that is historically
and structurally embedded in their institutions? While the introduction of this study framed the
problem of white supremacy and whiteness as historically embedded, my analysis suggests the
importance of connecting current organizational behavior to important historical contexts in
order to conceptualize how whiteness and white supremacy operate presently.
In a future paper on the dynamics of whiteness in organizations, based on findings in this
study, I plan to explore the complexities and variations of how whiteness fluctuates and operates
in institutions—how is it contested or reconstituted by individuals and processes in flux.
Ultimately, as a researcher, scholar, and practitioner, I need to continue to develop my
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understanding, in community with fellow critical scholars, about how and why whiteness
persists. In the next section, I discuss practice, institutional policy, and research implications for
this study’s findings.
Implications
This study's findings have broad implications for practice, institutional policy, and
research about planning and implementing DEI initiatives in graduate education. In this section, I
first discuss implications for graduate education leaders' who are tasked to design and implement
DEI initiatives for their graduate schools or programs. Then, I discuss implications of this
research for institutional policy regarding organizational structure that supports leaders and their
DEI initiatives. Finally, I discuss implications for future research on DEI, whiteness, and
transformative change in higher education. These recommendations are not exhaustive, but are
rather a starting point based on findings from this study. While some of my recommendations
entail coordination and internal development, each can be taken-up immediately but require a
long-term investment.
Implications for Leaders' Practice in DEI
Although I am interested in the further development of theories and conceptualizations of
whiteness and transformative change in higher education, as a practitioner in the field of higher
education I am invested in research informing practice, and vice versa. Below, I briefly outline
seven recommendations for graduate education leaders as they design and implement DEI
initiatives with the possibility of pursuing racial equity and justice. I specifically speak to leaders
in DEI-focused roles and committees within graduate schools and programs since these most
closely align with findings.
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I suggest leaders, programs, and schools working towards racial equity and justice
cultivate critical awareness of history and social contexts that impact them, their organization,
and the academy, and work to identify systems of exclusion within the organization in order to
change them. This includes systems like white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism,
imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, etc. Identify how these systems manifest in the
program or school in order to dislodge them towards transformative equity and justice. These
systems feel insurmountable, but start with a focus being able to identify and discuss these
systems in the graduate program or school and go forward from there.
To build coalition around racial equity and justice within a graduate school or program, I
suggest leaders engage in personal and structured, collective learning about racial equity, justice,
power, oppression, diversity, etc. to inform their orientation and motivation to engage in equity
work. Shared motivations among teams and colleagues working together to build collaborative
understanding, trust, and buy-in will aid in designing and implementing racial equity and justice
goals. Based on findings regarding racialized emotions, I recommend leveraging relationships
among colleagues and members of the program community to learn collectively and build
capacity to implement equity-centered changes.
As a whole school or program, I suggest leaders collectively discuss and construct shared
values, goals, and definitions to anchor their racial equity and justice work and focus priorities.
This will also help leaders identify the purpose of racial equity and justice for their particular
program and subsequent goals, and help maintain a shared focus.
Throughout planning and implementation, I suggest leaders return to their motivation and
purpose to anchor their collective pursuit of racial equity and justice, and in doing so, be explicit
in language, goals, and designs of what they are changing, why, and how. Terms like DEI or
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URM are vague and put issues and groups together in a muddled and unfocused way, which
often shows up during implementation.
To avoid isolating racial equity and justice work to a few overburdened leaders, I suggest
graduate schools and programs involve representatives across their communities including tenure
track Faculty, research Faculty, Staff, Postdoctoral Fellows, Lecturers, and students to help with
transparency, communication, and consensus of goals and work. This will also help unify
programs and schools around a shared racial equity and justice purpose. Racial equity and justice
is a lifelong commitment, and folks who joined equity and justice efforts after Trump became
president in 2016 or after the police murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter
movement in 2020 are new to equity. I recommend leaders who are new to equity dedicate
capacity to learning about racial justice as they partner in leadership and find willing mentors
who have been committed to equity and justice for longer than these recent historical markers.
In building racial equity and justice commitment and design in the graduate school or
program, I suggest leaders anonymously collect perspectives and experiences from relevant
communities for feedback and ideas about how to justly transform the organization. This
feedback can be coordinated within or outside the institution, but it should be administered and
analyzed by an equity-minded expert outside of the organization so they can anonymize
information and present the data. This important information will be a part of the co-constructed
blueprint for how to progress transformative equity and racial justice within the organization
along with cultivated expertise and leadership.
Finally, to sustain a long-term commitment to and ongoing development of racial equity
and justice, I suggest leaders and committees meet frequently to maintain momentum and
allocation of work. Rather than creating a single DEI committee, I suggest weaving racial equity
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and justice into the responsibilities of existing groups like full program or Department meetings,
graduate program or admissions committees, faculty meetings, staff meetings, hiring committees,
Undergraduate program committees, curriculum committees, etc. Equity and justice should not
only be siloed to one specific committee, but rather regularly infused across all graduate program
or school meetings and activities. While a committee can serve a useful interim role in the
change process, for instance to catalyze or evaluate progress, I suggest sharing equity and justice
across leadership.
Recommendations for Institutions' Organizational Support of DEI
In this study, we learned that leaders' capacity to pursue racial equity and justice was
often constrained by their organization. Therefore, I briefly outline six recommendations for
institutions on how to structurally support graduate education leaders as they design and
implement DEI initiatives with the possibility of pursuing racial equity and justice.
To support a shared DEI value across the university, I suggest institutional leaders make
clear and ongoing commitments to racial equity and justice that are simultaneously supported by
action in order to signal to Administration and Faculty that the pursuit of racial equity and justice
is central to the institution and cannot be ignored. One way that institutional leaders can
demonstrate their commitment towards racial equity is to incentivize and prioritize hiring
administrators, faculty, and staff who demonstrate equity-mindedness and have the capacity to
lead racially just initiatives and change. In doing so, institutional leaders have the potential to
model equity-minded leadership and transformative change for their university.
To facilitate change and reduce burnout, I suggest faculty leader' racial equity and justice
service for a graduate program or school should be compensated in protected time and formal
recognition in ways that are built into existing organizational structures. For example, Faculty
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promotion cases should have a required section on contributions to equity and justice that is
equally weighted with other recognized forms of service. Faculty leaders who take on a
designated DEI role for their Department such as DEI officer could be compensated with
protected time by alleviating a percentage of their job responsibilities elsewhere to match the
demands of their DEI role, for example in teaching load or research expectations for promotion.
To support staff leader' racial equity and justice work, I suggest building responsibilities
into their job description and allocating a percentage of their tasks explicitly to supporting equity
and justice goals so that Staff are compensated for their DEI leadership. In Staff annual reviews,
