Intermediary Public Policy Organizations and the Discursive Evasion of Systemic Racism and Racialized Violence

Abstract

The 2020 health pandemic and high-profile police murders of Black people inspired national conversations about racism and police brutality. This study examined how Intermediary Public Policy Organizations (IPPOs) discursively engaged with the racialized nature of the pandemic and the police murder of George Floyd, which have increased awareness of systemic racism in society. Our discursive analysis of IPPO statements published during these events revealed a pattern of humanizing higher education institutions, race evasive policy proposals, and a lack of policy action addressing systemic racism. IPPO evasion of race is consequential because it has the potential to limit the ability of public policy to dismantle systems of oppression and highlights the need for race-conscious policies to support Black, Indigenous, and people of color students and communities.

Keywords

policy higher education policy racial/ethnic data

On May 25th, 2020, a white police officer murdered George Floyd, an unarmed Black man. Following George Floyd’s murder, protests and organizing intensified around the world as Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) and their allies demanded racial justice and police reform. According to the nonprofit organization, Mapping Police Violence (n.d.), “Black people are 2.9 times more likely to be killed by police than white people in the U.S.” The police murdered George Floyd 2 months into the COVID-19 pandemic, a global event that likewise revealed racial disparities in how the pandemic impacted racialized groups, with Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities experiencing the harshest impacts. Due to these realities, some commentators posited that intensified protests and organizing to end police brutality were connected to the racial disparities that the pandemic drew into national focus, calling these events the “twin pandemics” (Patton, 2020).

Lori Patton Davis (2020) critiqued the “twin pandemics” framing for failing to acknowledge racism’s enduring and systemic nature, writing that:

Racism and white supremacy, a disease rooted in hetero-cis, capitalistic patriarchy killed millions of Black people throughout the transatlantic slave trade which spanned 400 years. The perpetual dehumanization and disposability of Black people is a never ending pandemic that preceded us, and remains with us today through state-sanctioned and other forms of violence.

Patton Davis connected racism to capitalism given both systems’ impacts on Black communities. As Patton Davis asserted, the “twin pandemics” discursive framing creates a dangerous false equivalency between racism and a health pandemic. A pandemic is a natural occurrence with an endpoint; COVID-19 is predicted to become a less-deadly seasonal virus like the flu (Norton, 2020), and is managed through physical distancing, mask wearing, and developing antibodies through infection or vaccination. Conversely, racism is created and maintained by humankind and reinforced by systems, making it impossible to vaccinate against. Racism is thus unnatural, intentional, insidious, and manifested through policies, practices, and state-sanctioned racial violence (De Lissovoy, 2012; Issar, 2021; Squire et al., 2018). Where a pandemic requires a policy and immune response, racism requires a systemic response that disrupts racist policies and practices and replaces them with anti-racist ones (Kendi, 2019).

On March 11th, 2021, the 1-year anniversary of the World Health Organization’s (2020) declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic, President Joseph Biden briefly acknowledged the pandemic’s racialized impacts in a national address, saying “. . .we’ve been focused on serving people in the hardest hit communities of this pandemic, Black, Latino, Native American, and rural communities . . .” (C-SPAN, 2021). Early into the crisis, researchers became aware of the pandemic’s disproportionate impacts on Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color. BIPOC communities are more likely to become infected by and die from the disease due to health disparities and the perpetual stress of racist systems that structure economic opportunity and health outcomes (De Lissovoy, 2012; Gould & Wilson, 2020; Pirtle, 2020). BIPOC are also more likely to be employed as front-line workers and rely on public transportation which increases their exposure (Gould & Wilson, 2020). Steep racial wealth gaps additionally made it difficult for BIPOC communities to weather the pandemic-induced recession (Gould & Wilson, 2020). Unequivocally, the pandemic and George Floyd’s murder underscored how systemic racism has structured the impacts of the pandemic and police brutality, with BIPOC communities experiencing the greatest harms.

We assert that the events of 2020—specifically, George Floyd’s death and the COVID-19 pandemic—created a policy window for policy actors to address both the immediate harms created by the pandemic and the long-term harms experienced by BIPOC communities due to systemic racism and state-sanctioned racial violence (Kingdon, 2011). The racialized impacts of 2020 were also evident in postsecondary enrollment patterns as BIPOC student enrollments dropped sharply at the pandemic’s beginning and remain lower at the time of writing, a phenomenon pointing to the need for race-conscious policy solutions (National Student Clearing House, 2020, 2021).

Amid this backdrop, this policy discourse analysis examined how Intermediary Public Policy Organizations (IPPOs) perpetuate discourses concerning the policy problems and solutions associated with the police murder of George Floyd and the pandemic—two events that increased general awareness of racism’s systemic nature. We were interested in examining IPPOs’ written statements because these organizations—despite being unelected—hold discursive power to frame policy problems and solutions and influence policymakers (Gándara, 2019; Gándara & Ness, 2019; Miller & Morphew, 2017; Orphan et al., 2021). We were interested in understanding what, if any, policy priorities IPPOs identified to remediate the harms of racism before and after George Floyd’s murder and during the pandemic. We respectfully acknowledge and hope to build on the research of BIPOC scholars, and in particular Black women, such as Lori Patton Davis, who have pushed our understanding of state sanctioned racial violence and systemic racism in important ways.

Context and Background

During a national event necessitating policymaker response, policy actors compete to shape public and policymaker understanding about the crisis and to advocate for policy solutions (Birkland, 2011). Policymakers with formal power to marshal resources, enact policies, and distribute benefits or sanctions to individuals or agencies are highly visible actors who make statements and perpetuate particular discourses (Birkland, 2011; Gándara & Jones, 2020; Orphan et al., 2020; Perna et al., 2019). When racialized events occur on a college campus, administrators with power to craft policy often make statements that set the stage for subsequent policy activity and debate (Squire et al., 2019). Squire et al. (2019) showed how institutional statements in response to the Trump Administration’s cessation of DACA expressed anger while invoking campus values and mission. These same statements failed to identify tangible policy changes that would address the harms experienced by DACA-mented students or resist Trump’s executive order.

