While universities provide valuable educations, they simultaneously contribute to pervasive miseducation. Higher education institutions are sites of perpetual inequality, where racism, classism, and sexism are necessary in order for it to survive. It is the university’s administrators who are responsible for maintaining a structure with values and practices rooted in exclusion and exploitation. This paper seeks to ethnographically understand the administrative experience in predominantly white (PWI), private, non-profit, liberal higher education institutions in the United States. Due to the fluid nature of roles and responsibilities at small liberal arts colleges, and to maintain the anonymity of my interviewees, administrators in this paper can either refer to a university president or a student affairs staff member. I discuss the findings from my formal interviews, where interviewees disclosed what motivates them to continue doing the work they do at their respective institutions, what responsibilities they are required to carry out in their roles, and how they communicate with colleagues in order to strategize solutions for relevant issues affecting their university. I also synthesize recurring patterns and analyze them in comparison to existing research from scholarly journals and books, podcasts, lectures and conferences, and news articles regarding the administrative experience in American higher education. This paper contributes to the discourse on American higher education by explicitly naming the role of administrators as key agents in the maintenance of an oppressive structure, whose choices made today will determine the sustainability and economic prosperity of private higher education.

In 2020, a global pandemic forced American education institutions to pull all modes of in-person instruction and subject students to tune into remote education. Doing so enabled students and their families to question the need and legitimacy of a higher education. Initial statements coming out of universities focused on convincing their students to stay enrolled, and others focusing on convincing first-years to pay their enrollment deposits. Persuading students and their families to choose them describes the competition between higher education institutions around the United States during the spring of 2020. Consequently, questions regarding which education was worth the tuition price pressured the administration, admissions teams, and even student body governments to articulate the benefits of choosing their respective institution despite the very harmful and real reasons why students should choose not to. The patterns are clear: there are overwhelming concerns regarding finances, housing, and a sense of [un]safety (on-campus and off-campus). Issues of accessibility, technology, and employment are also structural issues that have been exacerbated by the pandemic. But the desperation of administrations to blatantly dismiss these inequalities and carry on unless there is some tragedy or scandal is truly a vexing indication of unsustainability.

Higher education institutions are sites of perpetual inequality, where racism, classism, and sexism are necessary in order for it to survive. Despite tokenizing students on popular social media platforms, forming diversity task forces, and releasing wordy and superficial statements of solidarity promising “better,” the history of institutional change proves itself to be negligible. Time and time again, students, faculty, and staff collectively call for their respective institutions to acknowledge their harmful ways, but university administrators are quick to deflect blame, and instead of taking accountability, they choose to uphold precedent – a structure with values and practices rooted in the basis of exclusion and exploitation.

Although there are studies evidencing and literature explaining the pernicious inequalities in American education as a result of white supremacy, those vested with power – the predominantly white administration that is – within the institution remain deceptively/strategically oblivious, dismissive, and fragile when called upon to address such issues. In sociology and anthropology, such studies tend to focus on the relationships between teachers and students, and usually lack calls to action despite detailed, explanatory analyses on power dynamics. There is also existing sociological and anthropological studies on social inequalities within compulsory (K–12) education, especially regarding the effects of teacher identity on the socialization of children, again but not so much on the role of administrators in such schools. Therefore, this paper seeks to contribute to the discourse on specifically American higher education, with a focus on the role of administrators as key agents in the maintenance of an oppressive structure.

This study took place in the fall of 2020 through the spring of 2021, from Tacoma, Washington where I conducted virtual, formal semi-structured interviews (Bernard 2011) with 16 interviewees. In total, I spoke to about 50 people within American higher education, who are associated with predominantly white, private, non-profit, liberal institutions. I began with recruiting administrators within the University of Puget Sound. Additional subjects from other Pacific Northwest institutions were recruited via “snowball sampling” (Bernard 2011). I asked interview subjects if their colleagues in an administrative role, a staff role, a faculty role, and/or a student role at a predominantly white, private, non-profit, liberal, higher education institution in the United States, who were willing to be interviewed. The subject population within my snowball sample resembles a university’s administration, staff, faculty, and students who hold leadership positions that consult with the cabinet and/or the university’s board of trustees at their respective university. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I conducted interviews via Zoom meetings. Additionally, I had the chance to conduct informal interviews and participant observation (Bernard 2011) at virtual workshops and panels with activists and policymakers from the K-12 and post-secondary realms of the American education system.

