GSE Colloquium Series in Education & Organizations: Laura Hamilton
The Future of Faculty Diversity: How Public Colleges Respond to the Anti-DEI Movement
Recent state legislation and administrative guidance have reversed course on over seven decades of federal, professional, and institutional commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion in U.S. higher education. While these changes have been swift, their consequences for faculty diversity remain poorly documented. Drawing on national data on new tenure-track hires at public colleges and universities, Dr. Hamilton shows where public institutions engaged in anticipatory compliance with early anti-diversity legislation, reshaping hiring patterns and reducing faculty diversity. Interviews with a stratified national sample of faculty engaged in racial equity work further illuminate the long-term consequences for the infrastructure that supports racially marginalized scholars, from K-12 outreach and college access programs to supports during college, postdoctoral pipelines, hiring opportunities, and retention. Qualitative data reveal that organizational behaviors shift as state and federal pressures evolve, moving some schools from resistance to over-compliance. While organizational theory emphasizes compliance or symbolic adaptation, these findings illustrate that when political regulation targets core values as well as observable behaviors, organizations may go beyond modifying practices to dismantle supporting capacity—in this case, producing potentially enduring losses in faculty diversity.
Dr. Laura T. Hamilton is Professor of Sociology at the University of California-Merced and co-founder of the Higher Education, Race & the Economy (HERE Lab). As a sociology of education scholar, she examines the relationship between organizational arrangements in education and educational inequities. She has authored three award winning books: Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, Parenting to a Degree: How College Matters for College Women’s Success, and Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities. Her latest mixed methods project on the costs of and response to the anti-diversity movement in public postsecondary education is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan, Lumina, and Spencer Foundations.
