Initially entering a student affairs program, I had assumed I knew about organizational structure and how resources were managed within an institution because I was a former student activist. However, much to my chagrin, I was mistaken. As a student activist, I had made a career out of knowing who was in power at a university and why marginalized students did not have adequate support and resources from the administration. Although, being in the position I was as a student and not having a “seat at the table” per se, I held a partisan view of who held actual power within an institutional setting and my views on reallocating resources and creating transformational change was shortsighted and underdeveloped.
Within this program, I am grateful I have been exposed to the complexities enveloped within trying to deconstruct different departments on campus to be able to envision and rebuild a more equitable structure. While incorporating the tenets of critical race theory (CRT) during one of our Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) classes, Dian had us complete an exercise that involved the cohort to deconstruct the racialized policies and procedures that exist within the Office of Admissions at Iowa State. Ultimately, we never reached a conclusion on how to solve the issues we had named. Yet, this activity was the first time I had to think about the different elements involved with decision-making and oppressive practices. Additionally, this provided me with a critical understanding on how departmental operations work and that perhaps the answer to these problems would be more complicated than I had originally theorized.
In this past semester, we were required to take the program’s course on organizational structures and administrative policies. This class was short of excitement, though, it offered my valuable information and knowledge on how a university functions and allowed me to critically analyze how institutions make funding decisions. In one of our classes, we were discussing the financial impact of budgets as it pertains to student support and Dian mentioned, “Budgets are a moral document.” And with this statement, my understanding about administrative power had become amplified. This made me acknowledge the importance of capital within a university and provided me with strategies as a future professional to persuade administrators to become stakeholders in funding resources for marginalized students; meaning, most times we will not be able to convince people in power to make decisions solely based on compassion. Instead, we must motivate them by building a strategic rhetoric around monetary resources while developing comprehensive proposals to present to administrative staff for approval. We must also be able to build coalitions within university political infrastructures to garner further support for our initiatives.
Moreover, rather than constantly concentrating on how an institution is an intricately interwoven web of bureaucracy and how it would be almost impossible to provoke large-scale change, Dian pushed us to think about how we can still agitate systemic structures on an individual scale. He captured the theoretical abstract that is, creating institutional change, and forced us to reflect upon it in tangible ways. For example, one of our assignments included creating a short proposal (less than 1000 words) that addressed an organizational or procedural issue within a university. The issue had to be narrow enough to which if we wanted to propose this change to the administration, it would not be wholly unrealistic to implement. My proposal focused on how applications for admission should not require asking for one’s sex-assigned-at-birth seeing as this question can be viewed as trans-exclusionary and problematizes university statistics and demographics because it conflates sex with gender.
From my research on the issue, I discovered that both the Common Application and the Universal College Application have added a section that allows for potential students to clarify their own gender after answering the question about their sex. Arguably more inclusive, this change still falls short because it still requires transgender students to disclose their sex to the admissions office even though that is no longer how they identify. Additionally, the university will still use these demographics to statistically evaluate campus climate through a bi-gendered lens which is perpetuates trans erasure at academic institutions.
At the end of the semester, we were meant to choose an organizational issue within a department, analyze the problem, and provide a empirically-based solution for our final project. After interviewing a financial aid consultant within the office, a student worker, and the director, we had decided to focus our attention on Iowa State’s Financial Aid department and their inefficient communication structure. Our proposed solution was to implement a one-stop shop system in place of the siloed dynamics currently in place within the departmental structure. This project involved us examining institutional context, scholarly research and examples, while also thinking through potential timeline, physical barriers, and financial implications enveloped within our imagined proposal. It showed me the intricacies and difficulty involved with trying to implement even the slightest changes within university structures.
Conclusively, as university policies and dynamics shift over time, my strategies to implement change and deconstruct hierarchal power must also adjust. Certainly, at any institution I decide to work professionally, I will have to invest my intellectual labor in understanding the organizational and administrative powers of the campus to fully determine who holds power. In addition, I will have to dedicate my time to building relationships with different individuals from various departments on campus to build cross-partnerships and coalitions so I am heavily supported when it comes to creating structural change and distributing resources. I have come to accept that I will have to do this within every university environment, but hopefully, the more I network then the closer I am to creating incremental change thus shifting power dynamics and institutional culture.
Rachael Blansett 