Laura Hamilton:
The workers were so stressed that one of them said to me that for the DOJ and the local prisons seemed more compelling because the pay was better and the job was less stressful. It’s how bad it got. And our cultural programming effectively consisted of one social justice coordinator who, you know, at that time, there were no centers on campus. This person had to coordinate all of social justice for an entire campus. So these, you know, this is what to tolerable sub optimization looks like it’s happening around the country, but it’s happening more heavily on campus that have higher concentrations of marginalized students.

Keith Edwards:
Hello, and welcome to Student Affairs Now. I’m your host, Keith Edwards. Today, we’re talking about the new book Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities with the two authors, Laura Hamilton and Kelly Nielson. This book explores the dynamics, particularly in California’s UC system, but has brought in implications for all institutions of higher education. Student Affairs Now is the premier podcast and online learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find details about this episode and or browser archives at studentaffairsnow.com. This episode is brought to you by LeaderShape, go to leadershape.org, to learn how they can work with you to create a just caring and thriving world. Today’s episode is also sponsored by EverFi the trusted partner for 1,500 colleges and universities. EverFi is the standard of care for student safety and wellbeing with the results to prove it.

Keith Edwards:
As I mentioned, I’m your host Keith Edwards, my pronouns are he, him, his. I’m a speaker consultant and coach. You can find out more about me at keithedwards.com. I’m broadcasting from Minneapolis, Minnesota at the intersections of the ancestral homelands of the Dakota and the Ojibwe peoples. Let’s get to our conversation today. I’m so grateful to have both of you here joining us. Let’s Just begin with some introductions. Laura, I think we’ll start with you. Tell us a little bit about you and then we’ll get into more about the book and what you’ve learned and what we can all learn.

Laura Hamilton:
Absolutely. thanks for having me. I’m Laura Hamilton. My pronouns are she, her, hers. I’m a professor of sociology at the University of California – Merced. And for me, this book has been a long time coming. When I accepted a tenure track position at my university over a decade ago, I started to get interested in the topic particularly because of the wonderful students who really demanded scholarship that recognized the rich racial and ethnic tapestry of the US, which was really obvious in California. And I started to become really curious about the ways that my students limited access to resources might be linked to the student body racial composition.

Keith Edwards:
Mm-Hmm, awesome. I think many in our, our audience as student affairs folks really glad to hear that this generated from the students and their interest and their nudging and they’re pushing wonderful. Kelly, tell us a little bit more about you.

Kelly Nielsen:
Yeah, Thanks. It’s great to be here. I’m Kelly Nielsen, my pronouns are he, him, his. I came to this topic. I had written a dissertation about community college students in Riverside, California. And when I was sort of wrapping up my dissertation and Laura was starting this project, she needed someone who could take on the bulk of the research in the Riverside area at UCR. And it was, it was just perfect timing super fortuitous. And, I knew the region. I knew a lot about the campus. I knew a lot about the students in the area, but it was really a, just a great opportunity to go more into actually how the organization works. My work up to that point had really focused on students and their experiences. And through this project, I think we really got to look at the way a university functions, what a university means not just to students, but to the state and to the higher ed system as a whole. And so it was just this great opportunity to sort of take a, a, the, the sort of knowledge, the special knowledge I had and, and really expand it. So mm-hmm, that’s what brought me to this project.

Keith Edwards:
And you’re no longer in California, right?

Kelly Nielsen:
No, I am. So I left California for a bit. I went to Cornell for a couple of years in upstate New York. Did some work in the area of teaching and learning, and now I’m back and in California and continuing on.

Keith Edwards:
Oh, wonderful. Wonderful. Well, let’s jump into the book a wonderful read. I love how you’ve, you’ve done all of this research, but it doesn’t read like a dissertation. It reads more like a journalist would write about what’s going on with little stories and information informed by that. So it’s really was, was lovely to read. Give us an overview of the book and the implications for higher ed. Maybe we’ll begin Kelly with you. You all discuss new universities, what are new universities and how did they come into existence?