I suggest institutions create a required section on contributions to equity and justice that is
equally weighted with core job requirements.
To support graduate student leaders' racial equity and justice work, I suggest
compensating students with an hourly pay rate for work on tasks or participation on program
committees. If graduate programs seek a graduate student DEI representative, I suggest
compensating the student with funding equal to a teaching or research appointment that relieves
the student from regular research or teaching responsibilities while they serve as the DEI
representative. I also suggest formalizing graduate student DEI roles within the program and on
committees so students can include their service on their CV. To protect graduate students from
organizational power imbalances as they lead racial equity and justice, I suggest graduate
programs give graduate student leaders voting power on DEI-related decisions. Further, I suggest
graduate schools establish a formal connection to graduate student DEI representatives at the
program level (where these roles are established) to help discourage student experiences with
retaliation and advocate for graduate student DEI representatives who experience retaliation.
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To develop and sustain DEI initiatives, I suggest the institution allocate regular and
ongoing funding to the graduate school and graduate programs so leaders can budget for
programming and support. Where institutions frame their budgets as tight, I suggest an audit or
evaluation of their financial resource allocation from an equity-minded expert to facilitate the
reallocation of resources to match the institution's DEI values. In the short-term, I also suggest
institutions connect graduate education leaders to internal experts with successful grant writing
experience to secure external funding resources to support DEI initiatives.
Finally, to facilitate education around the importance of racial equity and justice, I
suggest institutions offer regular and ongoing trainings and opportunities for graduate school and
program leaders to develop critical race-consciousness and equity-mindedness. Here, the
institution should provide the tools and guidance on how to be equity-minded and critical of
whiteness so leaders can develop awareness of these as a skill. Further, these educational
opportunities should be offered in a variety of formats and times to accommodate leaders'
demanding schedules. If the institution already offers trainings during orientation or onboarding,
I suggest building equity and justice in to existing trainings and adding trainings explicitly on
noticing and disrupting racism within the institution.
Implications for Future Research
Beyond this study, further research is needed on DEI implementation, whiteness in
organizations, and transformative change in higher education. The scope of this study focused on
graduate education, and thus organizational analyses of DEI implementation is needed in
additional higher education areas such as student affairs, undergraduate admissions, faculty
hiring and promotion, and university leadership. The timeframe for this study was about a year,
during the COVID-19 pandemic, and so additional research is needed on the longitudinal
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impacts of DEI initiatives. Advancing from this study, some possibilities for future inquiry
include: 1) How do faculty outside of DEI committees and roles support or resist racial equity
and whiteness? 2) How do graduate students outside of leadership roles support or resist racial
equity and whiteness? 3) How do programs sustain DEI initiatives and change? 4) How can
leaders sharpen their lenses to notice whiteness, and feel empowered to push-back against
whiteness? 5) What does transformative change look like in an educational program?
Returning to disconfirming evidence within this study, future research on whiteness in
higher education organizations should examine how equity-minded leaders notice and disrupt
whiteness within their programs or schools. Although equity-minded leaders were the exception
and not representative of the study’s participants and cases, they offered an early blueprint
(Paton & Haynes, 2018) of how leaders could use their agency and position within their
organization to notice and mitigate whiteness. Research on the role of equity-minded leaders is
needed to further understand how to spark and sustain transformative change in higher education.
I intentionally focused the scope of this critical comparative case study to DEI work that
focuses on race because it continues to be omitted from organizational analyses, but an important
implication for future research on transformative change in higher education is the need for
research to have an intersectional conceptual and analytic lens. Following the scholarly traditions
and arguments of Patricia Hill Collins, Lori Patton Davis, and Chayla Haynes, an intersectional
conceptualization and analysis of transformative change will widen our awareness and critique of
oppressive systems, that are racialized, and how they manifest in our programs, schools, and
Institutions. An intersectional conceptualization of white supremacy also nuances how whiteness
works alongside cisheteropatriarchy and capitalism to prohibit transformative racial equity in
higher education organizations.
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Research on how whiteness functions within organizations, in particular research that
uses the conceptual framework I designed for this study, would be strengthened by the addition
of a core theoretical construct that offers guidance on how to practice transformational change.
Central to this study is the possibility of racially just transformative change. Imagining what a
racially just future for higher education could be, Patton & Haynes (2018) argued leaders should
look to models of liberation in education. Transformative change challenges traditional practices
like diversity discourse and encompasses justice in institutional structures and practices that alter
the institution (Stewart, 2018). The current conceptual framework allows researchers to identify
whiteness in organizations, but it does not include explicit guidance on how to go about changing
the system and processes it identifies. Expanding the conceptual framework to include a theory
of transformation would reorient the research design and analysis towards identifying and
implementing transformational change, which would also further align the research with the
ultimate goal to disrupt whiteness within organizations. In the final sections, I briefly discuss this
project’s significance for education leaders and organizations.
Project Significance
Collecting data from individual leaders, groups of leaders formed into committees, and
graduate schools and programs, this project carries significance for both leaders and
organizations. For leaders, this study offers some cautionary tales around prioritizing racialized
emotions in planning and implementing DEI and subsequent consequences which may not be at
the forefront of leaders' minds as they lead. We also learn from leaders how the ease of
nonperformative changes and underspecified DEI language derail efforts toward diversity and
equity goals. This study also situates leaders' DEI work within programs, schools, and
institutions which knowingly or unknowingly impose organizational constraints on change. For
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example, we see how constraints on time and resources limit the scope and possibilities of DEI
because organizational structure limit leaders' capacity to carryout change. In all three
universities, leaders expressed commitment to leading DEI, and yet change was often difficult
because leaders were under supported by their Institutions. This project also holds significance
for what we understand about how whiteness works to restrain equity and changes that would
shift the organization's structure and priorities, in particular through nonperformative DEI
activities and the prioritization of white racialized emotions.
This study has broad significance for both scholars and practitioners committed to a
deeper analysis of racism and white supremacy in higher education, especially in graduate
education. Whiteness inheres in graduate education policy and practice, and unexamined
whiteness is a barrier to racial equity because it ultimately reproduces racism and white
supremacy in higher education. Therefore, redressing the paucity of evidence and theory about
whiteness at the organizational level will raise awareness about the ways that whiteness and
white supremacy manifests in graduate education, even within efforts ostensibly aimed at equity.
Merely understanding how whiteness prohibits racial equity is only part of the work. Therefore,
this project on DEI plan implementation simultaneously identified both how whiteness functions
within graduate schools and offered a start on how it may be disrupted or mitigated by equity-
minded leaders.
Theoretical affordances of this study included the integration of new institutionalism
concepts with recent theorizations of whiteness and racialized organizations, emotions, and
equity. Additionally, a strength of the project was the inclusion of three levels of analysis in the
theoretical framework and in data collection (graduate schools, graduate programs, individual
leaders) so the conceptualization of whiteness and racial equity in organizations were not
EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
188

