Anti-DEI: A Playbook from the Past
The current anti-DEI movement relies on a decades-old playbook that frames equity programs and policy as a threat to the excellence of colleges, according to new research co-authored by Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy political scientist Quinn Mulroy.
“These warnings of a ‘quality crisis’ are a tool for rolling back equity programs—a political phenomenon we refer to as (e)quality politics,” Mulroy and co-author alumna Heather McCambly (PhD21) of the University of Pittsburgh wrote in the study, published in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.
The study, Constructing an Educational “Quality” Crisis, traces how the concepts of equity and quality became linked and contested in the development of postsecondary education policy decisions between 1968 and 1994 – a dynamic they argue is playing out today in contemporary political attacks on higher education.
“Both then and now, this discourse has served as a powerful tool of racial backlash to civil rights transformations,” Mulroy said. “In the late 20th century, white racial resentment followed from federal student aid policies that expanded access to higher education.
“Today, similar sentiments have emerged in response to the Movement for Black Lives, the proliferation of public-facing university DEI statements, heightened media coverage of postsecondary policy issues, and shifts in philanthropic postsecondary funding priorities.”
In other work, Mulroy and McCambly have found archival evidence showing how racialized understandings of school or student quality can be built into the formation of standards and metrics of the “quality” of a school or student or worker, even if they appear race-neutral and “objective” on their face.
In this article, Mulroy and McCambly show how these standards can later be used as a powerful tool of backlash when equity policies expand access to and increase diversity within schools. Using archival evidence, they trace how policymakers, when faced with claims that the excellence of higher education is under threat, often redirect their attention away from achieving equity goals, and toward the “protection and preservation” of high-status colleges and universities.
“These calls that warn of a “quality crisis” provide a tool for conservative policy actors to then upend and demolish equity policies and programs oftentimes without even mentioning race,” they wrote.
Mulroy and McCambly argue that “revisiting this not-so-distant past” is important because it “can shed new light on what we can learn as faculty, leaders, and advocates with the power to refuse racially regressive policies in the present.”
Mulroy is a political scientist who studies the political development of education, employment, and housing civil rights policies. Her research focuses on how political ideas about what equal opportunity means in America are reshaped and redefined by how policies are implemented.
McCambly is assistant professor of critical higher education policy at the University of Pittsburgh. An interdisciplinary scholar of higher education, she also studies the role of organizations in (re)producing systemic, racial inequalities.
- Read more: Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning The Rise of (E)quality Politics on College Campuses