Is our scholarship elevating or hindering transformation and possibility? Conceptualizations of student organizations in higher education

• Date: 22 December 2023
• Pages: 568-584
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-12-2022-0365
• Published date: 22 December 2023
• Author: Rican Vue,Lucy Arellano Jr,Uma Mazyck Jayakumar

Is our scholarship elevating or

hindering transformation and

possibility? Conceptualizations of

student organizations in

higher education

Rican Vue

UC Riverside, Riverside, California, USA

Lucy Arellano Jr

College of Education, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, USA, and

Uma Mazyck Jayakumar

UC Riverside, Riverside, California, USA

Abstract

Purpose –This review addresses how student organizations are conceptually framed in the scholarly

literature—organizations the authors referred to as “ethnicized student organizations”or “ESOs,”which

include both Black Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) studentorganizations and ethnically white student

organizations such as mainstream fraternities/sororities and clubs that are normalized as not having a racial/

ethnic affiliation.

Design/methodology/approach–Critical race theory informs the analysis of 175 articles that address ESOs

from 2002 to 2016.

Findings –Analysis revealed that a majority of scholarship conceptualizes ESOs in ways that can minimize

the role of institutional whiteness where they are positioned as either serving or hindering both individual

students and institutional goals. Findings also reveal a smaller body of literature that emphasized

institutionalized power dynamics and honors the transformative work of BIPOC students through ESOs.

Originality/value –Despite widespread public commitments to diversity among institutions, whiteness

remains a core institutional presence. This study illustrates the relationships among student organizations,

white supremacy and higher education transformation.

Keywords Student organizations, Ethnic student organizations, Greek letter organizations,

Institutional whiteness, Diversity, Transformation, Critical race theory, Higher education

Paper type Research paper

The problem

Despite widespread public commitments to racial diversity by U.S. postsecondary

institutions, a substantial body of research has demonstrated that the enduring dilemma

of racism continues to impact students of color. Historically and/or predominantly white

institutions (HPWIs), even when they have achieved compositional diversity [1], still lack true

inclusivity and liberatory potential. White normativity and racism remain core institutional

presences (Ahmed, 2012;Cabrera et al., 2017;Gusa, 2010;Museus et al., 2015;Nkomo, 2021;

Warikoo, 2016), racist power dynamics remain organizationally intact (Brunsma et al., 2013)

and Black Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) continue to experience ambient everyday-

EDI

43,3

568

The authors would like to thank Kelly Alvarado-Young and especially HyeSu Han for their assistance

with data collection.

Since submission of this article, the following author has updated their affiliations: Lucy Arellano is

at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, USA.

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

https://www.emerald.com/insight/2040-7149.htm

Received 31 December 2022

Revised 22 August 2023

Accepted 4 November 2023

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion:

An International Journal

Vol. 43 No. 3, 2024

pp. 568-584

© Emerald Publishing Limited

2040-7149

DOI 10.1108/EDI-12-2022-0365

racism via unhealthy campus racial climates (Harper and Hurtado, 2007;Ledesma, 2016).

We examine the role of scholarship on student organizations in shaping possibilities for

addressing white normativity and racism in higher education. While we include ethnically

white student organizations in the analysis to explicate them as racialized organizations, we

are most interested in scholarship on non-historically-white ESOs that center BIPOC student

needs toward promoting racial justice.

A decade ago, Shaun Harper’s foundational metastudy (2012) served as a wake-up call

demonstrating how infrequent ly higher education scholarship on racial inequalities,

published in mainstream journals, actually named racism itself as a root cause. Since then,

other higher education scholars have similarly constructed metastudies to understand the

potential of scholarship to intervene on racism (e.g. see Poon et al. (2016) examining framings

of the model minority myth in relation to white supremacy, and Kolluri and Tichavakunda

(2023) interrogating conceptualizations of structural oppression). We were interested in

exploring the extent to which higher education scholarship specifically focused on student

organizations is addressing versus avoiding whiteness: the way that white institutional

structures are not only historically organized around serving wealthy white male students

but continue to reproduce societal hierarchies and norms that fortify white supremacy in the

United States (Cabrera et al., 2017;Nkomo, 2021). Scholarly customs and publication norms

can push the field toward glossing over this deeper cause (Delgado, 1992;Harper, 2012;

Nkomo, 2021), participating instead in the white-centered racism-evasive institutional

rhetorics of “diversity”and “inclusion”that dominate the institutions where we teach. And

when we do this, our scholarship aimed at advancing racial equity on campus can reinforce

an idea of racism as a static, predetermined thing that institutions are heroically trying to

move beyond, rather than recognizing the way racist outcomes continue to be created by

institutions—and the way this has been resisted by people of color within those institutions.

For these reasons, this metastudy looks closely at the literature on organizations created by

and for BIPOC students, often called “ethnic student organizations”or “ESOs.”[2] Students

create the necessary conditions for organizational change (Rhoads, 2016), specifically drawing

attention to BIPOC students as the major energizer of an ti-racist campus efforts (Arellano and

Vue, 2019). As a legacy of the civil rights movement, ESOs responded to the social, political, and

cultural issues facing communities of color (Davis, 1997) and wereinstrumental in theeducation

of BIPOC students in a way that countered the dominant structures and cultivated student

agency. Since the 1960s, when campuses began to diversify, student organizations have been a

means for BIPOC students to organize on campus and push for social change (Chang, 2002;

Montelongo, 2002). As presented in the scholarship, ESOs recruit, engage, retain BIPOC

students, and provide opportunities for co-curricular participation (Astin, 1993;Griffin and

McIntosh, 2015;Guiffrida, 2003;Tinto, 1993). BIPOC students who matriculate at HPWIs

continue to find a number of academic, social, and cultural benefits from their participation in

these organizations (e.g. Gonzalez, 2002;Rhoads et al., 2002;TijerinaRevilla, 2004),largely du e to

the contrast in experienceof marginalization in the largercampus community (Arellano, 2020).

Scholarshave rightly problematizedinstitutionalreliance on students, particularly students

of color, foractivating social justice andthe emotional labor carried by studentswho engage in

this work (Linder et al., 2019a,b). Yet it is unclear whether and how dominant narratives of

superficial diversity progress and white normativity continue to frame the discussion. The

controversyarises, in part, whenscholarly understandingaround the roles of so-calledESOs at

HPWIs retells the dominant story of progress toward or away from “diversity”as

conceptualized from a superficially “race-neutral”point of view that is actually white-

centered,limiting our understandingof the ways that BIPOCstudent organizations“racialized”

as ethnic—or what we name as “ethnicized”—operate in a broader context of white

supremacist power dynamics. We wondered if and how scholarship aimed at intervening on

racism, conceptualizes the complexities of students’racialized realities in white supremacist

Conceptuali-

zations of

student

organizations

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