Kelly Nielsen:
Sure, thanks. Yeah, so we really started with two, I guess, broad areas or sort of phenomena and higher ed that, that struck us. And one is this persistent racial segregation. So when we looked not just at the UC system, but through higher education as a whole, you see a persistent segregation in by race, across institutions and institutions type. So this was something that really struck us, and we wanted to understand why does this persist? When we look back at the efforts to desegregate higher education and to produce a less segregated higher education system. What we found was that at this moment, you get this reaction, this conservative reaction to withdraw public funding from public higher education, and to impose the cost of public higher education onto students and their families and into the private sector.

Kelly Nielsen:
And so you get this process called austerity, right, which is the sort of willful deflation or willing deflation of, of public spending on public goods. Right? So these two processes really for us formed the nexus of the book where racial segregation and public funding really came together, and that withdrawal of public funding really reinforced this racial segregation in higher education. And what we saw is that there were these organizations that had begun to emerge that we have come to call new universities that decided or realized that in order to survive in a very austere context where austerity has really made running a public institution, very difficult, that it was now possible to turn to those students who had been historically excluded from higher education in order to get the revenues to not only survive, but to really thrive, and even to become in a sense, the model of the future of higher education and, this was really made possible by the fact that you had a much larger well educated population of students who had been formally excluded in the past or informally excluded, who could now be drawn into higher education.

Kelly Nielsen:
And then you had this cultural turn that made in higher ed higher education organizations, a, a real virtue, right? And so they could draw in these students and now try to rely on this cultural cache for one, and this financial benefit on the other to create a sort of new type of higher ed institution. They could really challenge these sort of old elite structures or hierarchies of higher education. And so these are really new models of how to do higher education that we were seeing start to emerge. And in the case of the book two universities, UC Riverside on the one hand and UC Merced on the other that were doing it you could say exceptionally well.

Keith Edwards:
Mm, great, great. I love that grounding. Laura, can you tell us a little bit more about the, the resource disparities and what you saw from some of these new universities?

Laura Hamilton:
Yeah. We use the University of California system as a case study to understand how race and resource allocation are linked in our current post-secondary system. But do you see a sort of like a best or better case scenario in the sense that it’s been widely recognized as a mobility machine? The nine undergraduate serving campuses are all research universities and have that backing. And the state has really had a historical commitment to serving racially and economically marginally students. So what we describe in the book and the resources that are dispersed among the UCs is really sort of like the tip of the iceberg. I would even say in California, you could compare any of the UCs to the CSU campuses, the California state university campuses, which are regional campuses. And you also see disparities there to that are also linked to race.

Laura Hamilton:
But when you have race racial segregation and you have austerity together, you start to see particular types of patterns. So I’ll give you those patterns in the UC, but again, you can generalize these what you see is that organizational resources, money, material resources, staff, faculty, that students need to succeed are very much connected to the race and class composition of the student body. We focused on UC Merced, where I work in UC Riverside, where Kelly did a lot of his research. And these two campuses as proportional to their size, really do the lion share of work with marginalized student populations for the university of California system. They’re both majority Latinx, they’re both majority low income. They’re both first generation student bodies. Yet, the campus is, is very, quite wildly in their access to financial support. The UCS in general are unusual in that the state sends the same amount of money per undergraduate students.

Laura Hamilton:
So we’re not looking at undergraduate student disparities, although there are a lot of disparities in graduate funding because the other campuses have more graduate students. That’s sort of unusual as well, many states actually fund give less state appropriations to students that are attending schools, where there are larger, larger numbers of black and Latinx student. Literally they receive less on the dollar than white students at more affluent universities, but in the UC and also everywhere else, there is a growing gap in access to private revenue. So this really matters a lot because state appropriations money from the state under austerity has really precipitously declined over time. So in California and the UC system, only 10% of the overall revenue comes from the state. It’s really a tiny amount. So even if you distribute tiny amount pretty equally you’re still gonna see a lot of disparity because the rest of the funding is coming in from private revenue sources.

