Democracy’s Experiment Station

In Short

• The evolution of University of California, Riverside shows that institutional whiteness, in demography, policies, and practices that assume a white “typical” student, blocks the potential for democratic higher education.

Combating institutional whiteness requires substantial investments in campus infrastructure and culture as population shifts.

• The logic of fiscal austerity in higher education developed around the same time that students of color gained greater access to predominately white institutions.

• Austerity pushes universities to rely on private sources of funding that are not as readily available to schools that serve socioeconomically and racially marginalized students.

• Meeting the goals of Higher Education for American Democracy will require the radical redistribution of postsecondary resources.

According to the authors of Higher Education for American Democracy, the role of education in a democratic society “is not merely to meet the demands of the present” but to “serve as an instrument of social transition” (p. 6). Education for democracy had to be “a primary aim of all campus living and, more important still, of every phase of campus life” (p. 9). The report’s authors believed a renewed democratic spirit cultivated by a fully democratic higher education system would engage “the passionate loyalties of youth” (p. 13). They emphasized equal freedom, rights, and opportunity along with equity, justice, and the pursuit of happiness for all the nation’s people, vital for “the making of the future” (p. 6). A democratic university should therefore be a living model of democracy that could embody the civic ambitions of a nation.

Our focus here is on one such model: the University of California, Riverside (UCR), in the last decades of the 20th century. UCR is a particularly useful example of democratic higher education and its limits. Its founding as an elite, predominately white university constrained the explicit democratic aims of the young institution until an environmental disaster depopulated the campus and created an opportunity to remake UCR into a more inclusive educational enterprise.

Yet the steady defunding of public higher education that began in the late 1960s in California and nationwide would eventually undermine the school’s democratic gains. Universities like UCR have become increasingly dependent on private sources of revenue and are subject to market forces that limit their capacity to pursue democratic ends. We argue that a phenomenon we call institutional whiteness, and the ideological–financial project of austerity are antidemocratic forces that have shaped higher education in recent decades. Universities’ pursuit of the ambitious democratic ideals articulated in the Truman Commission has been severely compromised in the process.

Our year-long (2016–2017) ethnographic study of UCR examined the workings of all campus units, from finance to facilities, academic advising to cultural centers. Historical and regional analyses helped us make sense of current conditions, as well as past and future trends shaping the university and its environment. We observed where we could—including student orientations, protests, social and cultural events, diversity programming, classes of interest, faculty town halls, and group-specific graduations. We also analyzed video footage and media coverage of relevant events. We conducted 46 interviews with university employees including current and former chancellors, vice provosts, deans, faculty at all ranks, and staff in a variety of units. We also interviewed 28 primarily Black and Latinx students, including student leaders. What we discovered offers a keyhole glimpse into the larger racial and financial politics shaping higher education throughout the United States at present. Considering UCR in detail helps us identify what a more democratic higher education could look like, how we might get there, and what might stand in the way.

From Exclusion to Austerity

UCR opened in 1954 on the grounds of the University of California Citrus Experiment Station. It began its life as a liberal arts college envisioned as the “Swarthmore of the West,” situated in a then prosperous farming region east of Los Angeles known today as the Inland Empire. At the inauguration for the UC’s newest campus in 1954, the words of UC president Robert Sproul echoed the Truman Commission. Dedicating a new institution in the “worried days of the mid-century,” Sproul laid out a vision of collective purpose and political will in which UCR would teach “the art of living together, of how to harness primeval instincts into lives of harmonious emotional stability … as governments of man across the globe seek the formula for peace and friendship.”

Yet UCR could not fully live up to the Truman Commission’s charge to foster “harmony and cooperation among people of differing races, customs, and opinions” (p. 8). It was a predominately white university (PWU) in a racially segregated higher education system, and as such could not grant equal opportunity to the marginalized groups it excluded. Despite the end of formal segregation with the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, UCR, like other historically white universities, remained a PWU. The campus displayed institutional whiteness; those who occupied the campus (students, as well as staff, faculty, and administrators) were white, and policies and practices both implicitly and explicitly assumed a white “typical” student.

By the early 1960s, UCR had become a research university like its UC peers and, with no formal distinction between UC campuses, was set to grow in size and status. Like other universities of the time, UCR was generously supported as part of the Cold War science machine. The state provided ample infrastructure for research and graduate education. As former chancellor Ivan Hinderaker (1964–1979) recalled in a 1998 interview,

The buildings were all in line before I got here. … In other words, that was a stated commitment, and obviously the campus needed this to get to graduate work. … So, they were ready, and the groundwork had been all set, certainly before me.