A less visible but still influential set of policy actors are lobbyists, interest groups, and IPPOs (Kingdon, 2011; Orphan et al., 2021; Supovitz & McGuinn, 2019). IPPOs are often less visible to the public, but have significant power to frame policy debates, articulate problems for policymakers, and identify solutions (Orphan et al., 2021; McDonald, 2014; Schattschneider, 1975). IPPOs have grown in number and influence since the 1960s (Honig, 2004). Higher education IPPOs derive power from their boundary-spanning nature (Savage, 2015) as they “operat[e] between and shar[e] information with four parties—campus stakeholders, including students, staff, faculty, parents, and administrators; the media; the general public; and policymakers” (Orphan et al., 2021, p. 326). Scott et al. (2014) identified four education IPPO types: foundations, think tanks, advocacy and ideological organizations, and membership associations. IPPOs engage in activities related to their missions and memberships. Where IPPOs with institutional members use information to advocate for the interests of colleges and universities, those with state policymaker members infuse non-partisan information into the policy process (Orphan et al., 2021). Ideological and advocacy IPPOs strategically use research to influence policy, and foundations and funders provide financial support to organizations to advance their priorities. Some IPPOs engage in multiple policy activities (Savage, 2015).

IPPOs infuse information they produce, or that is produced by other IPPOs, into policy debates (Natow, 2015; Orphan et al., 2021). This information may be imparted through legislative testimony, policy alerts, public statements, opinion pieces, or secondary research (Gabriel, 2020; Gándara, 2019; McDonald, 2014; Miller & Morphew, 2017). Informational texts produced by IPPOs are important policy discourse artifacts that may compel policy elites’ attention and action. Perna et al. (2019) found that during legislative hearings, policy elites positioned IPPO staff as having comparable expertise to academic researchers, calling on more IPPO staff than academic researchers to testify. Relatedly, Gabriel (2020) found that during legislative debate about policies to support their children with dyslexia, parents often shared talking points developed by Decoding Dyslexia, an IPPO. This research demonstrates the direct influence IPPOs have over policy through given testimony and their indirect influence over the testimonies given by others through the policy texts they produce.

Ideally, Congressional members and staffers infuse empirical evidence into their policy choices when responding to national crises. While we are unaware of research that has examined the informational sources of Congressional members who worked on legislation in response to such events, drawing on prior research we expect that IPPOs played an important role in informing policy elites through their written statements (Gándara & Jones, 2020; Orphan et al., 2020). At the time of writing, Congress had passed four stimulus packages to remediate the impacts of the pandemic (National Conference on State Legislatures, 2021). The stimulus packages earmarked funding for institutions to distribute to students (American Council on Education, n.d.). The U.S. Senate was also considering draft legislation titled “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021” to address police brutality (2021), an update to the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020. The stimulus packages identified student need based on income level but failed to consider how racial identity or systemic racism might create different needs for BIPOC students. To our knowledge, IPPO engagement with race and racism has not been examined thoroughly. One exception is Kovacs and Boyles (2005) who found that IPPOs resisted attributing racial differences in test scores to racism. This finding relates to Harper’s (2012) who found that scholars abstained from naming racism in research about students, instead using euphemisms for racism (e.g., chilly or hostile environments). This raises the question of how IPPOs, as powerful policy actors, advocated for anti-racist policies or discursively engaged in the racialized impacts of the pandemic and George Floyd’s murder? Our study explored this gap in our understanding.

Guiding Perspectives

We conceptualize IPPOs as having unique power to shape policy elites’ understanding of and responses to crises such as a pandemic and state-sanctioned racial violence. IPPOs also share information with postsecondary institutions and their constituents that may shape their crisis responses (Orphan et al., 2021). Thus, higher education IPPOs’ influence in shaping societal responses to a pandemic and police brutality is multi-directional as it targets policy elites with power to shape public policy and postsecondary officials with power to shape institutional policy.

We used discourse theory to conceptualize IPPO influence in 2020, which we posit is derived from their ability to shape and perpetuate policy discourses partly through the texts they produce (Foucault, 1980). In policy, discourses are powerful when used by policy actors to frame reality and rationalize policy choices (Allan et al., 2009; Apple, 2019; Gándara & Jones, 2020; Orphan et al., 2020, 2021). While discourse is reflected in words, it is also revealed in what remains unsaid. Discursive evasion of various topics is an expression of power that prevents these issues from reaching public or policy elite consciousness and debate (Winkel & Leipold, 2016). In the current case, IPPO discourses about COVID-19 and the police murder of George Floyd might acknowledge or ignore the systemic racism these events highlighted, which in turn may influence how policymakers respond.

Many IPPOs advance neoliberal discourses about education that advocate for financial retrenchment, accountability, efficiency, deregulation, and race-neutrality (Bensimon, 2018; Kovacs & Boyles, 2005; La Londe et al., 2015; McDonald, 2013, 2014; Scott & Jabbar, 2014). During a national crisis, policymakers frequently emphasize its impacts on the economy rather than individuals or communities, which scholars have theorized is due to the dominance of neoliberal ideology (De Lissovoy, 2012; Newfield, 2008). Neoliberal ideology assigns social institutions, such as colleges, with the responsibility for strengthening the economy and strips them of their moral, social, and democratic obligation to improve individual and community wellbeing (Shamir, 2008). As this research demonstrates, neoliberal discourses in education policy are pervasive and bi-partisan, and advanced by policy elites and IPPOs alike (Orphan et al., 2020; Trujillo, 2014).

Neoliberalism is a manifestation of systemic racism that promotes individualism at the expense of collectivism and absolves social institutions of their responsibility to address racism, instead assigning social institutions responsibility to strengthen markets and the economy (Apple, 2019; De Lissovoy, 2012; Issar, 2021; Squire et al., 2018). Neoliberal ideology further assigns blame to BIPOC communities for the inequities they experience, attributing these experiences to their own inability to advance themselves rather than to racism’s structural nature (Baldridge, 2014; Squire et al., 2018). These discourses promote race-neutral policies that support the economy and disregard the role of policy in upholding and/or dismantling systemic racism (Clay, 2019). Neoliberal discourses warrant greater scrutiny, since they perpetuate race-evasive approaches to education policymaking, ignore the endurance of racism, and contribute to racialized outcomes for students (Apple, 2019; Dixson et al., 2015; Squire et al., 2018).