Laura Hamilton:
And so when I talk about private revenue, I mean, things like tuition, particularly charging more for non-resident students. I mean, philanthropy, I mean, alumni giving, I mean, corporate partnerships, all of these things UC Merced and UC Riverside have very limited access to. And this is also true for schools that have student populations that look similar to those students. These schools are Riverside and Merced are almost entirely dependent on the state funds that they receive. They have tiny almost non-existent non-resident student populations. So they’re not getting that extra money. A lot of times campuses will charge two to three times as much for a non-resident student. And that revenue comes in, but not at these schools. Other UC campuses are about a quarter non-resident and these students bring in a substantial amount of funding, UCR and UCM do not have a regular routine million dollar donor pipeline.

Laura Hamilton:
In fact, in recent years, Merced’s foundation has received less than 1% of the private support that Berkeley’s foundation takes in during a given year also auxiliary services you know, selling of jerseys t-shirts campus markets at other schools that bring in those things tend to bring in money, but auxiliary services often drain coffers at UC Riverside and UC Merced. And so these schools serve as sort of a, a window to what is happening across the country. The pattern I described is not just restricted to the UC system or California university wealth is nationally concentrated at schools that serve very few numbers of marginalized students. We’ve seen recently some data on this. There’s some work showing that universities that serve 40% or more Latinx students actually receive something like $4,000, less per student in revenue, when you put all these things together, there’s also a gap for black students. That’s not as large, but is substantial. And so these gaps in organizational resources by student race are quite persistent across the country.

Keith Edwards:
Great. Well, I, I know that’s just, you spent years, I assume writing a, a very long book. That’s just the, the tip of the iceberg, but before we get much further, you explore very directly and very explicitly what it means to be white and studying race and racism, which I really appreciated. Could you share a little bit more with us about what you learned in that process and maybe what you’ve learned since?

Laura Hamilton:
Yeah, sure. It was really important to us that we had this conversation and that whenever we talk about the book, it’s often one of the first things that we mention we were very aware going into this, that we’re both white and that this posed what we felt like the single biggest challenge of the book. We knew we had to think very carefully and intentionally about our whiteness. We had a lot of conversations where we became convinced that white scholars should write about race in the academy, and that really the work of changing racist structures, shouldn’t just be shouldered by our colleagues of color. White scholars kind of move through their careers, profiting from the ability to move through universities with the privilege of basically never thinking about the racial dynamics of the environments in which we work. We did not want to continue some, according that inequity, at the same time, we were really aware that well-intentioned white people can do a lot of harm while they’re attempting support communities of color.

Laura Hamilton:
So we recognize that our whiteness gives us a platform to make bold claims about the academy, that aren’t gonna be demand as me-search or too political. And it’s a platform that’s been historically denied to a lot of black, Latinx, Asian, indigenous scholars, as well as those from other marginalized groups. So we understood from the outset that we could misstep by attempting to speak for instead of and about these groups, but we made efforts at every stage to reduce the harm that we might cause. And we felt kind of at the place, we could really make an intervention where we could do the most work and the least harm and leverage our positionality was an understanding how the organizational structure of university campuses and higher education in the US is both racially stratified and sends different amounts of resources to students of color.

Keith Edwards:
Yeah. I love the both and of that, right. There’s a history of well, intention harm and wheres our obligation to get in the game a little bit. Kelly, would you like to add anything to

Kelly Nielsen:
That? Yeah, I, I would, I would like to just add that there are consequences too, for the type of research and the way the research gets done. And I think that the, the knowledge of the organization that we’re able to elicit, not just in terms of race, but also in terms of gender. You know, for instance there were cases where Laura and I were treated differently in the same setting, by the same people where I was deferred to despite the fact that I had a much lower status than she did that we were sort of equal partners in this research. And so gender and race really shaped the way that people spoke to us, the kinds of information I think that people were willing to give us. And it went both ways. I think that white powerful administrators were very much unarmed by a white man interviewing them.

Kelly Nielsen:
You know, our book set out to really try to tell a positive story. So we were there to celebrate the successes of these two schools. And I think that coming from someone like myself was very unarm and people spoke in ways that I don’t know that they would have to a scholar of color. It’s not certain, but it definitely is possible. And then in other cases, like for instance, when I was, you know, interviewing people who worked in the cultural centers, who were, who were very much guarded but with a white man interviewing them about their work when they have been subjected to decades of austerity and hostility from you know, all corners, right from the campus, from conservative students, from white students. And so there was a, there was a understandable guardedness that had to be negotiated and sort of worked out.