I also had the opportunity to serve as ASUPS (Puget Sound’s student body government) President, which granted me the privilege of meeting frequently with students, faculty, staff, administrators, and the board of trustees. Notably, I served on the administrative task force to plan the logistics of the academic fall 2020 semester, which gave me the opportunity to observe and participate in discussions with administrators about the market of private American higher education. Through the presidency, I was tasked with one, directing remote and in-person activities under ASUPS to serve the undergraduate student body of 2,400, and two, overseeing the 2020-2021 budget of $600,000 and funding distribution across key cost drivers. These responsibilities and subsequent work with the ASUPS executive team over the year gave me exclusive insight on the politics of higher education in ways that are not normally articulated and made accessible to students on the Puget Sound campus. Both this information and exposure to administrators on a daily basis were unique to the student government role and proved invaluable to my research.

Although there may have been a tendency to generalize my findings exclusively to the University of Puget Sound, I had interviewees who represented other, yet still comparable predominantly white institutions (PWI) to Puget Sound, across the United States. By collecting those perspectives, I am able to extrapolate the qualitative data outside of the University of Puget Sound.

Who Is Considered Administration?

The following information in this section is based on standards and data collected by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR). Any other sources will be appropriately credited.

CUPA-HR’s Administrators in Higher Education Survey contains statistics on salary, gender, race/ethnicity, age and years in position of administrators at higher education institutions. In its 2020 report, CUPA-HR categorized the administrators they surveyed into six administrative categories in their 2020 Administrators in Higher Education Annual Report, of which I will refer to when discussing the findings from my ethnographic data of the higher education personnel I spoke to for this project. These six categories are all reflected in the range of perspectives of my research: (1) top executive officers; (2) senior institutional and chief functional officers; (3) institutional administrators; (4) heads of divisions, departments, and centers; (5) academic deans; and (6) academic associates/assistant deans.

In the same 2020 report, CUPA-HR also categorized to mid-level professional positions in the following nine categories: (1) academic affairs (e.g. admissions, financial aid, and enrollment management professionals), (2) student affairs (e.g. student success professionals; housing professionals student activities, wellness, and counseling professionals; and cultural, diversity, and equal opportunity professionals), (3) institutional affairs (e.g. administrative professional associates; legal and human resources professionals; organizational development and planning professionals; supervisors of office and clerical, skilled craft, and service and maintenance personnel), (4) fiscal affairs, (5) external affairs, (6) facilities, (7) information technology, (8) research professionals, and (9) athletics. My research includes the perspectives that reflect six of the categories.

Due to the fluid nature of roles and responsibilities at small liberal arts colleges, I will refer to the administration as including both what CUPA-HR considers as administration and as mid-level professionals. Furthermore, to protect the identities of my interviewee’s in this paper, I will not distinguish whether or not a quote or perspective came directly from an administrator or mid-level professional. The interviewees I have spoken to have worn many hats of roles and responsibilities at their respective institution(s), and thus, the analyses drawn from my ethnographic research reflect the main concern at hand – that being the experience of administrators.

Data: Occupations by Race & Gender

The American Council on Education (ACE) is another database that compiled data, which also included that of CUPA-HR’s data. ACE reported that in 2018 to 2019, “the majority of all college and university administrators were White. The share of people of color among these positions ranged from 6.6% among chief development and advancement officers to 26.4% among chief student affairs and student life officers.” These percentages are about the same for race of mid-level professionals on college and university campuses in 2018 to 2019. ACE added “The representation of people of color ranged from 13.7% of all external affairs positions to 31.2% of research professionals, among whom 19.6% identified as Asian, 4.6% as Hispanic or Latino, 4.1% as Black or African American, and 2.9% as another racial and ethnic group.”

As for data on gender, ACE reported that based on their data in 2016, 30.1% of all college and university presidents represented women, and 69.9% represented men. To aggregate the data further, “women of color represented only 5% of all college and university presidents, while men of color represented just 12% (Gagliardi et al. 2017).”

This data not only reaffirms how predominantly white American higher education is, but it also shows that power held in top positions are mainly by men. White men.

Reflexivity & Biases

Finding normalcy is challenging and finding ways to balance all aspects of our lives is a never-ending factor in the social unrest elevated by the racial injustices that made headway through social media from the summer of 2020. Communities, not just at my university, but across the nation were and are still all coping with senses of grief, anxiety, and hopelessness. At the same time, we are compelled to denounce white supremacy as we continue to advocate for racial justice and liberation. As a first-generation scholar, a Filipina-American woman, and avid student leader/activist, I know that the role of education is valuable. Thus, I believe that students, faculty, staff, administrators, the board of trustees at Puget Sound, and any other institution, must be mindful of the approaches we are taking to discuss and practice accountability, empathy, and collaboration. The ways in which these sentiments show up in my interviews are explicit through how I asked my questions.

In this thesis, I review existing literature and studies on the following key areas:

• sociological theories that can be used to conduct analyses on power and inequality in academia (Mead 1934; Durkheim 1964 [1897]; Omi and Winant 1986; Du Bois 1990 [1903]; Star 1999; Edwards 1979; Aneesh 2009; Sklair 2000; Polanyi 2001 [1944]; Firebaugh 2003; Coutin 2010; Dye 2014; Robinson 2014; Melamed 2011; Bonilla-Silva 2010)

• history on higher education in the United States (Connell 1993; McChesney 2013; Bear et al. 2015; Brooks 2005; Fraser 2011; Zakaria 2018; Brooks 2005; Fraser 2011; Zakaria 2018)

• non-profit organization structures, goals, and implications for education-based groups (Polman 2010; O’Reilly 2012; Malkki 2015; Katz 1974; Bebbington 1997; Bleiklie and Kogan 2007; Keeling et al. 2007; Kalargyrou and Woods 2009; Eckel 2017)

• white supremacy culture and the pervasiveness, regeneration, and defensiveness of whiteness (Okun 2021; Oluo 2021; McGhee 2021; Saad 2020; Jardina 2019)

• BIPOC educators have known how to sustain themselves and their students in an academic environment (Baker-Bell 2020; Andrews 2018; Ransby 2016; Hammond 2014; Yosso 2005; Rodney 1990)

• colorblind pedagogy and leadership (Edwards & Hulme 1996; POTUS 2020; Johnson 2020; Palos et al. 2011; Scott 1985; Korczynski 2007; Johansson and Vinthagen 2016)

In grounding my own ethnographic research in these theories and frameworks, what I want to emphasize is that analyses of power and inequality in academia are not new, but they are controversial and heavily suppressed by instititions. Educators, including many of those I have interviewed, are aware of the harmful practices that go on at their private, liberal, predominantly white institutions. They also express that they are aware of the disproportionate opportunities for academic success are that are granted to students at their institutions.

My ethnographic research reveals how the institutional sustainability of liberal, private, predominantly white institutions are dependent on the ways that administrators respond to situations with empathy and create appropriate policy change to account for social inequalities. It is evident that administrators and their peers have the tendency to make excuses for or even deny that institutional inequalities has real, detrimental effects on student, staff, faculty, and administrative retention and their sense of belonging. When administrators speak, whether it be optimistically or pessimistically, about campus climate and institutional changes both being "naturally and incredibly" slow, what they are indicating is that there is an agenda and business model that administrators have to accomplish, and currently enrolled students are expected to just "make it work". This "make it work with what you have" attitude shows up among administrators and their professional staff as well, revealing the lack of support people get when seeking help from their administrators. Additionally, the inclination to ascribe the character and spirit of the school to it's students seems hypocritical at times when administrators say that students are only at their institution for X amount of time and are thus unable to see change through the way administrators can. This statement in itself is vindication that students live out the visions, mission, and goals of the school – or franchise – set out by the administrators and key stakeholders. Literature supports this argument, particularly that students are made to believe they are contributing something meaningful and lasting when their work is actually being used as promotional material for the school's brand (Crain et al. 2016).

As for the ways that white supremacy culture is maintained among administrators, it is colorblind ideology that determines how administrators communicate with one another and respond to their staff, faculty, and students. Paired with respectability politics, in which social niceties are unique to particular regions in the United States, even just mentioning race, gender, and class are taboo in the higher education administrative workplace. This aligns with existing literature asserting that predominantly white administrations in higher education remain deceptively and strategically oblivious, dismissive, and fragile when called upon to address their complicity in upholding white supremacy at their institutions. The interviewees that I talked with, who represent a range of levels in administration, have disclosed to me the very ways both they and their colleagues emulate white supremacy culture, while also projecting it onto their students, staff, and faculty.