While neoliberal discourses are dominant, efforts to address race and racism are largely absent from education policymaking (e.g., Baldridge, 2014; Bensimon, 2018; Felix & Trinidad, 2020; Gándara, 2020). Bonilla-Silva and Dietrich (2011) argued that this is because many white Americans do not see race as a determinant of individual and community wellbeing and, as a result, deny the necessity of addressing structural racism. Policymakers also perpetuate discourses that blame BIPOC students for their challenges rather than acknowledge how structural racism shapes opportunity (Baldridge, 2014). We theorize that the discursive evasion of racism among policy actors is why policymakers tend to craft policy that remediates income disparities while ignoring structural racism (Bensimon, 2018; Gándara, 2020).

Building on the work of scholars who connect neoliberalism to systemic racism, we conceptualize racism as systemic, embedded, pernicious, and expressed in state-sanctioned racial violence and capitalism (Bonilla-Silva & Dietrich, 2011; Squire et al., 2018). We recognize that state-sanctioned violence against BIPOC is a manifestation of white supremacy within a neoliberal society that removes (murders) or punishes (imprisons) those not seen as contributing to capital accumulation or the free market (De Lissovoy, 2012; Squire et al., 2018). State sanctioned violence, then, is often targeted toward BIPOC communities who are viewed as disposable human capital. Regarding George Floyd, this conceptualization of neoliberalism’s racialized violence exposes economic rationality behind the police murdering him as he was, at that time, unemployed and suspected of using counterfeit currency—two activities perceived to threaten capitalism. Neoliberalism is both structured on the exploitation of BIPOC communities (Issar, 2021) and serves to structure BIPOC communities’ social and health realities (Pirtle, 2020). We examined IPPO statements about higher education during the pandemic and protests following the police murder of George Floyd to pursue the following question: How did IPPOs discursively engage with the glaring and palpable systemic racism elevated by the pandemic and police murder of George Floyd?

Methods

To answer our research question, we conducted a race-conscious policy discourse analysis (PDA) of higher education IPPO statements (A. J. Allan & Tolbert, 2019). PDA is a variant of critical discourse analysis focused on policy language—both what is said and unsaid—as well as its relation to social context (Allan et al., 2009). Garnering insights from Bonilla-Silva and Dietrich (2011) and Harper (2012), we explored how and if IPPOs directly addressed systemic racism in their statements, how they advocated for substantive policy solutions to combat systemic racism, to whom they assigned agency for pursuing racial justice and addressing the pandemic’s harms, and how they addressed the racialized harms revealed by George Floyd’s murder by police.

PDA is concerned with the consequences of discourse (Allan et al., 2009; A. J. Allan & Tolbert, 2019). In addition to attending to how language reflects reality, PDA draws attention to how utterances (and silences) powerfully shape the world. PDA provides a framework to analyze the power of IPPOs to influence policymakers (A. J. Allan & Tolbert, 2019; Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012). While power can be defined in various ways, we borrow Clay’s (2019) definition, which centers the role of discourse in producing social realities: “Power lies in the ability to produce narratives about society that supplant all other narratives and to institutionalize these narratives through laws and policies” (p. 81). Because of their influence, IPPO discourses can have broad influence across higher education and “contribute to the production and regulation of truth claims” with lasting effects (E. J. Allan, 2009, p. 31). When these discourses lead to new policies that harm, even unintentionally, the very people they intend to help, PDA calls on researchers to critically reexamine how educational problems are framed and what discourses are necessitated to create just outcomes (Apple, 2019). We designed our study to answer this call.

Data Sources

Our data comprised higher education IPPO statements (policy texts) about the pandemic and police murder of George Floyd, which are important data sources for uncovering the discourses IPPOs perpetuate. To identify IPPOs, we consulted GuideStar (n.d.), a database of U.S. nonprofit organizations which categorizes nonprofits according to subject area, populations served, and number of employees. After initial exploration of the database, we determined most higher education IPPOs are tagged with the subject area “higher education” and the population labeled “academics.” We first limited the sample to nonprofit organizations with this subject area (higher education) and population (academics), which yielded 4,645 results; most of these were postsecondary institutions or their affiliated entities. From this list, we removed colleges, universities, and their affiliated entities; the remaining list comprised higher education IPPOs.

The sample of IPPOs at this stage did not include community-college focused organizations, as they were not always classified by GuideStar as “higher education” for subject area. To include those IPPOs, we filtered the original dataset for the subject “community college education” and population “academics.” This search produced 983 results, most of which were community colleges and their affiliated entities. We removed these institutions and their affiliated entities, leaving only community college IPPOs. We merged the resulting list with our original list. We made two additional choices in constructing our sample. First, we chose to include national IPPOs that focused on state policy, since these organizations also engage in federal policy (Orphan et al., 2021). However, given our focus on federal policy, our sample excludes regional organizations. Our final sample includes 56 national higher education IPPOs (see Supplemental Appendix A). From this sample, we collected IPPO statements related to the pandemic and the police murder of George Floyd by searching all IPPO websites using the following terms: “COVID-19,” “pandemic,” and “coronavirus,” “George Floyd,” “police brutality,” “racial justice,” “racism,” “protests,” and “Black Lives Matter.”

We identified March 11 to June 25, 2020 for analysis. March 11th was the day that WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. That same day, the U.S. Congress responded by introducing the first piece of draft legislation addressing the impact of COVID-19 on college campuses with a policy protecting veteran students’ GI Bill if classes moved online in response to the pandemic (H.R. 6194, 2020). We theorized that these events signaled to IPPOs that further federal action was imminent which would provide them with opportunities to shape subsequent policy solutions. Police murdered George Floyd on May 25th. In choosing the June 25th endpoint, we hypothesized that if an IPPO was going to make a statement, they would do so within a month of the police murdering George Floyd. We found that all but three (AAUP, AUCD, and Lumina) IPPOs that released statements about George Floyd did so between 5/28 and 6/15 (6/24, 6/22, and 6/22, respectively), and just one IPPO released a statement on 6/24 which supported our hypothesis (see Supplemental Appendix B for a timeline of when IPPOs released statements about both issues).