Kelly Nielsen:
And I think that in the end it did, but it’s, it’s also likely that those interviews would’ve gone quite differently. Had they been the interviewer had been a person of color. And so, you know, we really Laura layed out our motivations very well. And, and I think then we also had to work through what the implications were for our findings. Right. And so we tried to do that and it’s always I think important to, to really sort of keep that at the forefront. I’ll just give one more example. And this is really because cultural diversity programming has become so ubiquitous across the higher ed landscape. And I participated in, in diversity programming, right? As a participant observer to, to get a sense of what was going on and the people running the program were just great.

Kelly Nielsen:
I mean, they were doing such awesome work with the resources and the constraints that they faced. But you could tell that the cultural diversity programming was very much oriented towards marginalized groups, right? So that the questions and the activities put a person put me as a, as a white man, a middle class, white man, for that, to that matter in a position where it was, it, the questions were not directed at me, but rather towards people who are marginalized within the university system. And so in a way it, it reinforced the fact that whiteness, masculinity class are, are really these sort of invisible categories. Right, right. And so it shaped very much how the work was done and, and really I think the, the kinds of outcomes that we were able to observe. But I think it was, it was really important for us to put that front and center.

Keith Edwards:
Yeah. Well, I really appreciate it. I think we can talk about being transparent, but I think the two of you have gone well beyond being transparent and really naming it and being explicit and being direct about it, not only in a significant portion of the book where you talk about it, but also throughout and naming that. So I, I really appreciate it. I think it’s a great model in many ways for others who wanna pursue things like this

Laura Hamilton:
I think it’s really important too. A lot of the work that we were building on is from scholars of color whose work is often just ignored and not cited. And so we did a lot of trying to pay homage to these people whose work was right there that people should be reading and that education scholars are not reading or that basically anyone outside of a small group of race scholars or critical race scholars, small, but growing group are not paying attention to. And so we, you know, to whatever credit we’re given, I think the real credit goes to these, these scholars that we pointed out again again.

Keith Edwards:
Yeah, it was, it was really noticeable to me, the foundation that you were building on and the credit you’re giving and the references and the citations throughout two themes. You talked about some bold claims that you were able to two themes that you highlight seem to be really showing up more than ever across higher education. Our colleague, Kevin McClure keeps naming them and giving the two of you credit for it. But the two things that really jumped out are what you call austerity administration and tolerable sub optimization. You have a great way of being provocative and all technically accurate. So help us understand these patterns for those who are not familiar. I think Kelly, you’re gonna start us here talking about austerity administration.

Kelly Nielsen:
Yeah. Austerity administration is, is great. It’s I mean, it’s incredibly frustrating to witness, right.

Keith Edwards:
Yeah, we’ve all felt it, but we don’t know what it is exactly.

Kelly Nielsen:
That’s right. An Auster administration is I think at base a belief that there are no other ways to run the university other than through austerity, which means that public funding is simply not an option. We’re not going to be able to go back to some old model where we get the state to really reinvest in what the university needs. And so this immediately constrains the way we can think about how to run university, how to solve the problems that we’re confronted with and through this sort of narrowing of what is possible, you get this austerity logic that leads you in particular directions, right? And we talk about these particular directions they’re cutting costs. So you look everywhere, you can to cut costs, you take your sort of people who can really analyze every cost function of the university and try to find places to reduce expenditures.

Kelly Nielsen:
You’re taking the low hanging fruit, your innovating with new ways of sort of reducing your overhead. So cost cutting becomes this, this dominant mode of thinking about how to run the university. You look to getting big, right? So you have to then think, well, okay, we can cut costs on the one hand, but then we also have to generate revenues on the other. And for campuses is that don’t have massive revenue streams from say donors or, or other other places, what are you gonna do? You’re gonna turn to students, right? Because tuition is one place that there are a few strings attached. So tuition is a wonderful place to go for money. It’s very flexible. And then you can scrape all off the top from, you can take it out of the teaching budgets and you can throw it into the infrastructure, into the research, into the amenities that make a campus desirable and sort of climb up the rankings.