In these heady years of sustained public investment, UCR was well positioned to grow as a major research university with abundant resources—but it still included very few students of color.

The affirmative action movement, a product of civil rights–era struggles to desegregate higher education, offered remedial action for structural inequalities in access to educational and employment opportunities, like those visible at UCR and across the larger UC system. The federal government issued racial representation benchmarks for students, faculty, staff, and governing boards, and universities admitted some students of color as proactive exceptions to general patterns of enrollment. Although affirmative action is an imperfect response to barriers that have blocked racially marginalized groups from accessing research universities, the historical record is clear that this set of policies was responsible for the largest movement of Black students into historically white research universities.

Race-based affirmative action began at UC in 1964 when the number of eligible applicants exceeded the number of available admission spots. Access for historically underrepresented students to UC was part of a broader political movement that came to be known as the Free Speech Movement (FSM). The FSM was a response to a directive by UC president Clark Kerr that the university could not be involved in outside politics. The FSM began in 1964, the same year that Berkeley began to admit historically underrepresented students through affirmative action.

The FSM and affirmative action became targets of a growing conservative movement represented by Ronald Reagan. In 1966, Reagan campaigned for governor on a promise to tackle student activism at Berkeley and evoked racial fears about liberal, often non-white students, who were portrayed as out of control, ungrateful for their education, and explicitly politicizing a supposedly apolitical academic domain. At UCR, student activism was more subdued, but it violated the Kerr directives nonetheless. Riverside’s Chancellor Hinderaker, known colloquially as “[Governor] Reagan’s Chancellor,” forced the resignation of vocal leaders on the student council.

Once governor, Reagan responded to the FSM with riot police and fiscal discipline, using the police and the UC budget as political tools. Reagan would cut the UC budget and propose tuition as both a way to make up for austerity-induced financial shortfalls and temper student protest. In 1970, the UC Board of Regents approved its first tuition charge—a move that would have long-term consequences for democracy in higher education and one that cannot be viewed outside of racial politics.

This move preceded the 1972 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA). The reauthorization provided postsecondary funding in the form of grants and loans directly to individual students, rather than to universities. Economists praised the “freer play of market forces and challeng[ing of] public subsidy patterns,” as Lawrence Gladieux and William Wolanin put it in a 1976 monograph. States could more readily withdraw support for higher education and offload financing to students and families, incentivizing universities to raise tuition.

The end of the FSM and the freer play of market forces did not, however, mean the end of affirmative action. Throughout his governorship, Reagan negatively portrayed students enrolled under affirmative-action programs as undeserving of admission. He whipped up anti–affirmative action sentiment that came to a head in the 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case, which ruled that quotas or enrollment spots reserved for members of particular racial groups were unconstitutional, even as it allowed consideration of race in admissions. After ascending to the presidency, Reagan accepted state postsecondary desegregation plans that did not meet the representation benchmarks laid out by the Federal Office of Civil Rights. Reagan pledged to overturn policies mandating what he perceived as “federal guidelines or quotas, which require race, ethnicity, or sex … to be the principal factor in hiring or education.”

The austerity and anti–affirmative action political agenda of the Reagan years came to a head in the 1990s. First, the 1992 HEA reauthorization created a full-blown student loan crisis by subsidizing and encouraging federal loan provision through private lenders. Also, one of Reagan’s many anti–affirmative action appointees to the Department of Justice founded the Center for Equal Opportunity, which collaborated with UC regent Ward Connerly on California’s Proposition 209 referendum. Prop 209 prohibited state employees from considering race, sex, or ethnicity in university admissions, with the intent of blocking affirmative action. Other states would subsequently adopt similar bans.

The Transformation of UCR

The transformation of UCR into a potential model for democratic education occurred in the wake of the major changes outlined above. Ironically, for UCR, the demise of affirmative action propelled astonishing demographic and cultural change that arguably well served the goals of democratic access to higher education—only later hitting the wall of austerity politics. Understanding how and why this once predominately white university quickly came to serve majority enrollments of Latinx Californians, and increasing numbers of Black Californians, provides insight into the larger political forces shaping higher education in recent decades.