Our search of IPPO websites yielded various content including blogs, event announcements, and newsletters. Since we were interested in policy statements and policy language, we limited our analysis to policy proposals, letters to policymakers, and policy statements. The final sample included 230 statements from 38 IPPOs. Some IPPOs did not issue statements related to the pandemic or the police murder of George Floyd, although they may have signed on to an association’s statement. For instance, the American Council on Education (ACE) released statements signed by numerous other IPPOs. The number of statements per IPPO ranged from 0 (e.g., American College Personnel Association) to 38 (e.g., ACE).

Data Analysis

We employed established methods of coding qualitative data (Miles et al., 2014). Specifically, we co-constructed a coding scheme based on our research questions and guiding perspectives. The original coding list included codes such as neoliberalism, systemic racism, describing crisis, and power/agency to act. Using this original coding scheme, each author separately coded two statements (six statements total). From our individual analyses, we revised the coding scheme by refining or merging categories and adding codes such as institutional harms and race evasion. This process allowed us to calibrate our coding approaches, enhancing consistency in interpretation of the codes across researchers. To strengthen the reliability of the analysis, we discussed questions that emerged during the analysis via email and during data-analysis meetings. Once we completed the coding process, we identified four sub-questions to guide the next phase of analysis, a choice embodying the question-driven nature of discursive analyses (Perna et al., 2019): (1) Who do IPPO statements discursively position as experiencing harm? (2) Who do IPPO statements position as having power/agency to act during the pandemic? (3) What policy proposals do IPPO statements offer to create benefits or remediate harms? (4) Whose interests/experiences do IPPO statements center and whose are ignored? These questions aligned with PDA’s critique of discourse used to assign power, agency, or harms or strip power and agency from people and organizations, while identifying silences (A. J. Allan & Tolbert, 2019).

Author Positionalities

We brought our identities as a Latina and two white women and experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic to this research. While we have all had the privilege of working from home and minimizing our exposure to COVID-19, we are aware that many have not. None of us have personally experienced police harassment or violence, but we are aware of or have witnessed the systemic racism, specifically anti-Black racism, that leads to BIPOC being harmed and/or killed by police officers each year. During this study we employed a critical framework while learning from and building on BIPOC scholars. It is our intention to use this research to disrupt systemic racism and state-sanctioned violence against BIPOC communities by encouraging IPPOs to engage in anti-racist policy work through the discourses they perpetuate.

Findings

Our overarching finding was that IPPO statements discursively evaded systemic racism or the differential impacts of the pandemic and state sanctioned racial violence on BIPOC communities. In the sections that follow, we present our findings as they relate to the four sub-questions that guided our analysis.

Who Do IPPO Statements Discursively Position as Experiencing Harm?

IPPOs discursively evaded the racialized impacts of COVID-19 and failed to acknowledge that BIPOC students were more likely to experience harm, a pattern that was unchanged when police murdered George Floyd. In describing the harms felt by various groups due to the COVID-19 pandemic, IPPOs with colleges in their memberships tended to personify institutions, focusing most on financial harms to their institutional members rather than harms to BIPOC. The Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) stated that it was “of national importance to get colleges back on their feet,” while Association of American Universities (AAU) shared how “research universities are suffering.” Colleges and universities were characterized by ACE as “uniquely vulnerable” to the COVID-19 pandemic due to the financial strains produced by campus closures. AAU claimed research universities were “at the forefront of the fight” as they weathered a financial crisis, while the president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) called for federal funding to “help distressed institutions.” This discourse framed institutions as withstanding the worst financial harms, which overlooks the harms (physical, emotional, and financial) affecting BIPOC students. While AAU discusses the harms to students in this statement, the personification of institutions facing similar, if not greater, challenges is evident:

American higher education is facing unprecedented challenges as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Students are struggling to adjust to rapid changes in their families’ financial circumstances, while institutions are grappling with closed campuses, wholesale shifts in how they teach, and the unanticipated expenses that arise from serving their students safely during a pandemic. . . the total support to institutions provided in CARES will only be equal to around 1 percent of total university expenditures.

The statement goes onto say that higher education “continues to face significant financial challenges heading into fiscal year 2021, including potential” revenue losses.

When IPPOs mentioned people, instead of addressing the unique harms to BIPOC students, the statements tended to highlight the struggles experienced by low-income students during the pandemic. AAU focused on how low- and middle-income students are the most likely to experience job loss. The Council for Opportunity in Education (COE) reiterated this discourse, saying the pandemic created compounding barriers for low-income and first-generation students:

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a crisis across higher education, for both institutions and learners. But these new challenges are coming to rest on old inequities that kept many low-income Americans from attending college or earning a degree . . . We must face the fact that the statistics we track in this report show systemic inequality at every step of the college journey for low-income and first-generation students.

In an AASCU joint statement calling for federal support for students and institutions, the only categories of students described as facing challenges after campus closures during spring 2020 were “low-income, homeless, or foster youth.” This is notable given later language in the same statement asking the federal government to “ensure that these students are not harmed as a result of efforts to protect them from COVID-19.”

The statements IPPOs released to address or respond to the protests following the police murder of George Floyd more explicitly named racial justice, however stopped short of proposing policy actions to address systemic racism. APLU’s executive leaders shared that racial injustice extends past the violent racist incidents shown recently in the media to the “disproportionate devastating impact that COVID-19 is inflicting on the African American community and other communities of color.” Notwithstanding this clear assertion of racism and in particular, anti-Black racism, this statement does not advance tangible policy solutions to address racialized harms. This imbalance is noticeable across statements, especially those by membership IPPOs. When they named racism, membership IPPOs generally called for their member institutions to fight systemic racism, yet failed to address systemic racism prevalent across higher education and within public policy that uniquely shapes the experiences of BIPOC students.