Kelly Nielsen:
Right. And so you’re looking, you’re beginning to approach administration through this austerity framework. And so, you know, at UC Riverside, the the financial picture wasn’t the same as it was at Merced. I mean, it was perhaps a bit more solid, you know, we, we spoke to high level administrators who said, you know, we could continue along like this and it’s would, we would be okay. Right. We don’t need to kind of take these sort of drastic moves to try to raise a ton of revenue or cut a ton of costs. We could, we could sort of just plot along and it would be fine. This wasn’t the case at Merced. Merced had a very different set of sort of constraints and a different context. But nonetheless, the, the administration was still thinking in terms of austerity.

Kelly Nielsen:
And we compare this to the way that administrators in the past had thought about the university. I think this was a really instructive approach for us because, you know, prior to this current crop of administrators, UC Riverside had administrators who had grown up in a period where public funding was really robust. And the model for this were as former chancellor Ray Orbach. Ray Orbach was a real transformational figure on the campus. And he was there from 1992 to 2002, I believe. Was it Laura? It was the nineties, right? So austerity was there. There’s no doubt about it. I mean, this was still the period of austerity. But Ray Orbach had grown up through the, the sort of Sputnik moment.

Kelly Nielsen:
I mean, this is when he came of age, right? And he came of age during the cold war university when money was just thrown at science and at campuses and at research universities. And when he became chancellor of UC Riverside, he said, look, this campus needs to grow. It’s a UC campus. It needs to be world class. Our model is Berkeley UC for listeners who don’t know, the UC system is a system of campuses that have a formal equality, right? There’s not a flagship in the system. And then campuses of, of lower tiers. There are formal equality, which means that everyone has to sort of be, are expected to achieve the same levels of scientific excellence and the same sorts of expectations for students and outcomes and that, so there’s a formal equality in the system.

Kelly Nielsen:
And so Ray, Orbach used this formal equality and this belief that you could go out and you could get revenue from the state. So he organized a group of local businessmen and elites and sent them to the governor, Pete Wilson of governor at the time, a Republican governor who’s you know, not, not going to be I can’t imagine was, was entirely loose with the cash, but he would send this group and they would say, look, we’re growing, we’re bringing all these students in. We need money to do it. And they were able to get some money from, and they built this university up from a place where it had really, it was there was a lot of room to grow. We’ll just say and he really transformed the campus. Now the administrators in charge now came of age in a much more sort of fully realized austerity system.

Kelly Nielsen:
They came into their administrative careers through the great recession and I think that they no longer looked to the state as a viable source of revenue and really had internalized the idea that austerity was the common sense or the natural order of things. And so it just shaped what was possible right. And in some ways, these things can be fine. Maybe there are, there is some low hanging fruit you could, you could make the university more efficient. Sure. but in other ways they became very harmful when everything looks like, like a cost over run or everything needs to be costed. So what do you do, do you, how do you measure the cost benefit of an interaction between a student and a faculty member, or, you know you, you try to sort of think of what a university does in all its complexity in these, these narrow terms. And so this is really what austerity admin means.

Keith Edwards:
And then that leads to tolerable slump optimization, both of these I guess I understand sort of within the frameworks, within the mindset of neoliberalism, right. Where everything is commodified, is that right? Laura, tell us a little bit more about tolerable sub optimization. Again, I think we’ve all felt this help us understand it.

Laura Hamilton:
Yeah. I mean, I real quick, on your point of neoliberalism in the book, we talk about racial neoliberalism and the ways in which this idea, the neoliberal idea is that, you know, we, you should earn your, your goods in a competitive marketplace system pays very little attention to systems and structured oppression that give people different abilities to do that. Different groups have different access to resources, right. To compete in a marketplace. And so under racial neoliberalism, what happens, you get a cycle where marginalized, racially, marginalized students often end up sorted into, you know, universities that have lower rankings and those universities because of their student body composition get fewer resources. And then those who your resources translate into something like tolerable, sub optimization for students that are there. You know, Kelly had mentioned the situation at, at Riverside and Merced was a little different.

