GSE Colloquium Series in Education & Organizations: Laura Hamilton
The Future of Faculty Diversity: How Public Colleges Respond to the Anti-DEI Movement
Recent state and federal interventions have reversed more than seven decades of legal, professional, and organizational commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion in U.S. public higher education. Drawing on mixed methods data, Dr. Hamilton examines how anti-diversity governance destabilizes universities by targeting organizational values and meaning, not merely discrete practices. Using national data on new tenure-track hires, she shows that public colleges and universities engage in anticipatory compliance with proposed anti-diversity legislation, reshaping hiring patterns, particularly at organizations most dependent on state funding, well before laws are enacted. Interviews with faculty across a stratified national sample reveal how these pressures extend beyond hiring to the systematic erosion of the infrastructure that has supported faculty diversity, from K-12 outreach and college access programs to postdoctoral pathways, recruitment, and retention. Together, the findings advance organizational theory by identifying a distinct regulatory condition—exogenous meaning control—under which compliance produces organizational contraction rather than symbolic adaptation. In public higher education, this contraction may produce potentially enduring losses in faculty diversity and institutional mission.
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.