Only three statements addressed the racialized harms created by both the pandemic and state sanctioned racial violence. These statements were released after the police murdered George Floyd and were authored by The National College Attainment Network (NCAN), The United Negro College Fund (UNCF), and the College Entrance Examination Board. Both NCAN and UNCF emphasized their ongoing commitment to advancing racial equity across higher education, while connecting the police murders of Black people to systemic racism impacting Black students. The College Board’s statement was written by self-identified Black employees who were members of a newly-formed internal group called DIASPORA rather than the organization’s executive leader or as a general organizational statement—this was the only such statement in our dataset of its kind. This statement addressed how DIASPORA members have been harmed as individuals experiencing racism as well and described the racial violence they had witnessed:

Our country needs to do so much better. Covid-19 has already taken a disproportionate number of our elders and some of our younger brothers and sisters. Black students everywhere will navigate a harsher future stained by violence and loss. How many more promising futures will be lost in the days, months, and years to come?

By centering low-income students, or generalizing harms created for “the most vulnerable students” (AAU; ACE; APLU), IPPOs avoided discussing the racialized nature of COVID-19. While many IPPOs referenced systemic racism in statements regarding police brutality following George Floyd’s murder, none addressed the realities faced by Black students and BIPOC communities in subsequent or prior statements and policy recommendations.

Who Do IPPO Statements Position as Having Power/Agency to Act During the Pandemic?

IPPO statements addressing COVID-19 largely situated themselves as having agency to be a mouthpiece to convey institutional interests and concerns about the pandemic to policymakers. In letters to lawmakers, membership IPPOs often began by stating that they were writing on behalf of their members who would benefit from the outlined proposed policies. A joint letter to the U.S. House of Representatives signed by six IPPOs including UNCF, American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC), and Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU), exemplified IPPO tendency towards member advocacy. The letter opened by stating that the IPPOs were advocating for their members that receive federal funding as minority-serving institutions. ACE, which frequently issued letters co-signed by other associations, reused variations of the phrase “On behalf of the undersigned higher education associations” to address lawmakers. By signaling the large number of associations co-signed on letters, ACE expressed agency in convening postsecondary groups to advocate for specific policy proposals. In a letter addressed to its membership, the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT) updated members on how ACCT had been advocating for institutions to the federal government:

ACCT is also working with [American Association of Community Colleges] to advocate strongly at the federal level in the interests of member colleges and your students. We are working with state community college associations to identify the most pressing needs, and we are communicating those needs to federal legislators and agency officials with the greatest urgency.

IPPOs assigned power and agency to federal lawmakers to address the harms experienced by postsecondary institutions due to the pandemic by passing legislation and issuing guidelines to protect institutions that the IPPOs supported. IPPOs managed up by signaling that the federal government had the “sole ability” (AAU; ACE; APLU) to address financial harms facing higher education institutions caused by COVID-19. Strikingly, these statements did not assign responsibility to policy elites or institutional leaders to dismantle systemic racism.

The IPPO statements that mentioned harms to Black communities in response to the police murder of George Floyd shared a discourse of managing down to postsecondary institutions which assigned power to institutions rather than policy elites to address racism. IPPOs also promised to stand in solidarity with Black communities, or more often, communities of color in general, and work on their internal cultures rather than make direct appeals for policy change. For example, Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) urged members to speak out against racism, while signaling solidarity with Black communities and focusing on realigning their mission with equity:

As an organization with a primarily white staff that serves a primarily white community, AASHE has committed to centering racial equity and social justice as part of our strategy and operational practice. While we have found that this work is challenging and uncomfortable, we believe that it is the only way we can meet the needs of our stakeholders and serve our mission.

While IPPOs have multidirectional influence on institutions and policymakers, the lack of IPPO advocacy for federal policy solutions to state sanctioned racial violence is striking. By assigning power to fight systemic racism to postsecondary institutions, IPPOs relieve themselves and policy elites of agency or responsibility to promote anti-racist policy.

What Policy Proposals Do IPPO Statements Offer to Create Benefits or Remediate Harms?

In statements addressing the impacts of the pandemic, most IPPOs seized the policy window to promote pre-existing policy priorities, such as increased postsecondary funding and reduced regulatory oversight. Overwhelmingly, IPPO statements addressed the perceived shortfalls of the CARES Act in supporting the financial solvency of public colleges and ensuring long-term financial support for students. ACE described the relief funds provided by the CARES Act as “inadequate” to meet the broad needs of institutions. ACCT expressed a similar view, saying the CARES Act provided the “bare minimum” needed to stabilize community colleges. To supplement the funding distributed by the CARES Act, IPPOs requested additional federal funding. These proposals pointed to the financial needs of institutions and students but requested funding for institutions to distribute to students rather than direct payments to students, which creates fewer barriers to aid. These statements positioned institutions as having greater financial need than students and as holding the power to fairly distribute student aid. In a statement addressing Congress, APLU shared how institutions required federal financial support to continue their educational mission:

Financial stability is essential to accomplishing all aspects of public universities’ mission and delivering on their commitment to students . . . Public universities are economic engines, civic centers, and an immense community resource. We urge Congress to take swift action to support and protect public universities.

This statement’s description of postsecondary institutions as “economic engines” represents a neoliberal discourse that was pervasive throughout IPPO policy proposals that positioned the economic contributions of colleges as especially important considering COVID-19 impacts to local and national economies. As large employers and workforce developers, IPPOs painted postsecondary institutions as a key to returning “our nation to normalcy and a robust economic state” (AASCU). In this discourse, funding would serve the needs of institutions and students while uplifting a distressed economy as “institutions are economic drivers that will be at the forefront of efforts to revitalize the economy and put people back to work” (State Higher Education Executive Officers Association).

IPPOs also saw a policy window to relax regulations for postsecondary institutions. Membership organizations representing minority-serving institutions, like HACU, proposed relaxing regulations on Higher Education Act funding so institutions could exercise greater flexibility in allocating emergency funds. Other membership IPPOs requested leniency “from existing rules that hamper colleges’ ability to manage operations under these unusual circumstances, access to federally subsidized credit for institutions, emergency changes to tax laws, and technical corrections on recently enacted legislation that exclude the public sector” (AASCU). These statements also proposed making colleges eligible to receive small business relief loans and excluding student workers from employment numbers to qualify for such loans.