Riverside very likely would have continued to grow on the same trajectory as its sister UC campuses were it not for environmental degradation. As the Inland Empire developed a largely industrial and low-wage service sector economy, air quality worsened dramatically. In 1971, Riverside’s Mayor Randall Lewis requested that the region be declared a disaster area. The smog crisis of the 1970s captured the national imagination. According to the New York Times, Riverside sat “squarely at the intersection of two ‘atmospheric sewers.’” Media outlets around the world published photos of Riverside joggers wearing gas masks. In 1975, the school abandoned its football program due to a lack of attendance at games. By 1979, UCR had 25 percent fewer students than 8 years earlier. Chancellor Hinderaker, who experienced the dramatic shift in his campus’ fate, recalled that the campus nearly closed. “You can imagine the gloom that is produced in a period like that,” he would later explain.

In 1980, the earliest year we have data on the racial composition of the student body, white students constituted 74 percent of undergraduates at UCR, even as the racial composition of the surrounding community and the state was steadily changing. As the sociologist Victor Ray argued, the whiteness of an organization is important because resources tend to consolidate among dominant groups, and PWUs have more resources than organizations with large proportions of underrepresented racially marginalized students. Historically underrepresented racially marginalized students include Black and Latinx students, as well as students from some Southeast Asian groups, Native Americans and Alaskan Natives, and Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders. In the United States, these students have experienced systematic economic and educational barriers. These students are more likely to be from low-income families and the first in their immediate families to attend a 4-year college. In a society where resources flow through racial and class hierarchies, the whiteness of UCR in its early years was almost certainly instrumental to its survival.

The crisis, however, marked a turning point for UCR. A new surge of enrollment that Clark Kerr famously called “Tidal Wave II” included large numbers of historically underrepresented students. In its wake, the UC Regents slated the underpopulated campus for massive expansion. The passage of Proposition 209, which banned affirmative action in California, further cemented UCR as the research university for California’s racially marginalized students, as more prestigious schools could no longer pursue racial affirmative action. Enrollment of racially marginalized students at more selective schools fell precipitously—by more than 50 percent between 1995 and 2002 at Berkeley and UCLA—while enrollment swelled at UCR.

The surge at UCR was also due, in part, to improving high-school graduation rates and rising numbers of racially marginalized youth meeting the requirements for admission to the competitive UC system. It was also helped along by UC’s move to a “multiple filing system” that allowed applicants to apply to as many campuses as they wished, dramatically increasing UC applications. The UC referral pool then redirected applicants who did not get into their top choices to UCR, even if they had not specifically applied there. Almost overnight, UCR had access to a much larger pool of students. Many of these students were racially marginalized due to racialized inequalities in K–12 education that left them less formally qualified in competition for admission.

By 1995, Asian students, many of whom were underrepresented and racially marginalized students, comprised the largest group of undergraduates. Latinx students on campus also began to grow rapidly, eventually overtaking Asian students in size while the Black student population gradually increased, peaking in 2009 at 7.9 percent of the student body. By 2016, and during our study, the transformation from a PWU was complete due to declines among white students and skyrocketing increases among Latinx students. White students comprised only 12 percent of the student population, while Latinx students topped 40 percent.

The combination of environmental catastrophe, political backlash against racial affirmative action, and changes to the UC admissions system combined to lay the groundwork for UCR’s experiment in democracy. By drastically changing the demographics of the student body, these conditions created the possibility for greater equality of opportunity and democratic community among California’s myriad ethnoracial groups. But the changing composition of the student body is only a necessary, not sufficient, condition for democracy in higher education. A university can retain institutional whiteness, even as student demographics shift, if the culture, resources, and overall structure of the university continue to disproportionately benefit white students and disadvantage racially marginalized students.

UCR’s experiment, however, went beyond racially diversifying the student body. It combined resources aimed at supporting these new students with a cultural shift that made their successful inclusion part and parcel of the university’s identity. Of central importance was the development of racial and ethnic cultural centers. In 1972, at the height of the smog crisis, African Student Programs (ASP) and Chicano Student Programs (CSP) opened their doors. These cultural centers were later housed in Costo Hall, named after local Native American scholars and activists and close friends of Chancellor Tomas Rivera (1979–1984). Rivera was the first Latino leader of a major research university in the United States and played a mentorship role for the few Latinx students on campus at the time.

ASP and CSP are a result of collaborations between student activists, university allies, and communities of color. There are also strong connections to group-based programs of academic study. The cultural centers are a thriving source of creative and intellectual energy on campus to this day. They are grounded in and facilitate social activism, starting from the movements in which they have their roots. ASP and CSP do the collective work that is needed to shift racial dynamics within the organization, as well as push back against larger social structures.