disjointed from important social or individual contexts. Finally, this study helps to begin
bridging a gap between theoretical developments on whiteness and racialization within
organizations with a need to show empirical evidence of how whiteness prohibits racial equity in
higher education.
Closing
While a higher education organization may claim a commitment to diversity, equity, and
inclusion, when whiteness at the core of the university is not disrupted, the work is not
transformative but rather more like reform—episodic and marginal to the organization (Patton &
Haynes, 2018; Stewart, 2018; Chang, 2002; hooks, 1989; Ahmed 2006; 2012). One participant
described it as “frosting” on a cake whose recipe remains unchanged. Interrogating equity work
and policy using an analytic lens of CHW spotlights how whiteness functions within the
institution and impedes equity (Leonardo, 2003). Analyses of DEI and racial equity in higher
education must consider whiteness and its role in shaping how equity is described and enacted,
particularly since “white dominance of the institutional environment and the property interest in
whiteness remain largely implicit, legitimate, and unnamed” (Ray, 2019, p. 38). Institutions of
higher education that engage with equity without working to disrupt whiteness will remain
distracted by significant symptoms of white supremacy and racism, such as racial
microaggressions and prejudice. Ultimately, institutions that work to cultivate equity but neglect
to understand how the institution is oppressive will never be equitable. Moreover, institutions
that practice equity without explicitly grappling with race or confronting how the institution is
racialized will fail to enact equity. Until colleges and universities dismantle institutionalized
whiteness, the academy will remain enmeshed in white supremacy.

EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
189

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Appendices
Appendix A – Conceptual Framework Model
Contestation of white supremacy as a racialized and hegemonic power across U.S. society

EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
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Appendix B – Collecting Examples of Whiteness Table
Collecting examples of whiteness in graduate education

EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
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Appendix C – Document Collection Protocol
Guided by critical hermeneutics of whiteness (Leonardo, 2003) to increase my awareness of
whiteness in organizational mechanisms, interactions, and interpretations.
-Examine whiteness within the graduate program and school, including DEI plan,
policies, practices, and espoused values;
-Examine how these efforts reproduce and/or mitigate whiteness;
*while I use the term ‘equity,’ documents may use alternative terms like diversity, inclusion, or
equality to describe their work.

Below I list possible documents:

Primary documents
-graduate school DEI plan and relevant documentation of equity initiatives
-graduate school policy handbook
-graduate school website, particularly relevant to equity commitments and initiatives
-Official school statements relevant to diversity and equity
-graduate program DEI plan and/or relevant documentation of equity initiatives
-graduate program policy handbook
-graduate program website, particularly relevant to equity commitments and initiatives
-Official program statements relevant to diversity and equity
-graduate student demands delivered to the school or program, if applicable
-University DEI plan
-University policy handbook
-University website, particularly relevant to equity commitments and initiatives
-Official university statements relevant to diversity and equity
-student demands delivered to the university

Secondary documents
-Campus climate survey
-Relevant journalism on the university and graduate school regarding diversity and equity
-Relevant state education policy, e.g., academic bylaws and regulations
-Relevant state policy, e.g., laws regarding the consideration of race in admissions

Historical documents
-Historical information about the university and race equity
-Past student demands delivered to the university
-Relevant legislation and court decisions with racialized ramifications, e.g., Morrill Act 1862 and
1890

EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
209

Appendix D – Observation Protocol of Graduate School / Program Meetings
Participants: graduate school & program committees for diversity/equity, admissions, and/or
education.