IPPO statements following the police murder of George Floyd called for solidarity and mentioned harms caused by systemic racism for Black communities, but these statements seldomly advocated for policy or systemic changes which was a striking departure from COVID-19-focused policy texts that advocated for specific policy solutions. The Association of University Centers on Disabilities (AUCD) published the greatest number of statements addressing the police murder of George Floyd. These five statements included an official response to the police murder of Floyd and subsequent updates on organizational actions. The remaining IPPOs published between zero to three statements addressing systemic racism following George Floyd’s murder, with 12 IPPOs failing to issue any statements on the subject. IPPOs in the latter group tended to have fewer statements (between one and five concerning COVID-19) except for ACE which had the highest number of statements (38) with none of them focusing on the racialized impacts of the pandemic or police brutality. Just 36 of the 230 IPPO statements addressed the police murder of George Floyd.

Apart from American Association of University Women (AAUW), AUCD, and UNCF, IPPO statements failed to engage with how campus policing may be a site of racial violence, a seemingly obvious focal point given student protests about this issue. As members of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, AUCD and AAUW signed a joint letter calling for “meaningful police reform legislation” that ranged from prohibiting no-knock warrants to creating a national public database of police officers with complaints, revoked licenses, and terminations. In a separate statement, AAUW committed to “work to advance the policies and systemic changes” presented in two Leadership Conference reports on policing and public safety, however details on these reports were not given. In contrast, UNCF released the only statement to endorse the Justice in Policing Act of 2020 with the intent “to hold police accountable, change the culture of law enforcement and build trust between law enforcement and our communities.” Unlike other IPPOs that stated plans to realign their mission to support Black communities in statements responding to George Floyd’s murder, UNCF reiterated its original purpose to advance racial justice for African Americans:

As the nation’s largest and most effective minority education organization, UNCF is as committed to that mission as it has always been. Subsequently, UNCF fully endorses the “Justice in Policing Act of 2020.” There has never been a time for systemic racism; but today is the day that UNCF roots out and seeks to eradicate the scourge of discrimination, like many others who have marched and protested recently.

By failing to leverage their influence and relationships to policy elites to propose policies addressing systemic racism, most other IPPOs evaded the racialized impacts of the pandemic and police brutality. Instead, the discourse represented in statements addressing systemic racism centered IPPOs own missions and internal actions to address organizational culture and delegated actions that postsecondary institutions must take to create a more equitable system.

Whose Interests/Experiences Do IPPO Statements Center and Whose Are Ignored?

IPPOs highlighted the impacts of COVID-19 on institutions and students throughout statements about the pandemic, but the harms to and experiences of institutions were consistently centered over that of students and communities. One way this was evident was through IPPOs discourse humanizing postsecondary institutions by assigning them human feelings or actions, such as colleges being “distressed” (AASCU) or how universities were “deeply engaged in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic” (AAU). In this way, IPPOs humanized campuses and systems, either situating the harms to institutions as being equal to those experienced by humans or emphasizing the financial needs of institutions over the holistic needs of people.

IPPO tendency to personify institutions was evident in policy proposals requesting emergency federal funding. When IPPOs mentioned students, they were often used as leverage for increased funding for institutions. This discourse was present in statements describing the financial fallout of COVID-19 for institutions if federal support was not allocated. AASCU asserted that if higher education continued to lose funding, local communities and the national economy would suffer:

Without adequate federal support, many institutions will be forced to make the type of financial cutbacks that would harm surrounding local and regional communities. A number may well be forced to shutter completely, crippling local economies just as we’re hoping for a recovery.

The harms experienced by BIPOC students during the pandemic were less prevalent in IPPO statements. When IPPOs mentioned students, they described them as lacking power to shape policy or respond to the pandemic. IPPOs also showcased local communities as lacking agency by situating institutions as “lifelines to their communities and students” (ACCT) that are “critical” (AASCU) for the revitalization of those very communities. American Indian College Fund (AICF) was an exception to how IPPOs portrayed communities, as the president described in a statement how Native communities were responding to COVID-19:

. . . I feel most is a deep swell of love and pride as I see all Native communities responding to this crisis. We are doing what our ancestors have always done – we are rising to this crisis with generosity, determination, innovation, and courage. History would also tell us we will not be defeated, and I see that in action everywhere I look.

When IPPOs mentioned students and local communities, outside of the AICF example, they continued to evade race. This was present in statements addressing the need to financially support DACA, immigrant, and veteran students after the CARES Act failed to do so, even though these statements failed to mention the impacts of racism or state sanctioned racial violence on these groups. Additionally, one Excelencia in Education statement quoted program partners connecting the value of supporting DACA and undocumented students to their economic contributions that furthered a race-evasive, neoliberal discourse. The president and CEO of Achieving the Dream stated that the ability for DACA and undocumented students to earn a college degree would “improve their economic mobility and their prospects for the future,” while another program partner asserted that excluding these students from CARES Act funding would decrease “opportunities of a large number of students who we are relying on for the health of our economy and democracy.”

The differential impact of the pandemic and state sanctioned racial violence on BIPOC was not prevalent in IPPO descriptions of the students experiencing harm in need of policy intervention. Instead, vague, race-evasive descriptors were more common across statements addressing both COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd. For example, “the most vulnerable students” (AAU; ACE; APLU) were highlighted as those in need of support during the pandemic, without details on who made up this population. Complete College America (CCA) used a similar descriptor to discuss how the pandemic heightened the inequities among “vulnerable student populations.” This statement was used as a call to action for CCA and higher education institutions to “capitalize on this trying moment.” Statements addressing the police murder of George Floyd recycled race-evasive language that prioritized the pursuit of “justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion” (AGB) without centering the inequities specifically faced by Black people. These examples of race-evasive language and the tendency to leverage students to advocate for increased institutional funding perpetuates a discourse that fails to assign power to or center the lived experiences of BIPOC communities or directly address their holistic needs.

Discussion

Policy discourse analysis examines what is spoken and unspoken (Allan et al., 2009), and calls researchers to expose and examine “hidden relations and effects” (Apple, 2019, p. 278). Our overarching finding was that IPPOs discursively evaded race in their policy statements about COVID-19, preferring instead to focus on the financial harms experienced by institutions and low-income students. In doing so, these organizations failed to leverage their connections to policymakers to advance anti-racist policies. Many IPPOs issued statements expressing outrage about the police murdering George Floyd and acknowledging systemic racism; however, these statements stopped short of making policy recommendations, thus failing to seize a policy window to advance racial justice (Squire et al., 2019). Subsequent IPPO statements following George Floyd’s murder by police continued perpetuating race-evasive discourses.