Laura Hamilton:
Riverside was had been built in the golden era. It was starting to fall apart. So their problem was like ceilings that are broken and, you know, wires coming outta walls, dirty floors, filthy desks, like buildings that are literally crumbling at Merced the, you know, the campus that was built in 2005. And so it basically always existed under it’s it’s a neoliberal university. It, it never existed in any other period of time. And so the, the policy of tolerable sub optimization, that word is actually a word that was used by administrators during a a webcast to the entire university was really targeted at staff . And they argued that essential, like, because we don’t have essential resources that we need, we’re just gonna have to accept a level of suboptimal operation. And so this, you know, sort of became the policy people actually had, t-shirts made for, to tolerable sub optimization.

Laura Hamilton:
You know, the, the message from administration was, was really difficult for staff to hear, because after saying, you know, we’re gonna have to move our operations to a suboptimal level, they then say, but we, you know, we absolutely up under performance. So they kind of put staff in a catch 22, like, what do you, what is okay, suboptimal, you know, level. And a lot of these staff members, you know, to get into these professions, you know, and the people listening to this podcast be these are deeply committed people who are not getting like highly financial, you know, highly compensated for the work that they’re doing.

Keith Edwards:
And being asked to do less, do more with less constantly

Laura Hamilton:
Right? Yep. And so we spent time looking at advising mental health and cultural programming at UC said all of which are like quite far from sufficient, despite the excellent employees. We’re doing incredible work under these conditions. Just to give you a sense of how, how, how burdened they are student access to academic advisors in the school of social sciences, arts, and human, at Merced where I work, the caseload for an academic advisor was 740 students per advisor during our study, which is two and a half times the national average for a public four year university, and seven times the average of a private BA granting institution. Mental health services were severely overloaded with high caseloads. There were wait times of a month or more. This problem was sort of compounded by being in a healthcare desert, such that the only place for students to get skilled and long term support was on campus.

Laura Hamilton:
The workers were so stressed that one of them said to me that for the DOJ and the local prisons seemed more compelling because the pay was better and the job was less stressful. It’s how bad it got. And our cultural programming effectively consisted of one social justice coordinator who, you know, at that time, there were no centers on campus. This person had to coordinate all of social justice for an entire campus. So these, you know, this is what to tolerable sub optimization looks like it’s happening around the country, but it’s happening more heavily on campus that have higher concentrations of marginalized students. Right? Sometimes when we present this research at a more affluent university, people are like, oh yeah, that’s here too. And I’m like, I don’t think you understand the level. We’re talking about degrees of tolerable sub optimization, and it’s much worse where you have more marginalized populations.

Keith Edwards:
Right. And it it’s the, the confounding of all of these factors. Right. You know, I think there’s a lot of public institutions that would love to get 10% of their funding from the state that sounds robust and luxurious, but they don’t have some of these other confounding factors of very little alumni contribu. They don’t there’s no medical center, that’s generating a lot of revenue. Right? There’s all of these things that sort of sort of becomes this flywheel. This thing leads to this thing, leads, this thing leads to this thing and they all sort of move in this direction. I really appreciate this. I think it gives names to a lot of things we’re experiencing and a lot of things we’re, we’re seeing more, I mean, I’m, I’m just thinking about there’s a piece this week about Hispanic serving institutions and people who are doing great jobs with that.

Keith Edwards:
And people who are giving lip service to that. I’m thinking about, I think it’s UCSB. That’s having this controversy over this residence hall that’s being built with no windows and things because a donor is willing to contribute to it. That’s part of it. And we’re talking about the attacks on, on CRT. We’re talking about the chancellor of Nebraska being attacked by legislators because they have a diversity plan so some, some of these things that are about these two campuses, right? These are, we’re seeing these broadly one more thing that I want to get into before we have to wrap up is you talk about student labor and centers of support and marketing diversity. Tell us a little bit more about this.

Laura Hamilton:
Yeah. So our, you know, our, we argue that our austerity is really linked often to what we call diversity regime. Diversity regimes are sort of affordable solutions to race that are often consistent with anti-affirmative action frameworks because they celebrate all kinds of difference together at the low cost of, of one center or one staff member. At UC Merced, we really saw that play out, right. There was a one cultural logic addressing race. It was a diversity regime where everyone had to be given equal resources, which meant that nobody got much of anything. There was one cultural center. And the problem with this approach is that diversity is a colorblind ideology. It tends to obscure race as a very central system of oppression by focusing on individual identities. So great. You like, you know, you, you ride in the rodeo wonderful.