Guided by critical hermeneutics of whiteness (Leonardo, 2003) to increase my awareness of
whiteness in organizational mechanisms, interactions, interpretations, and feelings.
-Examine how graduate programs use organizational mechanisms to institute change;
-Examine how practitioners feel about diversity and equity efforts as the graduate school
works to advance racial equity (Leonardo, 2003; Bonilla-Silva, 2019);
-Examine how these efforts reproduce and/or mitigate whiteness;
*while I use the term ‘equity,’ participants may use alternative terms like diversity, inclusion, or
equality to describe their work.

-How do leaders interpret, define, and discuss diversity and inclusion?
-How do leaders interpret, define, and discuss equity?
-How do leaders interpret, define, and discuss race?
-How do leaders interpret, define, and discuss under/representation?
-How do leaders describe their motivation/reasoning to engage equity?
-How do leaders use the DEI plan?
-How do leaders describe the role of the school/program in advancing equity?
-How do leaders describe their role in advancing equity?
-How do leaders approach instituting changes within the school/program?
-How are individuals tasked with responsibility for advancing equity?
-How do participants engage one another in discussions?
-How do participants express their emotions in discussions about equity?
-Based on findings from document analysis, where is whiteness manifesting in the
school/program meeting? (how I will notice examples of whiteness)
-Assumptions
-Values
-Practices
-Routines

Meeting Agenda
Meeting Content
My Thoughts
-How do they use routines/practices/frames/schemas to design/plan/engage in change?
-How do leaders use their agency?
-How do they feel about and interpret equity?
-Where is whiteness within the space? Is it supported? Resisted?
-If equity-mindedness is expressed, how? And, how it is received?
EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
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Appendix E – Interview Protocol with Graduate School / Program Leaders
Participants: graduate school deans, associate deans, diversity officers; graduate program chairs
of department and committees for admissions, diversity/equity, and education.

Guided by critical hermeneutics of whiteness (Leonardo, 2003) to increase my awareness of
whiteness in organizational mechanisms, interactions, interpretations, and feelings.
-Examine how graduate programs use organizational mechanisms to institute change;
-Examine how practitioners feel about equity efforts as the graduate school works to
advance racial equity (Leonardo, 2003; Bonilla-Silva, 2019);
-Examine how these efforts reproduce and/or mitigate whiteness;
*while I use the term ‘equity,’ participants may use alternative terms like diversity, inclusion, or
equality to describe their work.

Thank you again for participating in my dissertation research on equity in graduate education.
For our interview today, would it be alright if I audio recorded? The transcription will be
scrubbed of any identifying information and then the audio file will be deleted. Great, thank you.

To begin, I am going to ask you some questions about your role within graduate education.
Your Role & The Organization
1 - How did you prepare yourself to be a leader of equity initiatives in your graduate program?
-Thinking about your graduate program, what makes a successful leader of equity?
-What challenges do equity leaders face in your program?

2 - How do you define equity?
-What motivates you to work towards equity?
[if not mentioned] How does your motivation to work towards equity playout in
your professional role?
-What are some of your hopes for equity within your graduate program?
[if not mentioned] Why do you think your graduate program should care about
equity?

3 - What are the most pressing equity issues your program is addressing currently?
-How is your program addressing them? Can you share an example?
[if not mentioned] Why is your program addressing them?
-How do you feel about these issues?
[if not mentioned in hopes for equity Q at #2] Are there other issues you feel are
pressing? What are they?