To demonstrate the harms experienced by institutions, IPPOs discursively personified colleges and universities, using phrases like “suffering” and advocating for policies that would help institutions “get back on their feet.” Many IPPO statements, particularly those made by IPPOs whose members were postsecondary institutions, advocated for funding for institutions before advocating for funding for students. By advocating for institutional funding before student funding, IPPOs discursively centered institutions over people and created additional steps that further complicated access to and the distribution of financial aid, which is shown to create significant barriers to college access and persistence—particularly for low-income and BIPOC students (Scott-Clayton, 2015; White & Dache, 2020). Additionally, IPPO statements not only personified postsecondary institutions but they also centered their rights, needs, and harms over that of BIPOC students and communities.

IPPO discursive centering of institutions is a manifestation of neoliberal ideology that prioritizes the economic potential of institutions and responsibilizes policymakers to ensure institutions are free from regulation and flush with resources with which to ensure capital accumulation and economic vitality (Shamir, 2008). IPPOs commonly couched the rationale for increased funding for institutions in the financial harms they had experienced that threatened their ability to generate economic and workforce development. By emphasizing the economic contributions of colleges at the exclusion of their broader societal responsibilities, IPPOs discursively ignored the roles of postsecondary institutions and public policy in dismantling racism. While unsurprising given that neoliberalism assigns responsibility to social institutions to strengthen the economy and ignores their role in improving civic life, equity, and racial justice, this finding is deeply troubling (Apple, 2019; Giroux, 2014; Shamir, 2008). By personifying college campuses, IPPOs perpetuated race-neutral policies focused on supporting institutions rather than understanding how students might face differential impacts from the pandemic and police brutality due to their race (Kovacs & Boyles).

The framing policy actors use for public problems leads to specific policy solutions (Schatschneider, 1975). IPPO emphasis on the financial harms experienced by postsecondary institutions leads naturally to the need for government intervention in the form of financial relief. In this framing, the problems created by the pandemic are purely financial and solvable with money. This discourse is firmly rooted in neoliberalism which ties policy to economic and financial solvency that requires market-based solutions rather than systemic solutions that dismantle racism. By failing to make tangible policy recommendations following the police murder of George Floyd, IPPOs disregarded the state’s role in perpetuating racial violence.

When IPPOs mentioned students, they paid most attention to the harms experienced by low-income students, veterans, and undocumented students. When IPPOs discussed low-income students, they emphasized the likelihood that they had lost their jobs or had fewer financial resources to draw from which meant they merited financial support. IPPOs advocated for postsecondary institutions to be conduits for student aid which gave colleges power to disperse funding and left students to navigate campus bureaucracies to receive aid. Only a few IPPOs with explicit racial justice or identity-based missions advocated specifically for BIPOC students, describing the unequal impacts these students experienced due to the pandemic. Otherwise, IPPOs discursively evaded the pandemic’s racialized impacts on students.

When mentioning undocumented students, IPPOs tended to situate their worthiness for policy intervention within their earnings potential, a discourse rooted in neoliberalism which assigns merit to communities and individuals based on their economic potential (Clay, 2019; Squire et al., 2019). An economic argument for supporting undocumented students fails to acknowledge the systemic racism many face which merits disruption regardless of this community’s economic contributions. Such a discourse also raises some disturbing questions: what would happen if the economy no longer required the labor of undocumented workers? Would this economic reality end the imperative to educate undocumented students? This finding relates to that of Gándara and Jones (2020) who found that during Higher Education Act reauthorization legislative markup, policy actors described Dreamers as important contributors to the economy. By describing undocumented students as meritorious due to their economic potential, IPPOs eschew a moral argument to address systemic racism faced by these individuals.

IPPO statements assigned agency and power to themselves and others in interesting ways. IPPOs expressed agency to advance their existing policy priorities, using the pandemic as an opportunity to do so. One policy priority shared by many IPPOs was deregulating postsecondary institutions to enhance their agency to navigate the pandemic, which relates to Orphan et al. (2021) finding that IPPOs with institutional members were largely focused on reducing regulatory burden on their members. IPPO statements often assigned agency to postsecondary institutions to address the economic and health harms created by the pandemic. At times, this agency was rooted in an institution’s research mission and ability to advance innovations that would lead to a vaccine. In other cases, IPPOs assigned institutions agency to support workforce development and regional and national economic wellbeing. Discursively, though, this agency was hamstrung by the seemingly dire financial straits these institutions were in which IPPOs assigned policymakers agency to address. Strikingly, IPPO statements failed to assign agency to postsecondary institutions to address systemic racism, instead giving institutions agency to address their local institutional cultures. This finding relates to that of Harper (2012) who found that education scholars often recommend supports for BIPOC students rather than recommending that institutions dismantle racist policies and practices. In their discursive evasion of race, most IPPOs described BIPOC students as being “vulnerable” rather than naming their racial identities or describing the cultural wealth they possess (Yosso, 2005).

In statements about the police murder of George Floyd, IPPOs assigned themselves and postsecondary institutions agency to offer trainings for staff members about racism and bias. With few exceptions, absent from these statements was any discussion of how institutionalized racism and police brutality were revealed through George Floyd’s murder. By privatizing racism and discursively treating it as a personal, localized problem of individuals and organizations rather than a systemic problem, IPPOs advanced a race-neutral policy discourse (De Lissovoy, 2012).

Implications and Recommendations

Critical policy analyses are meant to “challenge the dominant forms of policy . . . that generate and/or reproduce inequities” (Apple, 2019, p. 285). Our analysis prompts implications for the roles of IPPOs and public policy in addressing state sanctioned racial violence and systemic racism. Regarding policy, the pandemic and the police murder of George Floyd surfaced racism’s systemic nature. Policy responses to the pandemic or other national crises will thus be inadequate unless they consider how particular racial groups are uniquely impacted by systemic racism. To that end, we encourage policymakers to design racially conscious and antiracist policy solutions in close partnership with affected communities.