The project reaches well outside the bounds of the university. As one director noted, “The work revolves around [the students’] needs and, not just theirs, but the community. Because we are part of the community. Because we are working with the community.” Black Graduation, an event organized with extensive support from ASP, is a clear example of the relationship between higher education and the community. As a UCR administrator explained, it was initially designed to be “a celebration of achievement of [an] individual as well as a community. For every one of these students who graduated … it was another opportunity that came to that community.”

UCR’s identity-defined centers do not stop at collective commemoration. Making changes also means calling out discrimination and protesting university policies. As one staff person pointed out, “I couldn’t work here, I couldn’t do my job successfully, if I wasn’t engaged in the politics of our students. My role is not to cultivate activists. It is for our students to be engaged and to know, to whatever level they would like to know, the issues in our community, but also the successes.” This was evident in the support that ASP gave to the Black Student Task Force (BSTF), a student-led effort grounded in the larger Black Lives Matter Movement. The task force was formed at UCR after the Black Student Union protested in solidarity with Black students at the University of Missouri. Because of this event, the president of the UCR BSTF explained that ASP helped organize meetings with administration “in which there was a discussion about our needs, and those needs turned into demands.”

Today there are eight such centers in total, working with their respective communities and together as an influential collective campus constituency. They enable not only the prefigurative and transformative aspects of democracy that were so essential to the Truman Commission but also bring students from different backgrounds together. As one center staff member described, “We now have up to eight ethnic and gender offices in our familia. We’re able to collaborate so effectively together.” Centers shared funding streams to support each other. They cohost events, which were also frequently intersectional.

The centers work in close collaboration with students. This is clear in how staff discuss what programming is offered and how it is organized. For instance, ASP staff told us that they “really give students the [opportunity to] … plan out [large events]. They’ve made the decision to change the name to My Black Excellence and are … putting the Pan-African lens on the student experience, putting students through workshops that will help them understand more [of] their Black culture.” In this way, the centers truly engage the “passionate loyalties of youth” at the center of a vision for a democratic future in Higher Education for American Democracy.

The influence of the centers has been facilitated by a broader campus culture that supports racially marginalized students at UCR. The student population grew rapidly during the 1990s under the leadership of Chancellor Ray Orbach (1992–2002). As Orbach recalled, “[When I became chancellor], my job was to ensure that [the UCR] campus developed.” The smog crisis had subsided, but the damage to the school’s ability to recruit was done. Orbach would need to look for a new student population to fill the campus. He found them in the surrounding geographic region whose population had grown tremendously during the 1980s and become much more Brown and Black in the process. Orbach actively sought out these constituencies—poor and working-class communities of color in the Inland Empire—to maintain the enrollments that would keep UCR’s doors open.

Orbach’s outreach efforts were unique for the time. “Almost every week the chancellor rides the circuit of the region’s high schools,” the New York Times wrote with a mix of enthusiasm and skepticism in a feature on Orbach and UCR in 1998. Orbach personally spoke to students and their families. In a canny move uncommon at the time, he passed out thousands of booklets in English and Spanish that helped families of middle- and high-school students understand the requirements for UC admission and how to obtain financial aid.

It worked. As Orbach later recounted, “With that, the campus grew, and it grew in a wonderful way. We were able to bring students who not only had no one in the family who had gone to college, but they hadn’t even thought about it. These were first-generation students, and they were marvelous. They were hungry. They worked as hard as they could. They did, I thought, beautifully.”

Persistent whiteness at UCR had been a consequence of relying on a colorblind notion of merit that had excluded the students Orbach pursued. Considerable social-science evidence demonstrates that merit—typically assessed via a combination of test scores, high-school performance, and extracurricular activities—bears little relationship to college performance. Instead, it has been a mechanism of exclusion since the end of explicit racial segregation in higher education. For example, University of Texas (UT) at Austin archives show that just 2 weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education outlawed racial segregation in education, administrators were passing notes about “how to exclude as many Negro undergraduates as possible.” Eventually UT at Austin’s Committee on Selective Admissions realized that white incoming students had higher aptitude test scores than Black students. They noted that a cutoff “point of 72 would eliminate about … 74% of Negroes” and recommended that the university president work with other state schools to establish similar test-based protocols. By abandoning the framework of merit that had been used to maintain whiteness in elite colleges and universities nationwide, Orbach paved the way for students who would have otherwise been treated as unworthy of a UC education.