4 - How are you tasked/do you come to work on the program's equity efforts/goals?
-How does the graduate program/department support you in your equity work?
EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
211

-What supports or resources are you lacking?
[if not mentioned] How do you feel the graduate program engages with equity
outside of your role and programming?
[if not mentioned] How did you first engage with the ___ program/initiative?
Who created it?

Now, I am going to ask you some questions about your graduate program, equity and change.
Organization and Change
5 - [if not mentioned yet] What are some challenges the program is facing as it seeks
equity?
-How is the program navigating these challenges?
-How are you navigating these challenges?

6 - What do you think fuels/drives possible change within the graduate program?
-As an individual in a large organization like your graduate program/department, how do
you feel about leading change?
[opt] -What do you wish leaders of equity knew about in order to initiate change?

7 - Can you share an example of a policy or practice you attempted to change in your graduate
program?
-How did this go?
-How was it received by colleagues?
-How did you feel?
-What is the policy or practice now?

To close, I am going to ask you some questions about racial inequity in graduate education.
Racism & White Supremacy in the Organization
8 - In your equity work within your program, do you think about white supremacy? How so?
[If they say NO: What about white privilege? How so?]
[If they say NO: What about racism? How so?]
-How does your program/committee discuss/think about white supremacy as you engage
equity?
[if not mentioned] Can you share some examples when white supremacy may
have come up in your work?
-How did your program respond?
-How did you respond? How did you feel?

9 - Are there any policies or practices within your program that concern you as potentially
upholding racial inequity?
-How does the program think of these policies/practices?
EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
212

-How do you address these policies/practices?

10 - If a graduate program at a peer institution was going to create an equity-focused role, what
advice would you offer?

Those are all of my questions. Is there anything you would like to share that we did not discuss?

EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
213

Appendix F – Analytic Protocol
Open coding plus sensitizing concepts guided by conceptual framework on racialized power
contestation - how whiteness is supported or resisted in organizations (Harris, 1993; Ray, 2019;
Bensimon, 2018).

Inductive codes from open coding
-Equity Framing: How documents and leaders understand equity and their motivation to engage
in equity.

-Racial Awareness: expression of racial awareness, particularly in discussions of diversity,
equity, and inclusion.

-Awareness of Systemic or Structural Issues: Expressions that equity issues are connected to
systems like education or structures like program policies. Can include awareness of power or
oppression within systems.

-Motivations to Address Equity: motivations or sources for leaders, programs, and schools to
address inequity. For example, graduate student demands or the BLM movement.

-Incentives to Engage Equity: Incentives or recognition or expectation for engaging equity within
program or division, both in/official or in/formal.

-Referral to DEI plans: Participant or document referral to a documented DEI plan or initiative.

-Perceived Barriers to Change: participants' perceived barriers or difficulties to advancing equity
within their program or division.

-Noticing White Privilege: Awareness or discussions of white privilege, often expressed at an
individual level of analysis or a group level analysis, such as white people have racial (white)
privilege.

-Hopes for Equity: Expressed hopes, desires, and goals for future equity work and initiatives.
Includes imagined futures and rethinking what the organization can become if it centered equity.

-Reflection of One's Leadership: How participants frame, think and feel about their leadership
role. How they see themselves within the organization and their leadership. How they came to
engage equity.

-Race-evasive: omission or ignorance of race in education, particularly in discussions of
diversity, equity, and inclusion.
EXAMINING WHITENESS AND MECHANISMS OF CHANGE
214

-Racialized Emotions: emotional reactions like ease, discomfort, or avoidance when discussing
race and in/equity.

-Emotional Labor: How participants manage their emotions and the emotions of others as they
engage in DEI and change work, including keeping up morale as teams experience challenges,
frustrations, and pushback.

Sensitizing Concepts from Conceptual Framework
-Equity-mindedness: critical race consciousness and understanding of systemic racial inequities
in education, including awareness of white supremacy in practices and norms (Bensimon, 2018).

-Organizational Mechanisms of Change: use or revision of organizational mechanisms, e.g.
routine, practice, resource, policy, as a form of change within the organization. Mechanisms like
built in to practice or routine, documented, tied to resources, work done in a committee, work
expected by institution or schools (Ray, 2019).