Laura Hamilton:
You like the skateboard. Great. Oh, you happen be from a working class family. Wonderful. You’re black. So it puts all of these things sort of on the same page. And it doesn’t devote a system at amount of resources to groups that have historically been excluded over and over and over again. Right. So Merced really had this logic that limited the kind of university supports. So what meant, what that meant was that students and staff and faculty who don’t play as what larger role in this chapter, but some of our other work do they pick it up? They do the compensatory work. We call it racialized equity, labor. Labor to make a place comfortable, welcoming, supportive of marginalized groups. And when the university doesn’t provide it, the students do the staff do and faculty do, and it’s uncompensated labor for which they’re not getting paid.

Laura Hamilton:
And it is quite draining. It takes a lot out of the folks who are doing this. In contrast at Riverside, we saw a really large network of cultural centers that were group based cultural centers, serving marginalized groups that worked together and worked separately. You know, they did sort of both types of work and it didn’t take away racialized equity, labor. There were still, students were still doing it, but because the centers were promoting racial equity through the empower supportive groups and providing resources for student organizations, they were providing resources for black graduation. The students could do other types of racialized equity, labor. They weren’t always having to respond in the moment to a crisis, but they could be forward think so they had a town hall, for example, when they brought the police to talk about policing and race, and this wasn’t the result of any particular bad thing that happened on campus, they were being proactive, right. It allowed for that. Right. So you have to have institutions supported infrastructure with deep community ties to allow that kind of student and staff and faculty labored happen and to take some of the burden off those folks.

Keith Edwards:
Well, and I think under that model too, then the, the student and faculty and staff, they’re, they’re doing that connected to a bigger idea. So it’s better integrated where at the UC Merced model they’re just doing it as one-offs like, I think I should do this, and I think I should be doing this and not interconnected. And then Kelly, tell us about marketing diversity.

Kelly Nielsen:
Yeah. Marketing diversity was something that we were building off of the work of of our colleagues like Amy Binder and Lauren Rivera, who had looked at the way that elite campuses like Harvards and Stanfords and others funnel students into elite careers. And this sort of career function is a huge part of what, you know, a university is supposed to be doing it , you know, for better or worse, it’s moving students into the workforce and what you have on a campus when you have a reputation as a campus that is diverse that it is producing a kind of in what at Riverside. And I think everywhere now is sort of trying to call as inclusive excellence. So you’ve got a very diverse, but also a really excellent student body. And you have a demand on the on the corporate side to diversify to create that diversity within the corporate ranks as well.

Kelly Nielsen:
And so there’s a opportunity, a kind of marriage there, right to market this diversity that universities are producing for these corporate positions for these, these roles in the private sector. And so universities forged these partnerships with different industries and different companies and they help students move into these positions and it, UC Riverside, this is very clear. It’s done in a very explicit way where former graduates of that were participants of these graduate of these cultural centers at UC Riverside have moved in. And we look at the case of Pepsi and they had moved into these managerial rules at Pepsi, and then had come back to Riverside to help forge this relationship between UC Riverside and Pepsi. And it was very much explicitly grounded in the diversity of the campus and the role that the cultural centers do.

Kelly Nielsen:
Right. but you know, what we found was that this is a sort of a double edged sword. So they are, these are good jobs, right? They’re, they’re decent, they’re they’re managerial positions. But what we learned from them is that Pepsi is not forming these relationships with USC. It’s not forming these relationships with the UCLA, at least not this part of the company. Right, right. This part of the company, which is managing the warehouses, it’s managing the distribution throughout Los Angeles, right. They’re turning to UC Riverside because they believe that UC Riverside graduates will be grateful for those positions that are in that middle management, those good, but certainly not at the top of the organization positions.