IPPO discursive evasion of race also implicates the possibility of postsecondary policy to remediate racialized harms elevated by the pandemic and police brutality. IPPO tendency to discursively situate harms faced by students via their income status rather than race could lead to policy solutions that address income disparities but fail to remediate racism (Bonilla-Silva & Dietrich, 2011). Such tendencies could in turn threaten the success of BIPOC students as policy solutions addressing racism’s systemic nature remain elusive. For example, IPPOs could have advocated for a review of campus police forces to understand their racial demographics and the incidence of racism—we saw little evidence of them doing so.

Many educational policy regulations are intended to protect students from fraud, abuse, and discrimination. The desire of IPPOs to deregulate higher education also implicates the ability of policy to hold institutions accountable for various student outcomes, including addressing the education debts¹ institutions owe BIPOC students due to systemic racism (Bensimon, 2020). By using the pandemic as leverage to reduce regulatory oversight of postsecondary institutions, IPPOs advanced a discourse that institutions do not need such regulations. Yet, research demonstrates that students of color have education debts which indicates that institutions are not serving these students well and need to be held accountable. We recommend that policymakers avoid reducing regulations on postsecondary institutions, particularly during global crises.

We are also concerned with the tendency IPPOs exhibited to center the needs of low-income students over that of BIPOC students. The hardships faced by low-income white students are meaningfully different than those faced by low-income BIPOC students. This reality points to the need to explicitly name and address the double bind of racial and class oppression low-income BIPOC students face as both Harper (2012) and Bonilla-Silva and Dietrich (2011) asserted. Moreover, by failing to name the racial identities of BIPOC students and instead describing them as “vulnerable,” IPPOs are advancing a deficit-based discourse about BIPOC students that strips them of their agency and community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005).

By failing to acknowledge systemic racism, IPPOs assigned agency to postsecondary institutions to address their own racist cultures rather than crafting policies to dismantle systemic racism. This discourse allows IPPOs to wield power as intermediaries in response to both the COVID-19 pandemic and police brutality by managing down to institutional members while absolving IPPOs of responsibility to advocate for anti-racist policies at the federal or state levels. Higher education leaders may have a role to play in pushing IPPOs to center race and address systemic racism in their policy texts given than many powerful IPPOs have institutions in their memberships and these IPPOs cater to their members’ interests (Orphan et al., 2021).

The IPPOs that produced race-conscious policy had explicit missions to advocate for BIPOC, identity-based groups, and minority-serving institutions. As all too commonly happens in education advocacy, then, the burden fell to those who are personally subject to systems of oppression to advocate for change without the partnership or support of other IPPOs. We encourage all IPPOs to claim their power and responsibility for advocating for anti-racist systemic change. IPPOs are advantageously positioned to do so given their intermediary role.

Our findings additionally create implications for future research. Our analysis was limited to March 11 to June 25, 2020 and relied on publicly available documents. As such, our study had time and data limitations that future research could address. To that end, we hope future research will involve qualitative interviewing of IPPO staff members to understand their rationale and goals in releasing policy statements during crises and how they conceptualize their roles in advancing anti-racist public policies. Future research might also extend beyond our time period of analysis to understand how IPPO perpetuated policy discourses change over time.

Scholars often define IPPO types along lines of missions and constituent bases, with four types identified: philanthropy and foundation IPPOs, membership IPPOs, advocacy IPPOs, and think tanks (Scott et al., 2014). We propose a fifth IPPO type that merits future research: IPPOs that explicitly advocate for policies that address systemic racism for BIPOC. We would include UNCF, AICF, AUCD, and HACU in this typology. We encourage subsequent researchers to examine how IPPOs with explicit missions to advance racial equity advocate for anti-racist policies and an end to state sanctioned racial violence.

We have advanced the use of race-conscious neoliberal theory that interrogates how the neoliberal project connects with the project of racial domination. We did so by drawing on the work of BIPOC scholars who have theorized the racial impacts of neoliberalism (e.g., Baldridge, 2014; Patton, 2020; Squire et al., 2018, etc.). We also connected race-neutral higher education public policies, and the role of IPPOs in promoting them, to the dominance of neoliberal ideology in postsecondary policy. We encourage future researchers to reject the race-neutrality of some theoretical accounts of neoliberalism and instead use theorizations of neoliberalism advanced by BIPOC scholars that historicize racism’s connection with the capitalist project. Such analyses hold the best hope for addressing systemic racism in education and advancing anti-racist public policies.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-epx-10.1177_08959048221120279 – Supplemental material for Intermediary Public Policy Organizations and the Discursive Evasion of Systemic Racism and Racialized Violence

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-epx-10.1177_08959048221120279 for Intermediary Public Policy Organizations and the Discursive Evasion of Systemic Racism and Racialized Violence by Casey McCoy-Simmons, Cecilia M. Orphan and Denisa Gándara in Educational Policy

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-2-epx-10.1177_08959048221120279 – Supplemental material for Intermediary Public Policy Organizations and the Discursive Evasion of Systemic Racism and Racialized Violence

Supplemental material, sj-docx-2-epx-10.1177_08959048221120279 for Intermediary Public Policy Organizations and the Discursive Evasion of Systemic Racism and Racialized Violence by Casey McCoy-Simmons, Cecilia M. Orphan and Denisa Gándara in Educational Policy

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Damani White-Lewis, Eric Felix, and the peer reviewers for their thoughtful feedback which greatly strengthened this manuscript. As three women who all navigated various stages of pregnancy during the lifespan of this research, the authors dedicate this work to their children.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Cecilia M. Orphan

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

Author Biographies

Casey McCoy-Simmons is a PhD student of Higher Education at the University of Denver. Her research examines higher education policy with a focus on how state policies address racial inequities in postsecondary access and attainment.

Cecilia M. Orphan, PhD, is an associate professor of higher education at the University of Denver and Director of Partnerships for the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges. Her research examines postsecondary policy and finance and regional public universities.

Denisa Gándara is an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy at The University of Texas at Austin. Her scholarship examines higher education policy and finance with particular attention to groups historically underserved in higher education.

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