Orbach realized that continuing to draw racially marginalized students to UCR, and keeping them there, required shifting commitments. The university needed to undergo a transformation. As an administrator involved with Orbach’s outreach noted, “When Chancellor Orbach started this we, in fact, were changing culture.” A major part of this task was getting everyone on the same page. He led by example. Each morning, he would walk across campus with his wife, Eva, and pick up trash because the campus “was a godawful mess.” Once a month, Orbach held a public Q&A called “Rapping with the Chancellor,” where he “would stand up in front of the [campus’s iconic] bell tower with a microphone and students could say whatever they wanted.” When a student complained about how long it took her to get from the parking lot to the campus, Orbach said he would park in the same lot for the rest of that academic term.

The growing student body also “created a lot of tension and friction with the faculty,” said one administrator, because of the perception that “these students were not prepared to be here.” A faculty member who arrived at UCR the same year as Orbach remembered the chancellor’s insistence that “[w]e have these students now; we have to educate them. Now we have to do right by them.” Faculty needed to recalibrate their teaching around the strengths and needs of the socioeconomically and racially diverse community the campus had become, which required additional work for faculty members who were used to teaching narrower demographic slices of young people. Here, too, Orbach led by example. As he explained, “They knew that I was … teaching freshman physics. I wasn’t separated from them.”

Orbach believed UCR “could carry out a [UC research] mission at the highest quality level and in a community that was poor. A community that needed help.” As a senior administrator who had been a doctoral student at UCR in the late 1980s suggested, “I’m not sure that anybody was articulating that vision [yet]. … I don’t think that we achieved this because we looked at anybody. I have to go back to Chancellor Orbach because of his commitment to providing access.”

Thus, under Orbach, what has come to be known as “inclusive excellence” was happening, without being articulated as such. It was a living model of democracy that expanded access to UC and strove for equal opportunity for all UCR’s students. Over time, this democratic spirit took hold. An almost religious fervor around the idea of serving marginalized students and their communities came through in almost every interview we conducted with university employees of all racial backgrounds. As one high-ranking official, and a person of color, noted, “Part of the satisfaction that comes from here—the term I use is that we have a righteous mission. … People don’t necessarily use that language, [but] I think they feel that.” Orbach’s democratic experiment had worked.

Hitting the Wall of Austerity

UCR’s democratic experiment worked so well that it ultimately brought national recognition. In 2015, Robert Reich, former secretary of labor under President Clinton, visited UCR and heaped praise on the university: “I don’t think there is any institution of higher education of this degree of prestige and excellence that has this large a percentage of undergraduates who are Pell Grant eligible. So, you have here what I would hope will be cloned across the country; an institution that really does provide opportunities.” A year later, in 2016, Ted Mitchell, former undersecretary of education under President Obama, visited UCR and praised the achievement of parity in graduation rates across racial and class groups. UCR began to appear at or near the top of university rankings that made social mobility a key criterion.

However welcome, the praise was also long delayed. As one faculty member put it to us, “Whatever new accolades and recognitions are coming to UCR now began and matured many years ago.” In fact, by the time the accolades arrived, the democratic experiment appeared to be running its course. The campus was no longer able to evade pervasive fiscal austerity. In a 2016 town hall one faculty member after another expressed concerns over deteriorating infrastructure and the lack of resources to serve their students. As one passionately articulated:

A world class university is not one in which new students arrive without housing accommodations, face panic with course registrations and financial aid or attempt to get appointments with overburdened advisors and staff. It is not one in which students come to class stressed out because they’ve spent an hour or more trying to find parking. And it is not one in which students avoid the restrooms, if at all possible, because they are, in my students’ words, disgusting. Only then to go into classrooms with broken furniture, missing ceiling tiles, dust encrusted air vents, wires coming out of walls, floors covered with dirty footprints and leaves, and filthy desks and chairs. They have to contend with unstable Wi-Fi access because the system is over-burdened, and several student centers are overwhelmed. The message students get is that once they … have contributed to UC-Riverside being named a Hispanic Serving Institution and recognized as one of the most diverse campuses in the nation, is that it is then unimportant that they, at a minimum, receive instruction in adequately appointed labs, classrooms, and lecture halls. This is not world class; it is third class.

