2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper provides an empirical grounding and historical perspective on the ways in which grant-funded DEI-focused initiatives in the U.S. are shaped by the institutional conditions. By interrogating these conditions we can move towards a more critical understanding of how a project’s context including motivation, leadership ideology, scaling goals, and administrative backbone may or may not influence potential outcomes. These factors are usually either presented by project leaders in shorthand as “background conditions” for proposed research, barely relevant to the envisioned intervention, or omitted entirely from research design. This deemphasis may have a practical purpose, cordoning off politically sensitive activity amid broader institutional resistance to DEI, but it is an approach that likely impedes change given the endemic character of anti-Blackness, misogyny, and other ideologies still shaping U.S. higher education. To capture the institutional landscape in which DEI initiatives play out, this work examines two NSF-funded alliances (defined as coordinated groups involving multiple 2- and 4-year schools), each designed to broaden participation in a technical field. Both alliances respond to NSF calls to incorporate principles of collective impact. They vary, however, in design, longevity and scale. We will explore the motivation for the work in both cases as workforce driven, in lieu of a more expansive approach that includes workforce but also civic engagement and personal agency. Consequences of that orientation for factors such as Alliance member involvement, leadership structures, and decentralized vs. centralized operation will be examined. We explore all within a framework of how Alliance stakeholders conceptualize outcomes, either embracing the unanticipated or experiencing discomfort with the unpredictable. By examining these two Alliances we can better understand the systemic context in which broadening participation efforts may either mobilize or stagnate against intractable conditions of racism, sexism, and capitalism.