-Agency as Mechanism of Change: individual consciousness or action as a form of change within
the organization. Agency to initiate equity change. Agency to resist change or keep things the
same/preserve (Ray, 2019).

-Manifestations of Whiteness: property functions of whiteness, e.g. white racial privilege and
comfort, racial exclusion and racialized work hierarchies, credential to access resources, expands
white agency, and manifestations of racialized hegemony (Harris, 1993; Ray, 2019).

-Interpretation: interpretation of hegemonic ideas, history, law, and institutional policies &
practices which then informs subsequent support or resistance to hegemony (Leonardo, 2003).

-Historical Ignorance: Race-evasive historical narrative of higher education and/or detachment
from racist history, particularly when conceptualizing current racial inequity (Feagin, 2010;
Bonilla-Silva, 2018; Mueller, 2020).

-Axial codes representing resistance to whiteness (hooks, 1989; Freire, 1970) and support of
whiteness (Harris, 1993; Ray, 2019) across codes.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract As higher education institutions grapple with issues of racial equity, few consider how whiteness and white supremacy may be embedded in organizations or implicated in their equity work. Indeed, it may be counterintuitive to some that efforts ostensibly aimed at creating equity would themselves be characterized by white supremacy. However, analyses reveal that diversity initiatives in higher education can reproduce whiteness by evading critical discussions of race and structural forms of racism (Ahmed, 2012; Cabrera et al., 2016; Warikoo, 2016). Presently, however, there is little evidence on how organizations and their leaders support or resist whiteness. Thus, understanding how white supremacy at the organizational level via specific mechanisms is necessary to comprehending how racial inequity persists in higher education (Bensimon, 2018; Cabrera et al, 2016; Ahmed, 2006).
In this critical comparative case study, I focused on equity work as a window into whiteness as embedded in organizations, and how agents navigate whiteness in their pursuit of equity. I focused on graduate education as a site of the academy’s self-reproduction (Walker et al., 2008), where practices may be shared across programs within the same field or discipline (Posselt, 2016; 2020). Its equity efforts are therefore a prime context for analysis of endemic whiteness and/or change. Through sixty nine one-hour interviews, fifty eight hours of observation, as well as documentary analysis, I examined how leaders from nine graduate programs and three graduate schools in three public research universities interpreted and enacted equity efforts. I answered four research questions: 1) How do graduate schools and programs utilize organizational mechanisms (e.g., routines, practices) to advance racial equity? 2) How do leaders approach racial equity within the graduate program and school? 3) How is whiteness manifesting in equity planning and initiatives in the graduate school and programs? 4) How do equity efforts reproduce and/or mitigate whiteness within the graduate program and school?
I found five mechanisms of whiteness that operated in DEI work to temper transformative change: 1) organizational constraints on time and resources limited leaders’ capacity to carry out change, 2) isolating DEI work to committees or roles unintentionally centered the buy-in of faculty, 3) using underspecified language (i.e., DEI) dulled critical consciousness and missed opportunities to introduce equity-mindedness, 4) nonperformative changes reinforced white priorities and ease, and 5) racialized emotions distracted leaders away from equity and towards the comfort of privileged faculty. Thus, although DEI planning and initiatives were designed for changes in graduate education that would advance equity, organizations and leaders inadvertently constrained possibilities of transformative change through implementation processes that centered whiteness. Implications are offered for future theory and research on whiteness in organizations, as well as future design and implementation of organizational equity efforts.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Southern, Deborah E. (author)

Core Title Tempering transformative change: whiteness and racialized emotions in graduate leaders' implementation of equity plans

School Rossier School of Education

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Urban Education Policy

Degree Conferral Date 2022-08

Publication Date 07/25/2022

Defense Date 06/13/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag equity,graduate education,OAI-PMH Harvest,organizations,whiteness

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Posselt, Julie R. (committee chair), Bensimon, Estela (committee member), Carrington, Ben (committee member), Harper, Shaun (committee member), Matias, Cheryl (committee member)

Creator Email deborahsouthern@gmail.com,desouthe@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111375227

Unique identifier UC111375227

Legacy Identifier etd-SouthernDe-10966

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Southern, Deborah E.

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Source 20220728-usctheses-batch-962 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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