Keith Edwards:
Whereas other schools are marketing their Supreme court justices

Kelly Nielsen:
Exactly. Or to the sort of corporate ladder at financial firms and these other, these other companies. So what they’re doing is they’re saying these graduates are gonna be great because they’ll be able to connect with the communities of color mm-hmm, where they will be working with the communities in the warehouses. And then they’ll be going into the community and, and helping to forge relationships, develop new products and things because of their supposed cultural knowledge. Right.

Keith Edwards:
A more racial segregation.

Kelly Nielsen:
And so we looked at the ways that that is both benefiting these students, but also can be harmful. Yeah.

Laura Hamilton:
And more racialized equity labor for these folks. When they end up in their corporations, they start running the employee resource groups for the black people who are working there as well. So I end up doing uncompensated labor for the corporations.

Keith Edwards:
And the corporation doesn’t have to change cuz these folks are being healthy. Yeah. Well as we knew we would, we’re running out of time. So we need to wrap up this podcast is called Student Affairs Now. And we always like to end with this question, what are you thinking troubling or pondering? Now this might be something because of this conversation or just what’s going on in the world. What’s really with you now. And also if you want share folks can connect with you. So Kelly, you wanna go first?

Kelly Nielsen:
Sure. Yeah. So Laura and I actually just wrote a piece that’ll be, I think it’s gonna be out in Change Magazine soon. And this looks at the relationship between democracy and what’s going on in the new university. And so I think, you know, I, I was very interested in this question of how austerity really has a dampening effect on the democratic possibility for universities. This is part of, I think, a broader trajectory of my own work, which is going towards really growing out of this austerity logic in the way that possibilities really become narrowed by the, the sort of political economic structures. So this is not just in terms of what we think we can do financially, but in terms of democracy what’s acceptable ways of sort of living democratic lives. And so this is an important direction. I think for my work.

Keith Edwards:
I Love it. I you’re taking out on university administration, racial segregation, justice, and not just throw in democracy. Right. Cause you’re taking on all the big challenges. I love it. Thank you, Kelly.

Kelly Nielsen:
Yeah. And you can, you can find me at I I’ve got a Twitter handle it’s Kelly J. Nielsen, all one word so you can find me there.

Keith Edwards:
Yeah. Great. Laura, how about you? What do you what’s with you now and where might we connect with you?

Laura Hamilton:
I am knee deep in contracts with OPMs who are these private providers, often for our public universities that we’re outsourcing our online education too. On that point of growing big, a lot of times campuses are doing that online. And they’re not really providing it, they’re purchasing it. So I’m knee deep in those contracts. I can not be reached on Twitter because I’ve been avoid it. And it seems too, yeah.

Keith Edwards:
Working for you, I guess.

Laura Hamilton:
Yeah. But you can, you can reach me on email. It’s lhamilton2@ucmeed.edu.

Keith Edwards:
Wonderful. Wonderful. Well, thank you both so much. This has been terrific. Congratulations on the book. It’s kind of new. Does it feel probably very ancient to you? Yeah, it’s awesome. Congratulations on the book and thanks so much for taking time to join us on Student Affairs Now. I want to thank our sponsors for today’s episode LeaderShaape and EverFi. LeaderShape partners with colleges and universities to create transformational leadership experiences, both virtual and in person for students and professionals with a focus on creating a more, just caring and thriving world. LeaderShape offers, engaging learning experiences on courageous dialogue, integrity, equity, resilience, and community building to find out more, please visit leadershape.org/virtual programs or connect with them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and linkedin and EverFi for over 20 years, EverFi has been the trusted partner for 1,500 colleges and universities with efficacy studies behind their courses. You will have confidence that you’re using the standard of care for student safety and wellbeing, with the results to prove it transform the future of your institution and the community you serve.

Keith Edwards:
Learn more at everfi.com/studentaffairsnow. Huge shout out to Nat Ambrosey the production assistant of the podcast who does all the behind the scenes work to make the three of us look and sound good. And if you’re listening today and not already receiving our weekly newsletter, please visit our website@studentaffairs.com. Scroll to the bottom of the homepage to add your email to our MailChimp list. You’ll get the latest and greatest every Wednesday morning. I’m Keith Edwards, your host. Thanks again to the fabulous guest today and to everyone who is watching and listening, make it a great week. All thank you both.

Racialized Equity Labor paper in Social Problems