2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Two graduate students, holding underrepresented identities, in academia, developed and ran a summer educational access program supporting local first generation and/or low-income (FGLI) high school students hosted at a well resourced university with an espoused commitment to community engagement, equity and inclusion. Originating from conversations with faculty on their struggles with recruiting high school research interns in an equitable manner that did not erase the presence of underrepresented students, the two students demonstrated, to relevant faculty for their work, the potential to leverage the university’s resources and community partnerships to support local FGLI high school students in gaining access to these research opportunities. Despite their extensive efforts over the course of two years and their measurable successes in demonstrating the efficacy of their program model in its first iteration, the program was not given the institutional support needed for a second iteration and left rendered obsolete by its host department. This paper presents a critical self-reflective auto-ethnography of the two graduate students in concert with a third party sociology scholar studying how university mechanisms interact with its individual decision makers influencing the design, implementation and resulting efficacy and sustainability of university programs designed to address academic inequity and injustice. In it, we begin at an assessment of the university’s loose organizational structure and garbage can decision making process that leaves opportunities, within the university’s administrative framework, for implementing solutions that challenge the status quo in the hands of individual university decision makers and their commitment to the solution. We highlight how university norms prime an aversion to these kinds of solutions. In particular, we point out how these norms also offer individual university decision makers sanctuary to circumvent critically assessing their complicity with not challenging harmful and/or ineffective normative solutions despite the decision maker’s agency and social capital to do so under the guise of “institutional culture”. Building on social identity theory, feminist social theory, and critical theory, we further leverage the auto-ethnography to present how these norms dichotomize individual decision makers into privileged decision makers with no personal consequence associated with the university issue at hand and afflicted decision makers who will be affected regardless of the chosen solution. We connect these theories to the experiences of the two graduate students and discuss the consequences of the dichotomy on the efficacy and sustainability of educational equity programs to challenge individual university decision makers of every rank to accept the responsibility of dismantling and interrogating harmful norms in their academic institutions.