Institutional Responses to Racial Incidents in California Public Higher Education: A Qualitative Historical Document Analysis
Despite stated commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion, racial incidents remain a persistent structural problem on college and university campuses. These incidents encompass a wide taxonomy of racialized harm, ranging from bias-motivated violence and hate symbols to controversial White supremacist speakers, structural inequities, and interpersonal microaggressions. Administrators responding to these incidents must navigate complex, often competing tensions between fostering safe, inclusive learning environments and upholding civil liberties protections, all while operating under intense political scrutiny, public relations pressures, and legal risk. To understand how these tensions are rhetorically managed, this qualitative historical document study examined how California public higher education institutions—encompassing the University of California, California State University, and California Community Colleges systems—publicly responded to campus-linked racial incidents between 2012 and 2020. Using a dataset of incidents identified through Los Angeles Times reporting, the study analyzed 72 official institutional response texts linked to 56 distinct racial incidents. To systematically evaluate this discourse, incidents were organized into an eight-category incident typology (Categories A–H). Additionally, the study identified 23 campus-linked incidents that generated no retrievable public statement, forming the basis for an analysis of archival governance and silent discourse. Critical discourse analysis served as the primary analytic method for investigating the linguistic and rhetorical mechanisms—such as passive voice, nominalization, and register shifts—that institutions used to narrate or erase racial harm. Critical race theory provided the interpretive framework for examining how this discourse reproduced or contested racialized power. Drawing on core critical race theory tenets, including the centrality of race and racism, interest convergence, and the recognition of experiential knowledge, the study examined how institutional language functions as a mechanism of power. The findings are structured through four analytical phases. First, the Typological Analysis revealed a highly adaptable yet ideologically consistent institutional reflex. Across all categories of racial harm, administrators deployed targeted discursive strategies to neutralize threats to institutional legitimacy and preserve operational control. By subordinating moral clarity to legal mandates, law enforcement epistemologies, or procedural compliance, leadership systematically reframed racial violence as manageable administrative events, thereby protecting dominant ideology and marginalizing the experiential knowledge of targeted communities. The second finding, Silent Discourse, examined the 23 campus-linked incidents lacking verifiable institutional response texts. The analysis revealed that silence operates as an active form of archival governance. Through the mechanism of outsourcing to spokespersons, claiming jurisdictional evasion, and creating a shadow archive of internal-only messaging, institutions successfully ensured that specific racialized harms remained impermanent and excluded from official public memory. The third finding, the Cross-Typology Synthesis, identified the portable discursive toolkit utilized across the systems to render racial conflict administratively legible. Through semantic dilution, agent deletion, and the shifting of communicative genres from an academic register to a forensic or managerial one, leaders routinely transformed ideological crises into neutral logistical disruptions, policy violence, or public relations matters. The final phase, the Grand Synthesis, integrated these findings to articulate the study’s central thesis: institutional response operates fundamentally as a form of risk governance. Rather than treating racial incidents as moral ruptures requiring sustaining accountability and target-centered repair, institutions repeatedly framed them as threats to institutional legitimacy requiring administrative containment. This coherent architecture of institutional response is sustained by five interlocking meta-themes: (1) the deployment of a register of non-liability, (2) the operationalization of interest convergence, (3) the policing of civility over justice, (4) the substitution of bureaucracy for substantive justice, and (5) archival governance. Ultimately, this study concludes that institutional language is not merely descriptive; it actively constitutes what becomes publicly legible as racism. While the dominant pattern prioritized reputational protection and liability management over the safety and experiential knowledge of marginalized communities, analytic outliers demonstrating explicit institutional accountability reveal that this evasion is a strategic administrative choice rather than a strict policy constraint. Consequently, this study challenges higher education leaders to abandon the register of non-liability, recognize the violence of bureaucratic neutrality, and transition toward a model of moral leadership and durable, reparative accountability.
Archival governance, Critical discourse analysis, Critical race theory, Institutional response, Racial incidents, Risk governance, Higher Education
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