By 2016 the infrastructure that Orbach secured had fallen into disrepair because of diminished financial support from Sacramento and Oakland. And, as the faculty member noted, that diminished support has racialized consequences on a campus that serves outsized numbers of historically underrepresented Californians.

The cultural centers at the heart of UCR’s cultural transformation were also underresourced and unable to continue supporting students in the same way. As one staff member described it, “[The] center has been staffed in the same way, shape, and form that it was in the ‘90s.” As the campus has grown in size, simply maintaining existing infrastructure was not sufficient. Another staff member remarked, “Support and the investment in the center has not grown to be able to support the large number of Chicano/Latino students who have, since the existence of CSP, grown to be [the largest share] of the undergrad population.”

Decaying infrastructure and underfunded cultural centers are a consequence of the austerity that began under Governor Reagan. The decline in public funding has been gradual but steady. Today, underfunding is a taken-for-granted way of life for administrators in public higher education. UCR’s current leadership built their careers at a time when austerity was deeply entrenched and part of the common sense of university governance, even more so in the wake of the Great Recession that began in 2008.

They embraced beliefs central to austerity, including the common sentiments that innovation and expert management can always enable doing more with less, and that government support is more a discretionary privilege than a right or civic obligation. As one top UCR administrator passionately explained, “The model that got us here is not going to be what gets us into the future.” The idea that “we have to dig our heels in and tell the state, the public, the legislature, the governor and so on, that we can’t do any more until they give us more money” is misguided because “we’re not as rich of a country as we thought we were.” This is a telling statement for a public official in California, a state encompassing the vast wealth of both Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

For university leaders under the sway of austerity logics, private revenues—from out-of-state tuition, revenue-generating services, corporate partnerships, philanthropic organizations, and donations—are the favored solutions. In practice, this means growing the student body to increase tuition revenue without providing sufficient infrastructure, shaving money from teaching to support research, assigning a market cost to every university activity, a hyperfocus on cost cutting, and monetizing as many assets as possible. These efforts are especially damaging for student populations that rely on the university for resources that have been systematically denied to their families and communities.

A turn toward private-market strategies will never work for majority-marginalized universities like UCR. These universities simply cannot compete for every dollar with majority-advantaged universities, which have large endowments to reinvest, intergenerational ties to the politically powerful, and access to the wealth of white and affluent families. Indeed, as a recent report by the Institute for College Access & Success indicates, in 2018–2019, universities with 40 percent (or more) Latinx students had nearly $4,300 less in per-student revenue than other schools located in the same state. Austerity leads to an almost singular focus on colorblind market dynamics. Yet, under these conditions, it is immeasurably harder to model democratic living or inspire the passions of youth. This was Reagan’s vision for American higher education, not the Truman Commission’s.

The impact of the Truman Commission was evident at UCR’s inauguration, as UC’s President Sproul expressed hope for democratic cooperation fostered by American higher education in the troubled days of the Cold War. The FSM, which brought questions of civil rights and access for racially marginalized students to the UC, along with affirmative action in college admissions, promised a correction to the antidemocratic exclusions of the past. Yet the conservative reaction with Ronald Reagan at the helm used austerity and racist attacks on affirmative action to maintain the whiteness of higher education.

Thus, it is remarkable that UCR became a living model of the vision laid out by the Truman Commission, beginning in the last decades of the 20th century. The confluence of events that marked UCR’s development from the 1970s to the 1990s created an opening for a more democratic university that can serve as an example of a different, more democratic future. This means abandoning frameworks of merit that exclude racially marginalized students, building strong centers of support for historically underrepresented groups, creating a culture that puts the success of underserved students at the forefront, and guaranteeing high-quality postsecondary infrastructure to everyone. Direct governmental support and funding priority should be given to public universities serving higher proportions of in-state residents, racially marginalized groups, and low-income students. Radical redistribution is necessary for democracy and a return to public education, with a public mission. 

Additional information

Funding

William T. Grant Foundation;

Notes on contributors

Kelly Nielsen

Kelly Nielsen is a Senior Research Analyst at the Center for Research and Evaluation in University of California, San Diego’s Division of Extended Studies. He is a coauthor of Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities and has published his research in the journals Sociology of Education, Theory & Society, Social Problems, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and the Journal of Classical Sociology.

Laura T. Hamilton

Laura T. Hamilton is Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. She is a coauthor of Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities, author of Parenting to a Degree: How Family Matters for College Women’s Success, and coauthor of Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality.