The Challenge of Institutional Change

Institutionalization is the product of the political efforts of actors to accomplish their ends … the success of an institutionalization project and the form that the resulting institution takes depends on the relative power of the actors who support, oppose, or otherwise strive to influence it.

Sociologists Roger Friedland and Robert R. Alford define institutions “as both supra-organizational patterns of activity through which humans conduct their material life in time and space, and symbolic systems through which they categorize that activity and infuse it with meaning.” [13] The place of digital scholarship associated with racial and social justice can be contextualized within an understanding of the material and symbolic developments of US colleges and universities.

Over the past 50 years, in response to changes in our society and in the interests of the student body, colleges and universities have begun to pay some heed to social movements that have pressed for civil rights and opportunities for those who have long been excluded from the social, economic, and academic privileges that US colleges and universities were founded to bestow upon the white privileged class. With these modest gains, scholars have begun to chronicle the extent to which the history of US higher education has included actions of systematic extraction. After being appointed as the first Black president of an Ivy League university, Ruth Simmons asked the university to turn its tools of analysis on itself; she “charged a Committee on Slavery and Justice with the task of shedding light on the history of Brown’s ties to the transatlantic slave trade and an overview of reparations programs throughout history. Second, she called on the group to organize a series of academic events and activities that might help the University, and the United States at large, think deeply, seriously and rigorously about reckoning with its history of racial slavery.” [14] Since the 2006 report of Brown’s Committee on Slavery and Justice, some colleges and universities have begun to recognize that their involvement and reliance on exclusion and extraction as not an incidental but a central reason for their now well-established place in US and world culture. [15] Some of these institutions, including Brown, have laid out steps toward both recognition and repair of these histories.

While participating in a seminar led by Shelly Lowe, then executive director of the Native American Program at Harvard, scholar/journalists Tristan Ahtone and Robert Lee created Land Grab Universities, a dynamic website/publication of the nonprofit High Country News. In their work, they describe how the Civil War-era investment in public education was not a cost-free federal gift to the states:

In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, which distributed public domain lands to raise funds for fledgling colleges across the nation. Now thriving, the institutions seldom ask who paid for their good fortune. Their students sit in halls named after the act’s sponsor, Vermont Rep. Justin Morrill, and stroll past panoramic murals that embody creation stories that start with gifts of free land. Behind that myth lies a massive wealth transfer masquerading as a donation. The Morrill Act worked by turning land expropriated from tribal nations into seed money for higher education. In all, the act redistributed nearly 11 million acres—an area larger than Massachusetts and Connecticut combined. [16]

Reports of these kinds use the tools of humanistic scholarship to reveal how deeply rooted in systemic inequity the material well-being of US colleges and universities has always been. Gradual changes in the expansion of subjects of study beginning in the last quarter of the 20th century have also sought to alter the long-standing order of the disciplines of the humanities. But effecting change within and across institutions has been slow and piecemeal. Institutions are not built to change; they are built to resist change. The change-resistant fabric of institutions is woven both vertically and horizontally; just as in a tapestry, the vertical threads of the warp are the strongest; vertical organized institutions are a mechanism of change-resistant continuity. The local, vertically organized institutions employ most of the people involved in the work of higher education—faculty and staff—and because of this material power, each college or university has a strong role in deciding what happens and how: campus-based constituencies determine which faculty to hire and reward, how much funding the library will have to support digital projects or build collections in which areas, or what sort of subsidy (and hence what degree of risk tolerance) to provide the university press.

The weft of the tapestry of higher education is drawn by the shared narratives and norms of the communities that reach across the vertical threads of local institutions. While what happens at one campus is undoubtedly shaped by the people, context, culture, resources, and situations of that campus, at the same time, those individuals involved are all more or less involved in trans-institutional communities through which their norms and expectations are shaped. The horizontal communities that connect faculty, staff, and students across institutions play a significant role in shaping the symbolic values of participants in this work: Library organizations may support the building or expansion of standards and software tools; disciplines shape the peer review and reward standards for faculty. The individual vertical organizations do not set their directions in isolation. They are connected both through the markets in which they compete with each other and in the communities through which they share norms, ideas, and values. Substantive change necessarily must infiltrate both the warp and the weft.

A vertical institution is wound tightly to maintain its structure. Changes that seek to adapt the material and symbolic threads run the risk of being entirely excluded or being absorbed invisibly into the existing structure. The structures of the humanities were established in the very early 20th century and have managed to resist—with minor adjustments—changes to their fiber.

Practitioners of digital methods have been insurgents against the established methods of 20th-century humanistic scholarship; scholars investigating topics of racial and social justice seek some share of the power and support that has mostly gone to white Eurocentric humanistic studies. Together, those who use these methods in these fields encounter the barriers of embedded agency, in disciplines, in departments, and in the reward and support structures in and across institutions.

Throughout its focus groups and interviews, the Commission heard of the many ways individuals creating or supporting digital work in racial and social justice became entangled in the powerful warp of their institutions and the difficulties they faced in seeking to change ingrained criteria for rewards.

Richard Cox, Project Director, Digital Library on American Slavery, University of North Carolina-Greensboro:

I can show website hits that are amazing and show how I’m reaching so many more people and this work is impacting lives, et cetera. But, you know, am I getting those citations?

Christopher Warren, Associate Head and Associate Professor of English and History (by courtesy), Carnegie Mellon University:

I was thinking one of the challenges that my colleagues and I have faced is around collaboration. Because so many digital projects involve multiple people, and so much of the model of evaluation in the humanities presumes a single author. It’s tricky with digital scholarship to ask people to kind of untangle their very rich and productive collaborations.

Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy, Director, Punctum Books:

There’s a kind of a loop . . . between the . . . standards a publisher wants to maintain editorially, content-wise and otherwise, and the kind of experimentation it might like to engage in along those lines, and what a tenure and promotion committee would normally expect. And some would say for good reasons, because you’re fostering the work of early career researchers and they need job security. [But] you’re also trying to publish work that’s transformative, field-defining, field-changing, et cetera. But if we stay within that loop, then it’s very difficult for something else, other than the conventional monograph, to emerge.

Jason Fikes, Director, Abilene Christian University Press:

There are fewer and fewer students for all of our schools to have. Universities must learn to market themselves more broadly. If faculty continue to hang on to ... the tenure review process when the impending student cliff is coming our way, the whole tenure process may explode or implode from underneath. Schools and scholars are going to have to start reaching new readers and their writing will need to reach well beyond the scholarly guild.

Academic community members want many things from the humanities. Students may want to figure out who they are and where they come from by studying literature and history; faculty who have advanced through a system that rewards specialized solitary research want to create new knowledge in the manner that works for them; administrators may want to differentiate themselves by attracting grant money to justify the humanities in the same scorecard that they justify the sciences. In a system without a strong sense of unified goals, evolution of what counts can be particularly difficult to change: As sociologists John Meyer and Brian Rowan note, “The more ambiguous the goals of an organization, the greater the extent to which the organization will model itself after organizations that it perceives as successful.” [17]

Unlike a commercial market where varying from the established success stories offers a new firm a potentially rewarding path forward, varying from the established norms in a “market” with ambiguous goals offers only risk. Horizontal institutionalization can reinforce and tighten the sector’s change-resistant fabric. At the same time, inter-institutional or trans-institutional infrastructure can also play an adaptive role. A range of local institutional forces and collective sectorwide pressures creates a strong weave within institutions of higher education that can embrace or resist changes that would adapt to the innovative modes of digital scholars and the outsider content studied by scholars of racial and social justice.

Innovators in the humanities have had home runs. Take, for example, the Colored Conventions Project, a scholarly and community research project dedicated to bringing the history of nineteenth-century Black organizing to digital life, co-founded by P. Gabrielle Foreman and her graduate students, including its current co-director, Jim Casey. In recognition of her leadership, Foreman was named a MacArthur Fellow. She has been recognized and admired throughout higher education. Still, the entrepreneurs who work on the more difficult end of the paradox of embedded agency take significant risks on themselves. As a MacArthur Fellow and first chair of the new department of African and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University, Kellie Jones remarks, “Do that [digital work, publicly engaged work, ambitiously interdisciplinary work] later—do what you need to do to get tenure first. Play by the rules, and then you can make your own rules.” When her students tell her that they want to follow her path, she warns them to be careful. “I have to tell them to know that they’re not doing what they need to do to make it in the academy.” The Commission believes it is time to change what is valued in the academy.

Meredith Evans:

This group [this Commission] should be pushing people to come into the now, because that’s where their student body is. And here’s where you can get those skill sets. And then that shifts and breaks the system. It’s ultimately going to push the tenure process and all the other things that academics ultimately have to think about after they do their great work and then get devalued by the system. Whatever you want to call it, diversity, inclusion, equity, accessibility, belonging, at the end of the day our world is full of a variety of people, regardless of what the leadership looks like. Ideally, there’s all walks of life in this.

As the Commission explored the many aspects of explicit and implicit norms that impact the field, a pattern emerged of support infrastructures essential to the health and sustainability of innovative work in the humanities. In these support infrastructures, both hard and soft, are the channels through which new and equitable solutions can bring about essential change, within and across institutions.